Kaelan didn’t finish his sentence.
He simply turned and vanished from the doorway in a blur of crimson afterimages, leaving Caius alone in the wreckage of his own bedroom with his heart hammering against his newly reinforced ribs.
For a full three seconds, Caius did nothing but breathe.
The war horn kept sounding, one long mournful note bleeding into the next, and somewhere below him he could hear the entire estate waking up at once.
Boots slammed against stone floors.
Voices barked orders in clipped military cadence.
Somewhere distant, a woman screamed, and it wasn’t a scream of fear so much as one of pure animal panic.
He knew House Draxos sat on the border.
He knew the estate had been built centuries ago specifically to hold back whatever crawled out of the Thornwood, the vast cursed forest that swallowed the empire’s northern edge like a bruise that never healed.
He had read about it in the game’s lore compendium back when [God Reborn] was just a piece of entertainment he consumed between exam seasons.
He had never expected to be standing inside that lore while it actively tried to kill him.
Caius forced himself off the wall, wincing at the dull ache blooming across his side where Kaelan’s flame-wrapped fist had clipped him even through his desperate block.
He dismissed the whip, letting Ember Lash dissolve back into shimmering ash motes that drifted lazily to the shattered floorboards.
He had two options.
He could barricade himself in this room like the coward he had been for the past seven days, waiting for either the monster or his family to decide his fate for him.
Or he could actually do something.
‘I have fifteen points of stats and two working skills,’ Caius thought, his mind racing.
‘I am nowhere near strong enough to fight whatever’s out there.
But I’m also not strong enough to survive doing nothing forever either.’
He thought of the maid.
The one who had knocked on his door and begged, the one whose soft frightened footsteps had retreated down the hallway because he’d been too much of a coward to open a door.
If something had breached the border wall, the servants’ quarters, poorly warded, cheaply built compared to the reinforced stone of the main keep, would be the first thing torn apart.
“Fuck it,” Caius muttered, and bolted for the ruined doorway.
The corridor outside was chaos.
Armored soldiers of House Draxos sprinted past him in both directions, their crimson-threaded cloaks snapping behind them, none sparing him more than a contemptuous glance.
A few of the younger guards actually shouldered past him hard enough to nearly knock him off his feet, muttering something about the cripple getting in the way.
Caius gritted his teeth and kept moving, following the flow of bodies toward the eastern stairwell that led down toward the servants’ wing and the outer wall beyond it.
By the time he burst out into the estate’s rear courtyard, the night sky had turned an ugly shade of orange, lit by roaring braziers along the wall and, far more disturbingly, by something burning out beyond the perimeter.
The outer wall of House Draxos’s estate wasn’t just stone.
It was warded, ancient sigils of Valerion’s authority carved into every block, meant to repel anything without a noble bloodline’s sanction.
Caius had grown up hearing his father brag that the wall had never once been breached in four hundred years of the family’s stewardship.
Tonight, a section of it had simply ceased to exist.
A hole nearly thirty feet wide had been torn through solid warded stone, the edges glowing faintly where residual mana still bled from the shattered wardstones.
Smoke poured through the gap in thick oily plumes, and silhouetted against the firelight beyond it was something that made every rational part of Caius’s brain scream at him to run.
It was enormous, easily three stories tall, its body a grotesque fusion of blackened bark and corpse-pale flesh, limbs ending not in hands but in clusters of thorned vines that whipped and coiled like living barbed wire.
Where its face should have been there was only a wide, lipless maw ringed with concentric layers of teeth, and its eyes, dozens of them scattered unevenly across its bark-like hide, glowed a sickly bioluminescent green.
“Thornwood Warden,” a soldier near Caius gasped, his voice cracking with barely restrained terror.
“Those things haven’t crossed the ward line in a hundred years. How is it even here?”
Caius’s stomach dropped.
He remembered the name from the game’s bestiary, vaguely, the way you remember a boss fight you’d watched a friend struggle through on stream rather than one he’d actually fought himself.
Thornwood Wardens were mid-tier territorial horrors, dangerous mostly because of how rarely they left their forest.
If one had actually broken through a centuries-old warded wall, something had either weakened the wards or actively driven the creature out of its territory.
Neither possibility comforted him.
House Draxos’s soldiers were already forming ranks along the courtyard, crimson auras flaring to life around dozens of Blessed warriors as they prepared a coordinated defense.
Caius spotted his father near the front of the formation, Lord Voran Draxos standing a full head taller than every soldier around him, his presence alone seeming to bend the air with pressure.
Beside him, Kaelan had already summoned a massive greatsword wreathed entirely in crimson flame, his earlier fury at Caius apparently forgotten in the face of a real threat.
Caius scanned the chaos desperately, looking for the servants’ quarters, and his blood went cold.
The wooden dormitory building where House Draxos housed its maids and stable hands sat directly in the Warden’s path, barely fifty feet from the breach, and it was already burning.
A handful of servants were stumbling out of the smoke, coughing and screaming, but Caius counted the shapes and his chest tightened.
Not everyone had made it out.
The Warden’s thorned limb lashed out, casually backhanding an armored soldier fifty feet through the air like he weighed nothing, and surged forward directly toward the burning dormitory.
Toward whoever was still trapped inside.
None of House Draxos’s soldiers moved to intercept it.
They were too busy reforming their ranks, too disciplined, too committed to a coordinated strategy that would take precious seconds the people in that building didn’t have.
Caius didn’t have seventeen Vitality’s worth of courage.
He barely had two working skills and a whip made of glorified fireplace ash.
But he had legs, and thirteen points of Agility that hummed beneath his skin like they were begging to be used, and he was already moving before his brain caught up with his body, sprinting directly toward the burning building while an entire army stood frozen in formation behind him.
“Draxos, get back in line!” someone bellowed from the ranks, but Caius didn’t stop.
The heat hit him first, a wall of shimmering, suffocating warmth that stole the air from his lungs the closer he got.
He could see the dormitory’s front door now, half collapsed, flames licking hungrily up its splintered frame, and beyond it, barely visible through the smoke, a small huddled shape pressed against the far wall.
It was her.
The maid from his door.
The one he had ignored.
She was curled protectively over something smaller, a child, maybe her own, and the flames were closing in on both of them with terrifying speed while the Thornwood Warden’s massive silhouette bore down from the opposite direction, thorned limbs dragging furrows through the courtyard’s stone with every step.
Caius didn’t have a plan.
He barely had a body capable of surviving what he was about to do.
He summoned Ember Lash on instinct, the cinder whip crackling to life in his palm, and threw Ashveil over himself the way he’d read the description in the Grimoire, feeling a thin gray mist bleed out from his skin and swallow him whole, dampening the heat, dulling the smoke’s bite in his throat just enough to keep moving.
He crashed through the collapsing doorway a heartbeat before the frame gave way entirely, and the maid’s terrified eyes snapped up to meet his through the haze.
“Young Master?” she rasped, disbelief cutting through her panic.
Caius didn’t answer.
He grabbed her arm with one hand, hauling her and the child upright, already turning back toward the door.
That was when the entire building’s roof came down, and the Thornwood Warden’s massive shadow fell directly across the collapsing entrance, blocking their only way out.