The army returned to New Tlanxla late that night.
The glow of torches along the city walls spread into hazy circles of orange light in the damp rainforest night, visible from far away.
The Saurus sentries on the walls spotted the approaching column.
They didn’t call out.
Lizardmen didn’t call out.
Instead, one of them struck its tail against the stone wall three times.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
The dull impacts carried far through the darkness.
Almost immediately, the creaking of a turning winch came from behind the walls.
The black ironwood gates slowly opened.
Fresh animal grease coated the hinges, gleaming faintly beneath the torchlight.
Kroq-Gar was the first through the gate.
He had to turn sideways.
At three and a half meters tall, with shoulders more than two meters wide, even the city gate was a little narrow for him.
His shoulder armor scraped against the stone doorframe, knocking loose a small patch of moss.
He continued walking without slowing.
“Tekuna.”
“Here, my lord.”
The Skink Priest appeared beside his leg.
Tekuna had traveled hundreds of miles with him over the past half month.
He looked noticeably thinner than when they had departed, yet somehow his spirits were even higher.
His golden eyes shone beneath the torchlight like two tiny lamps.
“Have the army rest.”
Kroq-Gar continued walking as he gave his orders.
“Take all the Cold Ones to their pens.
Wash them with warm water and give them twice their usual ration of meat.”
“Keep the Stegadon separate.
Don’t let the Cold Ones anywhere near it.”
“One of them was injured the last time it got stepped on.
I don’t want that happening again.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And tell the Skinks to stop working on their javelins tonight.”
“They all rest.”
“They can replenish their ammunition tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
Tekuna hesitated.
Then he added quietly, “My lord, you should rest as well.”
Kroq-Gar lowered his gaze toward him.
The Skink Priest was staring up with an utterly serious expression.
But his narrow mouth was trembling.
Not from fear.
He was holding something back.
Kroq-Gar could tell.
The old Skink had wanted to tell him to stop charging into every enemy camp by himself since the first day of the expedition.
He had held it in for half a month.
Now, finally, he couldn’t endure it anymore.
But Tekuna couldn’t say such a thing directly in front of the troops.
Kroq-Gar was their lord.
No subordinate could openly suggest that he had gone too far in front of his warriors.
So Tekuna had chosen another way to say it.
“…Understood.”
Tekuna’s mouth immediately stopped trembling.
He spun around with a sharp slap of his feet and hurried away to relay the orders, moving with the speed of a rainforest squirrel late for an appointment.
Kroq-Gar handed his Cold One mount over to the cavalry captain.
Then he walked alone toward the stone platform at the center of the city.
The stone pavement was still warm.
Although the rainforest canopy blocked much of the sunlight during the day, stone retained heat remarkably well.
Even this late at night, the warmth had yet to completely fade.
Kroq-Gar crouched down.
The position allowed his tail to stretch comfortably across the stone steps behind him.
Torches burned along the distant walls.
Every so often, a Skink sentry passed through the light, its small silhouette appearing for only an instant before vanishing into the darkness again.
The city was quiet.
The army was resting.
From the direction of the Cold One pens came the deep rumbling breaths of the mounts, accompanied by an occasional sharp, commanding hiss.
That would be the Cold One cavalry captain personally overseeing the cleaning of the mounts.
Kroq-Gar liked this kind of silence.
He had never experienced anything like it in his previous life.
No engines.
No traffic.
No voices.
Only stone and scales.
Torches and the night wind.
By the time smoke began rising from the cooking fires, Tekuna arrived with several Skinks to make his report.
The matter concerned the group of human hunters they had rescued half a month ago.
The seven or eight prisoners they had freed from the first Chaos camp during their expedition.
They had been given temporary shelter beneath the southern wall of New Tlanxla.
Half a month had passed since then.
The crude shelters had already been reinforced by the humans themselves.
