The castle never knew the hellish heat that scourged the forges, nor did it carry the copper‑tinged stench of sweat, fresh blood, and soot that clung thick and heavy across Ruitan's vast, lifeless plains.
Perched upon a jagged spire that jutted like a black spear from the ash‑covered earth, the stronghold rose far above the thick, acrid clouds that blotted out most of the sun's pale glow.
Its walls were built of polished obsidian‑hued basalt, cut and fitted so precisely that the seams were almost invisible — glinting with a dark, metallic sheen whenever stray rays of light managed to touch them.
Tall, narrow windows framed in dull silver looked down like cold, unblinking eyes, watching over winding roads, lines of laborers, and the immense, fire‑scorched expanse of the forge complex far below.
Stout buttresses and pointed turrets stabbed upward toward the sky, merging with the sharp, uneven silhouette of the cliff itself.
A wide iron drawbridge, held by heavy chains, spanned a deep, steaming chasm that separated the main gate from the nearest solid ground.
No smoke drifted lazily from its chimneys; instead, warm air escaped silently through hidden vents, carrying only the faint scent of rare spices, wax, and ancient stone — nothing of the sharp reek of coal or metallic tang that defined every other part of the region.
Inside and out, everything remained unnaturally clean, free from the dust and grime that coated every structure for miles around.
It stood there, apart, imposing, and distant — a stark contrast to the weary, fire‑ravaged world stretching out below.
This was the castle of Lord Tsukumo.
Within the colossal halls of that fortress, light seemed to be swallowed by the walls, and the silence grew so thick, so absolute and unnatural, that the very act of breathing sounded like an unforgivable sin against the place's order.
Through the long, shadowed corridors of the palace marched General Vanki.
The giant, whose armored boots usually made the ground tremble and laborers cower in fear in every mine across the empire, now moved with an almost pathetic hesitation.
The monstrous war axe strapped to his broad back felt as though it weighed tons beneath the unseen pressure.
His square jaw was locked tight with tension, and thick beads of cold sweat trickled down the sides of his scarred face, vanishing into his immense, coarse black beard.
Every step seemed to demand superhuman effort, as if he were wading against an invisible current.
Beside him, gliding with the lightness of a sharpened shadow, walked Katarina.
The commander of the Imperial Extermination Elite maintained her usual flawless bearing, her skin as pale as porcelain standing out against the palace's darkness.
Her long, deep purple hair fell across the left side of her face, concealing her dark leather eye‑patch.
Her single remaining eye — sharp and calculating — scanned their surroundings by pure predatory instinct, balanced perfectly with two slender swords crossed at the base of her spine.
Yet even her breath, controlled to the finest degree, betrayed the obvious: she, the most lethal blade in the empire, was being crushed by the weight of this environment.
It was the spiritual and physical gravity radiating from the very walls.
The closer they drew to the massive double doors of the main throne hall, the denser the aura became.
It was a force of Absolute Power and Gravity — a cold, crushing pressure so vast and undeniable that it needed no fanfare to assert its supremacy. It simply was, forcing the organs of lesser beings to feel heavy, as if the bones of Vanki and Katarina themselves yearned to yield and bow against their will.
The double doors, forged from solid steel and obsidian, slid open on their own as the two commanders approached, parting without the slightest sound of friction.
At the center of the vast, empty hall, beneath large thick‑paned windows that offered a high view of the empire's darkened, sickly sky, sat him.
Tsukumo rested upon a monumental throne carved entirely from the same dark steel as the castle itself.
The divine child who once descended from the heavens had grown into a young man of firm, cold countenance — with fine, perfectly symmetrical features and an aristocratic indifference.
His long, thick dark braids fell heavy against skin of a deep, striking ebony tone, yet now seemed to bear the bitter, exhausted weight of endless ages.
There was no trace of rage etched upon his face, nor the sadistic grin of a villain thirsty for blood.
Only what remained of the amber glow in his eyes — a gaze melancholic, hollow, so unfathomably deep and frigid that it drained every spark of light and warmth from the air around him.
A sterile beauty.
A god in an eternal state of mourning and detachment.
Vanki dared not take more than three steps into the hall before his legs gave way; he crashed one knee violently against the marble floor and bowed his head in total submission.
Katarina mirrored the movement in the exact same fraction of a second, placing one clenched fist upon the cold stone in a fluid, military gesture.
"My Lord…" Vanki's deep voice — usually a thunder capable of paralyzing entire battalions — came out strangely hoarse, struggling to push past his constricted throat.
Tsukumo did not blink, nor did he turn his head to look at them.
He kept his chin tilted down, resting it lazily upon the knuckles of his left hand, while his amber eyes continued to gaze out over the lifeless landscape beyond the glass — as if these two highest‑ranking officers of the empire were nothing more than insects buzzing in the distance.
