Laplace Village.
The walls of the elven village had beco a single, unbroken line of desperate motion.
Every warrior the village could field was up there — pressed shoulder to shoulder along the ramparts, weapons swinging, magic flaring, voices cutting through the chaos in short, clipped commands that barely carried over the roar of the tide below. The goblins ca in waves that showed no signs of thinning, crashing against the base of the walls like a sea that had forgotten how to ebb. No matter how many fell, more surged forward to fill the gaps, drawn onward by so frenzied, directionless hunger.
Surnark and Commander Brutus had both thrown themselves into the thick of it. Their magic weapons sang through the air in sharp, sweeping arcs, trails of energy carving through the goblin tide in long, violent lines — cutting, scattering, pushing the press of bodies back for a handful of precious seconds before the gaps closed again. Both of them were bleeding the edges of their stamina, and both of them showed no sign of stopping.
The death of Lich King Rokos had not brought order to the horde. If anything, it had done the opposite.
With the tether of his will severed, the goblins had co completely unhinged — stripped of whatever dark coordination had kept them moving with purpose, reduced to pure instinct and savagery. They fought without strategy, without formation, without any apparent regard for their own survival. They simply ca, and ca, and ca again, and the mindless relentlessness of it was in so ways more terrifying than organized opposition would have been.
Princess Evelyn had made the call herself. Staying inside Bloodmancer’s barrier had been a temporary shelter, not a solution — if the goblins surrounded the periter completely before the barrier held them off, the village would be suffocated from the outside rather than broken from within. The warriors had to co out. The alternative was to wait in safety until there was nothing left worth being safe for.
At the frontline, Jackie and Millie fought side by side.
The battle moved around them in the sa churning, violent rhythm it moved everywhere else — except for one quiet, inexplicable anomaly that had taken Millie longer than it should have to consciously notice, because she had been too focused on surviving to pay attention to patterns.
No strong goblin ca near them.
The smaller ones, the weak and the frantic, stumbled into their space occasionally — those were handled. Millie dealt with them the sa way she dealt with most problems: efficiently, and with enough force to ensure they didn’t beco a problem twice. One swing of her arm and whatever had been approaching simply wasn’t anymore, the impact sending fragnts scattering outward in all directions.
But the larger ones — the ones with real mass and real danger behind their eyes — gave them a wide, deliberate berth. Not out of confusion. Not out of coincidence. They steered away from Jackie and Millie the way animals steer away from sothing they cannot na but instinctively know to fear, rerouting their paths around them as if the two won weren’t worth the unknown cost.
Millie had clocked it properly by now.
She swept another goblin aside almost absently, her eyes tracking the movent of a cluster of larger ones as they curved away from their position without engaging, and the frown on her face deepened into sothing more thoughtful.
Wherever Jackie is, they avoid us. Every ti.
She didn’t have a clean explanation for it. She wasn’t sure Jackie did either.
But the pattern was consistent enough that it had stopped feeling like coincidence.
In the brief lull between one wave and the next, while her body was still warm with exertion and the sounds of battle continued to press in from every side, Millie’s gaze drifted.
Not to the walls. Not to the goblins. Not to the treeline where the next surge would co from.
Her eyes wandered, almost without her permission, to sowhere in the middle distance — to a direction, a general idea of where he might be right now.
Xavier.
The mory of him surfaced without invitation, the way mories do when they’ve been waiting for a quiet mont to make themselves known. That rash, direct, difficult man who had stepped in when he had no obligation to, no angle to play, no obvious reason to put himself between a threat and people who hadn’t asked him for anything.
He had helped anyway.
And even now — even after everything that had already cost him — he was still moving toward this village. Still heading this way. Not because anyone had asked. Not because he owed the elves a debt. Simply because he had decided to, and when Xavier decided sothing, she had learned, the decision tended to stick.
Millie didn’t have a tidy na for what she felt about that.
She just knew that, for so reason, the thought of it made the weight of the battle on her shoulders feel slightly less absolute.
Yet even amid the chaos, even with every pair of hands occupied and every eye fixed on the next incoming threat, the strange stillness surrounding Jackie and Millie did not go entirely unnoticed.
From the top of her watchtower, Princess Evelyn watched.
Her gaze had drifted toward the two girls the way a trained eye drifts toward whatever doesn’t fit — drawn by instinct before conscious thought could provide a reason. She observed in silence for a mont, watching the larger goblins curve away, watching the invisible boundary hold without either girl seeming to acknowledge it. Then she let out a slow, quiet breath and murmured to no one in particular.
"This Jackie... I need to be careful around her."
