Bunny dropped to her knees.
The sound coming from Lisbeth did not sound real.
Not at first.
It was too distant to be immediate, too loud to be ignored, and too full of pain to be mistaken for anything else. The wails carried over the open land in waves. Beneath them came the deeper sounds—explosions, collapsing buildings, crackling flame.
Her chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.
"Tarin."
Her twin brother stepped beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.
Whether Bunny realized it or not, being one of the Vixens meant something now. People watched her. Soldiers watched her. Towns watched her. In places all across the United Kingdoms, her name had become a story children shouted while swinging wooden hammers in the street.
And now those same eyes were turning to her.
Tarin's voice was steady, but not unkind.
"I fear the need for tears is only beginning today," he said. "We will have time to weep tomorrow. Please stand. The troops are looking to you."
His armor caught the light as he spoke—well-fitted, practical, and strong. Brannic's work. Jax had tried to buy it for full price, but Brannic had refused. Anyone willing to stand against the Empire had been offered protection at cost. Jax had accepted only because he wanted Bunny's brother protected.
Bunny's hands clenched.
Her body felt heavy.
But she rose.
Around her, the elven soldiers and beastkin volunteers looked toward the burning horizon in silence. None of them had been struck. None of them had fallen. Yet every one of them felt the sting of defeat all the same.
Because they had been close enough to stop it.
And still had not.
Tarin raised the Tele-Stone.
His voice changed at once, turning from brother to soldier.
"They didn't come to Campbell. Repeat—they didn't come to Campbell. They went to Lisbeth. Outcome catastrophic."
He lowered the stone.
No one around him spoke.
No one needed to.
They could all hear what catastrophic meant.
War Room
"Why Lisbeth?" one of the commanders demanded. "It makes no sense."
The war room had gone cold.
Not in temperature. In spirit.
A few minutes earlier it had been a chamber of strategy, momentum, adjustments, numbers. Now it felt like a place where people were waiting for someone to explain a nightmare into something reasonable.
Vaelith stepped forward, face unreadable.
"Perhaps because it makes no sense," he said. "An easy victory. An easy message. Something they can spin into strength."
"But that was their own people," another protested. "Their own sympathizers."
The Elven King's response came hard and immediate.
"They have done this before."
The room fell quiet.
His expression did not soften.
"Remember the Main Street Massacre."
That silenced even the most outraged among them. The reminder hung over the chamber like smoke. Yes. They had done this before. Innocents were not an obstacle to the Empire. Innocents were a tool. A spectacle. A statement.
No one wanted to imagine what Lisbeth looked like now.
No one had to.
A new voice broke the silence.
"How is Jax doing in Prominence?"
Every eye turned back to the map.
Every eye looked for movement.
For a moment, no one said anything.
Then a Tele-Stone pulsed.
Prominence
Jax arrived already moving.
Peacemaker left his hand almost the instant he appeared.
To the soldiers ahead, it must have looked impossible. One second there was only the battlefield—dust, shouting, fire, arrows—and the next a monstrous double-bladed sword came hurtling out of nowhere with the force of a launched siege weapon.
The six-foot dragon-forged giant blade tore through shields, armor, barriers, flesh, and bone like they were all made of wet parchment.
Men did not fall.
They came apart.
Dozens were cut in a single throw. Others tried to duck or twist away, only to lose arms, shoulders, hands, or half their faces to the spinning edges. Blood sprayed in a line across the battlefield.
And before the blade had even finished its first path through the enemy—
Infernal Requiem thundered.
Jax's pistols barked in rapid succession, each shot precise, brutal, final. Soldiers in the rear ranks crumpled with smoking holes through helm and skull. A mage who had managed to raise a barrier watched it crack open like glass a heartbeat before the bullet took him through the eye.
Llandra and Zee were already there, pinned down beside a ruined wall with a cluster of Wolfkin soldiers.
The problem had not been numbers.
The problem had been smell.
One of the Empire scouts was a Beastkin hound, a cruel creature who had spent a lifetime learning that the more brutally he treated his own kind, the more favor he earned from the humans who ruled over him. He had caught their scent before the ambush could fully unfold, and that single mistake had forced Llandra's group into defensive retreat.
At least—
Until Jax arrived.
Peacemaker's arc alone left nearly two hundred dead or maimed.
By the time the blade curved back through the chaos, Jax was still firing beneath it, his shots taking down anyone who tried to recover formation.
"Fall back!" Jax shouted. "Fall back!"
The order cut through the chaos.
Llandra moved instantly, rising just enough to send a storm of arrows over their heads. Fire blossomed where they landed. The battlefield itself became cover. Flames licked up in a jagged wall, forcing the Empire soldiers to hesitate before returning fire.
Zee's staff, Sanctaris, glowed as she layered barriers into the retreat—not walls meant to hold forever, but angled shields meant to disrupt sightlines, split volleys, and buy precious seconds.
The Wolfkin soldiers moved fast. Faster now that Jax had broken the enemy's momentum.
And once the withdrawal was underway, Jax shifted from savior to executioner.
He touched his forehead.
More shadows answered.
Massive shapes poured into the battlefield from impossible angles—S-ranked beasts, black forms with eyes like embers and claws that seemed to tear through the light itself. Their arrival turned a desperate retreat into a savage counteroffensive.
The Empire had expected a pinned group.
Instead, they found the field collapsing under them.
And then—
Just as suddenly—
It ended.
Jax's summoned beasts vanished.
The soldiers holding the position disappeared back through hidden routes.
Even the warriors who had seemed prepared to stand and die were suddenly gone.
One moment the battlefield was full of enemies.
The next it was full of confusion.
The Empire ranks staggered, shouting to one another, looking for targets that no longer existed.
