Chapter 279: The Barbarian Column (2)

They kept moving north. The column pushed across a plain glazed with snow, boots crunching over a hard crust that gleamed under a pale sky. Breath steamed in the cold and drifted like thin banners.

Just then, without warning, the ground shivered.

“Wh-what is that?”

“An earthquake?”

It felt wrong almost at once. The tremor did not ripple out in rings. It marched in from a single direction like a drumbeat.

A heavy thud split the air, and the earth buckled and burst. Something vast bored up from beneath the plain and broke the surface in a shower of dirt and ice. A cylindrical body as thick as a house rose straight into the sky and twisted as if tasting the wind.

Darkul’s face drained. “A Giant Worm!”

It was the famous monster that even he had heard about, the kind that made veterans lower their voices. It was the boss of an AAA-Rank Dungeon, the sort of threat only a fighter on the Transcendent level could handle without throwing lives away.

“What is a thing like that doing out here?” Darkul muttered.

His cry sounded like a curse. The Giant Worm flexed, coiled, and threw its mass around the column, circling with deceptive speed. The movement was clear enough to read as the monster meant to crush the entire column. It carried the clean, cold intent of a creature that only understood prey.

“Wait, no!” Darkul breathed.

The barbarians in this column were far from weak. A few stood at the Advanced tier, while most were Intermediate or Novice. Even so, that meant they were hardened men, carrying scars that proved their battles and the skill to put that experience to use. However, against a Giant Worm, none of that mattered. The gap was too big.

It was not that victory was impossible since Ketal walked in their midst. He had knocked down Advanced fighters with a single strike and had done it without drawing on the deeper power inside him. If anyone could face the monster, he could.

However, Darkul understood the price. The shockwaves from that kind of fight would kill most of the column even if they lived through the day. He drew in a breath and forced his mind to the work at hand.

“Form ranks. Everyone, fall back and—” Darkul began to order, but the rest of died died beneath a roar.

The barbarians screamed and ran forward.

“Kill the monster!”

“Cut down the enemy that blocks our path!”

They leveled axes and swords and charged as if a path had simply opened under their feet. The Giant Worm let out a grinding bellow and lunged to meet them. The ground heaved as its body slammed forward. Snow cracked, and dirt jumped. The first ranks were about to be crushed flat.

They knew they were going to die, yet none of them slowed. They ran faster, mouths open, eyes hot.

“Death!”

“Let death welcome us!”

That was when Ketal moved. He set his foot and was gone, sliding between the running barbarians and past raised blades like a shadow cast by the torches. He reached the front in a breath.

“I do not love the role,” he said under the sound, “but I am the leader for now. I am not going to watch them die.”

He aimed himself at the Giant Worm and drove his fist forward, straight for the gaping maw.

Boom!

The monster stopped as if it had struck a wall. The ground lurched and threw men to their knees. A few tumbled like children hit by a wave.

“What?”

“What just happened?”

Then, they saw where Ketal’s fist had landed. The Giant Worm’s flesh swelled. The skin bulged as if rot were being forced to the surface. The curve of its body inflated grotesquely, and then the tissue could not hold.

It ruptured. A wet blast rolled over the earth. Flesh and blood rained down in heavy sheets. The Giant Worm that had filled a hillside vanished in a single catastrophic pop, the echo fading into the empty air.

Ketal shook gore from his hand and stepped back as if he had swatted a fly.

“It is finished,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

Silence answered him. Barbarians stared with open mouths, and no one thought to cheer. They were not sure what to do with what they had seen.

They moved again. The column crossed another stretch of white ground until the plain turned to a fold of low hills. There, the road choked off. A mountain had fallen across the way and spilled down its own side. This was not a simple slide that left a path if one were willing to scramble. Half a slope had come apart. The debris lay as deep as a hall, and the packed stone and frozen dirt would take years to move with shovels and hands.

Even barbarians accepted what could not be kicked aside. The North taught a single lesson without fail. Nature did not bargain. They did not put their faith in gods, but they bowed to storms and rivers.

Men were ready to detour when Ketal noticed movement at the base of the fall. A handful of people in thick winter coats clawed at the rubble with bleeding fingers.

“Please. Please,” one of them gasped. “Please....”

They were trying to clear the slide by hand. Their faces looked raw from wind and crying. Darkul took one look and nodded to himself.

“Traveling merchants,” he said. “I can tell by the clothes.”

“They have those in the North?” Ketal asked him.

