Winter fell upon the valley like a hammer. The snow piled two meters high.
Without the wildlife, the enemy survivors who had fled into the mountains were trapped. They could not cross the frozen passes back to Sweden.
They had no food, no shelter, and their minds had been shattered by the trauma of the Greek Fire and the exploding hounds.
Hunger does terrible things to the human mind.
By January, Bilal's outer scouts started reporting horrifying discoveries. They found the frozen campsites of the fleeing Swedes.
But the bodies they found had not been killed by the cold. They had been butchered. The meat had been stripped from their bones with knives.
The survivors had gone mad. They were eating their own dead.
Bilal sat in his command chair, listening to the scout's report. Runa stood beside him, her hand resting on her sword.
"They have lost their humanity," Bilal said quietly. "They are rabid dogs now. If they run out of dead bodies, they will come looking for our farmers. We have to hunt them down."
For the next two months, Bilal, Runa, and the elite guard conducted "The Cleansing." They skied through the deep snow, tracking the cannibal bands.
It was not a war; it was an extermination of monsters.
When they found the maddened, blood-stained survivors huddled in caves, gnawing on human bones, there was no parley.
Bilal's crossbowmen put them down with clinical, merciful efficiency.
It was during these hunts that Bilal noticed a profound, almost comical biological reality.
He was walking next to Erik and Torik. Bilal was 181cm tall and 105kg of dense, heavy muscle.
But the orphans he had saved fifteen years ago?
Because he had fed them infinite protein, milk, and shielded them from parasites, they had hit their maximum genetic potential.
Several of the young men in his guard were now 185cm to 190cm tall.
Bilal looked up slightly at Erik. He let out a dry, exhausted laugh.
"I fed you too well," Bilal joked, slapping the young man's chest. "You look down at me now."
"We might be taller, Jarl," Erik smiled, looking at Bilal's massive, barrel-chested, 105kg frame. "But you are still twice as wide. The trees move for you. We just walk around them."
It was true.
Bilal was no longer the tallest man in the city, but he was undeniably the heaviest, the most grounded, and the most terrifying in a grapple.