The situation was already bad, and Karon knew it before anyone else dared to say it out loud.

Eight thousand soldiers had marched into the Ritefield under his command. Eight thousand banners. Eight thousand lives. And far too many of them were tasting real battle for the first time. Not drills. Not border skirmishes. War.

Worse, complacency had crept in.

The moment the Thal'Zar lines broke, the moment resistance collapsed too cleanly, too easily, discipline bled away. Weapons were dismissed in flashes of fading light. Skills were released. Shields lowered. Formations loosened as relief replaced vigilance.

Victory had been assumed.

It was a mistake.

A single, thunderous crack had proven it.

The sound still echoed in Karon's mind, short, brutal, final. Not the clash of steel or the roar of a skill, but something colder. Mechanical. Absolute. The kind of sound that did not belong on a battlefield where people still believed themselves safe.

He did not look back again.

Lorian's body remained where it had fallen, half-sunken into churned mud and blood, his head gone, his ambition silenced in an instant. A noble heir reduced to a warning no one had time to mourn. Confidence turned into carrion. Renown erased before it could ever take shape.

Karon's jaw tightened.

There was no time for anger. No room for regret.

Around him, the battlefield shifted. Shouts rose, overlapping, panicked. Soldiers scrambled to re-invoke weapons. Units tried to reform where no clear lines remained. Orders contradicted each other as fear spread faster than discipline ever could.

This was how armies died.

Karon drew in a sharp breath and let mana surge through his voice, raw and commanding, carrying far beyond the reach of normal sound.

"REGROUP!"

The word slammed into the field like a physical force.

Again, louder now.

"REGROUP NOW!"

The order cut through the chaos, giving direction where there had only been noise. Officers snapped to attention. Veterans moved instinctively, grabbing the nearest soldiers, dragging them into rough lines. Standards were raised again—not for glory, but as anchors in the storm.

Karon turned his horse away from the corpse in the mud.

The dead would not follow him.

The living had to.

Reform. Pull back. Find cohesion before the noose tightened completely.

This wasn't about winning anymore.

It was about getting out alive.

And as Karon pushed forward, guiding what remained of his forces away from the place where false victory had been celebrated, one truth burned colder than fear in his chest:

They had walked straight into this.

The retreat did not buy them silence.

It bought them chaos.

Skills ignited across the battlefield in violent succession, overlapping without rhythm or restraint. Bolts from heavy crossbows screamed through the air, punching into armor with bone-crushing force. Siege mechanisms—portable, hidden, prepared—came alive in thunderous intervals, hurling devastation in wide arcs that tore through clustered formations. The ground shook under repeated impacts.

Fire techniques bloomed in sudden bursts, consuming space rather than targets. Water surged in crushing waves, turning soil into sucking mud that dragged boots down and shattered momentum. Wind-based impacts struck from impossible angles, flinging soldiers aside like broken pieces on a board that no longer had rules.

There were too many classes.

Too many trajectories.

Too many directions to watch at once.

Lines blurred. Orders dissolved into noise. Soldiers fell mid-step, mid-turn, mid-invocation—some struck before they even understood they were under attack. Mana flared and died in flashes, skills cut short as bodies collapsed where they stood.

The numbers dropped fast.

Karon felt it instinctively, the way a commander sensed loss before reports ever reached him. The same hollow acceleration. The same sudden thinning of presence. Just moments ago, it had been the Thal'Zar who were breaking, dying in confusion, unable to understand where the killing blows came from.

Now it was them.

Now it was Sylvanel and allies blood soaking into the ground, soldiers dying without ever seeing the hand that ended them.

A mirror held up to their own actions.

Karon cut down an attacker that came too close, roots tearing up through the earth to impale the body before it could strike again. His mind raced even as steel and skill moved on instinct.

Yes. It was a trap.

That much was undeniable now.

But the question gnawed at him harder with every fallen banner.

Since when?

From the moment they marched?

From the moment the Ritefield was left undefended?

Why had the opening been so easy?

