The wind had shifted.

  It no longer howled with the heat of charging mana beasts or sang with the thunder of spells. Now, it carried the scent of scorched fur and damp soil—tired, metallic, faintly sweet. A strange quiet settled over the battlefield where the Unterkreis Division had made its stand. Not peace. Just silence heavy enough to press against the lungs.

  One of the mages pulled back her hood, letting the air touch her sweat-matted hair. Her shoulders sagged, more from mana fatigue than weight. The horizon was streaked with the remnants of battle: dark patches where fire had scorched grass, glowing fragments of broken sigils still flickering among the rubble, mana-fused bones half-buried in the mud.

  They had done their part.

  Unterkreis was never meant to hold the line—only to draw danger away from it. Mounted mages sent ahead like bait, tasked with splitting the approaching herds into smaller, more manageable clusters. Lure. Bleed. Break. Then retreat before being overwhelmed.

  And by some miracle—or perhaps sheer precision—they had succeeded.

  The commander of the Unterkreis Division sat astride his mount, cloak torn and streaked with ash. His eyes, ringed with fatigue, scanned the battlefield one last time before pulling a scroll from the case at his hip.

  It unfurled with a brittle crackle.

  The map shimmered faintly—a spell-imbued parchment, marked with live glyphs and shifting sigil points. He studied it in silence,

  A voice broke the still.

  “Everyone’s here, sir.”

  The speaker was a younger officer, his voice rough with exhaustion. Dried blood stained the side of his cheek, a shallow cut barely closed. He stood straight, but his shoulders twitched with the strain of it.

  “We got light casualties, “But the unit’s combat-ready. Most riders are recovering with elixirs. Awaiting next deployment.”

  The commander gave a quiet grunt

  “There are more mana beasts than predicted,”

  “Some of the spillage is pushing back into our vector. South edge of Einhartturm’s outer field is already seeing overflow.”

  He traced a gloved finger along the map’s southern quadrant.

  “We need to readjust our plan. Instead of heading straight into Einhartturm, we’ll bait part of that spillage—draw them off just enough to relieve pressure. Only then do we enter the walls or veer south, depending on how the field shifts.”

  The young officer blinked, choosing his words carefully.

  “With respect, sir… our riders are already on their last reserves. They’re combat-ready, yes—but only for a push to the wall, not another bait run. We should enter Einhartturm to –“

  “The southern road is crucial,” the commander cut in, voice flat, “tell the riders to drink the Draught again. I don’t care if they spit blood—they will march.”

  The younger officer hesitated—just for a moment. Then, without another word, he raised a fist to his chest in salute and turned, calling out orders to the riders. Boots struck mud, hooves shifted, commands echoed into motion.

  The commander remained still for a heartbeat longer. Then, with a grunt, he uncorked a vial from his side pouch—Voran’s red draught. The liquid shimmered like molten rust. He downed it in one motion.

  The taste was always worse than the pain that followed.

  He gritted his teeth as the potion coursed through him, burning its way into tired veins. Then he pulled his mount around and raised his hand. His signal cut through the field.

  They would move. They would bleed again.

  Far behind the battered plains, where hoof beats still echoed and the scent of scorched fur clung to the wind, the pulse of battle took a different form.

  Inside the Main Supply Depot, the air was thick not with blood—but with urgency. Crates scraped across stone. Runes hissed under pressure. And between the thunder of distant artillery and the muted hum of defensive wards, voices rose—quick, sharp, and ceaseless.

  But for the moment, two girls sat still amid the chaos.

  Vierna hunched over a slate board, scribbling something in tight, deliberate strokes. The markings weren’t visible from where Lina sat—only that she wrote with the kind of focus that tuned the world out. Whatever it was, she hadn’t stopped since they sat down.

  Lina leaned back against a crate, one boot half-off, her waterskin nearly empty. She sighed dramatically.

  “If I move one more crate, I’m going to melt into the floor. Just leave me here. Tell Herr Halwen I died bravely.”

  Vierna’s hand froze over the slate. She blinked once, as if her brain had tripped on Lina’s words mid-sentence. The scratching of chalk stopped.

  “If you’ve got energy to joke, you’re clearly not dying.”

