Chapter 94: The Silent Village

"Do we need to check that village, Lady Jeanne?"

Jeanne turned the question over carefully before answering. The ground they were covering now still sat some distance from Korven proper, but it had already drawn uncomfortably close to the Calamity Forest’s own border.

That alone was reason enough to treat every strange detail ahead of them as something worth handling with real care, not haste. A single careless mistake out here could cost them more than time.

"Elder Petrovel. Tell the whole column to go to full alert up front. We’re going to check that village."

She addressed Elder Petrovel directly, a senior Elder who’d ridden at her side through nearly every campaign she’d ever led, the kind of man she trusted with the tasks that mattered most without needing to explain why.

"...And how much further until we reach Captain Ulrich, and the main body of the Phantom force?"

The three hundred soldiers riding with them now were only a fraction of the Phantom unit’s true strength, scattered as it was across half the empire. Gathering the rest would take time, no matter how fast word traveled.

"By report, Lady Jeanne. Captain Ulrich estimates he currently has some thirteen thousand Phantom soldiers ready to join us, once we clear the next village ahead. Another twenty thousand from House Sarnel proper should be waiting for us by the time we reach Korven itself."

The number settled into Jeanne’s chest like a stone. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough for what lay ahead, though she knew their numbers would keep climbing over the coming days.

Her own original estimate had called for at least fifty thousand from her family alone, a figure that had felt reasonable only until she’d actually considered the sheer, impossible scale of the Calamity Forest itself.

If they truly meant to go in after Patricia, they’d need far more than that. She had no intention of leaning on other houses to find her own sister.

But even a force that looked enormous on paper would mean almost nothing once it stood among trees taller than most towers, surrounded by creatures no one had ever finished counting.

Still, this was what she had to work with. Cassius would never commit the whole of House Sarnel’s strength to storm an unmapped forest blind. Doing that would only hand them a second disaster on top of the first.

The trees around them had begun to thin, the dense wall of trunks giving way faster now, a sure sign they were close to breaking free of the forest road they’d been following for hours.

Jeanne wiped rainwater from her eyes with the back of one gloved hand, the wind sharpening by the minute, cutting sideways hard enough to sting.

Elder Petrovel pushed his horse ahead of hers, armed and armored, taking the lead so the worst of the wind and rain broke against him first instead of her.

Even he was struggling to make out the road clearly. He channeled a thread of his own mana into the small lantern mounted on his horse’s harness, coaxing a bright, steady light from it to cut through the downpour ahead.

Through the mud and the relentless rain, at a distance of perhaps a hundred meters, a small village came into view, exactly as dark and exactly as suspicious as the earlier scout’s report had described.

Elder Petrovel raised a closed fist, the signal to slow the entire column, and ordered everyone to full readiness, eyes sweeping whatever little of their surroundings the storm allowed them to see.

Jeanne and Lucian, sharing one horse, rode up alongside him to take in the scene for themselves.

Lucian studied the buildings as they drew closer. The wooden doors showed no sign of damage at all. The windows he could make out carried no cracks, no forced openings, nothing broken.

It became clear quickly enough. Nothing here had been torn apart by a Dark Beast, or by whatever monster they’d half expected to find.

Only one detail tied every house together.

Every single one of them sat dark and empty, without a flicker of light or the faintest sign anyone still lived inside, which made no sense at all set against how well kept the rest of the village looked. These weren’t buildings left to rot and ruin. Someone had clearly tended to them, and recently.

The silence of the place pressed in on them the moment they slowed to a walk, thick enough to feel almost deliberate. No dogs barking.

No livestock lowing somewhere behind a fence. Not even the ordinary creak of a shutter working loose in the wind, the kind of sound that should have been everywhere in a storm this violent. Just rain, and the soft, steady suck of mud under hoof and boot.

Jeanne dismounted and began walking slowly through the muddy village path, when word reached her from one of her own Phantom soldiers. He’d gone ahead and let himself into one of the houses, its door left unlocked.

Jeanne’s expression hardened the moment she heard what he’d found. A candle, still sitting on the dining table, and when the soldier had picked it up, it was still warm to the touch.

Someone had put it out only moments before they’d arrived. And yet, when he’d checked every room of that house, there hadn’t been a single living soul inside.

Another soldier approached from behind her, reporting a livestock pen they’d found nearby. Empty. Not one animal left inside it.

All that remained was a length of rope, still tied where it had once held something.

The wrongness of it settled deeper into Jeanne with every new report.

She glanced up toward the second floors of the houses around them, but the rain fell too thick to make out anything clearly up there.

Elder Petrovel’s voice called her back, drawing her attention toward whatever he’d found further ahead.

She spurred her horse forward and found him studying a building larger than the rest, a two-story wooden inn. For one brief moment, she assumed he meant to suggest they finally rest here, after three straight days of riding without a single real stop.

They’d been eating in the saddle just to keep hunger at bay, grateful, at least, that their mounts were bred from Beast-horse stock, far hardier than any ordinary breed, needing little in the way of food or water to keep moving.

But three days of cold, relentless rain wore down even creatures built for it. They’d have to decide on a real rest soon, because wherever they were ultimately headed still sat several days further out.

Then she saw it clearly. Two blue carriages, standing outside the inn, their doors bare of any crest at all. Beside them, a cluster of brown horses stood tied along the inn’s outer wall.

Jeanne ordered the column to dismount and establish a makeshift post around the property while they checked the inn’s surroundings. Elder Petrovel pulled together a dozen soldiers to move in and clear the building itself.

Jeanne chose to go with them. Lucian, curious despite himself about what this village actually was, followed close behind, hoping to understand even a fraction of what had happened here.

They reached the inn’s front door together and found it locked, firmly enough that it clearly wasn’t giving way easily.

Lucian lingered at the back of the group, eyes drawn upward toward one of the second-floor windows almost against his will.

For just a moment, he thought he caught something moving behind the glass, low and quick, there and gone again before he could hold onto it long enough to be sure of what he’d actually seen.

He blinked hard against the rain streaming down his face and told himself it might have been nothing, a trick of the lantern light bending through wet glass. But the unease that settled into his chest afterward didn’t feel like the kind that came from nothing at all.

Without warning, two Phantom soldiers, Elder Petrovel and Jeanne among them, drove their combined weight against the locked door and tore it open.

Inside, the inn was every bit as dark as the rest of the village.

"Elder Petrovel. Light this whole place up."

He raised his sword high overhead and poured mana into the blade, drawing a hard, brilliant light from it that flooded the room in an instant.

And in that same instant, Lucian’s body moved before his mind had finished catching up, because something was closing in on Jeanne from her blind side, and she hadn’t seen it at all.

"Sister Jeanne, look out!"