In the few hours that followed the meeting in the Hall of Roots, the Elf village, once regarded as a spiritual sanctuary for meditation and harmony with nature, transformed into a cacophonous and diabolical workshop.
Under Dex's direct and precise supervision, the Dark Elf set aside their pride and their intricate magical rituals. They put away their elegant enchantments and began executing engineering and chemical procedures that struck them, at first, as "barbaric", primitive and unworthy of a refined race. But with every step the former prisoner demonstrated, they came to understand that the effectiveness of this tactical filth was terrifying and guaranteed.
In the lower courtyard of the village, Dex stood with his sleeves rolled up before a group of senior Elf alchemists who had spent their careers distilling rare herbs to craft healing remedies. Now their faces were illuminated by the glow of flames burning beneath massive iron cauldrons.
Dex pointed to dozens of large barrels filled with the raw sap of giant pine trees, resin, that had been collected over many years.
"This raw natural resin is useless to us as it is," Dex ordered in a firm voice, probing the liquid's viscosity with a wooden rod. "I want you to boil this resin together with rock oil at a steady, moderate heat. I do not want it to ignite quickly and burn out in seconds. I want it cooked until it becomes viscous, heavy, and as repulsive as black tar. I want it to stick to everything it touches."
Dex explained his tactical concept with a glacial detachment that made the alchemists, who had lived for centuries, tremble at the ruthlessness of the human mind: "The southern forest corridor passes through a long earthen slope before it reaches our base. We will pour this sticky tar to coat the slope's entire surface, then conceal it under a thick layer of dry leaves and pine needles. The ground will look completely natural."
Dex traced the shape of the slope in the air with his hand. "When the Legion begins its advance, we do nothing. We let the vanguard and half the Legion enter the slope in complete safety. We will not burn them immediately, as armies expect. Instead, we will wait until they are packed in the middle like sardines in a tin, armour grinding against armour. Only then, we ignite the fire. Not in front of them, but directly behind them and along the lower edges at the rear of the army."
The alchemists' hands stopped stirring the cauldrons as they listened to this psychological nightmare unfold.
"Basic survival instinct," Dex continued without mercy, "will drive the panicked soldiers to flee from the wall of fire chasing them from behind. They will run blindly forward, trampling one another in their desperation to escape the burning. Their terrified sprint in heavy metal boots across the slope concealed beneath the hidden tar will make them slip. They will fall like ragdolls, unable to regain their footing under the weight of their armour and the stickiness of the ground, while the fire creeps behind them at a measured pace to swallow those who cannot rise."
"And what lies at the bottom of the steep slope?" asked the chief alchemist in a shaking voice, having understood by now that this human was engineering a massacre the likes of which the forest had never witnessed. "Where will they end up when they slide down?"
Dex did not answer immediately. Instead, he turned slowly toward the other side of the courtyard, where Lumia was. He tilted his head in her direction as an answer sufficient unto itself.
The Celestial girl sat quietly atop a flat, moss-covered rock, a surrealist painting in the middle of this grim workshop. Her long silver hair cascaded like a waterfall of light, and her serene, angelic features betrayed no tension whatsoever. Beside her, at Dex's orders, a massive pile of metallic scrap had been heaped up, shattered Elf armour, old rusted spears, and broken human swords captured from past battles that had served no purpose since.
Lumia picked up a thick slab of iron, part of the blade of a heavy battle-axe that would require two men to lift. And with her delicate, fine fingers, white as snow and seemingly fragile enough to be cut by a sheet of paper, she began to work the metal.
She used no hammer, no anvil, and no fire to smelt the iron. She used her Void Aura in a localised and concentrated manner, altering the gravitational force and molecular density within the metal itself. Before the stupefied eyes of the Elf, Lumia began to fold and squeeze the cold iron axe as though it were soft dough or a wet sheet of paper. The metal groaned and shrieked under the invisible cosmic pressure, strange blue sparks flying from it due to the intense molecular friction.
With unhurried precision and calm, Lumia shaped the compressed metal mass into ugly, grotesque geometric spheres.
"Caltrops," said Dex as he approached her, crouching to pick up one of the black metal stars she had just finished. It was not hot, but it was unnaturally heavy for its small size, no larger than the palm of a hand.
Dex raised the star to show the alchemists and Elf commanders who had gathered around them in horrified fascination. The star possessed four viciously sharp points, engineered with malicious ingenuity so that no matter how it was thrown and whichever way it landed, one point always remained perfectly vertical, directed upward.
"I asked Lumia to use her spatial abilities to compress this cheap metal and increase its molecular density to the absolute maximum," Dex explained, turning the heavy star in his hand. "This old iron is now harder than treated Imperial steel, several times over."
Then, with a swift motion, Dex passed his other hand across the star's tips. He drew a small drop of his Rank D burning mana from his core and charged the sharpened points with a light and imperceptible touch of dormant Phoenix Fire. The star's tips flickered with a faint, unsettling orange glow for a moment before returning to cold black.
"These are not ordinary caltrops for stopping horses," said Dex, his voice dripping with tactical venom. "When the panicked Legion soldiers slide down the slope on the tar, they will fall with their full weight, armour and all, onto a vast field of these stars buried beneath the mud."
Dex pointed to one of the sharpened tips. "The density Lumia has created will drive this point through their armoured combat boots and their steel greaves as though cutting through warm butter. And the moment the metal pierces skin and meets blood, the latent Phoenix Fire spark I have seeded in the tips will awaken. The sudden heat will not cause an ordinary wound, it will fuse flesh, bone, and metal together in a single instant, welding the soldier's armour directly into his skeleton."
The scene was surreal and morally nauseating. Lumia, with her divine beauty and apparent cosmic innocence, sat serenely crafting instruments of savage death and torment at the request of a young human whose mind had been forged in the hell of prisons.
As the Elf watched in silence, they grasped a terrifying truth. The definition of "war" had changed forever in their lexicon on this night. Dex was not aiming to kill the soldiers of the Sixth Legion with honour, to win a clean and glorious victory. He was aiming for something far worse than death in the reckoning of armies. He was aiming for permanent incapacitation, to transform thousands of powerful soldiers into a mass of screaming, writhing, broken bodies that would choke the entire army's advance and shatter its morale completely before they had laid eyes on a single Dark Elf warrior.
Dex had introduced the Architecture of Pain into the world of magic. And the Imperial Legion was its first proving ground.