"Speak, General," Tsukumo's voice echoed through the space.
It was soft, perfectly modulated, and required not the slightest physical effort — yet every syllable struck Vanki's and Katarina's chests with the mechanical force of a battering ram.
"And be certain, with every ounce of your strength, that your report is worth the oxygen you consume in my hall."
Vanki swallowed hard, the sound unnaturally loud in his own ears.
"Overall production has met and exceeded the required quotas for this cycle, my Lord. The North and South forges have doubled raw ore extraction from the deep mines, and our outer patrols have reported no hostile movement anywhere along the borders."
"Arms and energy reserves are being replenished; everything operates in perfect order, entirely under your command."
Lord Tsukumo leaned back into his heavy, carved chair, steepling his fingers beneath his chin, his eyes narrowed and unreadable.
"And who are the buyers this time?" he asked, his tone low and sharp as tempered steel.
"The contract is with an army from another solar system," Vanki replied without hesitation. "They are locked in a long war, far beyond our skies."
Tsukumo merely hummed a sound of bored acknowledgment.
Silence reigned once more — long, agonizing, torturous seconds stretching into eternity.
Tsukumo slowly shifted his gaze, turning his head millimeter by millimeter, until at last he fixed the full weight of his stare upon the giant, armored figure of the kneeling general.
"And the East Forge?" the Lord asked, his flat tone hiding any trace of what passed through his brilliant, unsettled mind.
Vanki hurried to answer, making the terrible mistake of letting slip the faintest sigh of relief at having a ready explanation on the tip of his tongue.
"Operating and delivering its quota as usual, my Lord. We encountered only a minor, insignificant setback during the night."
"The last direct radio report noted a small delay in changing patrols and work shifts."
Katarina kept her head bowed strictly low, her eyes fixed upon her own reflection in the dark marble, though her muscles tensed almost imperceptibly. Her predatory instincts screamed.
She narrowed her eyelids slightly, alert to the slightest microscopic shift in her master's breathing. There was something terribly wrong in the way Tsukumo listened.
"A delay…" Tsukumo repeated the phrase.
The words now dragged dangerously from his tongue, carrying a density that made the floor tremble at the base of the throne.
"What reason did your men give for slowing down my production line?"
"A mechanical logistical failure caused by one of those draconic rats, my Lord," Vanki answered, his voice gaining a touch of confidence — fooled by the false safety of old military excuses.
"The base reported clearly that a laborer mishandled coal and caught his arm in the secondary slag conveyor belt. The jam locked the seventh gear of the ore line."
"Forge Command said they had to shut down the machinery, engage safety locks to pull the worthless body free, clean the blood and oil from the equipment, and then resume operations."
"The shift also stated they made up for lost time immediately afterward by doubling the fuel supply to the furnaces. As you can see, smoke still rises thick and steady from the eastern horizon."
A sepulchral, utterly devastating silence swallowed the throne room.
Tsukumo closed his eyes for a brief moment and released an extremely slow, deeply weary sigh. It was the exhaustion of a divinity forced to deal, century after century, with creatures who refused to understand the very logic of the world he had shaped.
In the second following that breath, the atmospheric pressure throughout the entire hall tripled.
Katarina dug her gloved fingertips into the marble and clamped her jaw until her teeth ground together, pouring out immense energy in a desperate defense just to keep her face from being smashed flat against the stone.
Vanki, however, was caught off‑guard by his own arrogance.
The giant let out a choked, guttural cry of agony as the brutal gravity of Tsukumo's invisible aura crushed him downward.
The general was forced to plant both palms flat upon the floor, his massive arms trembling pathetically while the unseen force drove his thick chestplate toward the ground.
The sound of marble cracking beneath his steel knee guards echoed like gunshots in the dead air.
"A laborer caught his arm in the gears… and they stopped the machine," Tsukumo whispered, opening his eyes.
His voice now sliced through the thickened air like blades forged from ice, honed to pure lethality.
The Lord uncrossed his legs and leaned his lean torso slightly forward.
The hollow gaze that once stared across the lifeless sky now locked onto the struggling general, burning with inhuman tactical intelligence and predatory focus.
"Since when, Vanki…" Tsukumo began, enunciating every syllable as if distilling pure acid into his commander's understanding, "…since when do the brutal overseers I personally tasked with enforcing absolute terror across the plains halt the massive machinery of an Imperial Forge to spare the useless arm of a slave?"
Vanki gasped, air forced violently from his aching lungs as his eyes widened to their limit. The blood drained from his weathered face; the realization of his colossal mistake finally struck him, shattering his pride far faster than gravity crushed his body.
