The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The First Snow of the Northern Empire
The architecture of the Northern Empire was, to put it kindly, practical. Less charitably, it was brutal.
A central bonfire ringed by walls.
Roofs sloped to trap the heat while venting the smoke just enough to keep the people inside from choking.
All of it sketched a stark portrait of life under the Veil of Compassion's dominion—a grip that tightened so slowly you almost forgot it was there, until you didn't.
Build this way or freeze to death. Wake up without fingers and toes. Those were the options.
The architecture was survival, and nothing else.
Aslan looked toward the dark shape of the settlement and tasted something bitter.
He'd seen this in the world where he'd lived as Lee Hyun-woo, too. People made cruel or broken by circumstances they never chose. An old, familiar tragedy.
Its familiarity never blunted the grief, or the suffering.
Through the angled gap in the roof, smoke from the bonfire coiled upward. The heat shimmered along the walls, palpable even from a distance.
The encircling palisade was draped in treated leather—the Northern Empire's signature finish—sealing out the killing cold.
The settlement put him in mind of a crude animal pen, a bare prison. It was this encampment the party now approached.
"...Hm."
Ereta's murmur. A thread of quiet displeasure. Richard's face had soured as well.
Maybe the poverty was already settling into their bones—the slow realization that they'd be living in such conditions for a while. A faint disgust clung to their expressions.
The palisade gate swung open. What greeted them were fur-wrapped villagers with hunger stark in their eyes.
The old man vanished among them, then reappeared. He carried dried, smoked herring and scraps of meat.
"Please, eat. It's poor fare to set before a general... We don't grow vegetables here, so..."
What he offered, his words trailing off, was a meager meal.
The bread crumbled at a touch. They'd likely scraped together the best they had.
Rumel looked at the food. The pity showed only in the depths of her pale brown eyes as she picked up a piece of bread and bit into it.
Small and measured. She chewed, swallowed. Only when the old man allowed himself a relieved smile did she reach into her cloak and produce a bundle.
"Take this. Share it with the others."
One of the extra ration packs the party had brought. Dried fruit, dried mushrooms, and the like, wrapped tight.
The old man accepted it with a deep bow, and Rumel waved it off with studied indifference.
Once he had withdrawn, the party set about unpacking their gear and surveying the camp.
"...This is something else."
Angie's voice was hollow. The words came out as she scanned the walls, thick with dismay.
Even Angie, who'd crawled up out of poverty, let out a sigh like that. Their other companions wore the same expressions.
Pity, compassion, discomfort. All of it bent toward a single conclusion.
The Northern Empire was in worse shape than they'd imagined.
Not every commoner lived this way, surely—but if a coastal region far from the Veil of Compassion's worst touch was this destitute, the empire told its own story.
They'd need the details firsthand, but the shape of the place was already clear.
It was crumbling.
Likely thanks to the schemes and wedge-driving of the Self-Birthing Mother's priests.
And what drove that truth home for Aslan more than anything was the conduct of the next man to appear.
"...This wench is supposed to be a general? She doesn't even look like a warrior."
The words dropped like a stone. Aslan, who'd been examining the Dragon-king's lingering affliction near the bonfire, lifted his head. His breath misted white.
What he saw was a young man whose face was a mask of resentment.
Braided orange hair, a shade close to Angie's, falling past his shoulders. Green eyes leveled at Rumel with something bordering on contempt.
Rumel's brow tightened at the tossed-off words. The elder who'd escorted the man in sucked a panicked breath.
"Eric! That is no way to address the general!"
A scolding. The young man—Eric—took it with an air of studied unconcern.
He snorted and jerked his chin toward Rumel.
"You honestly believe this bitch is a general? Some woman who shows up at a forgotten shithole, asks about our troubles, and begs for food? Don't make me laugh."
Rumel's gaze went cold, but strictly speaking, the words weren't wrong.
She wasn't a general.
Whether he knew that or not, the young man kept going.
"And what about those outsiders behind her? It's not just one woman—there's a kid back there, and what looks like some kind of beast-folk whelp."
Now the elder's eyes turned toward Rumel. Not the eyes of a man prepared to defend his general.
