"Is that your contracted mount?"
Liora looked at Veyra with an expression caught somewhere between polite confusion and mild concern — the look of someone trying very hard not to say what they’re actually thinking.
Leo nodded.
Liora’s gaze moved over Veyra one more time. Two heads. Four eyes. Two meters of muscle and scale, crouched low in the dark like a shadow that had decided to have opinions.
"It’s..." She searched for the right word. "Unique." She turned back to the map. "Alright. We move."
Leo reached back and rested a hand briefly on Veyra’s nearest head. The golden eyes blinked at him once, calm and steady. He drew the Daybright Aegis onto his left arm, took his light-attribute greatsword in his right hand, and fell into position at the rear of the formation.
The five of them crossed into demon territory in a rhombus pattern — Mira at the point, Darius and Caden on the flanks, Liora in the center, Leo at the back. No one spoke. The hills behind them disappeared into the dark.
Ahead, a vast plain stretched out into the night. No landmarks. No lights. Just flat, open ground that seemed to go on forever, and somewhere in the air — faint, almost imagined — the distant copper smell of old blood.
Six thousand years of war had soaked into this land.
You could feel it.
---
Liora raised her staff and spoke a short incantation under her breath. From the tip of the staff, a translucent shape rose — bird-formed, pale as glass, silent — and shot upward into the night sky, climbing until it was invisible. A faint shimmer passed across both of Liora’s eyes as the spell locked in.
Eagle Eye Method. A mage’s essential scouting skill, projecting vision through a magical construct high above the ground. The higher the caster’s cultivation, the wider the range.
Mira glanced back at the sky and then at Liora. "This area is too open. We need cover before we can move properly."
Liora nodded without looking up. "Two and a half kilometers ahead, hills on the left side — thick brush on the slopes. We move that direction and work our way forward carefully. Five kilometer radius around us is clear. Go."
Mira angled left. The group followed without a word.
Leo noticed it without drawing attention to it — the two women who spent most of their time in Moonhaven City finding new ways to irritate each other had, the moment they crossed the border, become something close to a functioning unit. Mira read the ground and led from the front. Liora read the sky and directed from the center. It wasn’t friendship. It wasn’t warmth. But it worked, and working was what mattered out here.
He filed that observation away and kept his eyes on the dark behind them.
---
They moved through the night using every piece of natural cover they could find — shallow ravines, boulder clusters, the sparse woodland at the base of the hills. Every five kilometers, Liora marked their position on the map before signaling the group forward.
The route Moonhaven City had prepared for them was deliberate in its placement: close enough to the demon garrison to find patrols, far enough from the main encampment to avoid anything they couldn’t handle. The nearest garrison sat a hundred kilometers in. They had pushed forty of those before Liora raised a fist and called a stop at a patch of thick brush dense enough to hide them from any ground-level observer.
"We don’t go further tonight." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Past this point we enter detection range of their mage scouts. Some of them have Eagle Eye ranges exceeding fifty kilometers. If we push in further, we may already be seen."
Mira nodded. "My father said the same thing. The garrison mages are serious — not the standard rank you’d find on a patrol."
They settled into the brush and ate — dry rations, quick and quiet, more fuel than food. Liora maintained the Eagle Eye through the night, her concentration never fully breaking, her eyes going slightly distant every few minutes as she swept the magical sight across the surrounding terrain.
The night passed without incident.
The sky began to lighten.
And still nothing.
---
By the time morning had fully arrived, the mood in the group had shifted.
Not panicked. Not reckless. But quiet in the specific way that comes from waiting for something that doesn’t show up.
Darius finally put it into words. "Where are their scouts? We’re forty kilometers in and we haven’t seen a single patrol."
No one had a good answer.
The three-day window pressed on all of them. Three days to qualify. Three days to find twenty-five demons, engage them, survive, and get back to the Alliance staging ground. One day was already gone to travel. One night of waiting had yielded nothing.
