Chapter 102: The Empty Gap

"Yes, sir."

The soldier saluted, stepped back, and slipped out through the tent flap.

Inside, Lucian and Jeanne traded a glance, both turning over the same question. Whoever Flemming had been waiting on, it had to be someone significant, important enough that the Supreme Commander himself had walked to the entrance to greet them personally, a key piece of whatever plan he was still assembling to retake Korven.

Flemming crossed to the tent’s entrance and stood there, looking out with an expectant smile already forming.

From where he stood, a white carriage rolled into view, its horses easing to a stop directly outside. The driver at the reins carried himself like a paladin. One look at the carriage’s own design told most people exactly what they were looking at: a vehicle of the Order of Lumielle.

Jeanne and Eleonor both drifted toward the entrance, curiosity pulling them forward.

Lucian, equally curious about who from the Order might be arriving, chose to stay where he was a moment longer, bent over the map table, studying the layout in detail.

The chart spread before him mapped the full structure of Bravenheart’s territory, the Calamity Forest’s border, and the edges of several neighboring kingdoms beyond it.

What caught his attention first was the Dark Beast count Flemming had already marked across it, a number considerably higher than Lucian had expected. Tallied together, the markers added up to nearly ten thousand, split unevenly between the city’s western and northern approaches.

He recalled what Flemming had said earlier. The northern side carried fewer Dark Beasts overall, but redirecting the army that way simply wasn’t practical, the travel time alone enough to cost them dearly.

And yet Captain Ulrich’s own report placed the last trace of Patricia’s trail on that same northern side, near where her group had been tracking the Night Cervus, close enough to brush against House Melampus’s own main territory.

Reaching Melampus’s territory directly, which bordered the Calamity Forest in its own right, would mean a long detour through House Winter’s northern lands instead. That route alone would eat enough time to risk losing whatever other leads they might find along a faster path.

Flemming’s actual plan hinged on House Melampus pushing the Dark Beasts back from their own side, but the last word he’d received, days ago now, carried no confirmation they could actually offer that help.

Flemming suspected, privately, that a significant number of Dark Beasts might have already pushed into Melampus’s own territory, which would explain the silence. It was exactly what drove his urgency to break through Korven and push north as fast as possible.

Lucian’s attention shifted west instead, working from Ulrich’s confirmed numbers, the surest path to actually breaking through toward Korven with any real efficiency.

But as his hand drifted toward one of the pins marking the western cluster, something about the arrangement struck him as wrong.

Every Dark Beast marked there sat bunched together in roughly the same stretch of ground, and according to earlier scouting reports, they’d barely moved in days, holding that same position without drifting apart. That alone was strange.

Dark Beasts of different species almost never tolerated each other’s company, let alone settled peacefully into the same patch of territory for an extended stretch.

He’d already suspected Rhaiven’s hand in this. But the map suggested something had kept them mixed together, undisturbed, for days on end, when left to their own instincts they should have torn each other apart long before now.

And yet Ulrich’s report mentioned nothing of the sort, no infighting, no casualties among the swarm itself. Whatever technique Rhaiven was using to hold that many creatures in check, it ran far deeper than Lucian had given him credit for.

It dragged his mind, unwillingly, back to the old stories of the Nightkeeper, said to have once commanded thousands, hundreds of thousands, all at once, without a single one turning on another.

If Rhaiven alone can manage something close to that, what does the real Nightkeeper look like, fully awake? That thought alone should terrify every person in this camp.

He murmured it to himself, barely above a breath.

Then his finger drifted further along the western cluster and stopped.

Something else sat wrong there too. Studied closely, the Dark Beasts’ own positioning traced out something close to the shape of the letter U, curling around a patch of ground left entirely empty at its center.

Why would this spot sit empty?

The question nagged at him harder than it should have.

Why leave that one patch untouched, when every other inch of the western approach was packed with creatures? It felt less like an accident and more like something was already sitting there, something the Dark Beasts themselves were actively avoiding, keeping their distance from the city’s own central-western edge.

His suspicion deepened. Whatever occupied that gap, it was likely the reason the whole swarm hadn’t yet pushed forward into Korven at all.

He was still turning the thought over when the sound of footsteps broke his focus, three new figures stepping into the tent.

Lucian glanced up, withdrawing his hand slowly from the map.

Behind him, he recognized two of the three immediately. Luis and Arnold trailed a short step behind a third man, who’d clearly just climbed down from one of the carriages outside.

The man leading them looked, at a glance, like a Bishop. He appeared to be in his forties, a pair of glasses perched on his nose, a worn leather-bound book held loosely in one hand.

The aura that came off him was strangely calming, nothing like the raw, obvious weight of power Flemming carried, and yet the man moved through the tent with a quiet charisma that seemed to settle over everyone nearby, something that made people want to straighten up without quite understanding why.

Flemming’s earlier delight curdled instantly at the sight of him, his eyes blinking rapidly, a flicker of genuine irritation passing across his face. He pulled a fresh cigar from his coat and lit the end with a touch of his own fingertip, drawing on it hard enough to make the ember flare.

"Is this really how you greet your guests, Flemming?"

"Tch. Why in the world did they send you, Hugo?"

Flemming crossed his arms, mouth still working around the cigar, and let out a thick, deliberate cloud of smoke directly toward Hugo, Arnold, and Luis.

Arnold coughed hard, the second time tonight he’d caught the brunt of that smoke. Irritation flashed across his face, but he held his tongue, well aware of exactly how important the man standing in front of him was, and forced himself toward something closer to patience.

Hugo simply waved the smoke away from his own face with one hand, unbothered.

"Where is SaintessRosaria? Why send a Cardinal in her place?"

Lucian caught the word clearly. A Cardinal. It was the first time in his life he’d stood in the same room as one, men and women who, by reputation, rarely set foot outside their own cathedrals at all.

Jeanne, for her part, had clearly already known exactly who he was, offering her own greeting without hesitation.

"Oh, Miss Jeanne. I had a feeling I’d find you here. Is your father keeping well?"

"He’s well, Cardinal Hugo. Thank you for asking."

Hugo walked straight past Flemming, brushing off his questions entirely in favor of a few warm words with Jeanne instead.

The ease between them said plenty on its own, that Hugo had once been part of Bravenheart’s own cavalry ranks before the Order of Lumielle ever claimed him, and that he and Flemming had served in the same company together once, close enough that Flemming still felt entitled to speak to him without an ounce of formal courtesy, Cardinal’s robes or not.

Underneath the gruffness, something else lingered too, a quiet resentment Flemming still carried over the day Hugo had chosen the Order over everything they’d once shared, a choice Flemming had never quite stopped treating as a betrayal of their old friendship.

Once he’d finished his exchange with Jeanne, Hugo adjusted his glasses and let his gaze drift sideways, landing on Eleonor standing just beside her.

His expression split into a wide, delighted grin, one finger lifting to point directly at her, as though his real reason for coming all this way had never truly been Korven’s crisis at all.

"There you are. You must be Miss Eleonor, the White Awakening bearer."

"Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for you at the Virelle border outpost? Over a week now."