The midnight air inside the abandoned forge was thick and suffocating, saturated with the acrid smells of burning anthracite, sulfur, and molten iron.
24 Hours Before the Attack.
The forge doors stood open despite the cold. Every few breaths a gust knifed through the room, snatched sparks from the anvils, and sent them spinning into the dark courtyard. Nearest the furnace, heat scorched exposed skin; three steps away, sweat turned cold beneath wool.
Serik had stopped feeling the blisters on his palms hours ago. He was sixteen and had never forged anything more dangerous than a hinge. Now he held Resonance Steel while another novice hammered it into a four-pointed spike. Each impact rang through his wrists and into his teeth.
“Again,” Orren barked.
Serik rotated the glowing metal. A spark struck his cheek. He smelled singed hair but did not drop the steel.
Across the forge, Tair watched without praise. That frightened Serik more than Orren’s shouting. The Orun-Khar’s dark eye moved from hammer to mold to exhausted face, measuring everything.
Then Serik saw Tair’s left hand twitch against the bench. Once. Twice. A thin line of blood slipped from the boy’s nose. Tair wiped it away before anyone else seemed to notice.
Serik looked down at the unfinished crow’s foot and finally understood: their commander was not calm because he felt no fear. He was calm because whatever fear did to him, he had decided it would happen later.
The young novices of the Ash Company had been working for sixteen uninterrupted hours under Orren’s merciless direction. Heavy armor-piercing spears made from Resonance Steel—the same steel the Great Heir had intended to sell to the Iron Pioneers—had been fed one by one into the roaring forge.
They were not forging weapons of glory or fame. They were forging the instruments of a cold, industrial slaughter.
According to Tair’s precise charcoal drawings, the high-quality alloy was melted down and shaped into three different tools:
Four-Pronged Iron Spikes (Crow’s Feet): Four-pointed steel spikes designed to break the legs of charging cavalry horses.
Climbing Spikes and Tension Anchors: Heavy iron wedges to be driven deep into the sandstone walls of the Narrow Pass.
Resonance Trap Wires: Ultra-thin braided steel cables to be stretched at knee height across the pass.
Tair sat on a low wooden bench near the dying embers of the main forge, his right leg resting against a stone anvil. His face was pale, gleaming with cold sweat that refused to dry.
[ASTRA // NEURAL STRAIN WARNING: 91%] Current Cycle: 2 Temporal Anchor Stability: 64% Active Restrictions: • Structural Motor Skill Loss (Right Side) • Vocal Cord Damage (Mute) • Microvascular Bleeding (Eyes and Nose)
[ASTRA // SYSTEM WARNING] Excessive tactical simulations under high neural strain carry a risk of permanent cognitive fracture. Proceed with caution.
Tair ignored the red text glowing behind his eyelids. With the back of his left hand, he wiped the fresh blood from his upper lip, his cold, hollow gaze fixed on the stone floor.
The warning vanished, but the pressure remained. A pulse beat behind Tair’s left eye hard enough to distort the forge into alternating bands of darkness and orange light.
Ninety-six failed futures sat behind that pain.
In one, Kaşrûn burned. In another, the Vaşkar riders found the western goat trail and came down behind Orren. In another, the Red Snow arrived twenty minutes late and five hundred cavalry crossed the kill box beneath a clear sky.
Tair remembered every version. The dead did not.
That difference was becoming harder to carry.
He had once assumed repetition would make death easier. Instead, each simulation left residue: Serik crushed beneath a horse; Orren opened from shoulder to hip; a nameless recruit calling for a mother who would never know where he died.
ASTRA converted them into percentages. Tair could still hear the voices beneath the numbers. For now.
He was running the simulation for the ninety-seventh time.
The relay spat a burst of static.
In the eye of his mind, the world leaped into micro-frame resolution. He projected his consciousness three miles south, into the frozen throat of the Red Mile Narrow Pass.
The simulation was brutally clear:
Variable A: Vanguard Approach.
Vardun Vaşkar’s vanguard consisted of 80 heavily mounted cavalrymen wearing iron-plated hides, led by Commander Kuçar.
Movement Speed: 22 miles per hour in open terrain; reduced to 6 miles per hour upon entering the narrow pass due to loose shale.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Variable B: Red Snowstorm.
Thermal drops occur at dusk. Visibility falls below three meters within fifteen minutes.
Wind Vector: North to South, blowing directly into the faces of the advancing Vaşkar riders, blinding their horses and suppressing sound.
Tair advanced the simulation toward the critical point—the first strike.
In the mental projection, Orren gave the signal from the upper ridge. The novices pulled the tension levers, sending three barrels of refined naphtha oil rolling down the steep shale slopes. The oil spread across the frozen mud of the pass floor.
FAILURE CONDITION DETECTED IN SIMULATION #97: The simulated scout lifted his head.
Tair slowed the projection until snow hung motionless in the air. He watched the man’s nostrils flare, the horse shift its weight, and Kuçar’s column compress behind him.
One breath. That was all the enemy needed.
Tair rewound the micro-frame. Again. The scout smelled the oil. Again. Same result. Again. Tair altered the wind vector by four degrees.
The scout hesitated three seconds longer, then smelled it.
The Ash Company still died.
A hot needle seemed to enter Tair’s skull through the temple.
[ASTRA // SIMULATION #98 REQUEST DENIED] Neural load exceeds recommended threshold.
Tair forced the interface open.
[OVERRIDE ACCEPTED]
Error: The lead scout of the Vaşkar vanguard possesses a minor Fire Affinity. He detects the scent of naphtha oil in the wind, halts the column twenty paces before the kill box, and releases a burst of Essence to ignite the oil prematurely.
