The First Blood
The column had been marching south for nine grueling days when the smoke appeared.
It was a thin, oily ribbon that curled above the dense treeline, visible across the undulating plains like a smear of ash against a pale sky. It was too steady and centralized for a random cook-fire, too black and acrid for hearth smoke. It smelled of rendered fat and burning wood that was unnaturally damp—the smell of a village under siege.
Sir Aldric Vey, captain of the royal escort, raised a gauntleted fist. Five hundred boots—two hundred heavy steel from the knights, two hundred and fifty thick leather from the levied infantry—halted behind him with a disciplined, rasping sound. Trailing them, the fifteen otherworlders and the twenty anxious Academy mentors, who still looked barely older than their charges, shifted restlessly.
Sir Aldric's eyes narrowed, cold and hard as flint. He did not like rushing into an unknown situation. His core mission was escort and defense, not emergency intervention. Yet, the black smoke was a call he could not ignore.
“Scouts. Four riders. Go.”
Four veteran knights peeled off instantly, plunging down the slope at a punishing gallop. The column held its breath. Seven minutes later, only one returned, his horse lathered and breathing hard, its flanks striped with sweat. The knight’s voice was hoarse with urgency and horror.
“Low Cradle. Under attack. Forty to fifty demons, organised. They’re still inside the walls. It’s bad, Sir. Very bad.”
Sir Aldric’s mouth set into a grim, hard line beneath his beard. He could already map the enemy's intent.
“Organised raid,” he confirmed, his voice low but sharp enough to be heard by the forward command staff. “Mid-tier and below, testing our defenses. They wear the skins of the people they killed. Do not trust faces. Assume every non-combatant you see is a knife aimed at your back.”
He wheeled his warhorse and turned to face the fifteen teenagers in their mismatched, freshly polished armor. The moment had arrived years too early for them.
“Your war starts here,” he declared, his command echoing with finality. “This is not a drill. Hesitate and you die. Hesitate, and everyone behind those walls dies with you.”
He did not add the thought that plagued him: that the otherworlders were, in his private estimation, barely weaned from the Academy yard and utterly unprepared for the savage reality ahead. Orders were orders; they were the new blood, and they would be used.
The strategy was simple and brutal: Knights would anchor the line, forming the unbreakable steel wedge. Infantry would support the gaps. Mentors were assigned to keep their charges alive and within arm’s reach, acting as a final shield. No one—especially the unpredictable otherworlders—was to break formation without direct command.
The column crested the final, low rise. The sight below stopped the breath of every man and woman who had not seen war before.
Low Cradle’s modest palisade was shattered, splintered and blackened. The main gates hung open like broken jaws, exposing the chaos within. Inside, demons moved with chilling discipline: some were still in stolen villager clothes—a grotesque mockery of normalcy—others already half-transformed, revealing the signs of their true nature: curling horns, elongated claws, eyes burning with ember light, and vestigial tails lashing their flanks. Bodies lay broken and still in the muddy lanes; a child’s simple rag doll lay discarded in a puddle that was horribly, unnaturally red. The church bell tolled slowly, unevenly, struck perhaps by a dying man’s last, despairing strength.
The demons saw the approaching column and, instead of fleeing, they charged. They, too, were operating under orders.
Sir Aldric barked the final, terse instructions. Knights snapped into a dense, interlocking steel wedge. Infantry formed the disciplined second line. Mentors, white-knuckled, shoved their otherworlders behind the relative safety of the shields.
The first wave hit with sickening speed. They looked human—farmers, mothers, a little girl clutching a familiar rag doll—until black, pulsating veins crawled beneath their skin and their smiles split too wide, revealing rows of needle teeth.
On the third line, Livia’s hands flared with a beautiful, holy gold light, the promise of a powerful protective spell, but the light guttered and died as her arms shook violently from terror. Yuna’s signature white flame sparked and failed. Asha pressed both palms to the blood-soaked earth, begging for the thick, protective vines that would not answer her uncontrolled fear.
A "woman" with a common butcher knife sprinted straight through the initial shock line, aiming for the cluster of vulnerable girls.
Asha screamed—a high, raw sound of panic. The crude blade fell, aimed for Livia’s head.
Then, from the ground beneath Asha’s trembling hands, massive roots erupted like grotesque, splintering spears. They punched through the demon’s torso, showering the girls in black ichor, and nailed the screaming creature to a nearby wall. Asha stared down at her hands, slick with blood and earth, realizing with nauseating finality that she had just killed something that still wore the cherished face of a human mother.