  “Though from this angle, you do look like a collapsed camel. Just need a second hump and maybe a sandstorm for dramatic effect.”

  Lina jolted upright, jabbing a finger toward her.

  "Hey! Insulting your monarch is punishable by death," Lina declared, puffing herself up like she still ruled the Tray and Bread Kingdom, “although… I guess I’m okay being compared to a camel. They’re beautiful, tough, and just—majestic. Have you seen their eyelashes? And the way they move? Like they know something the rest of us don’t. Honestly, I think I was one in a past life."

  Vierna blinked slowly. Then set her slate aside. In her mind, the image of a camel rose unbidden—dull, lazy-eyed, clearly not majestic, and constantly spitting. She couldn’t fathom how anyone admired them. But this was Lina, and somehow, the absurdity made sense. Especially when she considered how much water Lina managed to drink in a day. Maybe the comparison wasn’t too far off after all.

  "My sincerest apologies, Your Camelness. I would never dream of insulting –“

  “Where are you two?” Halwen’s voice snapped through their minds, sharp and dry.

  Both girls jolted slightly. Lina grabbed her waterskin. Vierna reached for her slate.

  "Lina," Halwen continued, tone dry as a bone, “go to Bay Six and confirm the crates are marked and stacked properly. No crooked glyphs this time. If you find anything shaped like a camel, it’s not your long-lost relative—just send it to the front.”

  "Vierna, I need your crate label verification sheets now. And no, I don’t need footnotes flagging typos from the previous batch. Just what’s been confirmed and where it’s going."

  Neither girl responded aloud. But as the last words echoed in their minds, something tightened in the air between them. Vierna didn’t know why, but something gnawed at her. If Halwen had been listening earlier—if he’d heard them talking, even joking—why hadn’t he stepped in then? The thought hung in her mind like a frayed thread, tugging at something she didn’t want to unravel.

  The joke was over. The war hadn’t paused for their breath.

  Crates scraped again. Slate was stowed. Waterskins were tossed aside.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The depot pulsed back to life—faster, sharper.

  And beyond its walls, where the stone gave way to trenches and scorched mud, the first defensive line braced for what came next.

  The volleys hadn’t stopped. Spell fired and steel surged in seamless rhythm, the pace brutal, almost ritual. Hands moved by instinct now—load, cast, fire, breathe. Again.

  The minefield had done its work. The enchanted traps flared with devastating force, each detonation chewing through flesh and crystal. Yet the herd pressed on. For what felt like forever, they had come in waves—endless, gnashing, wild.

  And even stranger—none of them stopped to feed.

  Ordinarily, when a beast fell, the others would pause to devour it—ripping flesh, drinking its leaking essence, using the dead to grow stronger mid-charge. That was the rule of mana beasts. Hunger first.

  But this time… they ignored the bodies.

  They barreled forward, straight past their fallen, eyes fixed on something deeper within the line. It wasn’t just hunger anymore. It was direction.

  And then... nothing.

  No one noticed at first. The air was still filled with smoke and the burn of mana. Crossbow crews stayed in motion. Mages muttered incantations with muscle memory honed by repetition. A few groaned through the ache in their fingers. Another volley fired—then another.

  But somewhere along the line, a mage paused.

  She glanced past the fog, her eyes squinting through the haze—and saw nothing.

  No shapes. No movement.

  Just the churned field, soaked in steam and blood, yawning open beyond the shattered mines. Only a vast, empty moat now separated the first defensive line from the battlefield.

  The beasts were gone.

  “Is it over?” a mage muttered, lowering his staff slightly.

  “It is!” someone else called. “We won!”

  But the words had barely left their lips when the sky tore open.

  A fireball—massive, blazing, deliberate—screamed from the fog like a comet and slammed into the Orgelkanone position. The explosion was deafening. Stone split. Metal shrieked. At least dozens of the cannons vanished in flame and smoke, shrapnel raining down on the trenches.

  It was too accurate. Too focused. No way a simple minded mana beast could have done that.

  General Berbars’s eyes widened, he shouted

  “WE GOT A FUCKING CLOAKER! RESUME FIRING!”

