Free Web NovelThe wind on the hillside was biting cold.
Thomas knelt on one knee among the loose stones, raised a hand, and the White Night Squad fanned out behind the ridge.
Several searchlight beams stabbed from the slope into Grey Rock Fortress, like operating-lamp glare peeling the darkness from the gate tunnel layer by layer.
When the light swept past, dust and the lingering blood-mist rolled together, turning the distant air a murky, dark red.
Then Thomas heard it—chewing.
‘Smack... smack...'
The sound of fangs crushing bone and tearing flesh echoed across the empty castle square, rebounded by the walls, layered upon itself until it seemed countless mouths were feeding at once.
‘Shit.' Someone in the White Night Squad swore under his breath.
The curse was soft, but it couldn't smother the nausea rising in his throat.
Even these Extraordinary Knights, long used to fighting atop corpses, couldn't hear that sound without flinching.
The searchlights kept sweeping, illuminating the mountain of bodies piled in the square's center.
Shattered armor, blood-soaked silk, and trampled corpses were fused into a mound that looked repeatedly desecrated.
And crouched upon it—things.
Hundreds of them.
Thomas narrowed his eyes; his aura rippled faintly across his retinas, sharpening his sight beyond ordinary limits.
Those shapes could hardly be called ‘human' any longer.
Their limbs were out of proportion, joints bent backward, bodies sheathed in ash-black scales, twisted into forms that defied logic.
Each stood over two meters tall with freakishly thick skeletons, yet moved with unnerving steadiness.
Vertical pupils showed no emotion under the harsh light; they merely lowered their heads, bit, tore, swallowed.
Around them hundreds of half-finished things still writhed.
Their mutations were far from complete.
Bones pushed grotesque ridges beneath the skin; muscles twitched in erratic spasms.
Some froze mid-meal, as if enduring constant agony, then tore at the flesh even more wildly the next instant.
‘...Still changing.' Thomas judged quietly.
What unsettled him more was that they were not without power.
Dark-red aura flickered between the scales.
When several were ripped or trampled by their own kind and their flesh split open, the torn tissue writhed and re-knit in moments, as if some force forcibly mended them.
A squad member instinctively tightened his grip on his weapon—an animal revulsion.
‘Captain.' The deputy kept his voice low. ‘They're not human anymore.'
Thomas didn't answer at once.
He kept watching the gate tunnel, watching those things crawl, feed, pile higher.
They paid no heed to the glaring lights, no notice of distant watchers.
Thomas exhaled slowly, as if forcing down whatever churned in his gut.
‘Count and log their traits. Do not approach. If even one steps outside the gate, sound the alarm.'
He knew that even with every White Night Knight an Extraordinary, this was no place for them to set foot.
He looked away from the chaos inside the gate and instinctively glanced back over the hillside.
There, the scene formed a brutal contrast.
Outside the gate reigned deathly order.
Black steam-tank squats fanned out along the slope, treads sunk deep in the mud, sealing every exit from Grey Rock Fortress.
Steel armor gleamed under the downpour like cooled obsidian.
Heat still shimmered from the muzzles; raindrops hissed into white wisps the instant they landed.
Behind the tanks stood thousands of Red Tide Knights.
They waited in the rain, cloaks hanging, crimson crests on their plate turned hard and cold.
No talk, no restlessness; all waited for Louis's order.
On one side, a biological plague spreading unchecked.
On the other, an industrial war machine precision-built to kill with maximum efficiency.
Thomas stood between them; this was no ordinary war.
He looked again at the lit gate, stomach still churning, but no longer wavering.
Not because he underestimated the monsters.
Precisely because he saw them clearly, he knew—this was not a battlefield meant to be filled with knights' lives.
He trusted Lord Louis.
Not from blind faith, nor from title or rank, but from results proven time and again.
Year after year, when choices seemed hopeless or even wrong to all, Louis always picked the path that worked.
Even when no one understood then, hindsight always proved his choice the optimum.
So Thomas was not afraid.
Even if the gate framed a living hell, even if the things kept evolving—
As long as Louis stood here, it was already part of some larger plan, and the optimum solution would be found.
He believed this time would be no different.
Rain drummed on the armor plate of the vehicles, steady and muffled.
Louis sat at a folding table, fingers resting on the edge of a map, calmly watching the sketch feed from the front.
Inside Grey Rock's gate tunnel the warped shapes writhed under the searchlights—some squatting to feed, some shoving or trampling each other, others freezing mid-bite only to resume in a fiercer frenzy.
Dark-red aura flickered across their bodies like unstable flames forcibly caged within flesh.
No one in the command vehicle spoke; all looked to Louis, waiting for his order.
Yet Louis showed no surprise.
A scene from half a year ago surfaced in his mind.
That dawn, the usual screen unfolded—Daily Intelligence Update Complete—and among resources and military news one line looked unremarkable.
The Remont Family's dragon-blood formula has a critical flaw.
To pursue ultimate combat strength, the Alchemists removed every metabolic safety valve.
A dragon-blood warrior's heart is, in essence, an engine with no brakes at all.