The radio report he had accepted as absolute truth — with all its detailed mechanical explanation — was, in the harsh, grim reality of Ruitan, a logical absurdity.
"If one of those wastes of flesh gets any limb caught in one of my active belts," Tsukumo continued, his aura turning sinister, his tone deadly calm like the final judgment of an executioner.
"My soldiers would never pull a brake lever or pause to clean. They would simply ignore it and let the heavy grinders swallow the entire body of that flawed creature — tearing flesh, skin, and sinew, shattering thick bones, until the worthless remains turned to ash and impure slag alongside molten metal, serving as extra fuel."
The room seemed to darken further, consumed by the Lord's surgical, terrifying reasoning.
"My war machine does not make the mistake of stopping out of care for its own equipment," the ruler of the castle declared.
"And most certainly, General Vanki, it never has — and never will — make the repulsive mistake of stopping out of pity for cattle."
Vanki tried to speak, coughing blood onto the marble floor, the most primitive and humiliating panic seizing hold of his entire being. He understood with pure terror the beginner's error his arrogant oversight had allowed. He had been deceived by a mirage — a voice explaining a delay with details that belonged to a world of humanity, not one ruled by ruthless disposal.
Vanki's left shoulder gave way with a dry, sickening crack.
The joint was completely destroyed, dislocated and fractured from the inside out. The general let out a sharp, guttural scream of unbearable pain; the left side of his armored chest caved inward as if it were made of paper, crumpled by the fury of something invisible.
The giant's forehead slammed against the cracked floor, and blood flowed, staining the polished stone of the hall.
"The East Forge did not suffer some unfortunate mechanical accident, General Vanki," Lord Tsukumo pronounced, leaning gently back once more into the shadowed rest of his throne.
With the same ease as before, he lowered his finger, relieving only the exact percentage of gravitational pressure needed so that Vanki's damaged lungs would not collapse and kill him right there in the pool of his own failure.
"The East Forge has been taken. A few days ago, I myself felt a distinct aura — strong and strange — rising from the east, growing slowly through the smoke and chaos of this land."
"And you, demigods who think yourselves so alert and powerful — you felt nothing at all?"
"This mysterious silence reported by patrols is not a sign of maintenance, nor of normal order. The silence of my troops is, in truth, the sound of death walking through the corridors of that facility."
He paused, and the air around him grew heavier, denser still.
"Do you truly want me to have to rise from this throne to solve a problem that should be handled by you?"
Tsukumo dragged his cold gaze away from the pathetic, gasping, weeping form of the crushed general, fixing the endless darkness of his eyes upon the elite commander — who remained kneeling in perfect composure, focused and entirely unharmed.
"Katarina."
"I await and obey your command, my Supreme Master," she replied instantly, her voice clear, steady, and completely devoid of any tremor or emotion, as if the gory scene unfolding beside her was nothing out of the ordinary.
"I want you to remain at your own forge and double your watch over every route leading to the East Forge. Because Vanki himself will go there to deal with this problem."
"Alone."
"Understood completely, my Lord." Katarina offered a brief, respectful bow.
Tsukumo raised his hand in a sharp, dismissive gesture.
"You are dismissed."
Without waiting for acknowledgment, he leaned back against the armrest of his throne, half‑closing his eyes as if he had already lost all interest in them and the matter at hand.
Katarina rose with fluid, precise movements, walking backward until she reached the doorway, never turning her back fully. With a small nod, she signaled the guards to assist the injured general.
The soldiers stepped forward carefully and lifted Vanki with great effort. The giant let out a low, hate‑filled growl, clenching his teeth to hold back another scream of agony. His feet dragged across the polished stone floor, leaving a dark red trail in their wake.
Once outside the main hall, deep within the wide, silent corridors of the castle — Vanki's rage erupted without restraint.
He shoved the guards supporting him so hard they stumbled backward. The pain in his shoulder burned like living fire, but it only stoked his fury further. His face twisted in a mask of wrath, veins bulging in his neck and forehead, his eyes blazing with a thirst for vengeance so intense it made even Katarina, walking a few steps ahead, remain on guard.
"Whoever dared to invade my forge, kill my men, and spit upon my name…" he roared, his voice booming off the stone walls and echoing down every turn of the corridor, "I do not know who you are, nor where you came from — but I swear by the blood in my own heart: when I reach you, I will hunt every last one of you down."
He raised his uninjured hand, clenching it so tight his knuckles turned white.
"I will tear you apart limb from limb, split you right down the middle, and make you beg for death before you even realize what has struck you. You will learn that crossing Vanki is the same as digging your own grave."
With steps still heavy but now driven by a fury that dulled much of his pain, he marched onward — leaving a trail of blood and threats hanging in the air — heading straight for the castle gates and the road that led to the East Forge.