A Massacre, Not a Fight
But this wasn’t his fault, not really.
This was Dar’s doing.
Dar would answer for it eventually.
Right now, only one thing mattered.
“Do you know where they’re holding her?” Fate asked, voice flat as a blade laid on stone.
“No—but they grabbed her near Feign Night City, early this morning.”
Aisin’s breath came ragged, panic still clinging to him.
“I overheard something about a long-range signal crystal too. Some kind of message they’re planning to send.”
“That kind of equipment isn’t cheap,” Fate muttered.
He was already walking, boots crunching gravel like breaking bone.
“Means these aren’t simple bandits. Has to be a large operation behind it.”
He passed Kate without breaking stride, without even glancing her way.
“Family business, Miss Kate. Taking the rest of the day.”
“Wait.”
She caught his arm, ready to snap at the tone—but the second he turned and met her eyes, whatever she’d meant to say died in her throat.
Thirteen years old, and something in that gaze told her, with absolute certainty, that stopping him now would be a fatal mistake.
I don’t know what happened, she thought, but if I try to hold him back, he will kill me.
That’s what’s in his eyes.
Lord knows how a boy could kill a master like me—but I believe it.
Still, some flicker of confidence in his expression made her try anyway.
“Do you need help?” she asked—partly concern, partly the hope of learning more about this strange boy.
“No, thank you.” Fate’s jaw stayed tight. “I’ll manage alone.”
He turned and walked off, expression grim enough that the other students stepped back without being told.
He caught Aisin’s arm before the boy could follow.
“Go back. Make sure nobody suspects anything’s wrong.”
“I’m coming with you.” Aisin’s fists clenched at his sides. “I’m not a coward. I just thought we’d have better odds together than just you alone.”
Fate’s voice went hard, cutting like a whip crack.
“Fool. Think it through. If Dar learns the two of us both vanished from the academy at the same time, he’ll know something’s off immediately.”
“You already coming to my classes looks bad enough.”
“Go back, cover your tracks. Tell him I’ve been throwing around strange amounts of money lately and you got curious where it came from.”
Aisin went pale, then nodded slowly.
“You’re right. He’ll double down on hiding his own tracks if he thinks we’re onto him.”
He turned to head back toward the academy, shouting over his shoulder with forced normalcy, “And that money’s mine, not yours, you cheapskate!”
He played the part even as he ran.
Fate kept walking until Tivi’s hand caught his arm, spinning him back around.
“I want to help,” she said.
“You’ll slow me down.”
“Maybe you’re faster and stronger,” she shot back, eyes flashing, “but your stamina’s still garbage and your swordplay could use work.”
She nodded toward the sky.
“Besides—Shiro can get you there before sunset. No horse alive keeps that pace.”
“By sunset, the bandits will start drinking.” Fate’s voice dropped, cold. “They’ll forget their orders soon enough. Forget not to touch her, no matter how old she is.”
He checked the strap on his sword, almost as an afterthought—a small, mechanical motion, hands steady despite everything churning beneath his skin.
“As for the fight, I don’t plan on fighting them. This will be a massacre. I won’t be playing with swords today.”
Before Tivi could respond, Pan appeared at his side.
She hadn’t even noticed him call the horse—hadn’t caught the moment or the method.
Fate swung up onto its back and rode hard into the forest, hooves tearing gouges into the packed dirt.
Tivi stood there, furious, hands clenched at her sides.
Why do boys always turn irrational the second something like this happens?
She watched the dust settle where he’d vanished.
He probably took the main road. Fine—I’ll catch up on Shiro.
The town Aisin had mentioned sat roughly five hundred and forty miles from the academy as a bird would fly it—seven hundred and forty-eight by the winding road.
Fate used neither route.
He opened a shadow-step with Pan instead, the world folding around them like a held breath punched from the lungs, and within the hour reached the site of the attack—slow only because full daylight made the technique harder, forcing the shadows to bend against the grain of the sun.
“No shadow of her anywhere close,” Pan reported, nose still faintly twitching from the search. “Longer range, there’s an entire town’s worth of human shadow trails tangled together. Can’t isolate someone I’ve never seen before.”
“We need a ghoul or two,” Fate muttered, distaste thick in his voice.
He’d never liked relying on them.
There were bodies scattered from the earlier ambush nearby, but ghouls required something freshly dead, not decayed corpses—flesh that still remembered how to move.