An engine without brakes... If you try to stop it, the price is higher.
The truly rational approach is never to brake, but to push it to the limit and let it tear itself apart at unendurable revolutions.
At the time, the idea had been nothing more than a hypothesis.
It remained so until he placed the concept in Merian's hands.
In the memory, the alchemy chamber's lights were blinding; Merian stood at the workbench, cradling a sealed glass tube whose liquid glowed an unnatural, vivid red.
‘This is derived from the approach you provided,' the Grand Alchemist said, voice tight. ‘I added an induction factor that forcibly amplifies blood activity. Theoretically, it can push a magical beast's blood past its stable threshold in seconds.'
Merian had no idea what it was for; he only knew Louis attached extreme importance to it. Countless beasts had been tested, yet beyond making their blood boil, nothing else happened.
It was not a technique meant for repeated verification, nor did it need universal application.
It only had to meet the right target at the right moment.
That moment was now.
Searchlight beams still crawled across the hillside, bleaching the castle courtyard bone-white.
The monsters showed no reaction to the light, remaining locked in their cycle of feeding and mutation.
Louis drew back his gaze and finally spoke: ‘Form battle lines, in case the beasts break out of the castle.'
The signalman repeated the order at once; commands were passed in segments. Outside, the tank formations began aligning in unison, treads grinding through mud with disciplined restraint—no unnecessary sound.
The second command followed immediately.
‘Artillery battalion, switch to blood-boiling shells, Type Three Special—target, central castle plaza, saturation fire.'
Signals rippled down the chain; the heavy-gun emplacements adjusted elevation.
Loaders rammed red-striped shells into breeches; the scrape of metal sounded unnaturally sharp in the rainy night.
Louis leaned back in his seat, eyes returning to the periscope.
If the shells failed, the steam tanks could still advance—armor and firepower enough to grind everything beyond the gate to dust.
They would win.
But victory won that way carried too high a cost.
Even trading a single Red Tide Knight's life for these rampaging horrors was, in his view, a losing bargain.
In the plaza the monsters still writhed, fed, and piled upon one another.
Louis lifted his head, watching through the periscope the white zone carved out by the lights.
‘Tonight,' he said coldly, ‘we give the Remont Family a funeral.'
In the rain-shrouded night, the first salvo fell.
Thud... thud... thud—low, abrupt impacts.
Dozens of special shells arced over Grey Rock Fortress's broken walls and slammed into the courtyard like casually tossed tin cans.
On impact they didn't bounce; they merely rolled once or twice across the flagstones, then split open with a soft, almost negligible crack, like rotten fruit crushed underfoot.
The next instant, scarlet mist spilled from the ruptures.
It didn't disperse—it flowed along the ground.
Thick and heavy, as if drawn by something, it rushed along crevices, blood trails, and the low ground between corpses.
Avoiding high spots, it pooled at the plaza's center, its color lurid under the searchlights, seeming almost warm.
Only chewing sounds had filled the castle before.
Soon another noise joined.
On the corpse-heaps the monsters froze mid-motion.
Hundreds of misshapen heads lifted at once, nostrils flaring wildly.
Vertical pupils shrank under the glare, then dilated instantly.
‘Grr?'—a low growl of confusion and craving.
Even those gnawing on half-stripped limbs let go without hesitation.
A thigh dropped to the ground, slick with rain and blood; not a single creature glanced back.
Suppressed gurgles rose from their throats.
The sound newborn beasts make when suckling.
The next moment, the plaza surged.
Hundreds of twisted shadows pressed forward together—no formation, yet perfectly unified.
They shoved, trampled, climbed over one another, desperate to reach the densest crimson.
Some dropped flat, noses to the ground, inhaling in gulps.
They opened their mouths as if to swallow the very air.
Like starving beasts lunging at the only waterhole.
The red mist thinned, then was inhaled again.
A swirling, scarlet vortex briefly formed at the center... On the hillside's far side, Eagle Beak Rock observation post.
Thomas lay motionless in the damp grass, eyes glued to a high-power alchemical telescope, breath held to a whisper.
The scene in the lens made his brows slowly knit. ‘They... they're off.'
In the scope, the monsters that had breathed the mist did not collapse.
Instead, they accelerated—an impossible burst of speed.
Their after-images streaked across the retina, as though the lag between muscle and power had been erased.
Then came a more obvious change.
Black dragon-scales along their bodies bristled, edges rasping with a crackling chorus like a pine-cone forest bursting open. ƒrēewebnovel.com
Veins bulged beneath their skin.
Dark-red patterns raced along limbs and torsos, glowing as if about to burn through.
Body temperature spiked out of control; rain hit their scales and evaporated before it could slide off.
White steam wreathed the plaza—vapor forced out by searing heat.
The energy overload did not break them.
Not yet.
They sank into a frenzy of exhilaration.
Some clawed frantically at themselves, nails shrieking across scale.
Others hurled themselves on nearby kin, biting, tearing limbs; a few flailed at the ground with bare fists.
Thomas swallowed. ‘If we engage them now...'
He left the sentence unfinished.
Everyone who heard understood.