The Thal'Zar they had slaughtered at the start—disorganized, poorly equipped, reacting like panicked civilians rather than trained forces. Criminals. Rabble. A front that had folded far too cleanly under pressure.

A sacrifice.

The realization settled like ice in his gut.

They had been let through.

And now, as steel clashed and skills carved the air apart around him, Karon understood the truth far too late:

The real battle had never been the celebration.

It was this retreat.

And it was bleeding them dry.

The initial resistance had been pathetic.

Not weak in numbers, but weak in quality. The way they broke. The way they screamed. The way they died without coordination, without fallback positions, without even the instinctive discipline of soldiers who had trained to die together.

They hadn't fought like an army.

They had fought like people who weren't meant to survive.

Karon's gaze swept the chaos around him with renewed clarity, his mind cutting through the noise even as his body continued to move, to strike, to endure. He remembered the opening moments—the lack of cohesion, the absence of commanding presences. How few Flow Rank signatures he had sensed. How rare Prime Rank pressure had been

An event like the Ritefield should have drawn Thal'Zar elites. Commanders. Blooded warriors. Those who mattered in the house.

Instead, they had found criminals with weapons.

Contrabandists wielding borrowed steel. Murderers and raiders hiding behind half-learned skills. People who reacted like civilians when death arrived too fast to understand.

Disposable.

The thought made his jaw tighten.

The real troops had never been there.

They had known.

The Thal'Zar had known they would be attacked, had anticipated the strike not as a possibility, but as a certainty. And so they had made a choice, one so calculated, so cold, that it twisted something deep in Karon's chest.

They had turned the Ritefield into bait.

A sacred ground, offered up without hesitation. A tradition broken on purpose. Criminals and expendable forces placed front and center to absorb the blow, to sell the illusion of victory, to draw Sylvanel and others blades deep into territory already prepared to close around them.

A war won before the first sword was ever raised.

Karon felt something close to disbelief brush against him—not at the strategy itself, but at who had been willing to employ it.

One of the Eight Great Families.

Pride-bound. Tradition-obsessed. Willing to burn their own rites, stain their own name, and sacrifice hundreds without remorse if it meant securing the greater war.

Something like that wasn't supposed to happen.

And yet… it had.

The retreat didn't slow.

Karon felt it the moment the ground beneath his horse became unstable, mana detonations tearing through soil, impact skills collapsing terrain, the path ahead turning into a funnel of fire and steel. Orders were still being shouted, but cohesion was thinning by the second, stretched under pressure that refused to ease.

He didn't hesitate.

Karon swung down from the saddle in one smooth motion, boots hitting mud already soaked dark with blood. He passed the reins off without looking, fingers closing around the hilt of his sword as roots surged instinctively beneath his feet.

Steel was his tool.

Roots were his weapon.

The earth answered him with violence.

Thick coils of wood erupted from the ground, spearing upward through bodies that hadn't moved fast enough. Lycans were lifted off their feet, impaled mid-step, roots bursting from chests and mouths in grotesque sprays as screams cut short. Others were dragged down, limbs swallowed and replaced by twisting branches that pinned them in place, leaving behind shapes that looked less like corpses and more like malformed trees.

There was no elegance in it.

Only efficiency.

But then the pressure ahead held.

Something stopped the advance cold.

Karon's gaze snapped forward—and found him.

A Lycan, already transformed.

He still carried a vaguely humanoid silhouette, but that was where familiarity ended. The creature stood well over two and a half meters tall, shoulders broad enough to eclipse the chaos behind him. Muscles bulged unnaturally beneath torn armor, every movement dense with restrained violence. Claws dug into the ground as he exhaled, breath steaming despite the heat of battle.

A captain.

Prime Rank.

Karon felt the weight of it immediately.

There was no room to go around.

If they were going to retreat, this thing had to fall.

Karon stepped forward.

The ground beneath the Lycan exploded as roots speared upward, aiming to skewer him from below, but the beast reacted. He leapt, power coiling through his legs, claws tearing through the incoming wood mid-air. Splinters flew as he landed heavily, cracking the earth where he stood.

