Two months remained until the Awakening Ceremony.
The Vanguard's First Battalion had been marching through the High Priest's scorched wasteland for fourteen days.
To the royal scouts observing from the distant, ash-choked hills, the column looked like a moving localized apocalypse. The sky above was a suffocating gray, raining millions of flakes of black, charred wheat and burned timber. Yet, the Vanguard remained untouched.
Because of the overlapping, thirty-foot localized gravity fields anchored to their True-Cold Steel broadswords, the ash did not drift lazily over their heads. The moment a flake of soot crossed into the mobile domain, the extreme atmospheric pressure seized it and violently dragged it straight down to the petrified dirt.
The Vanguard marched in a pristine, perfectly clear tunnel of air, surrounded by a continuous, hissing curtain of falling black snow.
Captain Vance walked at the head of the supply train, the heavy leather yoke digging into his hyper-dense shoulders. He did not pant. He did not sweat. The heavy, pressurized twilight that clung to him was exactly the environment his body had mutated to crave.
He looked to his left, out past the gravity curtain. The charred skeleton of a windmill stood on a blackened hill.
"The silence is worse than the Beastkin drums," Vance grunted, speaking to his lieutenant marching beside him. "We have walked two hundred miles and haven't seen a single living animal. No birds. No deer. The Light has turned its own heartlands into a graveyard."
"Let the dead rest, Captain," Duke Arthur's voice rolled back from the front of the column. The warlord was not riding his chariot today; he marched on foot, his massive frame setting a grueling, fifteen-mile-a-day pace. "We are not here to mourn the King's grass. We are here to ensure it never burns again."
In the center of the column, Princess Lucy sat on the flatbed of her hovering command wagon.
She wore a heavy, soot-stained Vanguard cloak over her shoulders, her silver veil perfectly secured. On her lap sat a slate board covered in complex logistical calculations.
"The Fire Crystals are burning slightly faster than anticipated, Your Highness," High Healer Lyra reported, carefully inspecting the glowing red gem slotted into the oak undercarriage of the wagon. "The ambient heat of the scorched plains is increasing their volatility."
Lucy did not look up from her slate. She simply extended her left hand, letting a microscopic, perfectly measured thread of her Frozen Ice mana snake down the side of the wagon. The absolute zero kissed the Elven runic matrix, instantly cooling the volatile crystal back to a stable, humming violet.
"The crystals will hold, Lyra," Lucy said calmly, her wind-chime voice cutting through the heavy thud of the marching boots. "We have sufficient reserves. And the men are maintaining optimal caloric expenditure. The Sovereign's highway requires zero excess kinetic exertion to traverse."
She looked down at the petrified King's Highway beneath the hovering wagon. It was a flawless ribbon of gray granite, completely ignoring the destroyed, muddy terrain surrounding it.
Every night, Arthur would strike his black sword into the stone, and the deep-earth aquifers would rise to water the men. They were an army marching through a desert, completely self-sustaining, carrying the brutal, unyielding ecosystem of the North with them.
The High Priest wanted a war of attrition, Lucy thought, returning her glacial eyes to her slate. He did not realize he is fighting a glacier.
In the capital city of Aethelgard, the glacier's inevitable approach was causing the Kingdom's elite to unravel.
The King's war council chamber was a portrait of wealthy, gilded panic.
King Aethelgard IV sat at the head of the table, his face pale, his ermine robes looking too heavy for his trembling frame. He had not slept in days.
"Fourteen days," the King whispered, staring at the map. The red markers representing the Vanguard had moved steadily, horrifyingly southward, completely unaffected by the scorched earth. "They have crossed the Weeping Chasm. They have crossed the Ash Plains. My scouts tell me they are not starving. They are not thirsty. They are just... walking."
High Priest Malakor stood near the window, his white silks stark against the gloom of the room. He gripped his golden staff so hard his knuckles were white.
"It is an illusion, Your Majesty," Malakor insisted, though his voice had lost its smooth, dogmatic purr. "Demonic trickery. They are projecting an image of strength to break our morale. No human army can march two hundred miles in heavy plate without a baggage train of draft horses!"
"They are the draft horses, Malakor!" Commander Seraphen snapped, slamming his gauntleted hand onto the table. "They are pulling floating wagons filled with steel and meat! They created a bridge out of the bottom of a canyon! Stop calling it an illusion! They are coming, and our walls will not hold them!"
