The message arrived like a cold wind across the imperial court: the mask of the Scaled Saint hovered in the Duke's audience chamber, a silhouette of black and white against the gilded banners of the Tongsley Empire. The saint wore a faceless mask and a robe of scales that seemed to drink the light. The Duke of the Golden Lion dropped to one knee so fast his armor clattered on the floor; he had seen that form in visions and in old tapestries, and each time his stomach turned with dread. The Scaled Saint's voice brushed the room and slipped into the Duke's mind as if it were speaking directly into the bone.
"There is a mortal country in the west called the Kingdom of Ross. Do you know it?" the saint asked, not with curiosity but with the chill certainty of someone who had already decided the answer.
The Duke's heart thudded against the cuirass. If the Scaled Saint already knew of Ross, then things had gone beyond rumor or politics—something had reached the ears of that long-lived power that should never have been known. He steadied his voice on the surface. "Yes," he said, though his mind was already computing routes of blame and escape.
"Mobilize every troop you can and wipe it out for me," the Scaled Saint ordered. The words were the kind that did not ask; they carved an intent into the air and made it law. "Do not worry about magicians. I will lend you a force of two thousand arc-mages. Bring me the full might you can gather—if you can raise eight hundred thousand men, then raise them. Strike before their neighbors can react; erase them completely."
The Duke of the Golden Lion swallowed and felt the taste of iron. He had always been a loyal officer, but this was total war pressed into his hands as an order. He asked, voice thin, "How long do I have to gather such forces?"
"Two years," the Scaled Saint said after a moment of long thinking. "You will have two years. When Ross falls, everything taken will be yours."
Two years—an eternity for common men, a short meditation for ancient star saints. The Scaled Saint's mind flickered away, already planning how to spend that time in minor intrigues to avoid the tedium of watching mortal slaughter. For the saint, the Kingdom of Ross was a small chess piece in a game whose board stretched across eons. For the Duke, it was a command with consequences: he would be the one blamed if the campaign failed, and he would be the one celebrated if it succeeded. Either way, his name would be carved on someone else's ledger.
Far from the marble halls and the saint's mask, in the plain halls of another court, Gavin Ward moved quietly but with purpose. He had not been born into the sort of court to be shaken by gods and saints; his power rose by annexation and careful diplomacy. Now he was in the middle of absorbing two neighboring realms—the Kingdom of Loth and the Kiswell Kingdom—folding them into his realm and making tens of millions of new subjects. When the receive-and-assimilate ritual finished, his population would swell and his coffers would hum with new taxes. But rulers needed more than numbers—they needed control, manpower, and stability—and those came slowly.
As Gavin consolidated his holdings he kept a special interest in the two great knights who had become the stuff of whispers: Eren, the dragon knight whose armor seemed to breathe, and Lusia, the woman in heavy plate whose steps made the ground answer in tremors. He sent one of his best medical inventors—an odd, brilliant man simply called the Doctor—to study them. The Doctor had a mind split between scalpel and machine; he loved nothing more than reducing wonders to predictable parts.
When the Doctor came to Gavin with his preliminary report, his hands shook less from nerves than excitement. "Your Majesty," he said, bowing as if the monarch were a patron of experiments rather than a ruler of men, "our research shows the great knights are not merely stronger than men. Their raw endurance and strength exceed normal human limits by a factor of four."
Gavin raised an eyebrow. "Four times? I expected more."
The Doctor smiled, a bright, disturbingly hungry smile. "Four is only a baseline. Ordinary knights already have twice the fitness of common men—nerves that respond faster, bones that take punishment and stand. A heavily armored ordinary knight is already a living fortress on a battlefield. A great knight is something else: they carry within them an element that continuously restores their strength. Imagine a tank that repairs itself while still moving. That's the difference."
Gavin rubbed a knuckle against his chin. He understood numbers; he also understood that even tanks had weak spots. The Doctor leaned forward, voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. "But this is where it gets interesting, Your Majesty. Those half-orc girls we rescued from the Orc Empire—do you remember them?"
Gavin did. They were squat, powerful figures with iron cheeks and the quick temper of those raised in harsh lands. They had been used as labor and shock troops, and though they could survive the chaotic energies of a transferred device, they could barely fly and almost never managed to project power.
"What about them?" Gavin asked.
The Doctor pushed up his gold-rimmed spectacles and spread papers full of scrawled numbers and anatomical sketches. "We discovered a hormone produced in great knights. It acts like a slow, continuous charge—restoring tissue, amplifying strength, tuning reflexes. If we can transfer that hormone to the half-orc girls, we can electrify them."