Exactly what Karon wanted.

Detached from the ground.

Roots surged again, this time from the sides, wrapping around the Lycan's torso and limbs in a binding weave meant to crush and immobilize. The beast snarled, muscles swelling as he strained against the living prison.

For a heartbeat, it held.

Then the Lycan roared.

Wood cracked.

Roots snapped apart under sheer physical force, fibers tearing as the creature ripped himself free. Karon didn't retreat, but he hadn't expected the counter either.

The Lycan's fist slammed into his side.

Pain detonated in Karon's abdomen as the blow crushed into his liver, driving the breath from his lungs and sending him staggering back through the mud. His vision swam for a fraction of a second, roots flaring wildly around him as instinct took over.

Prime Rank.

Both of them.

And not at its foundation, no, they were brushing against the next threshold, power pressing against limits neither had fully crossed yet.

The Lycan didn't give him space.

He surged forward, claws flashing, each strike heavy enough to shatter bone. Karon raised his sword, steel ringing as he parried, roots snapping into place to divert killing blows, but it wasn't enough to dominate. Only to survive.

Around them, the battle didn't pause.

Ranged skills tore through the air—bolts, arcs, detonations—cutting down Sylvanel soldiers who couldn't move fast enough. Bodies fell in clusters. Lines thinned. Shouts turned desperate.

To Karon's left, water surged upward as the Watercaller Heir planted himself into the chaos, a translucent barrier forming just in time to intercept a barrage that would have torn through three squads at once. His face was pale with strain, hands shaking as he redirected impact after impact, refusing to let the line collapse.

It was teamwork.

Desperate. Fraying. Holding by force of will alone.

Karon blocked another strike, roots snapping up to force distance—but the truth pressed in on him harder than the Lycan's blows.

This was taking too long.

They were bleeding soldiers with every second they stayed here.

They couldn't win this fight like this.

There was only one name left in Karon's mind.

Aubrelle au Rosenthal.

The thought surfaced not as hope, but as calculation, the kind born when every other option had already failed.

And then the battlefield changed.

It was subtle at first. Easy to miss amid the screams and detonations. Karon noticed it only because he was searching for patterns through the chaos.

The cries weren't coming from his lines anymore.

They were farther back.

Behind the enemy.

Another heartbeat passed—and the pressure lessened. Not vanished, not broken, but reduced. Ranged attacks thinned. The relentless barrage that had been carving through his retreat lost its rhythm, as if something had reached out and gripped it by the throat.

Karon's eyes snapped upward.

Above the battlefield, high enough to see everything, a pale shape cut through smoke and drifting ash.

Pipin.

From the sky, nothing escaped him. Not the collapsing formations. Not the shifting mana currents. Not the moment the enemy rear began to buckle under sudden, unexpected force.

And Aubrelle saw it all through him.

She entered the battlefield not in haste, but in control.

Mounted upon the luminous stag—her mother's familiar—she emerged from the rear lines like an omen carved from light. Its antlers blazed softly against the smoke-darkened sky, hooves striking earth with impossible grace as mana rippled outward in disciplined waves.

Behind her came the Rosenthal forces.

A hundred summoners.

More than two hundred familiars answered their call.

Beasts of light and spirit surged forward—serpents of mana, armored constructs, spectral predators—each bound not by chaos, but by coordination. Two invocations per summoner, perfectly spaced, perfectly timed.

The Thal'Zar rear collapsed almost instantly.

Cries of confusion turned into panic as the pressure reversed, their retreat paths severed, their lines folding inward under forces they had never accounted for. From the front, Karon's armies pressed. From behind, Aubrelle closed the jaws.

The battlefield became a vice.

A perfect sandwich.

Enemy forces crushed between two advancing fronts, trapped not by illusion or terrain—but by inevitability.

Karon felt it then. The shift. The moment the war tipped back into motion.

And as the luminous stag advanced through smoke and blood, Aubrelle au Rosenthal entered the battlefield.

The direction of the war changed with her.

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