The deforestation was complete.
Where ancient trees had stood for centuries, only stumps and splinters remained. The forest floor—once shadowed and protective now lay exposed under an indifferent sky.
The Narkals swarmed.
Without cover, the demi-human army's advantages evaporated. Fox kin couldn't leap between branches that no longer existed. Elves had no high ground for their arrows. Wolf kin couldn't use terrain to flank and divide.
They got surrounded, and then overweldmed, ending up dying in droves on open ground.
Soldiers broke ranks and fled. Others simply stopped moving, weapons falling from nerveless fingers, waiting for the end. Some went mad amid the blood and screams, laughing or weeping or both.
Alice's signals kept firing into the sky—desperate attempts to reorganize, to salvage something… but her army was fragmenting faster than she could coordinate.
Morale was collapsing. Or perhaps, there was no morale left to speak of.
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Rowan's company felt none of it.
If anything, the Narkals' tree-hacking frenzy made maneuvering easier—the beasts were too busy chopping to intercept. The fifty-man unit swept through the chaos like ghosts, hunting their next target.
They knew the forest's destruction meant their end was near. But so what? They'd use this window to kill more, then be on their way.
But something put a halt to their killing spree. The Great Beasts converged.
All of them, every titanic Narkal that remained—over fifty—began moving toward a single point with coordinated purpose. They gathered in a cluster, making their combined mass create a wall of flesh and bone that seemed unstoppable.
Rowan's eyes narrowed. His mind spun, working to find the most optimal strategy to kill the maximum amount of Narkals possible before the eventual happened.
Fwoosh—
A clear sound echoed suddenly.
The air parted unnaturally clean amid the carnage.
The next thing anyone noticed was General Rowan Vance on the ground, an arrow buried in his shoulder.
Rowan felt the burning sensation on his shoulder, then felt his back hit the ground. He didn't cry out, just looked at the shaft protruding from his flesh.
'Another type of Great Beast.' He instantly concluded. And unlike the brutish titans that only boasted size and brute force, this was something more insidious.
If the sneak attack wasn't enough indicator, then the poison on the arrow sealed the deal of their nature. He could feel it spreading through his veins already, numbness crawling up his arm, his vision starting to swim.
His soldiers rushed to him, voices distorted and distant, but Rowan's attention was elsewhere.
He found Morikawa's eyes across the space between them.
One look. That was all they needed.
'This is the end. We go out with a bang.'
Morikawa felt it before he understood it—mana incomparable to anything he'd felt before rushing through his veins to his heart and then every inch of his body.
Four hundred thousand soldiers. All of their mana, channeled into one man.
His body blazed white, so bright it hurt to look at directly. His veins stood out like rivers of light beneath his skin. His heart hammered so hard he thought it might burst.
He understood his mission without being told and glanced back at the gathered Great Beasts.
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Morikawa's first instinct was to draw his second blade.
He'd always fought with one sword—it was cleaner and more controlled. But this amount of mana demanded more outlets or it would cook him from the inside out in seconds.
His left hand found the backup blade at his hip and drew it. The moment both swords blazed with channeled mana, the pressure in his chest eased just slightly.
…Enough to do what he set out to do.
He took a single step.
Body reinforcement turned that step into a catapult. He exploded forward, crossing fifty meters in an instant, and appeared directly in the face of the first Great Beast.
Both white blades flashed.
The titan's head separated from its shoulders, cut so cleanly the body stood upright for a heartbeat before collapsing.
Morikawa didn't wait. He stepped onto the falling corpse's shoulder and leaped again, carrying momentum into the next beast.
This one tried to swat him from the air. Too slow. He twisted mid-flight, blades spinning, and carved through its wrist. The hand fell, still reaching. He landed on its forearm, ran up toward the elbow, and drove both swords into its exposed throat.
Blood fountained, but he was already moving past it.
The third beast swung with both fists. Morikawa slid beneath the strike, blades trailing behind him as he passed between its legs. Twin cuts opened its femoral arteries. It stumbled, crashing to its knees.
