I heard the news before the words reached me properly. Not a full report at first, just fragments carried through runners, shouted between exhausted soldiers and Centurions as the encirclement tightened.
Torvald. I thought. Lirael.
Their names cut through everything else; they were dead. Not lost in the chaos, not swallowed by confusion. Gone where it mattered most to my plan, where the line had almost broken, where the enemy had nearly broken through. They had gone to the breach, the place where the horde had tested the trap.
The heroic couple had stayed there long enough to close it, making sure the circle held, long enough for the enemy to become fully sealed inside the killing ground I had designed. I stopped moving. For a moment, the battlefield continued without me. Steel still screamed against steel.
Orders still rang out across broken formations. Selene, Sahara, and Asmara were still fighting. Evangeline's magic flashed in bursts, tearing apart the enemy wherever they tried to rebuild. Somewhere in that chaos, the horde realised too late what shape they had been forced into a cage.
I tightened my hands; the claws were still there. Like they had been waiting for this moment, I looked toward the centre of the battlefield. The heart of the trap. Where thousands of men were no longer advancing or fighting as an army in any meaningful sense. They were trying to survive inside a space that no longer allowed survival.
Torvald and Lirael were not coming back; that truth didn't arrive like grief. It arrived like pressure. Too much pressure for anything human to contain cleanly. Something in me cracked open. The sound that came out of me was not a shout. It was not anger in any recognisable form.
It was an inhuman roar that bent the air around it. Even the men nearby faltered at the sound, not understanding it, only feeling it. I moved, and the moment I hit, the world stopped being a battlefield. Claws tore through the first line before they even registered that I had arrived.
Bodies broke apart in the path of motion, armour giving way like it had been waiting for permission to fail. Wherever they pushed together, I tore space open between them until cohesion stopped being possible. They were not fighting me; they were reacting to something that refused to stay in one place long enough to be engaged.
The Black Briar horde that had once believed itself an unstoppable tide now found itself collapsing inward, not because it was being pushed, but because the centre of it had become a storm it could not orient around.
I didn't think; I just tore through them, while somewhere behind the roar of blood and steel and breaking lines, the trap held.
***
(Garrick's POV)
From where I stood, the battlefield no longer looked like a battle. It was a blood-soaked plain, full of outlaw corpses. The encirclement was holding; that much was clear. When the king hears of this, the entire court will be shocked!
Selene's flank had become a grinding wall of violence, stripping away any attempt the horde made to widen the circle. Sahara's side was crushing the enemy, forcing entire blocks of soldiers to compress inward until they could barely move without stepping over their own dead.
In the centre, Asmara held the line like a blade driven into stone, unyielding even as the ground beneath her turned into a shifting mass of bodies and broken formations. Above it all, Evangeline's magic still fell like judgment from the ridge, breaking command clusters before they could form coherence again.
Then there was Prince Arthur. I had seen men lose control in battle before, I had seen rage, I had seen bloodlust. The young man I knew so well was not either of those things; he was something that had stopped pretending to be human at all. He was inside the centre of the trap now, while the Black Briar horde was collapsing around him.
Wherever he moved, waves of blood soaked the ground as hundreds dropped dead, making me gulp. Wait until the kingdom hears about this; it will change everything!
I watched as Claws carved through armour and bodies alike with a brutality that didn't pause long enough to be called technique. It was motion without hesitation, impact without recovery, a living rupture in the midst of the enemy who suddenly realised numbers meant nothing if the centre could not hold.
From my position behind the main line, I could see the consequences of the bandit's hubris. They tried to run and couldn't; the enemy then tried to push outward. The Legionnaires were already there. So they did the only thing left available to them. They died in place, thousands of them.
Not cleanly, not quickly, not in neat lines or honourable exchanges. They broke against the encirclement and against him, and the battlefield began to rise in uneven layers of corpses as the fighting continued over ground that was no longer ground at all. Men were forced to climb over the dead to reach the living. Still, the slaughter did not slow.
''By the gods,'' someone beside me whispered.
I didn't answer because there were no gods in this place anymore, only death. The Black Briar formation had once been a tide of confidence. Now it was a crushed spiral of bodies being forced tighter and tighter into the centre of the killing field, every attempt to escape only fed more men into the same narrowing space.
Prince Arthur was not just fighting inside it. Every time he struck, another section of the survivors failed. Every time he moved, another commander collapsed. The enemy wasn't being defeated in one place. It was being erased in layers all across the battlefield, unlike anything I've ever witnessed.
By the time I understood what I was really seeing, the ground between our two sides had already become impassable. Corpses piled so thick in some sections that soldiers had to climb over them to continue forward. A mountain of the dead, formed not by a single moment of destruction, but by everything that tried to resist the Third Prince.
At the centre of it all, Arthur kept moving, not bothering to check his injuries or anything that might have stopped a man under normal circumstances, just the endless, brutal correction of an army that had stepped too far into the wrong shape. I exhaled slowly, the sound lost in the distant roar of the battlefield.