“They do. Because it is the North, some of them risk it for bigger profit. They haul what others will not. Judging by their faces, they made it out alive, but their cargo did not. It is under that.”

Darkul’s mouth tightened. There was nothing to be done. No one could shovel a mountain. The merchants were only tearing at stone to fight what the truth already said.

Ketal watched for a beat, then stepped forward.

“Ketal,” Darkul called softly.

The merchants did not notice him until he reached them. They kept digging and talking to the slope as if words would turn it aside.

“No...,” one muttered. “No, please. If I lose this, I go under. We all starve.”

“Step back,” Ketal said.

“What? Excuse m—”

Ketal moved them aside with a steady hand and set his feet where they had stood. Barbarians looked at one another in confusion.

“Leader! What are you doing?” one of the barbarians asked him.

“There is a lot to move,” Ketal said. “I will apologize now. Some cargo may go flying.”

“S-sir,” one of the merchants stammered.

From their point of view, a stranger with a barbarian’s build had pushed them away from their last chance and stood facing a mountain like a man about to insult the sky. They hunched instinctively as if bracing for a blow.

Ketal closed his fingers into a fist and stepped forward, the ground beneath him splitting with a sound like bone giving way under a blade. Power surged as he drew Myst into his arm and swung, and the strike carried through the hillside itself. The earth leapt, and the shockwave rolled out like a tangible wall, crashing into the line. Men toppled where they stood, merchants yelped as they tumbled and rolled across the snow, and even Darkul, heels dug deep, slid back despite himself.

They staggered up and stared. The barrier was gone. The mass of rock that had turned the road into a wall was a smear of powder and flying grit that the wind was already lifting.

“W-what,” someone said.

“How is that possible?”

The North bowed to weather and stone, but a single man had just erased a mountain with his hand. Darkul’s jaw opened and did not find its way closed. Ketal did not pause to watch awe settle. He walked to the slope and dragged bundles out of pockets of debris and patched them with a few quick movements.

“Here,” he said. “I cleared the worst. You can find the rest.”

No one answered him. Every eye in sight was fixed on Ketal as if the world had turned a corner and they were not sure which map to use anymore.

The merchants found their voices first. Tears mixed with the dirt on their cheeks.

***

“Thank you. Thank you!”

“Truly, thank you!”

They found barely half of what they had hauled, but that half meant life. The words followed Ketal until distance swallowed them. The column crossed where the mountain had been. Darkul walked in silence until he found some breath to use.

𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

“You are very strong,” he said at last, almost to himself.

The Holy Sword at Ketal’s hip hummed in pleased agreement.

“How about that? This is the power of the one who carries me. It is impressive, is it not? You may admire it more loudly if you like!”

“Quiet,” Ketal said.

“Yes,” the Holy Sword replied.

Darkul flinched. “Were you talking to me?”

“No. I was talking to myself.” Ketal hushed the sword with a thought and kept moving.

“I am not weak,” Ketal replied to Darkul’s previous question.

Darkul let out a dry laugh. “I think you have passed beyond that level.”

He had watched Ketal erase half a mountain. He had never met a Hero, not in person, but his instincts did not lie to him. The force that had filled the air did not belong to ordinary ranks. He looked at Ketal’s back and shook his head.

“I suppose I am lucky,” he said. “To call a man like this a friend is once in a lifetime.”

Ketal smiled. He understood the feeling and did not tease him for saying it out loud.

“Let us keep looking after one another,” he said.

“Gladly,” Darkul answered. “When I return to the holy land, I am going to brag about this.”

Another obstacle awaited. A lake lay stretched across a shallow valley, frozen by half and thin by half. It would not bear the weight of hundreds of feet. It would not hold a boat properly either.

Ketal walked to the water’s edge and stepped onto the ice. The surface boomed. Waves ran outward in clean circles. The sheet shattered along those ripples and broke into small plates that knocked together and drifted. The open lanes gleamed.

“Launch the boats,” Ketal said. “We will cross.”

Men stared at the path across the water and then at him. They swallowed their questions and did what he said.

***

By then, the barbarians had begun to whisper. Ketal had already shown strength they could understand when he knocked an Advanced barbarian unconscious with a single blow. However, that had just put him on a tall ledge; it had not lifted him out of reach.

Now, he was on a different slope entirely. He had burst a Giant Worm with one punch, cleared a mountain from the road, and broken a lake’s skin with a step. They worshiped strength, holding to the belief that it alone decided what was right. To them, strength was as clear and certain as the rising sun, something that could not be doubted or denied. Faced with such proof, their eyes changed.

