Reign of the War King: Heavens Must Fall

Chapter 7: The Gathering Storm

For seven days the Academy ran like a fortress bracing for siege. Defensive arrays hummed along the perimeter walls around the clock. Supply wagons choked the main roads, loaded with enchanted weapons and rations, while instructors ran the third-years into the ground on the upper training fields.

Down in the workshop, Leon's routine barely changed: dull blades, oiled chestpieces, soot swept from the forge. But underneath the quiet, something was closing in on its limit.

Ninety-nine point five percent purged.

Only the faintest threads of the divine curse remained. The War Crest inside him had become an ocean of black-and-gold pressure, held in check only by Leon's own will.

On the morning of the eighth day, the sky opened into a cold grey drizzle.

The Grand Plaza filled with three thousand third-year combatants in steel-and-blue armor. Long lines of supply wagons waited by the eastern gate, guarded by auxiliary staff and mercenaries.

Up on the balcony, Harold and Duchess Eleanor stood among the capital's nobles, watching the procession assemble below. Eleanor, wrapped in fox fur, scanned the transport line until her eyes landed on Leon — plain leather rain cloak, holding a horse's reins near the back.

Her mouth curled into something cold.

"He looks right at home with the mules," she murmured to her attendant. "Make sure the transport captain knows his wagon leads through the Ashen Pass."

The Ashen Pass, the deadliest stretch of the northern route, a fog-choked gorge notorious for ambushes. Eleanor had spent good gold making sure her useless son-in-law walked straight into it.

On the main stage, Sophia stood at the head of the Elite Vanguard, ice-blue armor gleaming in the rain, rapier at her hip. She scanned the rear of the line until she found Leon, adjusting his horse's harness in the freezing wet, unbothered.

Remember the scroll, she thought, hand tightening on her sword. When the pass breaks, run.

A trumpet cracked through the rain. Marcus's officers raised their banners, and the whole army began its long march north.

Three days later they reached the mouth of the Ashen Pass.

The land had changed completely: green hills gone, replaced by jagged black basalt under a thick, sulfurous fog. The air tasted like ash. The sky overhead had turned a bruised, sickly violet.

The main combat force, Freya and the student vanguard included, had pushed three miles ahead to clear the road, leaving the slow supply convoy trailing behind in the narrow gorge.

Leon walked beside his wagon, reins in hand. Boros limped along next to him, crossbow slung over one shoulder, eyes fixed on the cliffs rising hundreds of feet above them on both sides.

"Too quiet, kid." Boros spat tobacco into the mud. "Wind's been dead an hour. When the wind dies in this pass, the air's thick with miasma."

"Scouts haven't sounded a horn," said Vane, the transport captain, a mercenary Eleanor had hired for the job, riding a warhorse near the front, sneering down at Boros. "Keep moving, old man. Ten miles of gorge before dark."

Leon said nothing. He lifted his head, eyes cutting through the drifting purple fog.

His senses, no longer bound by the curse, stretched out for miles. He could feel every heartbeat in the vanguard three miles ahead. He could hear Sophia's breathing as she led her squad along the upper ridge.

And he could feel something else.

Thousands of cold, mindless, hungry presences packed into the caves lining the canyon walls above.

An ambush, he thought, calm as ever. Three thousand low-tier crawlers. Four Vanguard-tier Executioners. Concealed.

Not random. The Abyssal forces had let the armored main force pass through untouched, waiting to fall on the slow, unarmed supply train that trailed behind it.

"Stop the wagon," Leon said.

Vane wheeled his horse around, glaring. "What did you say, trash? Giving orders now?"

"Stop the convoy." Leon's voice dropped, flat and strange in the damp air. "Ten more steps and the horses die first."

"You arrogant piece of-" Vane raised his riding crop to strike him.

A shriek tore through the fog above them.

The sky over the gorge seemed to come apart, hundreds of black, armored shapes peeling off the cliff faces, raining down onto the narrow path.

"ABYSSAL ATTACK!" Boros roared, wrenching his crossbow up. "FORMATION!"

Chaos hit instantly. Horses reared and snapped their harnesses. Mercenaries screamed as razor legs punched through leather armor and dragged them into the mist.

Vane's horse lost its head to a black scythe-claw that erupted from the fog. He hit the mud screaming as an eight-foot Executioner, bone-armored, twin jagged blades, stepped out of the mist and raised a weapon to cut him in half.

"HELP ME!" Vane clawed backward through the mud, grabbing at Leon's boots.

Leon didn't move his feet. He looked down at the weeping captain, then up at the Executioner ten feet away.

Something cracked, deep in his soul. The last half-percent of the curse turned to dust.

One hundred percent.

A quiet pulse of black-and-gold rolled out from his chest. The air in the gorge went still. The fog stopped drifting. Thousands of shrieking crawlers, mid-fall from the cliffs, died in their throats without a sound.

Leon unbuckled his tool bag and pulled out a plain two-foot iron crowbar, the one he used to pry open wooden crates.

He held it loosely in one hand.

"Boros," he said, and something in the word carried a weight old enough to make the sergeant drop his crossbow in the mud.

"K-kid?" Boros stared at his back.

"Keep the horses behind me." Leon stepped past the sobbing captain and walked, unhurried, toward the towering Executioner. "The road's open."