The forest ended as abruptly as it had begun.
One moment the expedition was walking beneath glowing leaves, and the next, the trees thinned and gave way to a wide, rocky plain under the black sky. The corruption came rushing back the instant they stepped out of the canopy, and Ashen tightened his hold on Trinity Harmony with a sigh he had gotten very good at.
They had barely gone a mile when the horizon began to move.
At first, it looked like a shadow creeping across the plain. Then it grew thicker and taller, like a black wave rolling toward them over the rocks, and the sound arrived soon after.
Thousands of feet pounding the stone, iron clanging against iron, and a deep, guttural roaring that rose and fell like a tide.
...And the bloodlust.
It hit Ashen before he could even make out their shapes. Thick, hot and greasy, it clung to the inside of his nose like the stench of rotten meat. He had grown up with that smell seeping through the wards of the settlement. Every child back home learned to recognize it before they learned to read.
But even without that particular education, Ashen would have still recognized them in a heartbeat. He had been swimming in this stench for years back home after all.
'Narkals.'
Eventually they came close enough to see.
They were hunched, grey-skinned brutes in crude black iron, with jutting tusks and yellow eyes, their armor hung with scraps of hide and bone. Among them lumbered the larger ones, troll-like hulks twice the height of a man, dragging clubs made from whole tree trunks studded with jagged metal. And scattered through the horde were the stranger tribes. One ran on all fours with long, grinning hyena faces. Another had curling horns and knees that bent in unusual ways, and their skin was stitched with patches of other creatures' hides.
Several of them carried tall poles with cages hanging from the ends. Inside the cages, things were still moving. Flayed beasts, whimpering, kept alive for as long as possible, so the horde could enjoy them a little longer.
Ashen's stomach turned at the familiar sight of brutality. His grip tightened on his spear, and he began weaving a spell in his mind.
'There are thousands of them. Maybe more. This is going to be a long day.'
He took a breath, braced himself, and glanced to the side to see how the others were preparing.
Bram was stretching his arms over his head. Orin was eating a glowing fruit he had saved from the forest. Two brothers at the front were arguing about whose turn it was to take the left flank. And a fair number of them were smiling with the open, relieved smiles.
"..."
Ashen turned to his father with a look of complete incomprehension.
Adam glanced back at him and seemed to understand at once.
"You might think of Narkals as fearsome, since you grew up knowing only them as monsters," Adam said calmly. "But at least in this region, they are the weakest prey around."
"…The weakest."
"The bottom of the food chain, in fact. That's why when we see Narkals, most of the time, we're happy."
"Happy," Ashen echoed hollowly.
Adam patted his shoulder and walked forward.
And just as he said, the horde was dispatched with insulting ease.
The warriors went through the black wave the way a boy runs a stick through an anthill. Narkals were cut down in rows. The hyena-faced ones lunged and died in midair. The horned tribe tried to circle around the flank and met a wall of spells that turned them into a fine red mist. The brothers didn't even bother forming a proper line. They simply walked into the horde and kept walking, and the horde kept falling.
At one point, a massive troll-like Narkal shoved its way to the front, roaring loudly enough to shake the stones. It was far larger than the others, and its mana rolled off it in heavy, crushing waves. Ashen recognized the pressure at once.
'A Catastrophe-tier.'
It raised its club.
A brother Ashen didn't even know the name of stepped in, swung once, and walked away. The Narkal's head hit the ground a moment later. The club was still raised over its shoulder.
Ashen stared at the headless body as it slowly toppled over.
'I compared the mechanical force to… that.'
He suddenly felt very embarrassed on behalf of his past self.
The whole thing was over in less than an hour. The brothers freed the caged beasts from their misery, gathered what little was worth taking, and moved on without looking back.
◉◉◉
Two days later, they reached a cave.
It sat at the base of a jagged cliff, a narrow crack in the rock that looked like a hundred other cracks they had passed. Ashen would have walked right past it. But Orin led them straight to a stone near the entrance with a tiny symbol scratched into its surface, and the column came to a stop.
This was their real destination.
They had found it by pure chance during the last expedition, and what made it special was buried deep inside. A vein of mithril.
The settlement's stock of ore had been running low for a long time. Another batch of children would soon be old enough to need weapons of their own, and many of the warriors were overdue for replacements and upgrades. For the tribe, this vein was rain in the middle of a drought.
And it was even more than that now.
With Ashen's Path skills, every weapon forged from that mithril would be nurtured into something far greater than its original form. Adam's great sword, which had spent long months under Ashen's care, was the best example of what that could mean.
But what Adam was greediest for was chainmail and armor. Weapons won fights. Armor brought his men home. He would take a mountain of plain mithril links over a single legendary blade.
So this time, they had come prepared.
At the entrance, a few brothers lifted their hands and carefully peeled away the concealment veil they had left behind on their last visit. Ashen felt the layered mana unravel like old bandages coming off a wound. In its place, they raised a soundproofing barrier across the mouth of the cave.
Meanwhile, the brother Ashen had noticed several times on the march, a cheerful, round-faced man who always seemed to be humming, walked through the cave hanging charms.
They were strips of yellow paper covered in red script, and he stuck them to the walls, the ceiling and every dark corner, all the way down to the deepest part of the cave.
Then the work began.
The vein ran along the back wall, a pale silver streak glimmering through the dark rock. First, the brothers bored deep holes into the stone along its length with mana-hardened drills. Then they packed the holes with blasting charges and tamped them shut. Everyone retreated to the entrance, Lucan triggered the charges, and a series of muffled booms shook the cave behind the barrier.
They waited for the dust to settle, and a gust of conjured wind swept the rest of it out of the cave. Then they went back in and checked the ceiling for loose rock, prying away anything that looked ready to fall before anyone stood beneath it. Timber props went up where the rock looked weak.
Only then did they start mining.
Pickaxes rang against stone. The brothers broke the blasted rock into manageable chunks, shoveled it into carts, and hauled it to the front of the cave, where others sorted the ore from the worthless stone by hand. The silver-flecked pieces went into one pile and the rest went into another.
Ashen took a pickaxe and joined them. It was dull, heavy, sweaty work, and after the past few days, he found it oddly relaxing. Nothing was trying to kill him. And certainly no raining death rays. It was just him, a rock and a pickaxe.
After a while, his eyes drifted back to the yellow charms fluttering on the walls.
He glanced at the round-faced brother swinging a pickaxe beside him.
"Big brother. What are those charms for?"