In this state, the horrors could rip a steam tank apart with their bare hands.
The air at the plaza's center shifted.
Not a sound—something more immediate, a pressure.
Thomas's gaze stayed welded to the telescope; instinctively he stopped breathing.
In the lens, every frenzied monster froze for a heartbeat.
As though something had reached its limit.
Thud.
The first muffled impact came—from inside their bodies.
Then came the second, the third.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sound was low and dense, as if hundreds of giant drums were being beaten at once.
Knights outside the walls could feel the earth tremble beneath their boots—a rhythm that had lost every trace of life, reduced to a mechanical, frenzied repetition.
Thomas's pupils contracted; he was seeing something he could not comprehend.
Hundreds of hearts forcibly catalyzed by dragon blood were pounding inside their chests at a frequency far beyond what flesh could endure.
In the frame, the monsters' bodies began to swell.
Muscle fibers snapped like steel cables stretched too far.
Dark-red light spurted from the gaps between scales; the blood no longer flowed but boiled.
Raindrops landing on them flashed instantly to steam.
Vapor and crimson mist mingled, turning the whole plaza into a pressure-cooker.
‘...Critical mass,' Thomas murmured.
The next instant, the largest specimen at the plaza's center shuddered.
It was the first to complete its molt, the one that had devoured Kyle's corpse—Subject Zero.
It opened its mouth as if to voice something.
But the sound never formed.
Bang—!
It blew apart completely, a flesh-and-blood bomb whose pressurized plasma, organs, and bone shards erupted outward.
That explosion became the signal.
Bang! A second.
Bang! Bang! Bang!—one after another, without pause.
The chain reaction detonated in full.
In barely ten seconds every creature on the plaza—finished or still unstable—tore itself apart at its own limit.
They never even realized what was happening.
At the heart of Grey Rock Fortress, it was as if some mad switch had been thrown.
Countless clouds of blood mist, bone chips, scales, and viscera were flung skyward in the glare of overloaded blood-light.
They burst between night and rain in layers, a deliberately staged scarlet festival—bloody and brilliant.
The blast-waves swept outward, shattering every shard of glass left in the surrounding towers.
Crack after crack rang through the rainy night, only to be swallowed by greater thunder.
Then the blood-rain fell—thick, warm, still steaming, spattering the entire castle from above.
Every stone, every broken wall, was recoated in heavy crimson.
It was a dead city.
A container emptied clean...
Several kilometres away, in the refugee camp, the downpour continued.
Makeshift tarpaulins quivered in the wind; waterlogged canvas sagged, droplets drumming tiny craters into the mud.
A woman stood at the edge of a tent, child clutched to her chest.
The boy slept, cheek against her soaked cloak, breathing evenly but twitching ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) whenever the distant tremors rolled in.
She did not step back inside.
Like her, many refugees stood outside.
Their eyes crossed the dark wilderness toward Grey Rock Fortress.
The city was glowing.
‘...Look.' Someone whispered first, ‘Such red light.'
At this distance the explosions' details were lost in night and rain.
No blood, no bones or organs could be seen—only clouds lit from beneath, layer upon layer, like a sky set ablaze.
The glow even felt strangely warm, as if a great bonfire party were underway.
No one cheered.
No one wept.
Only ragged, stifled breathing.
An old man, face gray with dust, leaned on a crutch at the rear of the crowd.
He squinted for a long time, as though identifying something—or confirming an end he had long expected.
‘That isn't fire.' His voice was hoarse yet clear. ‘It's blood.'
Those around turned instinctively toward him.
The old man exhaled slowly: ‘Demon blood burning.'
After a pause he added in a low murmur, ‘Lord Louis... is purifying that city.'
No one argued.
To these people, ignorant of what had happened inside, the sky-wide red was explanation enough.
It was the colour of a nightmare's end.
The signal that an old era was being burned away.
In their hearts they took it for divine punishment upon the Remont Family...
Five minutes later the final muffled boom faded into the rainy night.
Grey Rock Fortress fell utterly silent.
Within the walls no moving shadow remained.
Searchlight beams crept forward but found no figure still standing.
On the plaza no intact corpse could be found.
No complete skeleton either.
Only a half-foot layer of dark-red sludge, still slowly steaming.
Vapor and the stench of blood rolled in the rain like slag from a furnace just cooled.
The living weapons Kyle had deemed invincible—his ace to topple the empire—together with decades of the Remont Family's crimes, had been crushed and erased by intelligence and technology.
On the slope Louis lowered his telescope.
Without another glance at the now-meaningless plaza he adjusted his cuff, restraint itself, as though concluding a routine inspection.
‘It's over. All units enter the city. Clean the streets with flamethrowers...'
Orders were logged, repeated, executed.
Steam-tank engines rumbled back to life, their low growl merging with the rainy night.
Tracks advanced, grinding through the viscous, swamp-like plasma without hesitation.
Steel armour reflected the searchlights' cold glare.
They rolled through the gate.
Into this fortress that had lost its master.
Grey Rock Province, the era of the Remont Family—
after this brief and lavish scarlet firework—had ended.
