Chapter 101: What the Ground Might Hide

Still bowed, Tervis explained. Patricia and her assigned group had been tasked with tracking a Dark Beast as part of their trial.

"I lost her after they picked up the trail of a Night Cervus, along the Calamity Forest’s border, my lady."

A Night Cervus was a deer-shaped Beast, crowned with antlers of considerable size, each tip grown through with something closer to a living plant than bone, its nectar prized as a potion ingredient so rare it reached the highest, S-tier grade.

It only showed itself after dark, and catching one was brutally difficult, not only for its speed, but because its antlers could weave an illusion dense enough to leave even seasoned hunters hopelessly lost.

More than a few travelers had wandered straight into the Calamity Forest chasing one, drawn deeper by a creature whose true habitat had never actually left those woods at all.

"What? How could Orvis Academy possibly sanction an exam that dangerous?"

The exam itself had carried real danger, Elder Tervis admitted, but as he explained it to Jeanne, it had been set by one of the Academy’s own Alchemy deans, meant to push students into locating top-tier potion materials entirely on their own merit.

Jeanne’s jaw tightened. There were dozens of rare materials scattered across the empire. Why, out of all of them, choose a Beast that made its home right against the Calamity Forest’s own border?

Tervis had no answer for that. He genuinely didn’t know.

"What’s the name of the Dean who designed that insane exam?"

Irritation had crept fully into her voice now, already turning the question over as the opening move of a formal complaint she intended to drag straight to Orvis Academy’s own doorstep.

"Answer me. His name."

"Dean Kai, my lady."

Jeanne turned the name over in her mind and found nothing attached to it. In everything she knew of Orvis Academy’s faculty, she’d never once heard of a dean by that name, nor any history tying him to Bravenheart at all.

Tervis caught the confusion on her face and offered more.

"He’s new to the Academy’s ranks, my lady. If I’m not mistaken, he isn’t even from this continent."

That answered the question sitting unspoken in the back of Jeanne’s mind, though it did nothing to settle her nerves.

A dean with no history anyone in this room could vouch for, designing an exam that sent children straight toward the one stretch of ground every seasoned soldier in the empire still feared. She filed the name away with the deliberate care of someone who fully intended to use it later.

Beside her, Lucian’s hand drifted to his own chin, something about the name snagging at a memory he couldn’t quite place yet.

"Kai..."

"From outside this continent?"

Sonata trembled against his hip, violent enough this time that he had to close his hand around the hilt fast, pressing it still before anyone else noticed the blade shuddering entirely on its own.

It wasn’t the first time. He’d learned, by now, that whenever Sonata trembled like that, it meant something, a warning folded into motion rather than words.

He let his eyes drop to the sword at his side, and the memory arrived whole, a fragment pulled straight out of the Chronos Domain, a name he’d heard spoken there more than once.

"Rhaiven. Kai. Yunxi."

The three names left his mouth almost without his permission, and with them came the full memory, Kai standing beside Rhaiven during the incident that had involved Miyu, all those years ago.

He didn’t want to believe Kai was actually here. But the longer he turned it over, weighing it against Rhaiven’s own presence tonight and the push toward an expedition into the Calamity Forest, the harder the coincidence became to dismiss.

Add in the missing townsfolk, and his own third sister, caught up in something touching a man with a history this dark. That wasn’t coincidence. That was design.

Lucian felt the shape of it settle into place. Kai and Rhaiven, working together, deliberately engineering the disappearance of noble-born children, dragging their families into mounting an expedition no one could afford to refuse.

Orvis Academy held far more than just Sarnel blood among its students. Every noble house with a child enrolled there carried the same risk.

And the more of them vanished, drawn toward the Calamity Forest, the more soldiers, the more desperate searchers, would follow them straight into it.

His hand closed into a tight fist.

He already felt a step behind. If he couldn’t track down every missing noble child from that Academy exam quickly enough, this wouldn’t stay a Bravenheart problem for long.

Other kingdoms, other armies, would start arriving to help force their own way into that forest, and the more people who poured into it, the worse this was going to get.

"You’d be better served asking Captain Ulrich about Korven’s current state, and what his scouting turned up, Jeanne. We can’t chase down missing people’s trails freely while Korven itself still isn’t secured."

