Chapter 116: Remembrance
The first rays of dawn slowly spread across the eastern horizon.
As always, the changing of the guard began before sunrise.
Captain Roland rubbed his tired eyes as he climbed the eastern wall.
Another uneventful night.
That was what he expected.
The Night Crawlers never stopped attacking, but the barrier had endured for decades. At worst, there would be another pile of monster corpses beneath the walls.
Nothing unusual.
Or so he thought.
One of the younger soldiers suddenly froze halfway through his patrol.
"...Captain."
Roland frowned.
"What is it?"
The soldier did not answer.
Instead, he slowly pointed beyond the barrier.
Roland followed his finger.
Then his breathing stopped.
"...Impossible."
The endless plain outside the capital had disappeared.
Not because the monsters were gone.
But because the ground itself could no longer be seen.
Bodies.
An endless ocean of Night Crawler corpses stretched from the eastern wall all the way to the distant horizon.
Thousands.
No.
Tens of thousands.
Black blood had flooded the earth, forming rivers that reflected the crimson morning sky.
Not a single living Night Crawler remained within sight.
Silence.
Utter silence.
The soldiers standing atop the wall stared blankly, unable to process what they were seeing.
"...W-what happened?"
"...Was there a war?"
"Who did this?"
No one answered.
Because there was no answer.
No army could have crossed the barrier.
No elite hunting squad had left the city.
No alarm had sounded throughout the night.
Yet somehow an entire Night Crawler legion had vanished.
Captain Roland’s heart pounded violently.
He had fought these creatures for nearly thirty years.
He knew exactly how terrifying they were.
Even a squad of A-rank hunters would struggle against several hundred.
But this.
This was annihilation.
Complete annihilation.
He slowly turned toward the captain of the night watch.
"What happened last night?"
The man’s face was deathly pale.
"We... we did not notice anything."
Roland’s expression darkened.
"You expect me to believe that an army large enough to erase tens of thousands of Night Crawlers crossed these plains without making a sound?"
"...No."
"Then explain this!"
The veteran remained silent.
Because he could not.
None of them could.
The only strange thing anyone had reported was the silence.
Roland suddenly remembered the conversation from the previous night.
"Why do I have a bad feeling?"
His hands unconsciously tightened.
"...Report this to the palace."
"Immediately."
Within minutes, alarm bells echoed throughout the eastern district.
Officials.
Knights.
Formation masters.
Court mages.
Everyone rushed toward the walls.
One after another, their expressions changed from confusion to disbelief.
Then finally to fear.
Whoever had done this was not an ally they understood.
Nor an enemy they wished to provoke.
Far beyond the endless field of corpses, a lone figure silently walked deeper into the wilderness.
His clothes were stained black.
Azrael rested calmly in his hand.
Not a trace of fatigue appeared on his face.
His eyes remained fixed ahead.
Because he knew.
The creatures outside the capital had merely been the welcoming committee.
The first formation master to arrive nearly collapsed when he saw the scale.
Elder Voss had lived through three major Night Crawler tides.
He had seen walls breached.
He had seen entire outposts erased overnight.
Nothing in his long life prepared him for this.
He activated every detection array he carried.
Layer after layer of sensing magic swept across the plains.
No residual mana signatures of large-scale spells.
No traces of high-tier barrier-breaking techniques.
No footprints belonging to human soldiers.
Only one thing remained.
A faint, almost invisible path of pure destructive energy that cut straight through the center of the corpse field and continued westward into the deeper wilds.
It was not a path left by an army.
It was a single line.
One being.
Voss’s voice shook when he finally spoke.
"This was not a battle."
"This was a slaughter conducted by something that does not belong to our understanding of power."
The knights behind him shifted uneasily.
A young formation apprentice whispered, "Could it have been a Mythic-rank beast from further inland?"
Voss shook his head slowly.
"No Mythic beast leaves a trail this clean. They destroy. They do not erase with this level of precision."
Another knight stepped forward, face pale.
"Then what was it?"
No one answered.
Because every possible answer felt worse than the last.
Word reached the palace within the hour.
The King himself was informed before the sun fully rose.
Emergency councils convened in the high chambers.
Maps were unrolled.
Records of every known high-rank hunter and every sealed dungeon were checked.
Nothing matched.
The barrier had not been breached from the outside.
No teleportation formations had activated.
No spatial fluctuations had been recorded by the capital’s central array.
Yet tens of thousands of Night Crawlers that should have been tearing at the walls until dawn now lay in perfect silence, their black blood already beginning to evaporate under the morning light.
The implications settled over the room like a heavy shroud.
If something could erase a force of that size without anyone noticing, then the capital’s greatest defense, the very barrier that had protected them for generations, had just been proven irrelevant.
