Chapter 695: Terrified Envoys

To break a warrior’s weapon was common; to break the spine of them so thoroughly that their proud warriors hauled timber in open daylight without daring to run? That wasn’t just a military victory. That was the work of a force that had shattered their very souls.

As the escort turned the corner near the forge lane, the clatter of the delegation slowed to a near halt.

Sitting on a stack of ironwood beams right beside the thoroughfare, leaning his back against the timber with his legs stretched out casually into the dust, was a young man.

He was clad in dark, supple leather that looked deceptively simple, his dark hair ruffled by the hot breeze, and an easy, half-amused grin etched onto his handsome features.

He looked entirely at ease, like a lazy hunter resting in the shade. But the blade leaning beside his knee told a different story.

He had a sapphire-hilted blade leaning beside his knee, its bare sharp edge exposed to the air, humming with a faint, chilling resonance that seemed to drop the temperature of the dirt road by three degrees.

The man was lazily tossing a small bone paring knife from hand to hand, his neon-crimson eyes half-lidded as he watched the foreign procession approach.

The lead representatives of the delegation stopped dead in their tracks, as if they had walked headfirst into an invisible wall.

The three-toed scaled-kin let out a low, guttural hiss of terror, their grey-green hide instantly turning ashen pale as their amphibious gills flared open and shut in frantic suffocating spasms as the moisture seemed to evaporate from their skin.

The delegates did not know this man’s name. They were absolutely certain they had never seen his face before... if such a striking face and overwhelmingly powerful presence had ever crossed their paths and been forgotten, they would have died long ago in this unforgiving, savage world.

But even without knowing his name, the moment the man’s crimson eyes flicked lazily over their group, the primal instinct carved into their souls screamed at them to turn and run until their legs broke.

THUMP.

Every Awakened among the foreign envoys felt their own hearts violently shudder behind their ribs, skipping a beat in synchronized dread.

The air around that unbothered, slouching figure carried the phantom stench of severed arteries and pulverized bone... a dense, suffocating aura of concentrated slaughter that made the hair on every envoy’s neck stand straight on end.

As they continued to look, it was as if reality was torn at the seams.

The air which was so clean and refreshing before suddenly grew thick, humid with vaporized blood and the coppery reek of opened bellies.

In their minds’ eyes, the thoroughfare dissolved into an endless, desolate killing ground, a blood-soaked field choked under a bruised, crimson sky.

Everywhere they looked, the world had been churned into a red slurry of marrow and muck, drowned in congealed, boiling gore.

Piled high behind the youth wasn’t simple timber, but a mountainous heap of violently dismantled bodies. Shattered torsos, torn sinew, and jagged, pulverized ribcages jutted upward like broken ivory fences through the viscera.

Severed limbs and shattered skulls... both of monstrous beasts and powerful mens... lay scattered across the mud as far as the eye could see, every single one cleaved or smashed apart with extreme brutality.

Phantom screams rattled in the envoys’ eardrums, the dying wails of a thousand crushed souls vibrating through the marrow of their bones.

The killing intent radiating off the slouched figure was so dense, so steeped in absolute slaughter, that his mere presence warped the air around him, projecting the memories of the atrocities he had committed directly into their minds.

For a terrifying heartbeat, the foreign envoys felt as though they were drowning in that sea of butchery, knee-deep in cooling intestines and suffocating on the dead.

Then, Sol idly tossed his bone knife, catching it with a soft snap.

The illusion shattered instantly. The crimson sky vanished, the mountain of dismembered corpses dissolved into ordinary ironwood beams, and the blood-soaked field snapped back into the dusty dirt road.

Yet the envoys were left trembling, cold sweat drenching their backs, their lungs burning as if they had just clawed their way out of a mass grave.

The Scaled-Kin hissed softly, the blue frill gills along their necks expanding, clamping and releasing in an uncontrollable, evolutionary display of sheer biological terror.

The Stone-River elder, Sarn, instinctively recoiled, stumbling half a step back. His breath caught hard in his windpipe like a chunk of flint, his instincts... honed by decades of surviving the harshest predatory cycles of the wild... screaming at him to drop his staff, throw himself face-down into the mud in utter, groveling submission.

Beside him, an attractive woman in scout leathers gave the envoys a dry, sardonic smirk, closing a hide-bound ledger with a sharp, dismissive slap.

Sol caught the terrified gaze of Elder Sarn. But he didn’t bother to stand up. He merely offered a faint, lazy nod, his crimson eyes gleaming with cold amusement, before sliding the bone knife back into its sheath at his hip.

"Keep moving," the Veynar warrior barked from the front of the escort, not even sparing the trembling elders a second glance as his heavy spear butt thudded against the dirt. "The Warchief does not like waiting."

Elder Sarn swallowed hard, fighting down the burning lump of lead and bile lodged in his throat.

The captain’s harsh command didn’t sound like an insult; it felt like a sudden, miraculous decree of amnesty.

His knees wobbled violently beneath his robes, but he scrambled forward with undignified haste, forcing his heavy boots into a half-shuffle just to put distance between himself and that slouching shadow.

He snapped his gaze down, tucking his chin so close to his collar that his nose nearly scraped against his chest, terrified that a stray upward glance might pull him back into the psychic abyss of that phantom butcher’s yard.

Behind him, the rest of the delegation practically trampled one another to keep pace, their proud postures shattered into huddled, trembling silhouettes.

Whatever vague, desperate hopes these neutral tribes had nursed on their journey.. the quiet schemes of finding a bleeding, overextended neighbor ripe for extortion or territorial concessions... were utterly, irrevocably dead.

Right now, politics and treaty terms meant nothing to them.

Every single envoy shared only one desperate, all-consuming thought: if they could just walk out through these gates alive, they would fall to their knees and pray to their ancestors for the entire winter straight.

And even if the heavens themselves promised them the most precious treasures in the known world, they would never again cast their gaze toward this domain, let alone dare to dream of marching anywhere near its borders.