Result: The fire creates an impassable barrier, allowing the main army of 500 cavalry to turn back and flank the ridge through the western goat trails. The Ash Company is surrounded and annihilated within two hours.
Tair’s eyes snapped open in the physical world. His chest rose and fell like bellows as he drew a deep, broken breath through the neural migraine stabbing into his skull like a heated needle.
"Tair?"
Orren approached, carrying an iron bowl filled with melted sheep fat in one hand and a stack of newly forged steel spikes in the other. The old veteran looked at the blood on Tair’s lip, his weathered face darkening with deep concern.
"You’re bleeding again," Orren whispered, kneeling beside the bench. "The forge heat is too much for your lungs. Return to the tower and rest. The children have finished casting the last hundred crow’s feet."
Tair did not move. With his functioning left hand, he reached out and took a single iron spike from Orren’s bowl.
He raised it toward the dim forge light. The four steel points were sharp, rough, and unpolished—designed to bite deeply into horse hooves and leather boots.
Tair opened his mouth, forcing his ruined vocal cords to produce a dry, rasping whistle that cut through the clatter of iron in the room:
"...No... oil... on the ground..." Tair rasped, his dark eyes locking onto Orren.
Orren blinked in surprise. "No oil? But the naphtha oil... we spent three hours carrying those four barrels onto the cart. If we don't burn the floor of the pass, how are we supposed to stop five hundred cavalry?"
Tair reached down, picked up a piece of charcoal, and drew a single line across the stone floor beside his boot.
He did not draw the floor of the pass.
He drew the overhanging sandstone cliffs.
"...Soak... the rocks..." Tair rasped, his left hand making a crushing motion over the charcoal line. "...Burn... the sky... drop... the mountain..."
Orren stared at the drawing on the floor, then at Tair, as the terrifying genius of the correction struck him.
If they poured the naphtha oil onto the ground, a skilled Essence user could smell it or ignite it prematurely. But if the oil were soaked into the loose, water-saturated sandstone cliffs above, the freezing cold would trap the oil inside the cracks of the rock.
When ignited, the sudden thermal expansion would not merely create a wall of fire; it would shatter the frozen sandstone, triggering a massive, hundred-ton rockslide that would bury the vanguard beneath a burning mountain of shale.
They were not lighting a fire trap.
They were triggering an avalanche.
"By the ancestors..." Orren breathed, a shiver running down his spine. "You’re not just trapping them in the pass. You’re erasing the pass from the map."
Orren’s expression hardened. “How many times did you watch us die before you found that?”
Tair turned his attention toward the forty-two youths working beneath the sparks.
For a heartbeat the System labeled them automatically.
[AUXILIARY COMBAT UNITS: 42]
Tair dismissed the text.
“No,” he rasped.
Orren waited.
“Not... units.”
The veteran studied him, then nodded once. “Good. Remember that when the pass starts screaming.”
Tair rose, leaning heavily on his left leg, his dead right arm hanging motionless at his side. He wiped the dried blood from his chin with his sleeve.
"18 hours," Tair whispered, his voice a cold, breathless whistle carrying no doubt, no fear, and no mercy. "We march."
No cheer followed.
Orren struck the hanging iron plate three times. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. The hammers stopped and forty-two faces turned toward Tair.
Tair pushed himself upright. His first step nearly failed. He took another anyway.
“Red Mile,” he rasped.
Several recruits went pale.
“We don’t... hold.” He pointed toward the open forge, then closed his fist. “We close.”
Orren bared his teeth. “You heard him. Load everything.”
Outside, the first flakes of reddish snow struck the black stones of Kaşrûn.
ASTRA opened without being summoned.
[ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT CONFIRMED] Red Snow arrival: 17h 42m.
A second line appeared.
[UNRESOLVED VARIABLE DETECTED] Enemy Commander Kuçar — Behavioral deviation probability: 31.6%.
The march began before the forge had cooled. Each novice carried less food than steel. Crow’s feet filled grain sacks; tension anchors knocked against their hips; coils of Resonance wire were wrapped in wool so they would not sing against one another in the dark.
Halfway to Red Mile, Serik slipped on frozen shale. The sack on his shoulder opened and black iron spikes scattered across the path. Nobody laughed. Six boys immediately dropped to their knees and gathered them before the points disappeared beneath the snow.
Tair followed from the cart for three seconds, then tapped the sideboard. Orren halted the column.
“What?” the veteran asked.
Tair pointed at the scattered spikes, then at the recruits’ boots.
Orren understood. “Everyone stop. Wrap your soles. If Serik can slip here, you can slip on the ridge while holding a lever.”
The company tore strips from spare blankets and bound their boots for traction.
Serik looked toward Tair. The cripple had turned a mistake into preparation without wasting a word.
That was when the fear inside Serik changed shape. He was still afraid of Vaşkar. He simply became more afraid of failing the plan.
At the mouth of Red Mile, Tair ordered the column to stop once more. He made every recruit walk the kill zone in darkness before a single trap was armed. Orren called positions; the boys moved by touch, counting steps between anchors and memorizing which rocks marked safe ground.
One novice asked why they were practicing when the storm would erase the landmarks anyway.
Tair tapped his own temple.
Orren translated. “Because when you can’t see the marks, you’ll still have the count.”
The answer traveled down the line. From then on, the boys whispered numbers instead of prayers.
Tair’s eye narrowed. The simulation had finally given him a battlefield. It still had not given him Kuçar.