The Rain of Aura
The men of Silent Spear stood speechless before the sight that stretched out before them.
A sharp grind of teeth cut clearly through the cold air.
In that moment, every one of them felt the same thing.
Grein spoke first.
“……They’re bastards, every last one of them.”
“Looks like they meant to provoke us for real.”
In his previous life, Arteon had seen sights like this before. Claiming otherwise would have been a lie. But even after more than ten years of fighting in the North, something like this remained rare.
The Kar Tribe isn’t the type to provoke an enemy this way…
They had cut off every head of the men they killed, driven stakes through them, and stood the poles upright in the snow. These were people who knew exactly how costly that kind of labor became when the northern cold set in for too long. Inefficient work like this was almost never worth the risk.
That they had done it anyway could only mean one thing: the commander leading them hated Silent Spear with a hatred that went far beyond ordinary enmity. No lesser feeling would have driven anyone to this much trouble.
“These goddamn sons of bitches…!”
Kamarkan of the First Squad clenched his fists until the knuckles cracked, unable to hold back the curse.
Arteon, however, calmly drew up his mana and spread his senses outward. This could still be bait. If they meant to strike, they would have set an ambush somewhere inside a radius of at least three hundred meters.
Whether I can cover that entire radius… I don’t know. But there’s nothing to do but try.
He pushed the web of awareness as wide as his mana would allow—not merely checking for presence, but identifying every living thing within the circle. Unless someone could completely shut out his mana, nothing would escape him. It would take time, though.
“…….”
“Commander, what are you—?”
When Arteon closed his eyes and focused, Barter started toward him. Grein stopped the big man before his hand could touch the commander’s shoulder.
“Barter. Wait quietly.”
“……Yes, sir.”
The entire unit held its breath and watched. Roughly ten minutes passed. At last Arteon opened his eyes. In the bitter cold, beads of sweat had already begun to run down his cheeks. He let out a short breath.
“……Hah.”
“Are you all right, sir?”
“There’s no one nearby. Get those down. Now.”
At the very least, their dead comrades deserved a proper burial. Men like these should never have been mocked this way.
The soldiers of Silent Spear moved at once, taking down the frozen heads from the stakes. The ground was iron-hard with frost, yet not a single man complained as they dug.
“……Bastards. I’ll tear every last one of them apart.”
“Kill them all. How dare they do something like this…!”
As they lowered their former brothers into the earth, rage climbed until it burned behind their eyes. Arteon watched with a composed face, but the fury smoldering in his gaze was no different from theirs.
“Commander. We’re finished.”
“We move.”
The delay had been short, yet on a battlefield even minutes could become a fatal variable. Arteon turned the column toward their original destination and pushed them forward at speed.
Then it came.
“AAAAAAARGH!”
A scream tore through the dark from far off to the left of their line of march. Every head snapped toward the sound. A few men glanced at one another as if wondering whether they had misheard.
“Silent Spear!”
Arteon’s shout snapped them back to full attention. He drew Iglis in the same breath.
“Full speed. Don’t fall behind!”
“Yes, sir!”
The answering roar rolled out as the unit broke into a run behind him. How long they ran, no one could have said. Out of the blackness that had held nothing, the shapes of Kar warriors began to resolve—men who looked as if they were sealing off the ground in a wide encirclement. The sudden appearance of Silent Spear threw them into equal confusion.
“Wh-what?!”
“E-enemy!”
“Empire dogs! Stop them!”
They scrambled to form ranks—
But Arteon had already launched himself like a hunting beast straight into the heart of their formation.
“……!”
He cleared their heads in a single bound. The Kar warriors could not hide their shock. They spun, too late.
A wet, ripping sound cut the air. Three warriors were already falling, torsos split cleanly in half. It had happened in the space of a heartbeat. No one among them could stop the aura riding Arteon’s spear-blade.
He turned his gaze forward.
This encirclement… was it nothing more than a screen to block the road?
A hollow shell of a cordon, yet in the chaos it would have been enough to deceive anyone. Arteon’s eyes narrowed. Had the Kar Tribe ever fielded a commander who used tactics like this? The thought flickered through him that the fight ahead might not be simple.
But there was no time to hesitate. Allied soldiers trapped in the center were dying by the second.
Having smashed the outer wall, Arteon looked toward the middle of the enemy mass. The main force had to be there.
“……Found you.”
His eyes flashed.
“Grein! We hit their main body!”
“Yes, sir! All units—follow the Commander!”
At Grein’s bellow the eyes of every Silent Spear soldier lit with the same cold fire. The ground shook beneath their charge as if a herd of horses were thundering past. Snow sprayed up behind them in a white storm, and their pace only increased.