While Kroq-Gar and his army had been purging Chaos strongholds throughout the rainforest, the hunters had remained in New Tlanxla, helping the craftsmen with various tasks in exchange for food.
“They wish to see you,” Tekuna said.
“They say they have something important to tell you.”
Kroq-Gar lowered the stone tablet in his hands.
It contained the defensive plans for New Tlanxla, drawn by Tekuna the previous day.
“Bring them here.”
The human hunters were escorted to the foot of the stone platform.
Kroq-Gar had barely seen them since their rescue.
After freeing them, he had left their settlement arrangements to Tekuna and paid little attention afterward.
Now, half a month later, they no longer looked like people who had just been dragged from cages on the verge of death.
Color had returned to their faces.
They wore new clothing, crude garments woven from bark fibers by Skink craftsmen.
The older man who had thanked Kroq-Gar after their rescue stood at the front.
Back then, his lips had trembled so badly that he could barely speak.
Now his steps were steady.
Still, when he reached the platform and looked up at Kroq-Gar, he froze for a moment.
Kroq-Gar sat cross-legged on the stone platform.
He had deliberately chosen the position to bring himself closer to their eye level.
Even seated, he stood more than two meters tall.
For him, this was almost eye level.
For the humans, they still had to look up.
But at least they no longer felt as though a mountain were staring down at them.
“You wanted to see me,” Kroq-Gar said.
The old hunter nodded.
He wet his lips before speaking.
His voice was far steadier than it had been half a month ago.
“My lord, we…”
“We wanted to tell you how we were captured.”
Kroq-Gar said nothing.
He waited.
The old hunter glanced back at his companions.
Then he took a deep breath.
“We aren’t from the rainforest.”
“We came from outside the forest.”
“Outside?”
“North.”
The hunter pointed vaguely in that direction.
“If you travel through this rainforest for about three hundred li, you’ll eventually reach open grasslands.”
“Our town is there.”
“It’s called Hamstone.”
Hamstone.
Kroq-Gar had never heard the name.
But somewhere within his inherited memories, a vague sense of geography stirred. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
There was indeed a region of grassland north of the rainforest.
Farther north lay human settlements.
The Great Plan of the Old Ones had once marked that region as a “Secondary Node of Order.”
But that designation was thousands of years old.
Kroq-Gar’s inherited memories contained no information about what had happened there since.
“It’s not a large town,” the old hunter continued.
“About three hundred households.”
“We farm.
Hunt.
Raise livestock.”
“Life wasn’t good, but it wasn’t terrible either.”
His voice gradually became heavier.
“But starting last autumn, we began running out of food.”
“Why?” Tekuna asked.
The Skink Priest was crouched on a nearby stone.
His eyes rotated slowly.
A sign that he was listening carefully.
“War.”
The old hunter’s mouth twitched.
There was something in his voice that Kroq-Gar couldn’t quite identify.
Anger.
Helplessness.
Perhaps both.
As though these words had been trapped inside him for far too long.
“Our lands belong to the Kingdom of Elhart.”
“Last spring, Elhart went to war with the elves.”
“The elven city-states to the north.”
“I don’t remember what they’re called.”
“But they started fighting.”
“The war went on for half a year.”
“Then the army took all our grain.”
The old hunter clenched his hands.
“The king’s soldiers came to collect military provisions.”
“They told us that refusing to surrender our grain meant aiding the enemy.”
“Anyone who couldn’t pay was arrested as a traitor.”
“After the town surrendered its military quota, we didn’t even have enough seed grain left for the next planting.”
“More than a dozen people starved to death during the winter.”
“Then they came again in spring.”
His words came faster.
As though a dam had finally broken.
“It wasn’t that we refused to give them grain.”
“The land simply couldn’t grow that much.”
“The king’s men didn’t care.”
“They accused the town of hiding food.”
“They searched every family’s cellar.”
“Everything they found was loaded onto wagons.”
“They didn’t leave us a single grain of wheat.”
“My neighbor…”
The old hunter swallowed.