Thick suspicion. The kind that had been there from the start, hidden only because it couldn't yet be spoken.
And the party's composition was, to be fair, too peculiar to wave away.
On the surface, an Elf who looked no older than a child. A Dragon-kin.
Women outnumbered the men, and at a glance, none of them looked much like a general's retinue.
The only one who could pass for a Northerner was Angie—and she was no general.
As the atmosphere began to shift, the people inside the palisade cast sidelong glances toward the party.
Try to fumble through a halfhearted explanation now, and they'd be fortunate if it didn't flare into open suspicion. And then they'd have to slaughter a village.
Aslan, expression wry, readied himself to step forward.
It would undermine Rumel's masquerade as a general, but it was better than letting things spiral.
Rumel moved before he could.
She had already taken up Verdict, the spear hanging loose as she strode forward with a noblewoman's measured grace.
As she closed the distance, she spoke.
"Draw your weapon."
Her soft, elegant voice was entirely calm.
It landed cold and heavy as moonlight settling onto ankle-deep snow.
The charisma bleeding off her was so dense that even Eric, who'd started the provocation, flinched. Even the elder flinched.
She kept walking, and spoke again.
"If you want to live, draw your weapon."
Then she spun the spear.
The long polearm carved out a circle of silence, everything in its path yielding.
Wind shoved aside, sound displaced. The spear came to rest in her grip. Before Eric's eyes could even track the motion, his hand flew to his belt.
"You crazy bitch—!"
He drew an axe. A hefty one-handed axe, pulled free and into his hand. Much shorter than a spear; his draw started late, and the weapon was ready far faster.
By conventional thinking, the spearman was at a disadvantage. Close enough for an axe to reach, too close for a spear.
Speed, too—polearms need distance and time to thrust or swing. They need preparation.
So Eric was sure he'd won. It wasn't that simple.
Her raw strength was less than Eric's standing before her.
Her body wasn't particularly powerful.
But the skill she'd accumulated was on an entirely different plane.
A thrust refined thousands upon thousands of times. She held the spear in a gathering posture and drove it forward before Eric even registered the start of the motion.
Crack!
A spiraling spearpoint wrapped in gleaming threads. The awl-like tip struck the axe haft, and the wooden shaft split. Sawdust scattered as the axe head fell.
Before Eric's eyes could even widen, Rumel was already preparing her second move.
"Huh?"
Ereta's voice. The spear shaft swept around Rumel's waist.
It was a variation of a technique Ereta herself often used with her two-handed axe—a way of retracting a polearm by using the body itself.
Whipping around her, the shaft seemed to shorten and vanish, only to reappear. Practically an ambush.
Like a serpent coiling through underbrush to strike again, it aimed for the throat.
The whole sequence took a single breath. The moment the axe head split, the spearpoint stopped at the hollow of Eric's throat.
Rumel looked at him with cold, settled eyes.
Eric could do nothing but shut his mouth.
The razor sharpness resting against his throat. The technique beyond all common sense. The searing golden current threading along the golden spear shaft. Swallowing was all he could manage.
Their eyes met. And Rumel was certain.
She'd gathered the clues from the moment they set foot inside the encampment.
Before that, even.
The murmured relief that they were finally alive. The references to this place as abandoned. The despairing certainty that no general would bother showing up now.
An elder who couldn't refute it and let his suspicion leak out. Common folk poised to turn bandit at the slightest push.
Rumel read it all and understood.
Chaos had swept through the Northern Empire, and no one had restored order. People were suffering.
Waiting for rescue that would never come.
She understood their defeat.
And that meant the words she needed were obvious.
"A wench for a general, is it? Does that mean you think you'd be fit for the rank yourself?"
Crackle. She gave the current-laced spearpoint a slight twist, and Eric's face went pale as he stumbled back a half-step.
"Or did it never cross your mind that you lot failed—that there was no one else capable, so the burden fell to me?"
Words that had nothing to do with Rumel's true feelings, and everything to do with what these people needed to hear right now.
As Eric's face flickered between bewilderment and a simmering, helpless anger, Rumel let a contemptuous smile curl at her lips.
