The ships arrived three days later.
They did not fly the skull and crossbones, but the crisp, immaculate seagulls of the World Government alongside the holy banners of the Oykot Kingdom.
Oakhaven did not have walls.
It had a wooden pier, a tavern, and a populace paralyzed by indecision.
As the colossal warships dropped anchor just outside the bay, casting long, suffocating shadows over the fishing boats, the village elders finally made their choice: subservience.
Elian stood in the doorway of his home, his small hands trembling.
His father, Tomas, was strapping a thick leather pauldron to his shoulder, his face a storm of repressed rage.
His mother, Elara, was hurriedly packing dried fish into a rucksack.
“We don’t fight them,” Tomas muttered, testing the weight of a heavy iron harpoon.
“But we don’t let them take the women and children. We hold the square. We show them we aren’t worth the casualties.”
‘He’s leaning too far forward.
The pauldron is throwing off his center of gravity.
Three seconds in a real fight, and someone slips a blade right under his right armpit to puncture his lung.
He is going to die.
God, stop it, stop looking at his neck like that.
He’s my dad.’
Elian gripped his own hair, pulling hard enough to sting.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to drown out the obsessive calculations, the unending dissection of the people he loved.
But the absolute calculus of survival cared nothing for bravery.
In the village square, panic was giving way to an eerie, organized quiet.
Vane, the village butcher, and his wife Cora were distributing water from the central well to the men standing guard.
Vane had always been a pragmatist, a man who measured worth in coin and marrow.
“Drink up, Tomas,” Vane said, his voice unusually tight as he handed over a wooden ladle.
“We’ll need our strength. They’re lowering the rowboats.”
Elian stepped into the square just as his father took a deep, gulping drink.
Elara took the ladle next, sipping nervously.
A sudden, sharp scent cut through the salty ocean air.
It was faint—almost imperceptible beneath the smell of fear and unwashed bodies—but Elian’s cursed mind isolated it instantly.
‘Bitter almonds.
Oleander sap.
It’s masking the sweat on Vane’s hands.
Forty seconds until the heart misfires.
Two minutes until the lungs drown.
They are drinking death.’
“Dad, spit it out!” Elian screamed, his voice cracking with a child’s terror.
It was too late.
Tomas dropped the harpoon, his massive hands flying to his throat.
He fell to his knees, gasping, his veins bulging against his neck.
Beside him, Elara collapsed silently, a line of bloody foam bubbling past her lips.
Chaos erupted.
Dozens of men in the square were dropping, convulsing as the poison tore through their nervous systems.
Vane didn’t look horrified.
He looked relieved.
He pulled a long, serrated boning knife from his apron, while Cora drew a hidden hatchet.
“I’m sorry, Tomas,” Vane whispered, his hands shaking as he stepped over the convulsing giant.
“Oykot promised us a place in the New World if we secured the landing zone. We can’t fight a million men. It’s just numbers.”
“You… bastards…” Tomas choked out, trying to reach for his harpoon.
Vane drove the boning knife into the back of Tomas’s neck.
Cora buried the hatchet into Elara’s chest to stop her agonizing twitching.
Elian froze.
The frantic screaming of the dying village, the rhythmic splashing of Oykot rowboats hitting the shore, the dull thud of his parents’ bodies hitting the dirt—it all faded into a heavy, suffocating silence.
He collapsed to his knees beside his mother.
The tears came instantly, hot and blinding.
He grabbed her hand, begging her to wake up, sobbing with the raw, shattered heart of a ten-year-old boy.
He was terrified.
The world was ending, and he was completely alone.
But beneath the sobs, the desperate, human child was being forcefully drowned out by the chillingly serene logic of the murderer inside him.
‘C4 vertebra severed.
He’s bleeding out at a liter a minute.
Her lungs are punctured.
They’re meat now.
There’s nothing left to save.
Crying expends hydration and blurs vision.
Why does the butcher get to breathe?
Why is his throat still intact?
Take it from him.’
Elian hiccuped, a sob catching in his throat.
He reached out with a trembling, blood-soaked hand and pried the heavy iron harpoon from his father’s dead fingers.
It was too heavy to lift properly, so he dragged the tip against the cobblestone.
Vane turned, wiping sweat from his forehead, and froze when he saw the crying boy.
“Elian,” Vane stammered, raising his bloody knife.
“Listen to me. I had to. If we fought, they would have burned us alive—”
‘Nine hundred pounds of force to shatter a sternum.
The harpoon is heavy, but if I pivot on the blood and use the upward momentum…
it’s just physics.
It’s just meat giving way to iron.’
Elian let out a terrifying, guttural scream of grief and stepped inside Vane’s guard.
Pivoting on his slick heel, he swung the heavy iron shaft upward with flawless geometry.
The blunt end of the harpoon crushed Vane’s windpipe, snapping his neck backward with a sickening crack.
Before Cora could react, Elian let the momentum carry the weapon in a full circle, driving the iron spike through Cora’s eye socket.
They dropped like stones.
Elian stood over them, tears streaming down his face, his small chest heaving.
Down at the docks, the first wave of Oykot soldiers—hundreds of armored men wielding muskets and sabers—were marching up the wooden ramps.
Their boots thundered against the planks, a rhythmic drumbeat of incoming death.
‘Six hundred hostiles.
Open terrain.
Zero cover.
Probability of survival in direct combat: zero percent.
Retreat.
Secure the high ground.’
Elian dropped the heavy harpoon.
He reached down, his small fingers wrapping around the handle of Vane’s serrated boning knife.
Clutching it to his chest, the terrified boy turned and sprinted into the dark, winding alleyways of Oakhaven, vanishing just as the Vanguard entered the square.