Flemming cut in deliberately, steering her attention toward something more immediately useful.

"The last word I had was that the missing were being taken toward Korven’s own border. That’s right, isn’t it, Ulrich?"

"Correct, as Supreme Commander Flemming says, Lady Jeanne. We need to retake Korven quickly if we’re going to push north from there at all."

Ulrich’s answer pulled Jeanne back into focus, the sharp edges of her anger settling into something colder and more useful.

"Then tell me exactly what you saw out there, Captain."

Ulrich rose and stepped toward the broad map table dominating the center of the tent, its surface weighted down at the corners with brass markers, pinned reports curling slightly in the damp air. He waved the rest of them closer.

He tapped first at a point marking their current village, tucked into the territory south of Korven proper. Then, pin in hand, he moved to the western edge of the city itself, marking the stretch of ground his scouting party had actually covered.

Along that western border, he said, they’d confirmed sightings of at least seven distinct Dark Beast types.

"We saw them with our own eyes. Dark Goblin. Orc. Direwolf. Bone Crawler. Siphon Leech. Veilmoth."

A visible shudder ran through Eleonor at the mention of the Siphon Leech, a creature nowhere near as physically dangerous as an Orc or a Dark Goblin, but one that carried a reputation all its own.

It moved in a slow, bloated roll rather than a crawl, its translucent hide stretched so thin over the mass beneath that the dark, pulsing threads of whatever it had drained still showed through, visibly moving beneath the surface.

It left behind a stench strong enough to mark a room long after it had gone, something between rot and copper, and the sight of it alone turned most stomachs faster than anything with claws or teeth ever could.

Jeanne bit down on the edge of her thumbnail, clearly unsettled by just how wide a variety of Dark Beast had somehow made it this deep into Korven’s own territory.

The Veilmoth’s name drew the sharpest reaction from her, though, a Dark Beast built like a moth forced upright into something closer to a human shape, its chitinous body hard enough to turn a blade, its resistance to magic high enough to make most Wizards and Magic Archers nearly useless against it.

Orcs she knew well enough already, brute strength wrapped in thick, scarred hide, dangerous mostly in numbers.

Direwolves hunted in packs with an unsettling, coordinated intelligence, far smarter than any ordinary wolf had any right to be.

Bone Crawlers unsettled her in a different way entirely, skeletal things that moved low and fast along the ground, limbs jointed wrong, built to flank rather than charge head-on.

"That’s only six," Jeanne said. "What’s the seventh you haven’t named yet?"

Flemming, who’d remained seated through all of it, finally rose, stepping up to the table and tapping a thick finger against the border wall marked on the map.

"The seventh has to be a Gloom Rat."

"And that’s exactly why I haven’t sent my own forces in to retake Korven outright."

He laid out his reasoning. Gloom Rats dug, burrowing through the earth and carving tunnels wherever they operated, which was precisely why they almost never surfaced above ground.

Fighting one down in its own territory was a genuinely dangerous proposition, the air thin enough to choke on, movement slowed to a crawl in those cramped, suffocating spaces.

Worse than that, a Gloom Rat could bleed Dark Mana directly into a confined space like that, enough to start breaking down a person’s own body tissue the longer they stayed trapped inside it.

And the real danger, Flemming added, wasn’t the rats themselves. It was what they could smuggle in behind them.

Once Gloom Rats had tunneled beneath a city like Korven, there was no telling what else they might drag down there with them, nesting it somewhere beneath the streets until it chose to burst back up to the surface with no warning at all, right in the middle of a column of soldiers who’d thought the ground beneath their boots was solid.

"So you’ll understand why I’m not moving a single soldier in there blind. Not until I know exactly what’s waiting under those streets. We’re still short the help I’m waiting on."

A heavy silence settled over the table at that, every pinned marker on the map suddenly looking less like strategy and more like a warning.

The words had barely left his mouth when one of his own soldiers pushed through the tent flap.

"Report, Supreme General. Our reinforcements have arrived."

The man saluted sharply, requesting permission to let whoever had arrived into the meeting.

"Ah. Perfect timing." Flemming’s face split into a broad grin. "Send them in, quickly."