“An old blacksmith.”
“He stood in front of one of the grain wagons and begged them to leave a few sacks behind.”
“They whipped him until he lost an eye.”
Kroq-Gar listened in silence.
In his previous life, he had never witnessed military grain requisitions firsthand.
But he understood what they meant.
Throughout human history, armies taking grain rarely meant simply collecting food.
More often, the people who produced that food were crushed along with it.
But Kroq-Gar’s body felt nothing.
This ancient reptilian body held no instinctive sympathy for human suffering.
Its inherited memories contained only the Great Plan of the Old Ones.
The corruption of Chaos.
The endless war against disorder.
Humans were merely another piece on the board of the Great Plan.
A piece that had yet to find its proper position.
Kroq-Gar suppressed that ancient indifference.
Not completely.
His expression remained cold.
Only his tail moved.
It tapped softly against the stone step.
“Why did you enter the rainforest?” Tekuna asked.
His voice was calm.
But his eyes had stopped moving entirely.
They were fixed upon the old hunter.
“We had nothing left to eat.”
The old hunter spread his hands.
They were rough and covered with calluses.
Old scars from branches crossed his skin.
“Almost half the town fled.”
“Some went to stay with relatives.”
“Others went to the cities to beg.”
“We were hunters.”
“We thought there would always be game in the rainforest.”
“Anything we could hunt would be better than starving.”
“At first, it wasn’t too bad.”
“We hunted deer.”
“Gathered wild fruit.”
“We were afraid to go too deep into the forest, so we stayed near the edge.”
“We thought that if we could survive until the autumn harvest, maybe we could return home.”
“But then…”
He stopped.
Swallowed.
The young woman beside him had been staring at the ground the entire time.
Now she suddenly spoke.
“Then the monsters came.”
Her voice was soft.
But clear.
“They didn’t come from outside the forest.”
“They came from deeper inside.”
“They attacked at night.”
“We never saw which direction they came from.”
“When we woke up, we were already locked inside cages.”
She shivered.
“Someone stood outside the cages and sprinkled something over us.”
“They said they were…”
“Planting seeds.”
Sprinkling something.
Planting seeds.
Tekuna and Kroq-Gar exchanged a glance.
Only for an instant.
But both understood.
When these hunters had been rescued half a month ago, Tekuna had personally examined them for signs of Chaos corruption.
They had been clean.
But that didn’t mean Chaos hadn’t tried to corrupt them.
It merely meant the process had been interrupted.
Had Kroq-Gar arrived several days later, these hunters might no longer have been human.
“Why weren’t you corrupted?” Kroq-Gar asked.
The old hunter blinked.
He didn’t understand the word.
“His lordship means,” Tekuna explained, “why didn’t the power of Chaos twist your bodies?”
“Ah.”
The old hunter thought for a moment.
Then he pulled open the collar of his shirt.
A small piece of silver metal hung around his neck.
It wasn’t anything valuable.
Just an old silver coin polished smooth by years of wear.
A hole had been punched through its edge, with a leather cord threaded through it. Get faster updates on g.com.
“This.”
“The old priest in our town gave it to me.”
“He said it was a holy relic.”
“That it could ward off evil.”
“We didn’t really believe him.”
“But wearing it didn’t hurt.”
“When we were captured, those monsters took everything we had.”
“But they didn’t touch this.”
“One of them tried.”
“The moment its hand touched the silver, it pulled away.”
“Like it had been burned.”
“What happened to the old priest?” Tekuna asked.
“He’s dead.”
The hunter released his collar.
“He starved during the winter.”
“He gave his own food to the children in town.”
Kroq-Gar sat silently on the stone platform.
Two separate lines of thought were moving through his mind.
One concerned the lands beyond the rainforest.
The Kingdom of Elhart was at war with the elves.
Military requisitions had devastated agriculture along the frontier.
Civilians were fleeing toward the rainforest in search of survival.