Mira’s jaw tightened. "I’ll take the Rose Unicorn up and push further in. Draw a response. If I get into trouble I pull back fast — the unicorn can outrun anything in this range."
"No." Liora said it immediately and firmly. "The Rose Unicorn is too visible. It’s a fifth-rank beast — any scout with decent spiritual sensitivity will feel it coming from kilometers away. If you fly into their detection range on that, you don’t draw a patrol. You draw a war party."
Mira didn’t argue. Her expression said she wanted to, but she didn’t.
They sat with the problem.
Leo had been quiet for the last several minutes, listening — not to the group’s conversation, but to the ground. The air. The specific absence of sound in the brush around them.
Something was wrong with that absence.
"Everyone—"
His voice came out sharp and low, cutting across the discussion.
"—get ready. They’re here."
He didn’t wait for questions. His right hand brought the light greatsword up in a single motion, and he pushed his spiritual energy through the blade hard and fast. Light erupted across its edge — and he swept the sword outward in a wide arc, the energy releasing in a pulse that expanded around all five of them.
Divine Light Mantle.
The protective shell snapped into place just as the ground beneath their feet detonated.
A *crack* — then an impact that traveled up through their boots and into their bones — and then the Mantle took the hit and shattered. The force that had come up through the ground was not small.
In the same instant, before the first Mantle was even finished breaking, a second one bloomed from ground level around them — same shape, same golden light, catching the follow-up pressure from below and holding it.
Leo hadn’t cast the second one.
He glanced to his side.
Veyra’s golden-eyed head was raised, the holy aura still radiating from its open mouth, the light dissolving as the threat passed. She had read the situation in the fraction of a second between the first impact and the second, copied the skill she had watched Leo use dozens of times, and deployed it on her own.
There was a short, complete silence.
Then Mira’s voice — controlled, immediate, combat-sharp. "Luke Clan!"
Her sword was already out, red light burning along its edge. She drove it straight down into the ground.
Leo, Darius, and Caden moved in the same breath — three blades hitting the earth in three different directions, a ring of impacts that shook the soil outward.
*Thud. Thud. Thud.*
Wet sounds. Something below them stopped moving.
"Weapons out!" Liora’s staff swung down and a beam of ice-blue light struck the ground in a flat, spreading wave. In the space of two seconds, the soil around them hardened — ice spreading outward in a half-meter-thick layer, steel-solid, locking whatever had been tunneling beneath them in place.
Then the ground erupted anyway.
They came up from the frozen earth like they’d been fired from below — one, two, four, seven figures punching through Liora’s ice and landing in a ring around the group.
Leo got his first clear look at them.
Roughly human in shape. Roughly. Each one stood about 1.7 meters tall, bare-skinned above the waist, the upper body covered in purple-black skin pulled tight over dense muscle. Below the waist, fine black scales layered like armor. Three eyes — two normal, one set in the center of the forehead, and all of them cold. All of them locked on the five humans.
And then the detail that didn’t fit anything Leo had seen described in any book.
Four arms.
Every single one of them had four arms. The lower pair ended not in hands but in natural weapons — narrow, rigid, tapering to needle-sharp points that caught the dawn light in a faint, cold gleam.
These were not a species that had developed weapons.
These *were* the weapons.
They stood in a perfect encircling formation, and for one stretched-out moment, nobody moved.
Sixty centuries. Sixty centuries since the Seventy-Two Demon Gods had descended on this world and something in the fabric of life had broken open and poured out things like this. Six thousand years of war, of borders held and borders lost, of humans learning what they were up against and still not giving ground.
And now Leo was standing in the middle of a circle of them, sword in hand, heart beating exactly the right amount — fast enough to be ready, slow enough to think.
On his left, Mira’s grip on her sword was absolutely steady.
On his right, Darius had locked his tower shield into position without being asked.
Behind him, he felt Liora’s spiritual energy building.
The Luke Clan demons didn’t wait any longer.
Neither did they.