“O Ketal!”

“Ketal the Great! He is the strongest warrior!”

The words were half prayer and half chant. The leader title was no longer enough. A man with this weight in his hands fit another word—a king.

The conclusion came on its own. The law of the North was the law of the strong, and a king was king only because he had forced every barbarian to bow. If Ketal went before the Barbarian King, if he stood at the foot of the throne, there could be only one reason.

“Our new king!”

“He is the one who will be our new king!”

The story ran through the column like fire on frost. They assumed that Ketal was going to challenge the Barbarian King. Ketal would claim the seat. By the time the rumor reached Darkul’s ears, he was uneasy enough to ask.

“Ketal, are you trying to become the new Barbarian King?”

“Of course not,” Ketal answered on the spot. “I would not take that seat even if you handed it to me.”

“I guessed as much,” Darkul said, loosening the breath he had held. “Still, the talk has spread. Every group that joins us says the same thing. They say you are going to challenge the Barbarian King.”

The Holy Sword perked up.

“Are you going to be the new Barbarian King? There is no real need for it, but if you do become king, people will look at me and start asking questions. They will say,

what is that broken sword the king carries?

They will praise me, and that sounds pleasant. So let us be king.”

“Be quiet,” Ketal said.

“Okay...”

“I have no plan to be king,” Ketal replied to Darkul, rubbing his chin.

He was curious—that much was true. He wanted to see for himself what kind of strength a Hero among barbarians carried. His first thought had been to ask for a simple bout, but the crowd’s presence made even that small wish complicated. If he refused and let the rumor spread unchecked, the outcome would not be simple.

“If I refuse from here,” he asked Darkul, “how will they react?”

“They will not sit quietly,” Darkul said. “They are certain you are going to fight. If you do not, their expectation will turn into disappointment, and disappointment will look for a way to show itself.”

It would not go well for anyone in the column.

“I have a good idea,” Ketal said after a moment. He smiled.

“Should I worry?” Darkul asked him.

“No, it’s a good idea.”

“All right.”

Darkul stepped back with an uneasy look and let Ketal handle the line. Ketal called over the barbarian who had been the leader before all this began.

“What kind of man is the King of the North?” Ketal asked the barbarian.

The man’s eyes lit as if a torch had been brought near. He heard what he wanted to hear. Ketal was taking an interest in the opponent he meant to challenge.

“He has the power to be our king,” the man said. “He declared that he would be our king and stood for one hundred days while every barbarian in the North came to test whether he had the strength to support the words. In all that time, he did not lose once. He proved that his strength was true. He is a very strong man. He has a full right to be king.”

The man clicked his tongue, a trace of regret in the sound.

“He has a flaw, though. He is a coward,” the barbarian continued.

So he’s cautious,

Ketal thought.

“He tries too hard to control us,” the barbarian went on. “He keeps saying do not do this, do not do that. It is annoying.”

And he enforces rules

, Ketal thought.

“He is like the cowards outside the North,” the barbarian finished.

Sounds like a reasonable man,

Ketal thought.

He translated the complaints into his own language and found they made a simple picture. The Barbarian King had taught others to keep lines they did not like. He had forced rules onto a people who had always lived by instinct. Where they once followed the natural freedom of their own steps, he had pressed them into fixed lines they had never wanted.

“I am not happy,” the barbarian admitted. “There are more restrictions on what we can do since the king appeared. Even so, he is the king.”

Ketal knew that the barbarians couldn’t do anything since the Barbarian King was strong enough to crush all the noise. The argument ended because no one could finish it with their hands.

“By the way,” the former leader added, “he was not always this cautious. They say he used to be more of a warrior than anyone. He did not know fear. Then one day, he left the North to test his limits. When he came back, he was like he is now. He used to be like all the other fierce barbarians. Then he turned into someone closer to a man from outside the North.”

Ketal raised his brows. “Do you know why?”

“No. Many have asked. He does not answer. Whatever he experienced, it was something large enough to change a warrior like that. I would like to experience it once myself,” the barbarian said, eyes shining.

“I see,” Ketal said.

They kept walking. A few more problems rose and fell, and each time Ketal cleared them away. The column did not shrink. It gathered more men and more voices. The talk about a challenge thickened with every mile.

At last, the walls of a city rose out of the white ground ahead. The place where the Barbarian King lived stood waiting for them in the cold.