Chapter 29

  Burnar Wolfsgrund stood in the pulpit of the Claw-Lord, his entire body vibrating in unison with the massive machine. Unlike his son Sk?ll, who fought with the impetuous ferocity of a young predator, Burnar’s leadership style was defined by a chilled, almost mathematical brutality. He did not see the battlefield as a place for glory, but as a complex equation of steel, pressure, and kinetic energy, which he solved with every blast of his heavy plasma cannons.

  Following the fall of the first two Titans, the golems had reformatted with an efficiency that gave Burnar a grim sense of pride. They had split into three hunting squads, perfectly synchronized to intercept the next wave of three giants that had just burst from the glowing earth. The Claw-Lord and the Night-Howler formed the spearhead of the central attack as they pincered the first Titan of the new wave—a monstrosity with violet-pulsing shoulders.

  "Sk?ll, hold the flank low. I want you to sever his tendons before he can brace his stance," Burnar commanded over the private channel. His voice was deep and steady despite the static discharges flickering through the atmosphere.

  "Understood, Father. He won't even be able to turn around," Sk?ll replied, and Burnar felt the heat in his son’s voice.

  But as Burnar fixed his sensors on the Titan, something stirred in the back of his mind—one of those instinctive warnings that had allowed him to survive three wars and countless skirmishes. It wasn't a technical signal, but a shift in the wildness of his consciousness. He glanced briefly at the tactical overlay displaying the positions of the allies. The Heartfire Legion, under Commander Pyrax’s deputy, was supposed to be covering the ramparts and providing long-range support.

  "Sergeant Malgor, report from the walls! Why are the dragon-men moving out of their positions?" Burnar barked into the general comms network.

  Seconds passed that felt like hours. Then the Sergeant’s reply came, his voice marked by suppressed panic. "My Lord! The Legion... they aren't retreating. They are advancing! They’ve mobilized and are heading directly for the pack! They’ve activated their shields and their necks are glowing! This isn't a relief maneuver, it’s..."

  "Betrayal," Burnar finished the sentence quietly to himself. His intuition was now clanging like an alarm bell in his mind. He saw on the screens how the dragon-men were streaming down from the fortress slopes in a wedge formation—not toward the enemy Outcasts, but into the backs of the golems.

  "All packs! Immediate abort of primary objectives! Formation Iron Circle! NOW!" Burnar roared, putting such authority into the command that the pilots reacted instinctively before they even grasped the danger.

  It was a last-second salvation. The golems broke off their attacks on the Titans and whirled around. The Titan seized the sudden distraction and swung its massive fist of rock and gold in a wide arc. A heavy Bear-golem, in the middle of rotating for the new formation, was caught full force. The fist struck the golem’s side armor. An ear-splitting crash of bursting composite steel echoed across the plain. The Bear-golem was hurled aside, its feet plowing deep furrows into the mud while its Arcane Shields flared violet and nearly collapsed. Yet, the machine held its ground. The pilot recovered the golem with a massive hiss of hydraulics and stabilized his position.

  "Shields holding at twelve percent!" the pilot panted. "I'm still standing!"

  "Into the circle!" Burnar ordered. He wrenched the Claw-Lord around. Before him, he saw the first wave of the Heartfire Legion. The dragon-men, in their shimmering armor now reflecting the violet light of the Titans, had lowered their spears. They thought they would strike an unprepared foe. They thought the golems were still occupied with the stone monsters.

  Burnar Wolfsgrund felt a cold, dark heat rise within him. It wasn't the wild rage of his son; it was the wrath of a Baron whose honor and land had been defiled by cowardice. Wolfsgrund had entrusted their backs to these bastards, and they had tried to stab them.

  "You want blood?" Burnar whispered as he switched the Claw-Lord’s servos to maximum load. "Then you shall choke on it."

  The Claw-Lord surged forward. Burnar didn't wait for the dragon-men to make contact. He harnessed the kinetic energy of the heavy golem, channeling it into a horizontal rotation of the massive torso. The enormous plasma cannon on the right arm was used as a club, while the left claws hissed through the air like scythes.