Their training had not prepared them for this.
They were used to mirrored lines. To banners in sight. To both sides agreeing—openly or silently—to meet in one place and bleed under the sun. This was different. This was movement, sting, collapse, disappearance.
To them, it felt dishonorable.
The irony was almost laughable.
They were on a march to butcher towns full of men, women, and children—and they were offended that their enemies did not stand in neat rows and die politely.
Their lieutenants did not care.
Not really.
The surviving officers barked their troops back into order. They wanted the same thing they had wanted at the start of the march: victory, favor, reward.
If not reward—
Then spectacle.
If not spectacle—
Then proof.
They would return with the heads of their enemies.
Or with wagons full of corpses.
For the soldiers beneath them, this was still a campaign.
For the lieutenants, it had become something else.
A death march.
They would either return triumphant—
Or not at all.
Southwest Road
Far to the southwest, another set of scouts rode hard across the road to Bale.
Bale was no fortress. Just a quiet farming town with merchants, storehouses, and families who leaned openly toward the United Kingdoms. Nothing glorious. Nothing strategic enough to matter to the Empire's pride.
Which was why seeing Elven forces positioned in the road ahead made the scouts grin.
To them, it looked like panic.
A mistake.
The U.K. had shown its hand.
They wheeled their mounts around and hurried back to their general.
"The road to Bale is defended," one reported.
The general smiled.
"Then Route B."
No hesitation.
No debate.
He turned them away from Bale and led the column right—toward the next town ten miles southwest of the Capital.
Daylewis.
Behind them, hidden observers waited just long enough to be sure.
Then the message went out.
"We have diverted them to Daylewis. Prepare for incoming. Repeat—prepare for incoming."
Daylewis Outskirts
Nyxian stood beside the hidden portal with her arms folded.
Grim and Steed pawed at the ground beside her, great shadow bulls wreathed in darkness and ember-light. Echo rested around her shoulders like a living scarf, his small shadow-ferret body coiled and tense.
Above her shoulder, Pixelle hovered with her arms crossed and one eye fixed on Echo.
"I will end you in a way that makes it impossible for Nyxian to ever summon you again," Pixelle warned.
Echo's tongue did not flick out.
Not because he didn't want to.
His eyes practically screamed that he did.
But fear and control kept him in line.
Nyxian ignored them both.
"Charlotte," she called, "are you ready?"
The sand in front of them bulged.
Then split.
Charlotte's massive spider head emerged, black eyes gleaming, mandibles shifting.
She dipped her head once.
Then slid back beneath the surface.
All around her, smaller shapes moved in the sand—hundreds of spiders burrowing into position.
Pixelle's work had already transformed the terrain. What had once been hard-packed roadside earth now sat under a thin, natural-looking layer of unstable sand, with shrubs and brush grown carefully around it to hide any sign of tampering.
This was not an obvious kill zone.
That was the point.
The army came on in good order.
Their scouts reached the sand first and slowed.
But only slightly.
It was a nuisance, not a warning. A little soft footing. A stretch of discomfort, perhaps a hundred yards at most.
They advised the troops to edge off the main path where they could.
When the larger force arrived, about half did exactly that.
The other half marched straight through.
Nothing happened at first.
The knights crossed.
The cavalry crossed.
Even the front lines of soldiers made it through with little more than irritation.
Then the mages entered the stretch.
And the sand came alive.
Tiny spiders burst upward by the hundreds.
Then the thousands.
They swarmed robes, boots, sleeves, collars, faces. Poison fangs pierced exposed skin. Paralysis followed in seconds. Men screamed and clawed at themselves as the swarm swallowed them.
Charlotte erupted from the center of a knight formation like a nightmare taking shape.
Soldiers threw themselves sideways in pure instinct, only to land in soft ground as thousands more spiders spilled from her body and rushed over armor seams and exposed flesh.
The Empire soldiers had expected something large.
Something obvious.
Not this.
Not venom.
Not panic.
Paralysis spread through the formation. Horses screamed and toppled. Mages collapsed mid-chant, limbs failing under them.
"Now," Nyxian said.
Grim and Steed charged from the flank.
The shadow bulls hit the mage line like living siege engines. Flesh tore. Bones snapped. Fire spilled from their mouths as they trampled through the poisoned and paralyzed ranks, finishing any mage the spiders had not already neutralized.
Pixelle stayed back. Her part was done. She hovered at Nyxian's shoulder and watched the slaughter with one eye still on Echo, as though daring him to try something foolish.
Nyxian did not waste time admiring the trap.
She watched for the moment the enemy line truly broke.
Then she recalled Grim and Steed at once.
The hidden portal flared.
She and the small band with her slipped through and vanished.
No speeches.
No flourish.
Just another strike.
Another wound.
Another disappearance.
End of the Day's Truth
Across all fronts, the same lesson was sinking into the Empire's bones.
The United Kingdoms would not meet them on their terms.
There would be no neat battlefield.
No honorable mirrored lines.
No chance to trade one glorious clash for one clean victory.
There would only be pressure.
Movement.
Ambush.
Loss.
And just when the Empire thought it had found the shape of the enemy—
That shape would vanish.
For the lieutenants, however, none of it changed the mission.
They would continue marching.
Even without mages.
Even without proper healing.
Even with barriers shattered and scouts dying and the land itself turning hostile under their feet.
They still intended to return with proof.
Heads.
Bodies.
Burned towns.
Some symbol to lay at the feet of the King and say: We did what you asked.
Most of the soldiers still believed they would survive.
The officers no longer thought that way.
They had crossed beyond that.
For them, the road ahead had become absolute.
They would either return victorious—
Or none of them would return at all.
And though they did not yet know it—
Their fates were already sealed.