"Your incompetence blinded you to the necessity of bringing in outsiders, and now you spew nonsense that the woman who brought them is no general."
"That's...."
"You have no shame."
Tsk, tsk. With those clicks of the tongue, Rumel's masterful performance unfolded. Aslan, inwardly sick of the charade, stepped forward.
"General."
A low murmur. At the sound, Rumel channeled the memory she had once glimpsed through Gerald.
A figure of immense authority, jaded and arrogant.
A gaze steeped in world-weariness. With it, she looked the villagers over like cattle.
"Hmph."
A contemptuous sniff. As the sound left her, she slowly lowered her spear tip, gave a languid blink, and spoke.
"If you have no need of assistance, so be it. I, too, have no need for indolent and useless people like you."
She turned her back and walked away.
Watching her, the villagers all felt much the same thing.
Rumel herself was no ruler.
She was the heir to a noble house, but she had no experience in governance.
She had rarely wielded authority over others.
But she had watched many people.
Observing them, she had gathered ample material.
Blessed with profound empathy, Rumel divined their emotions, mimicked the feelings she understood—and wove them into a performance.
The act that emerged was remarkably faithful.
These people of the Northern Empire would not know it, but the woman standing before them was not the naive noble lady who had taken up a spear for vengeance, the Master of the Spear.
She was the iron-willed king who had reigned for over eighty years and never once loosened his grip on the throne.
Crushed by that charisma, that dense presence, the villagers trembled as they watched her go.
So did Eric, the one who had been most vocal in his defiance.
"W-wait, please!"
He finally produced an honorific. Rumel merely flicked her eyes back at him, devoid of any hint of innocence, then turned her head again and kept walking. Toward the log palisade's gate.
Eric had few options left. He scrambled forward, stopped in front of the gate, and dropped to his knees. He pressed his forehead to the dirt.
"Forgive me, General!"
A desperate plea shouted across her path. A pitiful voice. The patchwork pride of a Northerner who had finally grasped his place.
Rumel did not acknowledge it immediately. She gave Aslan a jerk of her chin over her shoulder.
He caught on quickly, as she'd hoped.
Stepping forward, he reached back and drew the Beast of Tiyalmisof.
Grrumble.
A threatening growl, the hiss of white iron scraping against white iron. The villagers flinched in fear, and Eric squeezed his eyes shut, shaking uncontrollably.
Even those who had been debating whether to bar the way froze at the sight of the monstrous greatsword emerging into the light.
A two-meter blade. Aslan hefted it and prepared to strike.
"I-it was me! I was too foolish to recognize the General! P-please, just one chance...!"
Eric panted, begging for his life. Aslan answered by swinging Kal. It was his own part in the act.
Whoooom. The greatsword swept down with a sound like tearing wind. A blade like a saw-toothed edge. A blow that could split a man in two.
Eric sucked in a breath, and the other villagers, their fear finally bursting free, screamed.
"Please spare us, General!"
Only then did Rumel raise a hand, not a moment late.
"Enough."
The Beast halted in front of Eric's face. A hair's breadth from sending his head rolling.
He swallowed hard at the sight of the blue Kal blade before his eyes, gasping as he frantically shifted his gaze.
Rumel looked down at him with weary, heavy-lidded eyes.
"There will not be a next time."
"Th-thank you... thank you...."
Eric wept and panted in relief alongside the other villagers. No one seemed to have any objections left about Rumel being a general.
Though when Aslan sheathed the Beast, the sharp clack of steel still made them all flinch.
*
Inside the village, Aslan finally got a clear picture of the Northern Empire's situation.
It was far worse than he had imagined.
The empire was fragmenting.
"Fragmenting...?"
"A-aye... that it is."
An old man spoke, head still bowed. Aslan turned over the man's earlier words in his mind.
That the Northern Empire had splintered into warring factions.
That the general had been killed by a foreigner he'd hired, and the Emperor himself had been assassinated, plunging everything into chaos.
Aslan was not surprised by the foreigner's identity—it was him, years ago—but the Emperor's assassination was genuinely startling.
"With no successor, warriors and lords all fight to claim the title of Emperor."