  Officially, it was designated Daemon Varian #34: Black Umbral, Alone, it was just another daemon—dangerous, but not unprecedented. But near a herd, everything changed. Its mere proximity distorted the air, bending light, muting sound. Cloaking the beasts near it, rendering them almost invisible unless directly struck.

  Worse still, it exuded something—an aetheric field, invisible but potent. Not a spell, not an incantation, but an ambient distortion that gnawed at the instincts of mana beasts and sharpened them. Like a fog lifting from feral minds. The coordinated fire ball, the surprise attack, the way the beast didn’t stopped to eat their fallen kind, it made sense now.

  “Cloaker,” he’d called it—because that’s what it did. It cloaked. Not just their bodies, but their minds. The beasts near it moved quieter, smarter. As if something whispered behind their eyes.

  And the Cloaker was there all along, hiding in the crowds since the beginning, waiting to strike at the perfect moment

  General Berbaris raised his hand, etching a swift array into the air—concentric loops that shimmered in layered blue and gold.

  “Dyerain Array,” he muttered.

  The sky groaned and cracked, as though the heavens themselves had been forced to bleed.

  A moment later, droplets began to fall—not water, but glowing pigment, streaking through the air like alchemical ink. It splattered across stone, trench, steel… and then caught on something else.

  Shapes. Dozens. Maybe more.

  Humanoid silhouettes, previously invisible, now dripping in ghostly reds and yellows. They flickered into view across the battlefield like living smears of light—Cloakers. Far more than anyone had expected.

  “Gods,” someone whispered.

  One Cloaker was bad enough.

  General Berbaris didn’t hesitate. His voice cracked like thunder across the defensive line:

  “Oberkreis Division! Switch to long-range spellfire. Target the Cloakers. I want them dead—now.”

  Mages shifted formation at once. Chanting began—sharp, practiced, relentless.

  “Frienhart’s Destructing Javelin!”

  “Sonnenrache!”

  “Wyrm’s Piercing Shot!”

  A chorus of advanced-class incantations surged into the sky. Spell lines arced like spears of wrath, trailing heat and light.

  The glowing rain from Dyerain still fell across the field—General Berbaris’s spell to mark invisible targets. Cloakers, once hidden, now stood revealed in vivid color. Painted silhouettes crouched behind mana beasts, too many to count.

  The volley should’ve landed clean.

  It didn’t.

  Beasts lunged into the spell paths—deliberate. Others conjured thick earthen walls, crude but coordinated. It wasn’t evolution. It wasn’t strategy. It was the Cloakers—still alive, still amplifying.

  Every moment they remained on the field, the herd fought like something it wasn’t meant to be. As if a greater mind had threaded itself through their instincts. A terrible rhythm had taken hold—and it would not break until the Cloakers did.

  Berbaris’s eyes blazed.

  “Fucking Cloaker, giving free education to the damn beasts!"

  He slammed his gauntlet to the barricade, voice rising.

  “Arkenfaust mages, forward! Switch to close quarters”

  A different group moved now. Not a formal division, but a specialized discipline—Arkenfaust mages, trained to wield mana and steel in tandem. They carried melee weapons of their own choosing—swords, halberds, axes—anything that fit their fighting style. Their armor lighter, optimized for parrying. They were casters who didn’t flinch when the lines collapsed—mages who met claws with blade.

  Berbaris turned toward the rear trench.

  “Signal the Aschezug and Splittermarsch. No more rotation. Everyone to the front.”

  “Kill the Cloakers… before the beasts start debating battlefield ethics.”

  Berbaris’s brow furrowed. He opened a resonance thread—one-way at first, then locked the connection.

  “Rellgardt. Pull the cannon range back. We’re going into melee. I don’t want our own men getting flattened by a misfire. Cloakers in the field. Too much chaos to risk it.”

  Rellgardt’s voice crackled over the mana-line.

  “What in the fucking hell is a Cloaker?!”

  “That fucking daemon that makes the others invisible—and gives them a bit of brain while it’s at it!” Berbaris slammed his fist on the railing, “get your ass out of the tower sometimes and study things when you’re in the fucking field!”

  “Use the official fucking name, damn it—Daemon Varian Number Thirty-Four: Black Umbral!”