The shock was broken by action. Cassian, overcoming his initial paralysis, slammed up a proper light wall, shielding the middle pack. Yuna’s white flame roared to life, burning a path. Asha’s roots rose to meet the dungeon’s vines—hers stronger, angrier, tearing the attackers apart.
The first wave fell.
The nobles who had been screaming moments earlier now followed in the wake the six had carved, pale and silent.
Depth One was cleared in eight minutes.
The fight did not end quickly. It was a prolonged, vicious brawl.
These were no scattered scavengers; they were a professional, coordinated force. Lesser imps spat corrosive acid that ate through shield plating and flesh alike. Brute-class demons, thick-skinned and heavily muscled, shrugged off desperate spear thrusts and needed three or four men to hold them down. Winged scouts dove from the smoke, targeting the commanders. Worst of all were the four mid-tier commanders—horned, six-armed horrors wreathed in black, swirling flame—who barked chilling, guttural orders, directing the ebb and flow of their troops.
Knights and infantry held the line and bled profusely for every inch gained. Sir Aldric and his high knights fought at the spearhead, their voices hoarse with commands that even the noble-born mentors obeyed without question, knowing their lives depended on the disciplined defense. One mentor, driven by a foolish desire to play a hero, rushed a brute prematurely and lost his entire left arm to a cleaver’s swing.
In the melee, Kael and Noel moved like twin shadows, utterly ignoring the frantic directions of their assigned mentors. Demons simply came apart around Kael’s ethereal, blinding speed; Noel’s spear appeared exactly where it needed to be, piercing vital points, always a split second too late for the enemy to react. There was no wasted motion, no sound of panic from them—only lethal efficiency.
Zeon, meanwhile, stayed exactly where Rin wanted him—three rows back, visible but never flashy, a quiet anchor in the chaos. When a brute smashed through the infantry and charged the retching Milo, Zeon flicked two fingers almost casually. A hair-thin blade of solidified wind removed the creature’s head so cleanly the body ran three more steps before it finally fell. Everyone assumed a knight got lucky or that Aldric himself was using some hidden skill.
Rin, his mentor, never drew her short sword. To every observer, she was simply maintaining her cover, shielding her charge and whispering basic commands. But only Zeon felt the invisible, intricate lattice of sharp mana threads she had spun around their specific position—a shimmering web sharp as glass. Anything she mentally marked as ENEMY stepped inside that field and instantly left pieces of hide or armor behind. She and Zeon finished off whatever stumbled out, her actions subtle, his appearing entirely defensive.
The battle lasted one full hour—an eternity of screaming steel, spat acid, burning mana, and fresh blood.
When the last six-armed commander finally crashed beneath Sir Aldric’s halberd, its black flame guttering out, the village square was a slaughterhouse. The mournful church bell had long since stopped.
Sir Aldric walked slowly among the fifteen otherworlders, his boots squelching horribly in the pooled mud and gore.
“First blood,” he said, his voice flat with exhaustion and grim pride. “You did not break. You did not flee. That will do.”
The aftermath was a scene of immediate, raw trauma. Livia collapsed beside a dying farmer, golden light spilling uselessly from her shaking palms as he bled out his final seconds. Tears carved clean, startling lines through the soot on her face. Yuna stood rigid over three small, charred corpses that had once worn children’s faces, white flame still flickering uncontrollably around her fists, clenched until her knuckles bled. Asha sat slumped against the wall, the massive roots still twitching around the impaled demon, staring at the dark blood on her hands as if it might never wash off.
Across the square, Kael wiped the black blood from a blade no one had seen him draw. His eyes met Zeon’s across the carnage. A tiny, almost imperceptible nod passed between them. Noel, standing beside him, echoed it. A silent recognition of shared competence in the face of chaos.
Rin leaned close, her lips almost brushing Zeon’s ear, her voice laced with dry, chilling mockery that only he could hear.
“Welcome to the war they promised would send you home.”
Zeon looked around at the bodies, the weeping prodigies, and the exhausted knights already piling the possessed corpses onto pyres for burning.
“No return ticket,” he whispered, the realization settling like cold iron in his stomach.
Rin watched the thick, black smoke from the pyre curl into the pale, bruised sky. It was a signpost of their passage.
In the distance, an hour later, another small plume of smoke began to rise, visible far on the horizon. Three hundred leagues of occupied territory still lay ahead.
Low Cradle had been saved—or at least avenged.
It would not be the last village to burn.
End of Chapter 7.