Two months remained until the Vanguard's march.
In the pitch-black silence of the Leyline Nexus, Kaiser Warborn completed the five-hundred-mile spine of subterranean granite. The invisible highway stretched from the northern gates of his estate all the way to the cobblestone outskirts of the capital city, buried deep beneath the muddy King's Road.
The earth had been folded, compressed, and permanently fused by his will. The stage was set.
But as the Sightless Sovereign sat in his flawless lotus position, his newly synthesized, vacuum-dense Void blood circulating with a slow, terrifying power, he identified a critical flaw in his father's tactical doctrine.
The Vanguard has adapted to the crushing gravity of this estate, Kaiser analyzed. Their muscles, their bone density, and their combat reflexes have all mutated to function flawlessly under a massive atmospheric handicap.
He cast his sensory web upward, observing Captain Vance and his men drilling in the courtyard.
If they march past the boundary of the dark dome, the ambient gravity will instantly return to normal. To a hyper-dense Vanguard Knight, normal gravity will feel like absolute weightlessness. They will over-swing. They will lose their footing. They will be like deep-sea leviathans suddenly beached on the surface.
The Vanguard could not leave the Anvil behind. They needed to take the crushing weight of the North with them.
Kaiser did not need to devise a complex, new spell. Princess Lucy had already provided the perfect conductive medium.
Kaiser pushed his perception into the Vanguard armory, locking onto the racks of True-Cold Steel broadswords. The black metal, quenched in the Elven Princess's absolute zero mana, possessed zero internal variance. It was a flawless sponge for kinetic energy.
Kaiser reached out to the heavy, sluggish river of the Earth Leyline.
He didn't pull the mana into the walls of the estate this time. He threaded microscopic, invisible tethers of raw gravity directly into the molecular structure of the three thousand True-Cold Steel weapons resting in the armory and strapped to the soldiers' hips.
He permanently anchored a localized, thirty-foot radius of heavy gravity to each individual blade.
Up in the courtyard, Captain Vance was mid-stride, hauling a hovering supply wagon.
Suddenly, Vance paused. He looked down at the black broadsword sheathed at his hip.
The sword itself hadn't grown heavier. But the air immediately surrounding Vance violently thickened. The perpetual twilight of the estate's dark dome seemed to cling to the metal.
Vance drew the blade. As he moved, the localized sphere of crushing gravity moved with him. When he stood next to his lieutenant, their overlapping gravity fields locked together, creating a perfectly stabilized, hyper-dense atmospheric pocket.
"The air..." Vance breathed, looking up toward the command balcony.
Sir Kaelen, leaning on his cane on the veranda, felt the shift instantly. A low, raspy chuckle escaped the blind assassin's scarred lips.
"The Anvil goes where the steel goes," Kaelen murmured.
Princess Lucy, standing beside the veteran, watched the men draw their weapons in awe. The Elven acceleration runes she had carved into the fuller still gleamed with dormant silver light, ready to temporarily negate the weight for a catastrophic strike. But the ambient gravity surrounding the men ensured they would never lose their hyper-dense footing.
"He anchored the estate's ward to the weapons," Lucy whispered, her glacial eyes reflecting the dark sheen of the steel below. "He has compressed a stationary fortress into a mobile domain."
She looked down at the marble floor beneath her boots. It was cool, perfectly ambient, no longer requiring the intense geothermal grid to keep her stabilized.
You are not just preparing an army to fight, Lord Kaiser, Lucy thought, the sheer scale of his intellect sending a shiver of profound respect down her spine. You are re-writing the laws of physics so they cannot possibly lose.
Five hundred miles away, the laws of politics were being frantically rewritten to match the approaching terror.
High Priest Malakor stood in the King's war council chambers, surrounded by the highest-ranking generals of the Royal Army. Commander Seraphen stood at the head of the table, his golden armor gleaming, his expression grim.