“It’ll cost mana I don’t really have to spare,” he said, jaw tightening, “but there’s no other option. I’ll pull from the death dimension.”
The death dimension: an endless, silent expanse where the dead waited to be called by necromancers willing to reach for them.
Fate had studied it a little in the past, and what he’d found there had unsettled even him—countless undead beasts stacked beyond counting, creatures even ancient necromancers had no names for, existing in total stillness, total silence, waiting.
No one knew where they truly came from.
Every necromancer simply learned, eventually, how to open that connection and pull something through—a tear in the fabric of death itself, held open by will and blood-cost alone.
Fate summoned two ghouls—his personal limit—and sent them out to search.
Ghouls resembled zombies at a glance, stronger and considerably faster, marginally smarter too—though that wasn’t saying much; even a rock is smarter than the average zombie.
Their real value lay in tracking: once a ghoul caught a scent, it hunted better than any pack of hounds, patient enough to stay hidden from prey the whole way.
Within minutes they picked up a trail.
Four hours later, deep in the trees, Fate found a camp hidden in dense brush—at least four hundred people, judging by the scatter of tents and makeshift shelters spread across the clearing.
Fuck, he thought, staring at the size of it.
This isn’t a bandit camp. This is a small town.
He called the ghouls back and retreated to think, pulse hammering steady and cold beneath his ribs.
“Pan—find her. Don’t move on her until she’s completely safe. I don’t want to spook this many people into scattering.”
“And if something goes wrong while I’m in there?”
“Take her and kill anyone standing in your way. No hesitation.”
Pan grinned, teeth flashing white in the dark like a blade unsheathed, and melted straight into the shadows without another word.
Fate took a slow breath and summoned his lich—not from the death dimension this time, just from the mine roughly a thousand miles off, well within easier reach.
It would still take time to arrive with its skeleton force, so Fate spent the wait raising more ghouls one at a time, spacing them through the surrounding tree line to hunt down anyone who tried fleeing into the woods once things started.
By nightfall he had thirty-one ghouls stationed, and the lich had finally arrived with a hundred and forty-eight skeletons in tow, bones clacking soft as falling rain in the dark.
That orc shaman’s base intelligence really was sharp, Fate thought, watching the ranks assemble in silence.
When full night fell, Fate released poison mist across the camp—one of his favorite spells, especially effective against unprepared humans.
Within the hour, the camp began to sicken from the inside out.
The weaker fighters started collapsing outright, gasping, retching into the dirt.
Even the strongest felt their strength draining, sweat beading cold on their skin like the first symptom of a fever that never broke.
Then the undead army hit the camp from three sides at once.
Fate cut through the chaos himself, dancing his blade between panicked bandits, the metallic stink of blood thickening fast in the cold night air.
The lich conserved its mana reviving fallen skeletons—far cheaper than raising fresh ones from scratch.
Fate, needing no such economy, switched tactics entirely and began raising zombies instead of skeletons—slower, stupider, but devastatingly effective in close quarters chaos, since terrified bandits kept mistaking them for fellow fighters in the dark, right up until rotted hands closed around their throats.
Some of the more desperate bandits broke and ran for the tree line, straight into the waiting ghouls—screams cutting short in the brush, swallowed whole by the dark.
Half the skeleton force had already fallen by the time the lich cast a mass revival spell, momentarily exposing its position and drawing the attention of the bandit leader directly.
Roughly twenty of the stronger fighters each required forty skeletons just to bring down; the remaining hundred or so weaker bandits fell to a combination of zombies and mounting panic.
Voices screamed across the camp for reinforcements that never answered—because there was no one left standing to answer them.
Fate had nearly cleared the entire camp when the lich itself finally collapsed, bones scattering like dropped kindling.
Normally its skeletons would have crumbled with it—clearly something the bandit leader had been counting on—but thanks to the link Fate maintained with the summon, control simply transferred over to him instead, seamless as a blade sliding home.
A few more overconfident bandits died in that instant of confusion alone.
Fate crossed the churned, blood-soaked ground toward the lich’s fallen body and pressed a hand against its shoulder, the reek of iron and rot thick enough to taste.
“YOU!”
The bandit leader screamed, backing away, sword shaking hard enough in his grip to rattle the steel.
His eyes were wide, white-rimmed, the look of a man staring straight into something that shouldn’t exist.
“Who the fuck are you?!”
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