The second concerned the rainforest itself.
Chaos was capturing those refugees.
Turning them into cultists.
Or using them as sacrifices.
This group had been rescued.
But how many others had entered the rainforest looking for food?
How many had already been captured?
“My lord.”
The old hunter suddenly dropped to his knees.
The others followed.
The young woman knelt at the back of the group, her head lowered.
“We can’t go home.”
“There’s no food left.”
“Even if we return, the next round of military requisitions will starve us anyway.”
“We want to stay here.”
“We won’t cause trouble.”
“We can work.”
“We can hunt.”
“We can build houses.”
“Anything.”
His voice trembled.
“Just give us enough food to live.”
Kroq-Gar looked at them.
From his towering height, the humans seemed almost pressed against the stone.
They were so thin that their shoulder blades pushed visibly against their clothing.
He remained silent for a moment.
This wasn’t a game.
These people weren’t background characters.
They weren’t flavor text.
They were ordinary people.
A blacksmith who had lost an eye trying to save a few sacks of grain.
A priest who had given away his own food and starved to death.
More than a dozen people who hadn’t survived the winter.
They weren’t soldiers of any faction.
They were simply people who happened to live near the edge of the rainforest.
“You may stay.”
The old hunter’s head snapped upward.
“New Tlanxla needs workers.”
“The craftsmen will find work for you.”
“But I have one condition.”
“Name it, my lord.”
The hunter’s voice trembled.
“Tell Tekuna everything you know about the war between the Kingdom of Elhart and the elves.”
Kroq-Gar leaned slightly forward.
“Troop movements.”
“Locations.”
“The situation on the front.”
“Anything you’ve heard.”
“You survived long enough to reach this place because you were fortunate.”
“But fortune doesn’t last forever.”
“If there’s a war outside this forest, I need to know about it before it reaches us.”
The old hunter froze.
Perhaps he had expected Kroq-Gar to demand payment.
Perhaps he thought he would be forced to worship some unfamiliar god.
Instead, Kroq-Gar wanted information.
A lord was asking him for intelligence.
The hunter’s lips trembled again.
But unlike half a month ago, this time it wasn’t fear.
It was something else.
He lowered his head until his forehead touched the stone.
“We’ll tell you everything we know.”
Kroq-Gar stood.
His tail had gone slightly numb from sitting cross-legged for too long.
He flicked it several times behind him.
Then he turned toward Tekuna.
“The army rests today.”
“Tomorrow, full training resumes.”
“Come to me the day after tomorrow.”
“I want Hamstone’s exact location.”
“I want everything we can learn about Elhart and the elves.”
“And…”
Kroq-Gar glanced at the hunters.
“Give them proper clothing.”
“Those bark-fiber clothes will rub their skin raw if they wear them too long.”
Tekuna lowered his head.
“As you command, my lord.”
Kroq-Gar turned and descended from the stone platform.
He needed to visit the barracks.
During the previous day’s fighting, one of the Saurus Warriors had twisted an ankle on broken stones.
Kroq-Gar wanted to check on him.
He had only walked a few steps when he heard the old hunter speaking behind him.
The man’s voice was very quiet.
But Kroq-Gar heard every word.
This body possessed hearing far beyond that of any human.
Even from twenty paces away, a whisper was perfectly clear.
The old hunter said,
“I thought he was going to eat us.”
Kroq-Gar didn’t stop walking.
Several steps later, the corner of his mouth slowly curled upward.
A Kroq-Gar smile.
Not a sneer.
He was genuinely amused.
Eating humans.
Of course.
In human stories, giant reptilian monsters eating people was probably practically mandatory.
He suspected this wouldn’t be the last time he heard that particular rumor.
Kroq-Gar didn’t turn around.
He simply raised his tail.
Then lightly struck it against the city wall.
Thump.
The dull impact echoed through the night.
Back at the stone platform, every human hunter shuddered at the same time.