Gavin's interest deepened. The Doctor's tone turned electric. "This morning—just this morning—we tested it. We dosed a half-orc with a purified extract and then stimulated her with the chaotic magic device. She didn't just fly—she released a powerful magical shield. She could carry herself and a heavy weapon, and the shield held against tests that would have torn ordinary armor apart."
A silence settled between them, the kind that comes right before plans are born. Gavin's mind raced through battle maps and port schedules and the smell of black powder. If a legion of flying orc units, each capable of projecting shields and carrying heavy thermal arms, took to the sky, what could stand against them? Empires could be broken not just by numbers, but by novel tools used in new ways.
"Imagine this," the Doctor continued, voice low but urgent. "Individual, flying half-orc units equipped with thermal weapons—mobile orc squads that can seize a fortified hill or burn an enemy's armory from the air. A single formation of such units would change every tactic nations use."
Gavin let the thought settle, then outline the steps to his mind like a craftsman's plan. They would need to scale production of the hormone extract. They would need safe protocols—how to support the half-orcs' hearts under the strain, how to keep their minds steady with enhanced bodies. They needed weapons that fit the new aerial tactics: compact thermal lances, lightweight ammo systems, and a new doctrine for strike and retreat. The Doctor's grin widened; he had already sketched early prototypes of thermal rifles and shown them to Gavin's engineers.
On the other side of the sea, the Scaled Saint's order spread like frost through the ranks of the Tongsley Empire: conquer the Kingdom of Ross within two years. The Duke of the Golden Lion prepared to march while planning the blame that would fall on his shoulders if the campaign faltered. And inland, Gavin Ward readied to transform a ragtag band of rescued half-orc survivors into a new kind of force.
It was not a clash announced by trumpets but a reshaping in laboratories and arsenals. Gavin authorized the Doctor to begin mass trials. He insisted on humane conditions where possible—he was a conqueror, yes, but he also wanted to keep the loyalty of newly absorbed people. The Doctor recruited medics and alchemists, and the first squad of enhanced half-orc pilots trained in a clearing outside the capital. Each session left scorch marks on the training ground and the smell of ozone in the air.
Then came the first public test. In a controlled demonstration for Gavin's closest advisors, a half-orc—arms thick as tree trunks, face set and proud—took to the air, shield blazing, and fired a thermal lance at a mock fortress wall. The bolt hit, the stone steamed, and a neat, smoking hole opened where the structure's spine used to be. The advisors whooped and exchanged numbers as if they had seen the birth of a new commodity.
Gavin stood back and watched with a ruler's patience. He saw opportunity, not cruelty. With a small grin he said, "Give me a regiment of these and a handful of thermal rigs. We will not only defend our borders—we will make offense cheap and fast."
Word spread like wildfire through the ranks of Gavin's new subjects. For some, it meant a chance at purpose: a half-orc raised out of servitude and taught to fly and fight with honor. For others it meant fear: a world of new tools that could level what they had built. And for the Tongsley Empire, blinded by the Scaled Saint's orders and its own ancient politics, the sudden rise of a new war machine across the sea was a threat not yet visible to the eye.
Plans multiplied. Gavin assigned names to his units and insisted on discipline and training. The Doctor wrote the formula for the hormone extract on sealed paper and kept it locked beneath three doors. Engineers built prototypes for ammo feed systems that would not choke at high altitude. Priests were consulted to bless those who would pilot the first fleet—Gavin understood that a weapon felt better in a man's hands if he believed he was chosen for a destiny.
And so the pieces moved: the Tongsley Empire prepared for a war that would erase a small kingdom, the Scaled Saint's will waiting two years like a trapdoor, Gavin Ward consolidated a massive new realm, and in a quiet lab the Doctor turned rescued half-orcs into the first orc girl mobile units—an idea that would soon be whispered about in every war room from the western ports to the northern mountains.
If the future had a single, burning question at that moment, it was this: which of these changes would prove decisive? The answer would depend on speed and cunning, on how fast Gavin's new units could go from demonstration to battlefield, and whether the Scaled Saint's order would be the distraction that allowed a new power to rise—or the hammer that smashed it before it could swing.
For now, the world turned and men and saints and inventors took their places. The Duke of the Golden Lion bowed to a saint and began to raise troops. Gavin Ward watched his engineers test shields and heat-lances and let himself imagine skies full of armored figures who were both terrifying and strangely beautiful. In the hush before action, both patience and haste were weapons—and a small researcher in a lab had just handed the future a new tool.
-------------------
Visit our Patreon for more:
Get membership in patreon to read more chapters
Extra chapters available in patreon
patreon.com/Dragonscribe31
----------------------------------------------------- .