The King covered his face with his hands. "The Awakening Ceremony... Arthur intends to bring his demon right to the steps of the Cathedral."
"We will not let them reach the Cathedral," the King suddenly said, dropping his hands. His eyes possessed the manic, terrified clarity of a cornered animal. He looked directly at Seraphen.
"Commander. Prepare the vault."
Seraphen froze. The blood drained from his face. "Your Majesty... the Abyssal relic? It has not been unsealed since the First Kingdom. The rotting frequency it emits... it does not differentiate between friend and foe. If we deploy it against the Vanguard, it will necrotize the Aura of every Royal Guardsman within ten miles."
"Then the Royal Guard will die for their King!" Aethelgard screamed, spittle flying from his lips. "If Arthur Warborn breaches this city, the dynasty falls! The Church falls! Unseal the relic, Seraphen! When the Vanguard reaches the outer plains, I want that rotting curse unleashed. Let their impossible gravity decay into dust. Let them choke on their own mutated mass!"
Seraphen stood in stunned silence. He looked to the High Priest, expecting the holy man to object to the use of a dark, primordial artifact.
But Malakor simply looked away, his silence a damning confirmation. The Light had failed. They were resorting to the abyss to fight the abyss.
"It will be done, my King," Seraphen whispered, bowing his head, feeling the soul of the Kingdom finally fracture.
Five hundred miles north, perfectly sealed within the heavy, lightless tomb of the Leyline Nexus, Kaiser Warborn solved the equation.
Two hundred and sixty-three million, four hundred and ten thousand beats.
He sat in the pitch-black void, his liquid-void blood pulsing lazily through his crystallized veins. For fourteen days, his grandmaster mind had been locked in a state of hyper-computational astrophysics.
He 'looked' at the glowing, three-dimensional mathematical model suspended in his mind.
He needed to project the Void Orbit—the localized sphere of absolute, screaming madness—directly into the King's vault to devour the Abyssal relic before it could rot his Vanguard.
The capital is five hundred miles away, Kaiser analyzed, reviewing the data. If I project the Void across the surface of the continent, the curvature of the earth will cause the trajectory to bend. If I attempt to manually steer the Void over that distance, the atmospheric friction will destabilize the frequency, causing the madness to bleed out and annihilate the King's farmlands along the path.
He could not shoot over the earth. The sky was too volatile.
The shortest distance between two points on a sphere is not an arc, Kaiser deduced, his chilling, godlike logic clicking flawlessly into place. It is a straight line drawn through the interior.
He didn't need to project the Void across the surface. He needed to shoot it straight down, directly through the planetary crust, slicing a chord through the subterranean mantle, and angle it to erupt exactly beneath the King's throne room.
It was a feat of geometric and magical telemetry so staggeringly complex that it defied the very limits of human comprehension. He had to account for tectonic drift, the variable density of the planetary mantle, and the exact rotational speed of the earth beneath his tomb.
Kaiser raised his right hand.
He tapped into his core, drawing a heavy, liquid pulse of the Void. The purple light flared, illuminating the dark-silk blindfold covering his eyes.
He didn't fire it yet. He needed to calibrate the subterranean barrel of his sniper rifle.
He reached out to the Earth Leyline. He isolated a microscopic, needle-thin pathway of raw gravity, driving it straight down into the bedrock beneath the Catacombs. He aimed it south, boring an invisible, frictionless tunnel through the deep earth, calculating the exact angle required to bypass the planet's curvature.
X-axis calibrated. Y-axis locked. Z-axis penetrating the lower mantle, Kaiser tracked, his mind a flawless, hyper-dense supercomputer.
He 'felt' his invisible, gravitational tunnel slide beneath the scorching ash plains, beneath the petrified highway his father marched upon, and finally angle upward, resting perfectly, microscopically flush against the bottom of the blood-magic runes sealing the King's vault.
The planetary sniper rifle was built. The crosshairs were locked onto the rotting heart of the Abyssal relic.
"Unseal the vault, King Aethelgard," the Sightless Sovereign whispered into the dark, his voice carrying the deep, inevitable finality of an executioner's blade falling. "Open the box. The Anvil is ready."