Chapter 44 – The Boy on the Western Front
The war room was suffocating.
Not from heat—though the fire roared too loud in the hearth—but from the silence that had settled like dust over ancient stone. Generals, war mages, and nobles sat in uneasy stillness. Maps stretched across the long oak table, stained with ink and ash. Markers denoting lost battalions had begun to outnumber those still standing.
And at the center of it all, a name none dared speak too loudly.
Sirius von Ross.
"He's just one boy," the Duke of Veltara said finally, breaking the silence with words that sounded almost like prayer. "A child, they say. Sixteen."
General Maerel leaned forward, fingers steepled beneath his chin. "A child does not disintegrate three platoons in under ten seconds. A child does not walk into flame and return without a scratch."
He looked around the table.
"Whatever he is—he's not a child."
Another general grunted, one eye covered by a burn-scorched bandage. "He's the Grand Duke's heir. The only Grand Sword Master of this generation, after his father. And the only ninth-class magician alive."
Whispers swept through the room like shadows.
The titles alone were already nightmare enough. Separately, such strength would have altered battlefields. Together…?
One of the court advisors stood abruptly. "What if it's sorcery? Forbidden magic? A contract with something eldritch?"
Maerel's gaze didn't move. "No signs of a pact. No energy irregularities. I've reviewed every field report myself."
"But the way he fights—"
"He doesn't."
Silence. Again.
General Maerel's fingers tapped the table once.
"He doesn't fight. He ends. No theatrics. No wasted movement. No bloodlust. He neutralizes. Efficiently. Quietly. Almost… coldly."
The Minister of Intelligence shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "I've had to issue misinformation reports to quell the rumors. Entire regiments are deserting before he even arrives. They say he rides alone. That the earth splits when he walks. That he—"
"Don't repeat campfire tales in here," snapped Maerel. But his voice held no conviction. Not today.
The truth was worse than the stories.
A report sat beneath his hand, edges still damp with rain.
Four cities gone. Without siege engines, without demands. No surrender accepted. Just silence. No survivors to speak of how. Only the remains of structures warped by unknown magic and swords cleanly sheared in half as if by thought alone.
"Then what do we call him?" asked the youngest mage present, her voice barely above a whisper. "If he's not a child, not a demon… then what is Sirius von Ross?"
Maerel's answer came slowly.
Not because he didn't know.
But because he wished he didn't.
"A warning."
The room turned cold.
"Every empire has one," he continued. "A harbinger. A signal that the old balance is ending. That something greater—unmanageable—is rising."
He rose from his seat and looked toward the map. His fingers hovered over the Western Front, where their territories were vanishing one by one, as if erased by fate itself.
"We are not at war with the Empire anymore," he said quietly.
"We are at war with him."
Far from the war room, across the broken hills and burned-out villages of the western territories, a boy stood at the edge of a ruined outpost, his coat fluttering in the wind.
Sirius von Ross.
He did not look toward the flames behind him.
Nor toward the approaching soldiers coming to retrieve the broken remains of a victory.
Instead, he raised a journal to the wind. Pages fluttered, then stilled.
He drew one word.
Abylay.
The ink didn't smear, though the wind howled.
Back in the enemy's capital, Maerel sat alone in the now-empty council chamber, one hand pressed against his temple, the other gripping a scouting report from an hour ago:
He crossed the Vallin River. Alone. Without a bridge. The river turned to steam.
He read it three times before setting it down.
No one—not even the gods—knew where the boy had come from.
But Maerel knew one thing:
He was not here to win the war.
He was here to end it.
And they were running out of time.