  In a single, fluid motion, the Claw-Lord swept through the first rank of attackers. Twenty dragon-men were literally shredded. The legionaries' armor burst like eggshells under the force of the golem. Blood, scales, and metal fragments sprayed across the battlefield in a grotesque cloud. Those not struck directly by the claws were crushed by the pure shockwave of the impact or hurled meters through the air.

  A cry of horror went through the ranks of the Legion, but it was immediately drowned out by the howl of the remaining Wolfsgrund golems.

  "Traitors!" Sk?ll screamed over the radio, and the Night-Howler shot past Burnar’s side like a shadow. His son’s golem used its plasma blades to bore through the next group of dragon-men like a glowing drill. Where the golems had just been acting surgically against the Titans, they now moved with an unleashed brutality that knew no mercy.

  "Hold formation!" Burnar commanded as he grabbed another legionary with his golem’s bare hand and slammed him against a boulder. "Don't let them get between us! We fight on two fronts! Packs one and two, form the outer ring against the Titans! Packs three and four, clear the rear! No prisoners!"

  Wolfsgrund’s battle order changed at a breathtaking pace. The forty-six machines now formed a double ring. The outer golems fired their heavy mana cannons at the three Titans, which were now slowly closing in, attempting to pincer the golems. The inner golems—led by Burnar and Sk?ll—dedicated themselves to the annihilation of the Heartfire Legion.

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  It was a slaughter of unprecedented cruelty. The dragon-men were excellent warriors, but they stood no chance against the sheer mass and unbridled fury of Wolfsgrund golems who felt betrayed. The Legion’s fire flared up, engulfing the golems in infernal flames, but the shields, fed by the heart of Drymon, absorbed the heat while the machines pressed on undeterred, crushing everything beneath their steel feet.

  Burnar saw the Legion’s deputy commander on an armored riding dragon attempting to regroup his men. He raised his burning sword and shouted orders that were lost in the din of battle.

  "You're next," Burnar growled. He fired a concentrated volley from his main cannon. The shot narrowly missed the commander but instantly vaporized three of his bodyguards.

  Wolfsgrund’s wrath had reached its boiling point. There were no more tactical considerations regarding resources or ammunition. There was only the destruction of those who had dared to break the bond. The plain before the fortress became a maelstrom of violet light from the Titans, the blue glow of the golems, and the red fire of the dragon-men.

  The three Titans, now almost undisturbed by the golems' shift in focus, began slamming their stone fists into the ground to create tremors designed to throw the machines off balance. The golems in the outer ring had to perform miracles of stability while simultaneously fending off the charging Outcast infantry, who now sensed the opportunity and crawled out from the darkness.

  "They think they’ve surrounded us!" Sk?ll screamed, laughing—a sound that sent shivers down even Burnar’s spine. "They think we’re the prey!"

  Burnar wrenched the Claw-Lord around and crushed a dragon-man who had tried to thrust his sword into the golem’s leg. "They forgot that a wolf is most dangerous when cornered."

  The new battle unfolded in its full, terrible splendor. It was no longer an ordered war; it was a fight for raw survival against an enemy in front, an enemy behind, and the giants of the earth themselves. House Wolfsgrund stood alone on this blood-soaked plain, surrounded by treachery and monstrous magic, yet their formation remained unbroken.

  Burnar Wolfsgrund looked at his displays. Energy levels fluctuated, the Claw-Lord’s armor was torn in several places, but his will was as firm as the granite of the mountains. He looked at his son, raging in the center of a circle of dead legionaries, and he knew that Reyn had made a mistake. He hadn't sent them death; he had given them a reason to destroy everything in their path.

  "All units, frequency to 'Iron Wrath'!" Burnar ordered. "We do not break. We do not bend. We are the anvil upon which the world shatters!"

  The golems let out a synchronized metallic roar that carried for miles through the audio amplifiers. The battle for Wolfsgrund was no longer a fight for a fortress. It had become a crusade of retribution, and the blood of the traitors was only the beginning.

  -

  I leaned my back against the cool, unyielding rock of the cellar wall, far enough from the frantic bustle at the war table to stay out of the way, but close enough to feel the electric crackle of the mana-projections on my skin. In my right hand, I held a "Wolf’s Paw." The name was a program in the North: a sticky, nearly rock-hard bar of coarsely chopped venison, pressed with dried blood, honey, and crushed nuts, then smoked over resinous wood.

