Chapter 90: Korven Has Fallen

Everyone still standing, everyone the Grimoire’s light hadn’t struck down, rose from where they sat and turned to face Varka, drawn by the weight in his voice.

He drew one long breath, letting his gaze sweep the hall, running down the list of noble families already confirmed to have lost someone tonight. His eyes caught, briefly, on Cassius, who had only just finished absorbing the news of his own missing daughter.

"For those of you who haven’t yet received word about your own people, I’ll tell you myself, now, directly."

He paused, pressing a hand briefly to his temple, and the whole hall fell into a held, uneasy silence, waiting, because the strain showing on his face said more than his words had yet.

"Let me be plain about where we stand. The city of Korven has fallen."

A fresh wave of shock rolled through the nobles who’d only just struggled back to their feet after the Grimoire’s blinding flash, hearing that one of the empire’s own trade hubs, a city that linked half its regions together, was simply gone.

For those who hadn’t yet received word of their own families, the claim felt almost impossible to believe.

But watching the strain etched across Varka’s face, and across the faces of every Seven Pillar family seated near him, made the truth of it settle in all the same.

"And the worse news is this. We’ve lost several of our own promising young talents tonight, along with a number of our officials. Marquis Halstead among them, reported to have fallen in the attack."

The grief in Varka’s voice reached every corner of the hall. Losing the Marquis who’d governed Korven was no small wound.

By every account, Halstead was the man responsible for the city’s rising prosperity, one of the most respected Marquises in the entire kingdom, and with him gone, Korven’s future now sat on far shakier ground than anyone wanted to admit.

A few nobles, too stunned to simply accept it, pressed for more. How could a Marquis carrying Tier 7 Core strength fall so easily, and so quickly? By their own understanding, there should have been a general stationed there as well.

"Your Majesty, might we ask after General Tristan’s fate?"

"If this was truly only a few dozen Dark Beasts, surely between the garrison and the two of them together, they should have held the line. They should carry more strength than Commander Lucas’s own division."

More than one voice in the hall wanted to ask the same question, because if the scale of this attack matched the earlier reports, Korven falling at all made no sense whatsoever.

"General Tristan is alive. His condition is critical. We’re still working to coordinate with whatever forces remain holding out there."

The answer came not from Varka himself, but from one of his guards, his armor marking him as a man who’d likely come straight from the front of this crisis.

Jeanne’s voice cut in before the murmur could settle, picking up where the nobles’ questions had left off.

"From what we saw in the first wave, you should know this wasn’t only a Dusk Feather problem, something that can simply fly overhead. One of the villages we failed to save had something far worse than that waiting in it."

She didn’t seem the least bit surprised by news of Korven’s fall. If anything, some part of her had already expected it, having glimpsed with her own eyes exactly what kind of monsters were loose out there.

The hall turned toward her as one, demanding to know what she’d actually seen.

"Beyond Dark Goblin tracks, the worst of it was a set of prints belonging to a Wendigor."

A current of dread passed through those who already understood what a loose Dark Goblin meant. A single one wasn’t especially difficult to put down, but people still feared them with good reason.

Dark Goblins were mutations, ordinary goblins warped by the Calamity Forest’s own corruption until they carried the Dark element in their blood, sharper and stronger than any common goblin had any right to be. Worse, they never hunted alone.

They moved in packs, packs dense enough to overwhelm even a Tier 5 Core fighter without much trouble at all. Whatever had happened to Korven’s missing, Dark Goblins were almost certainly behind a good part of it.

"Jeanne, you said Wendigor tracks?" Evandra’s attention sharpened at once. "Are you certain you read that sign correctly?"

Jeanne answered without a flicker of doubt, certain of exactly what she’d found in that village.

"It left a trail of poison from its own footprints. That alone slowed our advance considerably. By the time we traced the trail to its end, the creature itself had already vanished."

Disbelief flashed across the Matriarch of House Melampus’s eyes at that. By everything her own family’s knowledge held, a Wendigor favored deep darkness, its nature closer to some vengeful spirit that could slip through shadow itself than any ordinary beast.

But a Wendigor was worse than any number of spirits gathered together, its sheer size alone dwarfing an average house, and its ability to slip in behind an enemy despite that size made it a threat few could prepare for properly.

Beyond that, the poison it shed from every footstep was lethal, capable of ending an ordinary person’s life within minutes of a single breath.

A grim understanding settled over the hall. The Dark Beasts weren’t simply rampaging. There was no telling, now, what other horrors might still be loose out there.

Across the room, Helia had Rhaiven by the arm, her grip tight with open fury.

"Have you lost your mind? Why would you kill Marquis Halstead? He was one of our own supporters."

Rhaiven had heard Varka and Helia both say it plainly enough, that the Marquis had fallen to the Dark Beast attack. But whatever showed on his face beneath the mask carried nothing close to guilt.

Then something clicked into place for him, a detail that made it impossible this had been his doing at all.

"Has the Princess forgotten? Marquis Halstead was supposed to be in the kingdom of Castilla tonight, delivering the shipment we’d ordered. He had no reason to be anywhere near Korven."

He kept his focus on Helia, something closer to genuine confusion creeping into his voice now.

"And Princess Helia, the Dark Beasts shouldn’t have been capable of reaching Korven at all. Have I drawn so much of their attention lately that they’ve grown hungry enough to push that far on their own?"

Rhaiven looked, for the first time all night, like a man who genuinely didn’t understand what was happening around him anymore.

In the middle of that confusion, Varka issued his decree to the Seven Pillar families, charging them with drawing up a plan to retake Korven from the Dark Beasts occupying it.

The council that followed moved quickly.

The Seven Pillars agreed to send troop units, each commanded by one of their own Tier 7 Elders, with instructions to also search for signs of the missing, suspected to have been dragged into the Calamity Forest itself by the Dark Goblins.

Cassius summoned the Elders already gathered with Jeanne’s unit at once. Even the Phantom soldiers were folded into her command for additional strength, a force whose presence alone was worth five times an ordinary company’s.

It was a heavy weight for Jeanne to carry, bowing her head before Cassius to accept the order, her hand trembling faintly at the thought of facing those creatures again so soon.

✦ [HARMONY: THE CONDUCTOR MUST SEE THIS MISSION THROUGH.]

✦ [QUEST — GNOSIS: Prevent the resurrection of the Archon, the Nightkeeper, by stopping the sacrifices from entering the Calamity Forest in his name.]

The text rose in front of Lucian again, unbidden. But this time, there was no room left in him to argue against it. If the report was true, if his third sister really had been taken and dragged into that forest, then the expedition was no longer a question of if. It was already happening.

As he turned the Calamity Forest’s layout over in his mind, the memory of the map he’d just gained rose with it, and he realized, almost by accident, that somewhere within that visualization, he’d glimpsed something marking his own position.

If I can call up the Omni Map again, maybe there’s something more in it I can use.

The moment the thought formed, blue light bled across his vision once more, visible to him and no one else, laying the full map and its present state out before him.

Just as I suspected. This isn’t only a static image. It can show what’s happening around me, in real time.

He could see it clearly now, markers tracing the position of people moving somewhere nearby, functioning almost exactly like the Pocket Orb he’d built with his own hands, except on a scale that dwarfed it entirely, the geography already mapped in full, with no need to scan the surrounding area at all.

Lucian felt something steady in him at the realization. If he used the Omni Map well, there was a real chance he could help guide people away from whatever waited inside that forest.

He pushed himself forward, driven by that single hope, determined to find a way into Jeanne’s unit before they left.