Iglis thrummed in Arteon’s grip, blue aura flaring along its length. His gaze locked on the figure at the heart of the enemy host—Bowukartaon.
“YOU BASTAAAAARD!”
Through the thick darkness of the northern dawn, Bowukartaon’s scream tore free, thick with rage, killing intent, and a deep, festering resentment.
Yet Arteon’s eyes flicked aside for an instant. There—Tairen and his men, who had first seemed ready to break and run, had instead wheeled hard and were driving straight into the enemy main force. Arteon could not help a quiet surge of admiration. They were not throwing themselves blindly into the trap; they were ramming their heads straight at the enemy’s throat.
That direction… the only way out.
But a way out did not mean everyone would live. At best a handful might escape total annihilation. That calculation no longer held.
Everyone goes home alive. No—
They would smash the enemy to pieces instead.
Tairen, spotting the charging figure of Arteon, wore a look of pure astonishment. He had never imagined Arteon would appear at this exact moment.
“Friendly forces! Reinforcements are here!”
“Kill every last Kar tribesman!”
“Take the enemy commander and avenge our brothers!”
“UAAAAAAAH!”
In a single breath the atmosphere of the field reversed. Tairen’s company roared until the night itself seemed to shake. Morale soared; the Kar warriors began to falter.
“Th-their reinforcements just—?”
“Where the hell did they come from?!”
Confusion rippled through the Kar ranks. Bowukartaon, however, looked almost pleased as he raised his bow.
A vicious whistle split the air. A dull, heavy impact followed. One of Tairen’s soldiers died without even managing a scream, his body hurled backward as if struck by a siege engine. Every man in the company flinched. That arrow had been too fast, too heavy, for the eye to follow.
Bowukartaon’s voice rolled out.
“Form ranks! Nothing has changed! These fools jumped into our encirclement—kill them all!”
“Butcher them!”
“UAAAAAAAH!”
The battlefield flipped again. Power crashed against power, and a slaughter without mercy began in earnest.
Steel rang on steel; blades bit flesh. Behind the melee the Kar archers drew their strings with careful precision, hunting clear shots through the tangled mass of friend and foe. At their center Bowukartaon fixed his gaze on the charging Arteon.
“I came back… just to kill you.”
His already grotesque face twitched. The corner of his mouth curled upward as he leveled the bow at Arteon. No one understood better than he how terrifying the young spearman was—the boy who had severed the tendons of both his legs in the blink of an eye and vanished.
“This time will be different.”
He drew the string in a single smooth motion. His eyes locked on Arteon’s heart, and the arrow that left the bow followed that line of sight with lethal intent.
Arteon swept his spear in a tight arc. The shaft cracked against the arrow and sent it spinning away. Without aura he might have been driven back a step; the shot had been strong. But only strong.
“If that’s all you’ve got, you die here.”
“You really think that’s all?”
Bowukartaon lifted his bow toward the sky and spoke in a low voice. He had known the frontal shot would be blocked. In the fractional instant Arteon’s spear knocked the first arrow aside, a second had already left the string and climbed into the dark.
And now—
“Die with every last man who follows you.”
Arteon felt the dense pressure descending from above and raised his head. A rain of aura arrows was falling like a cloudburst. The power in each shaft was pitifully thin by true aura standards, yet against ordinary soldiers it would be catastrophe. And there were enough of them to blot out the sky.
“……Hah.”
It seemed he was not the only one who had grown stronger. Looking at what Bowukartaon had become—something close to the mad beasts of the berserker units Arteon had faced before—he understood.
You reached into a domain you should never have touched.
That explained the sudden leap in power, at least in part.
Arteon exhaled softly and tightened his grip on the spear. If those countless aura shafts reached the ground, half his men would die.
But then… I simply won’t let them fall.
Iglis howled in his hands, vibrating with fierce light. Blue aura blazed along the spear until it shoved the surrounding darkness back.
Bowukartaon’s pupils shook.
How could any aura be that intense—?
“Y-you…?”
Only days earlier the boy had not been this strong—only a little above Bowukartaon himself. Then Bowukartaon had swallowed the drug that created madmen and become far stronger still, buying supreme power at the price of what little life remained to him.
And yet—and yet—
“WHYYYYYYYY?!”
A single strike from Arteon shattered everything Bowukartaon had poured into the sky. The rain of aura arrows vanished as if it had never existed. Arteon looked down at the archer commander.
Then he gave his final order.
“Silent Spear.”
“Annihilate the enemy.”
Across the darkened northern plain, the unit under Arteon’s command became a giant reaper’s scythe and began to cut the Kar warriors down.