  It wasn’t food; it was a provocation for the palate. One look at it made you expect the worst, but the effect was immediate. The arcane additives mixed into these bars—to keep golem pilots and guards artificially awake for hours during a siege—shot into my brain like a hot wire. My senses sharpened, the orange glow of the Rift behind us became more piercing, and the murmuring in the room transformed into a precise backdrop of information.

  A few meters away, I saw Thivan Sothar. The King of Caleon was also chewing on a Wolf’s Paw. He did it with a mechanical grimness, as if he were grinding the meat on behalf of the traitors who were currently pushing his realm into the abyss. His eyes glowed with a dangerous blue light as he barked orders into the ether crystals.

  "Fire at will!" he snarled at a commander on the city walls. "I don't want to hear that they were our allies! The moment they raised their blades against Wolfsgrund, they forfeited their right to exist. Aim the mana cannons at Pyrax’s camp. Burn them out of their tents before they can take a single step toward the main gate!"

  Thivan cursed the Heartfire Legion with an eloquence only a desperate monarch could muster, while simultaneously holding the logistical threads of a two-front war in his hands.

  The rest of my group was integrated into this strange dead silence before the storm in their own way. Vin sat cross-legged on a wooden supply crate. Her fingers moved in complex, flowing patterns as her emerald-green vines slithered from her sleeves like living snakes. She was testing her reaction time, intensely focused—a hunter preparing her traps.

  Arik, on the other hand, had become the center of a small cluster of officers and researchers. Since he was, as usual, wearing absolutely nothing, his imposing figure could be admired in all its glory. The techno-magi stared at him with a mixture of curiosity and scientific zeal. Arik, however, was far from being a silent relic; he conversed animatedly and talkatively with them, explaining details of his nature and occasionally laughing deeply from his chest, which made the scholars flinch every time. His race was no secret to anyone here, but seeing him so lively and friendly in the heart of the palace was an unfamiliar sight even for the most hardened officers.

  And then there was Maira. She stood rigid before the Rift, her gaze fixed on the endless, orange void of the Lower Realms. Due to her proximity to the portal, her connection to Erebos, the Plague Father, seemed to have reached a clarity beyond anything she had shown before. She was part of the frequency emanating from the abyss.

  I looked at them all—my friends, my companions—and an ironic smile crept onto my lips. I felt almost like a student in the corner, marveling at the arts of his teachers, while so much of it was forbidden to me. An absurd thought, considering I was the one leading this troop. I was the most powerful among them, the anchor holding this chaos together. My power might be unstable, feeling like a hungry beast inside me, but I had its use under complete control. I was no novice; I was the weapon they all looked to when things got dire. But the irony of this silent observer role in the corner was too delicious not to enjoy.

  At this point, I could tell you about a flashback I had in that moment, but that would be a waste of time and would only distract from the actual situation.

  "Luken, we have to interrupt here," an archivist says suddenly and matter-of-factly. She looks me directly in the eye, her eyes weary from reading. "The reader understands your anger, but they don't yet understand where it comes from. You can't just keep chewing dried meat while the world ends without showing us what made you into this leader."

  "It's a waste of time," I counter, leaning back in the wooden chair, which is much more uncomfortable here in the archive than the rock wall in the palace. "The battle is raging. Reyn is creating Titans. We don't have time for nostalgic excursions. Besides... haven't I told you enough about Zarkhural?"

  The second archivist, a man with glasses, shakes his head. "We decide what is a waste of time, Luken. We are the archivists. We hold the threads. And we say: here we go. Tell us the begin of the story of when the ice began to break. You know the one. The thing with your girlfriend."

  I sigh. This part is perhaps more unpleasant than anything else. But if these people insist that I look back, I can hardly resist. They are the stewards of my being.

  "Fine then," I say, closing my eyes to detach myself from the archive hall. "If you think it's necessary for completeness. But don't complain when the cold of the winter seeps through your papers as well."

  The woman smiles faintly and makes an inviting hand gesture.

  Here we go.