Spread across the table was a map of the continent, identical to the one in Duke Arthur's study, but covered in panicked, hastily drawn defensive lines.
"The raven from Oakhaven confirms it," Seraphen reported, pointing a mailed finger at the northern border. "The King's Highway is petrifying. The mud is drying into solid, seamlessly smooth stone, extending directly southward toward the capital. It is an impossible feat of geomancy."
"It is a psychological parlor trick," a bloated Royal General scoffed from across the table. "Arthur Warborn is trying to intimidate us. The Vanguard is a heavy infantry force. They will sink in the spring bogs regardless of what the road looks like."
Seraphen shot the General a look of withering grandmaster contempt.
"Do not mistake a tectonic shift for a parlor trick, General," Seraphen snapped. "Whoever is orchestrating the magic in the North does not waste energy on illusions. If they are hardening the road, it is because their army has grown too dense for the earth to support them."
"Commander Seraphen is correct," Malakor interjected, his reedy voice cutting through the rising argument. The High Priest looked haggard, the stress of the unbreakable quarantine gnawing at his immaculate facade. "The North intends to march. And they intend to march heavily."
Malakor placed both hands on the table, leaning forward.
"The Duke believes he can simply walk five hundred miles to our doorstep," Malakor sneered. "He relies on the deep-winter stores he hoarded. But five hundred miles is a long walk for men wearing heavy iron. They will burn through their rations before they reach the halfway point. Then, they will be forced to forage."
The High Priest looked up, his eyes burning with cruel, absolute zealotry.
"We will not give them a single grain of wheat. Commander Seraphen, order the Royal Cavalry to ride north immediately. I want every field, every granary, and every village along the King's Highway burned to the ground. Poison the wells. Slaughter the livestock."
Seraphen stiffened, his jaw locking. "Your Eminence. Those are the King's subjects. You are ordering the starvation of tens of thousands of innocent commoners."
"I am ordering the salvation of the Kingdom!" Malakor roared, slamming his fist onto the map. "If Arthur Warborn's demonic army reaches this capital, there will be no subjects left to govern! We burn the land to starve the beast! Let the Vanguard march through ash and drink mud! By the time they reach our walls, they will be too weak to lift their swords!"
The bloated Royal Generals nodded in fervent agreement, eager to avoid a direct confrontation with the Vanguard.
Seraphen looked at the map, then at the High Priest. He placed his hand on the hilt of his golden sword. He was a knight of honor, but he was bound by oath to the crown, and the crown was currently dangling from the High Priest's puppet strings.
"It will be done, Your Eminence," Seraphen ground out, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. "I will deploy the torches at dawn."
Deep within the pitch-black abyss of the Leyline Nexus, the Sightless Sovereign felt the order given.
Kaiser's continent-spanning sensory web picked up the exact vibrations of Malakor's fist hitting the table, the specific cadence of his cruel, scorched-earth decree, and the heavy, reluctant heartbeat of Commander Seraphen.
Kaiser did not feel anger. Anger was a chaotic, hot emotion that belonged to the human he used to be.
He felt a deep, chilling, abyssal absolute.
You burn your own lands to starve me, High Priest, Kaiser thought, his liquid-void blood pulsing flawlessly through his crystallized veins.
He 'looked' at the massive, hovering Vanguard supply wagons sitting in his courtyard. Because of Princess Lucy's Elven runes, the wagons could carry ten times their normal capacity without sinking. They were packed to the brim with True-Cold Steel, preserved venison, and deep-root tubers.
The Vanguard would not need to forage a single grain of wheat from the capital's lands. They were bringing their own mountain.
Burn the fields, Kaiser's will whispered into the dark, his white hair pooling like liquid moonlight on the freezing stone. Turn the road to ash. It changes nothing.
Kaiser raised his right hand, summoning a tiny, microscopic sphere of the King's rotting, Abyssal artifact frequency. He summoned the Void mana to surround it, practicing the conceptual devouring process again, refining the execution down to the millisecond.