The march into the eastern wastes became legend before it ever reached its end.
Sand seas opened beneath black skies, and from those depths rose the ancient guardians of the world's bones—the great worms, vast as towers, armored in plates older than kingdoms. Their coming was not sudden; the earth itself fled from them, dunes collapsing, stones screaming as they were dragged below.
The pelt hunters did not break.
They formed, they struck, they bled.
Steel met scale. Spears vanished into endless flesh. Fire only angered the beasts. One by one, hunters were taken—dragged screaming into the sand, crushed, swallowed, erased. Half the pelt clan fell before the final pass, their deaths buying distance, time, and honor.
Calcore fought at the center of the storm.
When the greatest worm rose—its shadow blotting out the sun, its roar shaking the horizon—it did not strike him.
It charged.
The ground vanished.
Man and monster went over the edge of a forgotten cliff, plunging into a chasm so deep the wind screamed like a living thing. Death rushed upward.
Calcore did not fall.
He acted.
Mid-descent, he drove his blade deep—not wildly, not in panic, but with precision earned through endless war. He cut into the worm's armored flesh and forced himself inside as the creature writhed.
The beast's body burned with its own furnace-heat, muscles spasming, blood boiling as gravity tore it apart. Its massive bulk absorbed the impact, its death slowing the fall as its life fled in agony.
By the time the corpse struck the abyss below, the worm was already dead.
And Calcore walked out.
Unbroken.
Unburned.
Unbowed.
Those pelt hunters who remained stood at the edge of the chasm in silence, watching him climb back into the light like something the world had failed to kill.
No words were spoken.
They had lost brothers. Sisters. Legends.
But now they knew.
If the Dark Lord believed fear, beasts, or distance could stop what was coming—
he was already dead.