  Rellgardt exhaled hard. Talking to a field commander had never been his strongest suit.

  “Of course it’s not enough they’ve got overwhelming numbers—now they’ve got fucking wannabe commanders.”

  “Send anyone you can spare to reinforce the front. I don’t care who—if they can fire a damn musket, that’s fucking enough.” Berbaris didn’t wait for a reply.

  “Fine. I’ll send what I can. But if those levy kids crack, you’re getting the pieces.”

  He turned from the barricade, boots thudding hard against packed stone. The soldiers were already assembling—Arkenfaust mages, frontline units from Aschezug and Splittermarsch, bruised but ready. Smoke clung to their armor. Burn marks blackened their sleeves. No one spoke.

  He raised a crimson vial—Voran’s red draught—high above his head. No words. Just the motion.

  Then he drank.

  The liquid blazed down his throat, setting his nerves on fire. Pain twisted his jaw. His eyes snapped open with renewed clarity.

  His voice bellowed across the line.

  “FOR EINHARTTURM!”

  “FOR EINHARTTURM!”

  The soldiers roared back, their voices shaking the trench walls.

  Runes flashed. From behind the forward barricade, a massive earthen bridge rose—conjured by the siege-casters, its spine etched with binding glyphs, its surface glowing faintly under the falling Dyerain. It arched over the deep moat like a drawn blade.

  And then they ran.

  Steel rang. Boots hit stone. The charge began—straight toward the Cloakers.

  The bridge trembled under the weight of charging boots, spell-lined steel, and raw resolve. Across the field, the Cloakers still shimmered beneath the dripping glow of Dyerain—ghosts wreathed in color, each silhouette flickering like a smear of bleeding ink.

  One of them turned.

  Its hand—a spindly, four-jointed claw—rose silently and pointed.

  The response was instant.

  The herd screamed.

  Mana beasts surged forward with terrifying unity, claws pounding mud, tusks tearing through ash, their frenzy sharpened by unseen will. They weren’t protecting—they were obeying. Shields of flesh. Fangs on command.

  And then the lines met.

  The first clash was thunder. Steel rang against bone. Sparks burst where spell and sinew collided. An Arkenfaust mage drove a halberd through a snarling beast’s gut—only to be dragged down by another from behind. A knight from Splittermarsch split one open with a mana-forged axe, eyes alight with something too bright to be natural. Cries rang out. Bodies fell. The sky narrowed to blood and breath.

  And the Cloaker still stood. Watching.

  Waiting.

  General Berbaris did not wait for formation.

  He surged forward—through the press of bodies, past the crumbling edge of the bridge, straight into the fray. His sabre lit with a searing white edge as he raised it skyward, runes along its fuller sparking alive with ancient command.

  “Halbmond: Erl?sung!” he roared.

  The arc of his swing cracked the air. A bladed crescent of pure force tore loose from the sabre’s edge—sweeping wide, howling with silver fury. It cleaved through the beasts guarding the Cloaker, carving a path of torn sinew and ruptured bone. Limbs scattered. The Cloaker flinched.

  Berbaris didn’t slow.

  He jumped.

  For a breathless moment, he was suspended above the battlefield—cloak unfurling like a storm flag, ash curling around his boots, death staring down from the grey-stained sky.

  “Reikardschlange!”

  The spell coiled out from his outstretched hand, a bolt of twisting, zig-zagging mana. It danced like lightning drunk on blood—jagged, deliberate, and unforgiving. It found the Cloaker’s chest and pierced it clean through.

  The daemon reeled, shrieked—a sound like ice shattering under skin—and then collapsed.

  Its death revealed what it truly was beneath the veil: a sunken, hooded husk, long-limbed and shriveled, face like dried leather beneath a halo of smoke. Not invincible. Just cloaked. Just clever.

  Berbaris landed hard, cracking a crater beneath his boots.

  “THESE NERDS ARE NOT INVINCIBLE!” he bellowed, "KILL THEM ALL—FOR THE REICH, FOR ORDER, FOR TRUTH!”

  The charge surged anew.

  And from that charge, under grey sky and ruin, the tide began to shift.