Chapter Seven: After the Breach

Captain Trey turned toward the wall, blinking like he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. His spectacles were nowhere to be found, soot streaking one side of his face, hair stuck damp to his forehead.

"I can't believe that actually worked," Kael muttered under his breath, half in awe and half in disbelief.

Kael let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

The smoke still hung in the air, thin and acrid, as if the battle hadn't quite finished. The breach was sealed, but the fighting hadn't stopped. It clung to the air, in every breath, every step, in the way the soldiers walked as if expecting claws to burst from the fog at any moment.

Beasts still clawed at the walls, hurling themselves against the hastily welded metal. But the line held—for now. The shrieks were farther now, but not gone. Just waiting for another break.

Kael moved through the chaos, not as a prince but as another pair of hands. Not a figurehead, not a symbol, but a man coated in ash and old sweat who hadn't rested since the wall had groaned under the weight of monsters.

"Your Highness," Trey called out, halfway between deference and urgency. "What do we do next?"

Kael didn't answer at first.

He stood there, dirt on his face, hands still stinging from the heat of chain and flame, and looked at the wall they'd just melded together with fire and desperation. The patchwork was holding, but only just. If too many beasts hit it at once, it wouldn't hold. Everyone knew that. So did he.

For a moment, he let the quiet settle. That brief, trembling quiet between chaos and collapse.

Then he exhaled, steady and low.

"Mages and archers climb the wall and fire at will until nothing moves."

They moved.

They no longer looked at him like a prince. The captain looked at him with solemn eyes. He couldn't believe the prince was leading them.

Once, when he first arrived—just another noble with a different uniform and better stitching. They saw someone sent to observe, to issue orders from a tent, to disappear when things went dark.

Now they looked at him differently.

They looked at him like a weapon that had chosen to fight beside them.

Kael climbed the stone stairs at the edge of the wall, two at a time, until he reached the top. From there, he could see the scale of it. The beasts' desperation to breach the wall again, the sheer numbers still lurching forward from the tree line. He needed to see it for himself.

He paused long enough to watch as the mages and archers rained attacks down from the wall—fire, arrows, bursts of energy that lit up the ridge. The glow turned the smoke into shifting glass.

Beasts shrieked, stumbling under the assault. But most of them still kept coming, driven by whatever unnatural force had pushed them through the breach to begin with.

He stared at the beasts charging through smoke and arrow-fire, their frenzy undeterred. And for a second, the thought occurred to him—maybe they could feel fear. Maybe not the way humans did, but fear was older than reason. Even a bear, for all its strength, still backed away from something larger than itself. They just needed to make these things believe there was something worse waiting for them.

"We need something bigger, something that burns itself into their memory. Flashy enough to make them think twice about coming back."

Trey looked at him, hesitating. "Your Highness... your skeleton soldier. That thing could do it."

He couldn't say more. Couldn't tell Trey that the card had a limit, or that its use came with a cost even he didn't fully understand. So instead, he kept his voice calm.

Kael shook his head. "We don't know how many more got through."

Trey didn't argue. Instead, he stepped forward, muttering under his breath, palms already glowing with heat.

A moment later, a flare erupted skyward, followed by a concussive blast—loud, violent, blinding. It ripped light through the smoke, echoing off the hills in every direction. The ground shook beneath their feet. Some soldiers flinched. Others turned to look, startled.

It wasn't lethal. But it didn't have to be.

The beasts froze, snarled and then turned. One by one, then in stumbling clusters, they began to retreat. Their shapes melted back into the dark tree line beyond the ridge.

It worked.

"Holy shit," Kael muttered as the beasts turned away. "That actually worked."

He climbed the last few steps up the wall to see it for himself, wind catching the edge of his scorched coat.

Around him, the soldiers erupted into cheers—short, hoarse, and tired, but real. A sound pulled from relief and the realization that, for now, they were still alive.

Kael stepped toward Trey and clapped him on the shoulder, a rare gesture of approval that made the captain blink.

"Stay on watch," Kael said. "Make sure they don't circle back."

Trey nodded, then immediately turned toward the nearest group of soldiers. "Get the wall properly mended. Reinforce every weak point. I want another line behind the weld, just in case. Move!"

Kael left them to it. He descended the stairs, boots crunching over broken stone, passing soldiers dragging supplies and medics kneeling over the injured.

The beasts that had gotten past the outer line, those the commander and the frontline had been holding back, were now dead. Blood soaked the ground where they'd fallen. The air stank of iron, ash, and something fouler beneath.

Then he saw them—the same small group he'd noticed before, near the wreckage. Mana stone gatherers. Quiet, precise, heads down.

He walked toward them.

They were surrounding a torn section of earth where one of the larger beasts had fallen. And there, half-exposed in the creature's chest cavity, a stone pulsed.

Red.

Glowing.

It was nearly the size of his fist.

Kael stopped.