This was no longer about whether we would win. That question had been answered the moment the trap closed. Now it was about how much of the bandit horde would still exist by the time the answer was finished.
***
(Asmara)
This place no longer felt like a battlefield; it was a slaughterhouse. My arms were heavy in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue and everything to do with time spent refusing to break. The shield wall had stopped advancing some time ago, not because we were ordered to, but because there was nowhere left for the enemy to go.
The corpses had done that; they rose in jagged, uneven piles where bodies had fallen too densely to clear, turning the ground into something broken and vertical. What had once been a plain was now a choking maze of dead and dying, and beyond it, the last remnants of the Black Briar horde were trapped in pockets of shrinking space.
I lowered my blade, breathing hard, and tried to understand the sound that had replaced the roar of open battle. It was different now, and at the centre of it all, Arthur was still moving. I had seen commanders in battle before. I had seen men who fought like they were more than human, driven by discipline or belief or fury so sharp it bordered on madness.
But what stood in the middle of that killing field was none of those things. Arthur was covered in blood, his, theirs, I couldn't tell anymore, and every step he took left a trail through bodies that had already fallen. His body was covered in wounds that should have stopped anyone else long before this point.
There were slices across armour and flesh alike that he simply ignored as if pain had been reduced to background noise. What shocked me was that he did not fall. He didn't even slow in the slightest. The Black Briar soldiers recoiled from him now; they were truly horrified by the Third Prince.
Like something in them had finally realised what they were facing was not a man on the battlefield, but a force moving through it. A monster in the shape of a prince, around me, the Ninth Legion stood frozen, even the veterans, soldiers who had survived sieges and border wars and things that never made it into songs.
They were watching him, all of them. Watching as he finished what the encirclement had become. The last organised resistance collapsed entirely under the pressure of the corpse walls; those still trying to escape found no path left that didn't lead back into him or into the legion that had sealed them in.
The outlaw army ceased to exist. Slowly, the sound of battle faded until at last, there was silence where tens of thousands had stood. The survivors were being rounded up by the Verona Swords to be sold. Arthur stopped moving in the centre of it all, blood dripping from him.
Breathe heavy, surrounded by the remains of an army that had believed itself unstoppable only hours before. He did not look victorious; he looked like something that had survived being the thing that ended a war. Then, from somewhere behind me, a single voice shouted in disbelief.
''We did it.''
That broke something, not in me, in all of us. The Ninth Legion suddenly erupted. It wasn't orderly. Shouts rose across the battlefield, and weapons were lifted. Men and women collapsed to their knees laughing, screaming, crying, some all at once. The weight of hours of combat finally left their bodies in a flood of noise and motion.
We had won, it was undeniable now. But my eyes stayed on Arthur. He stood alone in the centre of the dead, still upright despite everything that should have ended him. Covered in blood, marked by wounds that would have killed most men ten times over, and yet refusing even now to fall.
For the first time since the battle began, I understood something I didn't want to name. We had not simply survived a war, we had followed him through it, and he had ended it in a way none of us were ever meant to witness.
The birth of a legend, mother, I thought with a small smile, admiring the young man I once thought useless. Now I can witness the rise of the Devourer Prince everyone is speaking of.
***
(Arthur)
The roar was still deep inside me, not the sound I had made during the fight, but something deeper, something that kept trying to pull my body back into motion even when there was nothing left to kill. The battlefield around me had gone quiet in pieces, like the world itself was struggling to decide whether it was over.
I could feel the blood coating my hands like a second skin, smeared across my face, matting my hair, seeping into places I didn't dare name. It wasn't just on me. It was me. My chest heaved with ragged, savage breaths, each one still locked in the brutal rhythm of killing rather than the peace I desperately craved.
The world around me blurred at the edges, a chaotic storm of noise and fury. Somewhere behind the roaring chaos in my skull, I heard it: the legion's celebration swelling like a victory hymn. Cheers, laughter, triumph. It made no damn sense. None of it did. The wild thing inside me snarled and clawed for control, threatening to drag me back into the slaughter.
A growl escaped my lips, only to be drowned out by a thunderous roar from somewhere not far away. The sound wasn't just noise. It was power given voice, raw seventh circle authority that made the air itself tremble. From the mountain of corpses to my left, the warrior rose like a nightmare given flesh.
A towering seventh circle monster in an obsidian plate veined with pulsing runes, his presence alone warping the battlefield around him. His eyes burned with the kind of hatred only a man who had watched his entire army die could carry. He moved before I could even brace.
His punch came like a falling mountain. I got my claws up in time to partially block it, but the force was catastrophic. Bones in both arms snapped. The impact launched me backwards like a rag doll, tumbling violently over piles of the dead. I slammed into the ground hard enough to bounce, ribs shattering on impact, blood spraying from my mouth.
Before I could draw breath, the sixth, no, seventh circle mage materialised above me, her pale hair whipping in a storm of her own making. Her eyes glowed with cold violet. She was smaller, but her aura pressed down like the weight of an entire sky.
''Monster,'' she hissed. ''You took everything from us.''