Commander of the Royal Guard, Sir Kael, slammed his gauntleted fist against the table.
"We send scouting parties. Immediately. I want every trace of that path followed."
An old court mage raised a trembling hand.
"And if whatever left that path is still out there?"
Kael’s jaw tightened.
"Then we learn its nature before it decides the capital is next."
Outside the walls, the soldiers continued to stare.
Some vomited when the wind shifted and carried the full stench of the black blood.
Others simply stood frozen, unable to look away from the horizon-spanning carpet of death.
A junior officer finally found his voice.
"Captain Roland... those bodies near the front. Look at the wounds."
Roland forced himself to examine them more closely.
The first corpses had been torn apart with raw physical force.
Later ones showed cleaner cuts, as if a single blade had moved through them faster than the eye could follow.
Further still, entire groups of Night Crawlers had simply collapsed with their cores ruptured from the inside, as though something had reached into their bodies and crushed the source of their existence without ever touching the outer flesh.
The progression of the kill methods was clear.
Whatever had done this had grown more efficient as the night continued.
It had learned.
It had adapted.
And it had never slowed down.
Roland felt a cold weight settle in his stomach.
He had spent decades studying the Night Crawlers.
He knew their regeneration.
He knew their pack tactics.
He knew how they coordinated through that strange hive-like instinct.
None of it had mattered.
They had been treated like insects under a boot.
By the time the second wave of officials arrived, the sun had fully risen.
Light revealed details that the earlier gloom had mercifully hidden.
Some of the larger Night Crawler elites, creatures that required entire A-rank teams to bring down, lay in pieces so fine they looked almost powdered.
Others had been bisected with such precision that the cuts still looked fresh, as if the blade had never dulled no matter how many times it was used.
A formation master knelt beside one of the largest corpses and carefully collected a sample of the black blood.
The moment his sensing magic touched it, he recoiled.
"There is residual intent in the blood," he said, voice strained.
"Not mana. Not killing intent in the normal sense."
"Something colder."
"Something that looked at these creatures the way a man looks at weeds in a garden."
The words hung in the air.
Weeds.
That was the feeling that settled over every experienced fighter present.
This had not been a desperate defense.
This had not even been a hunt.
It had been cleaning.
Far beyond the corpse field, Amon continued walking.
The black stains on his clothes were already beginning to flake away under the morning wind.
Azrael rested against his shoulder as if the blade itself was satisfied.
He did not look back.
There was no need.
The Night Crawlers that had gathered near the capital had been numerous, but they were still only the outer edge of the true tide.
The real dens lay further west, deeper in the corrupted lands where the barrier’s influence no longer reached.
He could already feel them.
Larger signatures.
Older ones.
Creatures that had lived long enough to develop crude intelligence and territorial instincts far beyond the mindless swarms that had thrown themselves at the walls night after night.
Amon’s expression did not change.
The night had been efficient.
His body had adapted faster than expected.
Each kill had fed something inside him, refining the edge of his movements, sharpening the connection between thought and action until the later stages of the massacre had required almost no conscious effort.
He had not needed to use everything.
That was the important part.
The capital still slept behind its barrier, unaware that the force which had just erased an entire legion had never considered them relevant.
They were simply in the way of the path he needed to walk.
Amon’s eyes narrowed slightly as a new presence brushed against the edge of his senses.
Something larger.
Something that had noticed the sudden absence of its lesser kin and was now moving toward the disturbance.
He adjusted his grip on Azrael.
The welcoming committee was finished.
The real reception was about to begin.
Back at the walls, the first scouting party prepared to leave.
Twenty elite knights, two formation masters, and one court mage who specialized in tracking residual energy.
They stepped through the temporary opening in the barrier with faces set in grim determination.
None of them spoke as they walked across the blackened earth.
The scale of the death pressed against their minds with every step.
After half an hour of travel, the lead formation master raised a hand.
"The path continues."
"And it is still fresh."
Sir Kael, who had insisted on joining the first group, stared at the faint line of destroyed earth that stretched toward the western horizon.
"How far does it go?"
The formation master checked his instruments again.
"Further than our arrays can measure from here."
"Whatever left this is still moving."
A heavy silence followed.
Then one of the younger knights spoke the thought that had been growing in every mind since dawn.
"If it can do this to the Night Crawlers..."
"What happens when it turns around?"
No one answered.
Because the answer was already written across the plains behind them in rivers of black blood and mountains of silent corpses.
The capital had survived another night.
But for the first time in decades, the people standing on the walls understood a simple and terrible truth.
The greatest threat was no longer the monsters outside.
It was whatever had decided those monsters were not worth leaving alive.
And that thing was still walking.
Unhurried.
Unchallenged.
And completely alone.