He stepped forward, eyes locked on the red-glowing stone embedded in the beast's ruined chest. "Let me see it," he said.

The soldier holding the extraction tongs hesitated. His grip didn't loosen right away. He looked up at Kael, clearly unsure if even a prince should be touching something like that.

After a beat, he offered it, careful and slow.

Kael reached out and took it. The moment his fingers closed around it, light burst across his vision.

It didn't explode. It didn't burn.

It dissolved.

The mana flowed into his palm like water and vanished under his skin, absorbed like breath returning to lungs.

He blinked.

The glow faded from the stone. Its crimson sheen dulled to a dull gray, the veins of red dimming until only dead crystal remained in his palm.

The mana stone gatherers froze.

"What just happened?" one of them asked.

Another stepped forward, eyes wide. "Are you all right, Your Highness?"

The soldier who had handed it to him looked stunned, mouth half-open.

Then came a sharp smack to the back of his head.

"What the hell were you thinking?" another soldier hissed. "You handed a raw mana stone to the prince! That was dangerous!"

One of them unconsciously stepped back. Another reached for a weapon but didn't draw it.

Kael said nothing at first, still feeling the warm echo of the mana coiled beneath his skin.

Shit, he thought, not for the first time. I did something weird again.

He looked up and saw the group staring at him—not in awe, but in silent, cautious fear. Like they weren't sure if he'd strike them down or disappear into smoke. Maybe they were afraid he'd retaliate. Maybe they thought he should.

"No one speaks about this," Kael said flatly. His voice didn't rise, but it cut through the air like a drawn blade.

Then he turned, grimacing in his mind—because in the same moment the mana settled into his skin, a new faint number had flickered to life just below the deck. It hovered there, strange and quiet: [25%].

A charge? A countdown? Or something worse.

If it ever hit one hundred... can he go home? He didn't let himself hope. 

And that's when he noticed it, a new card is floating low in the arc of the deck.

[Card 7: Seven of Flowers — Fearbind]

He barely had time to read the card before a loud horn call sounded.

Kael turned to see a line of scouts dragging a limp body toward the medic tents. One of the soldiers called out a name.

"Captain Griffyn! He's alive!"

Kael moved at once, weaving through soldiers and discarded gear, the chaos parting around him. Not because he was worried but because the soldiers were looking at him expecting him to do something. Commander Rellan was already there, speaking in low tones to a medic while his eyes swept the yard.

The captain had been buried beneath part of the collapsed western tower. Blood marked his temple, and his leg looked twisted the wrong way, but he was breathing. Conscious. Barely.

Griffyn looked up at Rellan, voice dry and slurred. "You held it?"

The commander looked at Kael, his weathered face unreadable for a moment, then softened into something close to pride. Not the loud kind, but the kind buried under years of grit and loss. "Our Highness did it."

Kael wasn't sure he believed what he saw in the man's eyes. Pride? Gratitude? Or just the relief of surviving another day? Either way, he said nothing.

"Thank you, your highness..." the captain rasped, before slipping into unconsciousness.

The medic pressed a hand to Griffyn's throat and nodded.

Kael stepped back. The wall was holding. The captain was alive.

But the quiet didn't last.

Before he could step away from the crowd, a horn rang again.

A rider in dust-caked armor galloped into the yard and leapt from his saddle before the horse fully stopped. He tore off his helmet, panting hard, mud streaking down his cheeks as if he hadn't stopped once since the breach was sealed. Kael turned toward the commotion, eyes narrowing against the dust still clinging to his lashes.

"Message from Captain Ryze!" the scout shouted, voice raw. "The village Unthir is under attack. Five monsters sighted. Civilians still trapped inside. Possibly more."

He looked to Commander Rellan.

The commander's expression tightened, lips pressed into a grim line. Then, with grim satisfaction, he barked the order. "All remaining squads who can fight, prepare to move east! We ride now!"

Kael grimaced as Rellan brought him a horse. Of course it had to be a horse.

"Trust your instincts," Rellan said quietly, voice too knowing.

Kael muttered a prayer, then swung into the saddle—and to his own surprise, his body moved with fluid familiarity. Muscle memory that didn't feel like his. The reins settled into his grip as if molded there by habit, not hesitation.

He had no idea how he was doing it. But his hands moved before he could question it.

Commander Rellan reined in beside him, glancing once at the winged silhouette above the treeline. His lips parted in something close to grim satisfaction.

"Good," Rellan said, nodding. "Everyone—ride for Unthir!"

He steadied the reins, his grip instinctive now, and trusted his body to carry the rhythm as he rode. The motion no longer felt foreign—it flowed through him as if it had always belonged there.

He pushed the horse harder, matching the speed of the vanguard. They tore across the plain, hoofbeats hammering the earth in a relentless rhythm, rising dust curling behind them like a signal fire to the sky.

As they reached the final ridge, Kael's eyes caught movement above the distant village—there was something winged, large, and circling.