The fighting was nearly even.
The conflict was sharp, every side possessing both cause and advantage. And what stood out most were the faction leaders.
The Blessed Ones.
The old man gave them that name.
When asked what they were, he threw a suspicious look before answering.
Those with the strength of beasts, and the vitality of undying immortals who walked away from every battle alive.
They appeared on every battlefield, he said, turning an already barren land into a wasteland.
Aslan listened to all of it with a grim expression.
The situation had grown far more tangled.
Those Blessed Ones were likely humans born from the power of the Self-Birthing Mother, or hybrids, or priests.
If every faction had one, simple means would never root out where the true mastermind was hiding.
A much closer investigation would be needed.
With that thought, he asked,
"What of the factions nearby?"
"What do you... mean...?"
A blunt question would only breed more suspicion. Aslan considered for a moment before replying.
"I intend to gather and report on the surrounding powers for the General. We must know who is most fit for the new empire. For now, I want to hear what kind of warlords control this area."
"Ah... if that's the case...."
The old man finally seemed to understand and opened his mouth. With Eric chiming in beside him, three factions came into focus.
First, the Red Mane.
A rapidly swelling faction suddenly raised up by a Blessed One.
Its defining trait was a leader who fought in the form of a beast with a red mane.
Second, the Bloodstained Axe.
A faction forged by a warrior and hunter who had been famous long before receiving his blessing.
And finally, Valder.
A force established by the descendant of a general from generations past, a man who had taken his warlord ancestor's name as his own.
"None of those three are what you'd call kind to folks like us."
"Well, we've got too many old folk and children for them to care about...."
Aslan listened to the old man and Eric, satisfied that he'd secured intelligence on three factions.
"Ah, now that I think of it."
Until Eric suddenly blurted something out.
"Didn't we mention it, old man?"
"Ah."
The old man's eyes flew wide as if he'd just remembered, and he nodded. Aslan eyed the pair and deliberately furrowed his brow.
A calculated display of menace.
"What? Hiding something?"
"No, it's... at my age, things slip the mind. I'd meant to say... recently, Valder's men plundered a great ship washed in from the sea...."
A great ship. Noting how Aslan appeared to focus on the story, the old man broke out in a sweat and pressed on.
"Ah... they kidnapped a green-skinned person from it, looted a heap of treasure, and now they're gathering warriors from all around... that's what I heard, you see...."
"It happened near here, so it'll be true enough, Sir Adjutant."
Eric backed the old man's words.
Aslan found no trace of a lie in either of their faces. He massaged his jaw, his expression heavy, and let out a low hum.
Green-skinned. That practically meant Beastmen.
There was nothing strange about Beastmen being here. They were human, after all; one was bound to run into them somewhere.
The issue was why a vast ship carrying Beastmen—the rulers of the Southern Continent—had come to the Northern Empire.
Was it by design, or by accident?
It was not an easy distinction to make.
At least, not until he heard Eric's next words.
When Aslan's gaze shifted to him, Eric spoke.
"It was a genuinely huge vessel. The hull had a bluish hue...."
"...Bluish?"
A ship built of blue wood. Aslan knew of only one nation that used such a vessel as its symbol.
"Did it have any markings? A symbol, a crest of some kind?"
He asked for confirmation. Eric thought for a long moment before answering.
"It had an eye painted on it."
He used the word for a human eyeball.
"A rather unsettling one at that. The way it seemed to stare right at you...."
Aslan's expression hardened into stone.
A colossal ship of blue timber, marked with an eye.
Beastmen aboard it.
That could only mean one thing.
Unlike claimants in the Northern or Southern Empires who postured as heirs to the Ancient Empire with no real connection, these were its true successors.
The supreme reconnaissance officers of the largest empire on the Southern Continent.
Masters who had refined a single school of magic to its absolute limit and honed a combat art or weapon art to match.
Only twelve existed across their entire empire. True powers. Experts who rivaled the Masters themselves.
For generations before Budongong and Aslan appeared, they had held the title of Master of Combat.
A Watcher.
Grave-faced, Aslan turned to Eric.
"Can you take us there?"