Chapter 342: Mini-Boss [1]

The Queen looked at him across the map table.

"What do you suggest?"

Kane didn’t glance at the counselors.

He spoke to her alone.

"I will check the forest once for any remaining signs—stones, heat, anything still holding a shape. Tomorrow we leave for the Giants and lock their treaty before this problem grows another limb. The southern hole stays the priority. The tree gets inspections and rear anchors while I am gone."

"And if the attack happens again while your strength is on the water?"

"You have stronger warriors than mine on these walls when they are properly set. I will call for Seraphine’s army as well."

One of the counselors frowned.

"The Milfheim warrior?"

"Yes. She knows how to hold a line that is not hers by blood, and the city has already seen what coordinated corruption looks like. Between Seraphine, the named elven commander, Sira, and your inner wards, the rear is not empty. It is simply not carrying the full household."

Misha’s pen had stopped.

"You are compressing the timeline."

"I am refusing to let a spent probe cancel the crossing," Kane said.

"There is no clean reason for full devil manifestations to walk this layer yet. What we are seeing is stored essence leaking: stones, teachers, turned bands, a possession that could drop its tools when it was done looking. I will find the source of that leak in the belt if it is still bleeding, kill it if it can be killed, and then I will put the Giants on the board before the next leak learns a better shape."

The hardline counselor tried once more.

"You want us to accept that a barbarian will clear our forest in a single sweep, leave a foreign rear anchor, and sail into Giant ground while our outer gate is still a wound."

"I want you to accept the arithmetic," Kane answered.

"Today measured how fast we close a door. If I stay here chasing heat-haze through trees for a week, the southern approaches stay open, and the measurement becomes an invitation. One controlled pass through the belt. Then the boat."

The second counselor’s voice was thinner.

"And if your ’source’ is not a thing that dies to an axe?"

"Then I bring back a better description of what it is, and the tree wards and rear protocols do the work they exist to do. Standing still teaches the leak nothing useful about fear. It only teaches it our schedule."

The Queen studied him for a long moment.

The chamber held quiet enough that the distant noise of the yard’s ordered burns could be imagined more than heard.

"You are certain the manifestations are premature."

"Certain enough to bet the crossing on it," Kane said.

"Full devil presence changes the smell of the air. What hit the gate was ugly and coordinated and still one step down from that. Essence with a hand on it. Not the hand fully in the room."

Misha exhaled through her nose.

"Rear protocols still written before you leave. I will not let speed erase the conditions."

"Agreed," Kane said.

The Queen’s fingers lifted from the map.

"Then the council hears the decision as mine, not as a barbarian’s preference. One forest pass. Source killed or identified. Departure on the first morning after inert confirmation and rear papers are sealed. If the secondary shrine reading climbs while you are in the trees, you abort the pass and return immediately. Clear?"

"Clear."

The hardline counselor looked as if he had more argument and nowhere left to put it.

The thinner one only stared at the secondary shrine token. Neither objected again.

Kane inclined his head, took Misha’s brief confirming glance, and left the high chamber with Firlia already building the Seraphine message in her head and the Queen’s darkened expression fixed on the root lines of the map.

Thora met him at the second-ring arch with the compact axe already on her hip and no patience for a long retelling.

"Well?"

"One pass through the belt. You with me. Everyone else holds the yard and the papers. Tomorrow we aim for the Giants if the residual stays inert and the rear anchors are live. Seraphine gets the call for the walls."

Thora’s mouth twitched.

"Sira will hate the chair."

"Sira will sit in it anyway."

Kane adjusted Mjoldr across his shoulder.

"We move now. Blood will not stay readable until evening."

They left Sylvander’s repaired outer works by a side post, two shapes against the tree line, no full hunting party to announce a second panic.

The forest took them in with the same ordinary birdsong that had returned too quickly after the mass drop. Ordinary, and wrong for it.

Blood marked the undergrowth in sprays and drags: black-tinged in places, ordinary red in others.

Tracks layered over tracks.

No clean bodies.

Whatever had driven the bands had also cleaned its own path, or the turned had dragged their dead into brush that refused to give them back.

Thora crouched once, touched a dark smear, and rubbed her fingers clean on bark.

"A lot of bleeding. Not a lot of corpses. Either something ate, or something moved the proof."

"Or both."

Kane kept the system on a low passive sweep.

"Stay wide. If the heat comes back, we do not stand in it to be polite."

They worked deeper along the line the elephant had broken from.

Charm fragments hung on low branches like discarded jewelry.

A warm stone sat inert and cool under moss where the map still insisted there should be only dirt.

Kane didn’t touch it.

Thora marked the position with a cut in a neighboring trunk, and they moved on.

The blood trail thinned, then gathered again toward a stand of older trees that didn’t match the surrounding growth.

Kane’s steps slowed.

His eyes widened a fraction.

He knew this tree.

In the game, it had been the strongest mini-boss the elven empire maps offered: an encounter players treated as a gate check before serious root content.

The bark pattern, the way the roots shouldered up out of the ground, the wrong density of shadow under its canopy even in daylight.

The system did not need to label it.

His memory already had.

"Move!" Kane shouted.

Something above them cracked like a limb giving way under too much weight.

An ape the size of a gorilla dropped from the canopy in a blur of black fur and muscle, eyes filmed with the same sick yellow the gate wave had worn, jaws open on a scream that belonged in no ordinary forest.