It was a strange thing to feel. Of all the people present on this battlefield, Jackie carried the least threatening air — on the surface, she looked like soone who simply didn’t belong here. And yet, watching this scene unfold, Princess Evelyn felt more unsettled by her than by anyone else in her field of vision. The things that made no noise were always the ones worth worrying about most.
Just as that thought was settling, the battlefield shifted.
A grunt — low, heavy, and wrong in the way that sounds are wrong when sothing very large has just been hit very hard — rolled in from the direction of the eastern wall. Brutus, who had been holding a section of the goblin tide almost single-handedly, flew backward through the air. He hit the stone behind him with a force that shook the wall, and when he slid down it, there was a wound across his chest deep enough to show the battle wasn’t going his way anymore. Blood poured freely, soaking through his armor in dark, spreading streams.
"Damn it—" He forced himself upright through sheer stubbornness, his voice rough and strained. "First Sequence goblin! Soone get Bloodmancer Thalia up here — she’s the only one who can handle sothing like—"
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Before the words could fully leave his mouth, the elves flanking him simply ceased to exist. No warning. No sound of impact that the mind could properly process. One mont they were there — and then they weren’t, the space where they had stood replaced by a fine, wet mist that drifted on the wind.
From the breach they left behind, the goblin knights erged.
They walked in full black armor that absorbed the light around it rather than reflecting it, each piece fitted and deliberate, carrying the weight of sothing crafted rather than scavenged. Their weapons were heavy and enormous, proportioned for bodies built purely for destruction. They didn’t rush. They didn’t surge. They walked, and that steady, unhurried advance was sohow worse than a charge would have been — the gait of things that did not feel urgency because they did not feel threatened.
The elven soldiers along that section of the wall raised their bows. Arrows flew. The goblin knights walked through the volley the way a river walks through reeds, and what remained of the archers did not remain for long.
From the watchtower, Princess Evelyn saw it all.
The sharp breath she drew in cut through her composure like a blade.
So many First Sequence goblins. Her eyes moved fast, counting, recounting, trying to find the ceiling of this new threat and finding that the ceiling kept rising. Where did they co from? There was no intelligence suggesting a force like this was anywhere near—
Then she felt it.
Beneath the noise and blood and motion of the battle, threading through everything like a current running under still water — a death aura. Dense and cold and deliberate, carrying the particular quality of sothing ancient and purposeful. It pressed against her senses with a familiarity that made her stomach drop.
A Lich King.
The thought arrived fully ford, unwelco and certain.
Don’t tell these goblins are a Lich King’s minions...
The mont it crystallized in her mind, Evelyn felt the ground shift beneath her certainty. Lich Kings were not creatures that could be outlasted or outmaneuvered with conventional force — not even at the First Sequence level, which was already beyond what her village could comfortably handle. If one was nearby, if it was directing this — then the wall wouldn’t hold. The barrier wouldn’t hold. Nothing she had available to her would be enough.
She was not alone in reaching that conclusion.
Bloodmancer Thalia arrived without being summoned, as though she had felt the shift herself and co running on instinct. Threads of blood rose from the ground around her in thick, dark coils — living ropes that moved with focused, intelligent purpose, wrapping around the nearest goblin knight and pulling tight, trying to arrest its advance with everything she had.
One knight slowed. Struggled. Held.
The others walked past it without breaking stride.
Thalia’s jaw tightened. Her concentration fractured across too many directions at once, trying to multiply what she only had enough of for one.
The goblin knights moved through the elven defenders the way fire moves through dry wood — not with malice, not with rage, simply with the chanical certainty of sothing that burns because burning is what it does. Elves fell. Not slowly, not with the dignity of a hard-fought last stand — they fell quickly, and they fell in numbers, and the sounds they made were swallowed almost imdiately by the larger noise of the battle continuing around them.
Atop the watchtower, Evelyn stood very still.
Her hands had closed around the railing without her noticing. The knuckles had gone white.
These were the last of her people. Not the remnant of a great nation, not a fraction that could be rebuilt from — the last. Every face down there on those walls was a face she knew. Every na attached to a history she carried. They had crossed into another world carrying nothing but the will to begin again, to carve out sothing new from unfamiliar ground.
And this was where it ended. Under the weapons of goblins on a foreign plain, far from any ho they had ever known.
No matter what I do. The thought moved through her mind with the dull, heavy quality of sothing that had already stopped fighting. No matter what I sacrifice — I cannot save them.
She watched another elf fall from the wall.
Is this how we end?
The question sat inside her chest like cold iron, waiting for an answer that the battlefield showed no sign of providing.
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