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“My Lord, the goods are all packed.
Last night’s ‘support supplies’ — seven head of cattle, twenty sheep, one packhorse, and all the various odds and ends — have been recorded in your ledger and bundled up.”
Carl wore a proper cloth tunic, but his expression was thoroughly miserable.
Nobody was happy about entering the North.
They stood on the city wall gazing outward, and beyond the ramparts there was nothing but gray fog stretching all the way to the sky.
Only fog.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about running.
Field simply never gave him the chance.
Slave soldiers like Wildcat, thoroughly corrupted by money, had already become Field’s die-hard loyalists.
Carl was certain that the moment he bolted, those damned dogs would cut him down on the spot, and Field would reward them with a single silver coin.
Damned dogs, he seethed inwardly.
Selling their souls for money.
Not even caring whether they live or die.
That’s how slaves are.
Give them a sliver of hope and a little decent treatment, and they’ll throw their lives on the table without blinking.
“By the way, my Lord.” Carl hesitated, glancing sideways at Ashina several times before he finally couldn’t help himself.
“That slave — forgive me, I mean Miss Ashina, she’s truly a Chosen One?
She isn’t putting one over on us, is she?
Could she perhaps show us a miracle?”
Field had gathered everyone the night before to announce the news, hoping to boost morale.
“I need to prove it to you?” Field stopped Ashina before she could summon the giant wolf, and fixed Carl with a cold stare.
“How about you handle the pioneering, and I’ll be your butler?
I’m just not sure you’d survive the Empire’s encirclement long enough to enjoy that arrangement.” He let out a short, humorless snort.
This disloyal butler had been spouting demoralizing nonsense from the moment they set out.
If Carl weren’t one of only two people here who could read and write, Field would have happily reassigned him to the stables.
Time for a reminder of who was in charge.
Carl felt the pressure land.
Cold sweat slid down his forehead.
A choked sound escaped him and he kept his mouth shut.
His master was practically a different person from before.
Maybe the pressure from the family had broken something in him?
That had to be it.
Carl himself had no desire to enter the cursed land, a pampered noble certainly wanted to even less.
Or so he told himself, trying to make sense of it.
His thoughts were a mess.
“No objections?
Then we move out!”
Field lit the Fog-Repelling Lamp.
25 gold coins apiece.
Every minute it burned was money going up in smoke.
Every sound died instantly.
Every trace of living warmth in the air: gone.
In its place: silence.
Pure, wrong, absolute silence.
Field looked up.
The death-fog hung over everything, gray and dead and total, swallowing the sky so completely that not even the sun was visible.
Standing inside it long enough gave a person the creeping sense of being at the bottom of the ocean.
Field’s pulse quickened despite himself.
If even he felt it, the tightening in his chest, the urge to look over his shoulder, he could only imagine what the slaves were going through.
If not for the Fog-Repelling Lamp keeping corruption at bay, and if not for last night’s announcement about the Chosen One, half of them would probably have already cracked, stumbled blindly into the fog, and joined the ranks of whatever lived out here.
The ground was carpeted in writhing red-black tendrils, corrupted plants.
No offensive ability, but they coiled around cart wheels and clung like fingers.
“Damn near looks like Silent Hill,” Field muttered, forcing his voice to stay steady.
He walked at the front of the column, keeping himself visible, letting his presence do the work his words couldn’t.
Someone had to look like they knew what they were doing.
Besides, if the nobleman who valued his own life most was still walking forward, the slaves had no excuse to break.
ROAR!
Strange cries, GAH-GAH-GAH, bled through the fog from every direction.
The Fog-Repelling Lamp carved out roughly a hundred paces of visibility ahead.
The roars came from considerably farther away.
No one in the column felt remotely safe.
Crumbling ruins surrounded them on all sides.
Desiccated heads sat impaled on corroded iron spears driven into the earth.
Field even spotted a faded griffin banner hanging limp from a broken wall, the Empire had sent plenty of pioneering legions into the North.
It was a pity they had all died here, then very thoroughly become part of the local population.
Field swallowed.
“My Lord, move behind me.” Ashina’s crimson eyes locked onto something off to the right.
“A monster is closing in.”
A Rotten Corpse lurched into view seconds later, half its face missing, dragging itself forward in a shambling stagger.
Ashina drew, aimed, and loosed in one fluid motion.
A silver streak split the air.
The Rotten Corpse’s head burst like a watermelon.
The body rolled twice and went still.
“Careful, more are coming!” A dense cluster of skull markers bloomed across Field’s mini-map all at once.
He stopped trying to keep his voice quiet.
“Same as before!
Circle the carts into a wall.
Crossbowmen, loose!”
Back at Ka Mountain Fortress, Field had gotten his hands on 80 crossbows and 100 standard Imperial bows.
The problem was that fewer than three slaves actually knew how to shoot a bow.
Fortunately, crossbows didn’t require talent, he’d armed 20 crossbowmen with them, and they’d get the job done.
The screeching intensified.
Then the sound of feet, hundreds of them, all at once, and the corpse horde burst out of the fog in a dark, churning wave.
Field’s mini-map told him where every monster was, but there were too many and they were too close.
“Damn it, loose!” The slaves didn’t need telling twice.
Shaking hands fired shaking bolts.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH.
The front rank of Rotten Corpses hit something invisible and dropped, seven, eight of them crumpling at once.
Ashina stowed her bow and summoned the Dragon-seed Wolf.
She launched into the horde without hesitating.
First-Rank Chosen or not, a Chosen One’s combat power was in a different class from any ordinary mortal.
Her long blade danced, fast and fluid, cutting a path through the press of bodies.
One Rotten Corpse after another went down.
Heads severed.
Skulls caved in under the Dragon-seed Wolf’s claws.
She drove deep into the thickest concentration of the horde, then had the wolf spin and breathe fire.
A column of flame swept in a full circle around her, and the Rotten Corpses packed in close didn’t even have time to scatter.
They burned to ash where they stood.
“She…
she actually is a Chosen One?” Carl rubbed his eyes like he was trying to wake himself up.
The disbelief on his face was absolute.
Ashina absorbed an enormous share of the pressure.
But the atmosphere didn’t ease one bit.
The fog limited how far anyone could see, and the Rotten Corpses just kept emerging from it, an endless feed, relentless and formless, grinding on everyone’s nerves.
“Kill!” Wildcat’s voice was low and hard.
He drove his long halberd forward with everything he had.
Three or four halberds punched into the same Rotten Corpse’s chest.
A sharp upward flick sent it flipping through the air like a tattered sack and crashing to the ground.
More corpse creatures crashed into the slave guard unit, fists and claws hammering against shields and lamellar armor in a relentless, clanging downpour, CLANG CLANG CLANG, like someone beating an anvil.
“Hm?
Something’s coming from above.”
A skull marker on Field’s mini-map was moving fast, already directly overhead.
Field didn’t think.
He threw himself off the horse immediately.
He was the only one in the entire column sitting elevated.
That made him a target.
He landed, steadied himself.
Hadn’t even looked up yet when the wind hit him, a sudden, sharp gust punching downward from above.
“Watch your heads!”
Field dropped into a crouch and drove his longsword straight up.
One quick glance told him what was coming.
A bat-woman.
No hair.
No eyebrows.
A hideous, hollow face.
Her body had the shape of a woman from the neck down, but her arms had become bat wings, and where her legs should have been, she had sharp, curving talons.
➤ Next: Within the Gray Fog (Part 2)