He didn't stop to finish it. The fourth beast was already lunging, massive jaws opened wide enough to swallow him whole.
Morikawa jumped straight into its mouth.
For a beat, darkness filled his vision. Then light—his blades piercing upward through the roof of its mouth into its brain. The beast's skull exploded from the inside, and Morikawa emerged from the gore-shower already moving to the next target.
Fifth beast. Sixth. Seventh.
He was a phantom, a nightmare, a force of nature wearing human skin. Where he passed, they fell. Some he beheaded. Others he crippled and left to collapse. Some he simply gutted in passing, letting them bleed out while he moved on.
The Great Beasts raged, swinging desperately, but their size worked against them. They hit each other more often than him. He was too fast, too small, and far, far too lethal.
What made it more terrifying was how quickly he adapted. The mana of four hundred thousand soldiers should have killed him instantly, turning his brain to sludge, his heart to ash, his bones to powder.
Instead, he mastered it. Distributed it perfectly through his body, channeling exactly what he needed for each movement, each strike, each breath. It was almost as if his talent, always held back by his human biology, was finally unleashed without limit.
He fought like he'd been born to carry this much power.
But the hidden snipers hadn't forgotten their true target.
Fwoosh—
Another arrow lanced toward Rowan's position.
The soldier kneeling closest to the general moved his body by instinct the moment he heard the deadly sound. He threw his body over Rowan, and the arrow punched through his back instead of piercing the general's heart.
The man died without a sound.
Fwoosh—fwoosh—fwoosh—
More arrows came, a rain of death aimed at the poisoned general lying helpless on the blood-soaked ground.
Not one reached him.
Bodies kept throwing themselves forward. Soldiers who could do nothing against the titans, who were useless in this fight of gods and monsters, found the one thing they could still do.
They could be shields.
Each arrow found flesh, each soldier fell without complaint. They gladly piled atop their general, a growing mound of corpses, buying him seconds with their lives.
They had no last words or farewells. No heroic proclamations or remembrance.
Just bodies falling, one after another, in silent devotion, all for the hope that their sacrifice will pull another Narkal to hell alongside them.
…And pull it did.
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Morikawa carved a circle of death around the company.
Twenty beasts down. Thirty. Forty.
He could feel his body beginning to fail. Blood leaked from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes. His muscles were tearing themselves apart from overuse. His bones had microfractures spreading through them like spiderwebs.
But the mana kept flowing. Rowan was still alive, still channeling, giving everything he had left to fuel this rampage.
The deputy killed three more Great Beasts, but he could feel his movements now slightly slower, his precision faltering just barely.
Fifty down.
The kilometer around the company was cleared. Narkals lay in pieces, Great Beasts fallen like broken mountains.
Morikawa fell back to where his general lay buried beneath his soldiers' corpses.
He stood there, both white blades dripping, chest heaving, and asked quietly:
"...Is this enough?"
As if answering his query, the milky white glow slowly retreated from his body. The mana dissipated like mist, flowing back to nothing, because the source—
Because General Rowan Vance had breathed his last.
When the light was completely gone, Morikawa's condition was revealed.
He was bleeding from every orifice. Nose, ears, eyes, mouth—all streaming red. The mana of four hundred thousand soldiers had unraveled his body from the inside out. His skin was bruised purple-black, veins burst beneath the surface. His hands shook, barely able to grip his swords.
But he stood.
Fwoosh—fwoosh—fwoosh—
The hidden archers found him at last. Arrows punched into his back, one after another. Five, ten, fifteen shafts buried in his flesh.
Morikawa swayed. But his knees refused to bend.
He stood there, alone, surrounded by corpses and the monsters he'd slain, arrows bristling from his back like grim decoration.
He stood there until his heart gave one final beat and stopped.
He died standing, white blades still gripped in dead hands, facing the enemy, unbroken to the last.
…He had fulfilled his general's last order. Kill as long as we breathe.
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