Chapter 319: Ashen-Haired Barbarians of the White Snowfield (1)

The barbarians advanced in high spirits, their light steps drumming a carefree rhythm across the earth. Each footfall pressed the ground as if the land itself were a springy floor in a training yard. They talked idly, laughed at nothing, and watched the world with that open curiosity that made even a shoreline feel like a festival street.

A vast forward base rose ahead of them, ugly and functional, a knot of walls and towers hammered together by enemy hands.

“What is that?” one of them asked, tilting his head.

None of them knew it, but the coast they had reached lay just behind the front line. By following the road as their feet pointed, they had wandered straight into a demon outpost. This base guarded a route to another continent, which meant the demons attacked and defended this place with a kind of frantic devotion. Named demons stood at its core, and even those who had risen beyond names and sat with ranks and titles cruised its walls like sharks.

“Who goes there?” A sentry burst from the gate and skidded to a halt. His face stiffened when he saw them. “Ah... ah?”

“These ones are blocking our path,” the scowling barbarian said.

“In this case, is it still self-defense?” the thoughtful barbarian asked, as if he were working out a principle from first terms.

The scowling one nodded without hesitation. “Of course!”

“Oh,” the woman said, delighted.

They smiled as if they had been given a sweet. Then they lifted their axes. Killing intent fell like a hard rain. It pounded across the gate and swallowed the sentry whole.

“Y-you—”

The words never made it out of the demon’s mouth. An axe spun in from nowhere and tore his head from his neck.

***

Inside a fortress, a man pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose and massaged away a headache that had been living with him for days.

He was a Hero Swordmaster, one of the West’s great blades. He had marched east with a contingent of soldiers to reinforce this fracture in the line. He had seen worse walls and better faces, yet the present sight left him quiet. The soldiers’ morale slumped like wet canvas. On another day, he might have barked and kicked them to their feet. However, there was no room for that now. The situation had turned bad enough to make even pride sensible.

This was all because of Necrobix.

One of the Four Pillars of Hell had descended to the Mortal Realm, and the continent had begun to buckle. The Tower Master and the barbarian called Ketal were holding it back, or so the reports claimed, but their grip could not cover three fronts at once. Important positions kept failing. They didn’t know when Necrobix would descend again, and that ignorance gnawed morale raw.

We need to kill the demons in the front as quickly as possible,

the Swordmaster thought, narrowing his eyes.

He assembled his men, buttoned their courage with brief, firm words, and marched them toward the demon outpost. The wider war would not let them choose a perfect time. If the line needed an open road, then they would open it, even if the toll came due in blood.

He reached for the hilt at his waist, fingers brushing against the familiar grain of worn leather. His jaw tightened, and he moved forward with the calm, deliberate steps of a seasoned fighter.

He was a Hero, a man counted among the continent’s few. Against most enemies, that would be enough to promise victory. This outpost held a ranked demon, however, not a simple brute, but a name that curdled faith when whispered.

It was Meris, the Demon of Hatred. Even he could not promise a clean triumph against such a foe.

I may have to stake my life,

he thought, and when he fixed that decision in place, a looseness came to his shoulders that made his steps easier.

They crested a low rise, and the outpost came into view.

“What...?” His expression twisted in surprise.

The outpost was broken—though

broken

was too mild a word for the scene. The place had been turned inside out. Walls lay flattened, towers reduced to muddy stumps, and the once-solid ground that had supported barracks and armories was torn into trenches and pits, as if a titan’s fingers had raked through it.

“Uh... sir?” a soldier said. “What happened?”

“What is this?” another breathed.

They edged forward, tense and wary, braced for an ambush. But none came. No claws lashed out from the rubble, no spells hissed through the air to obliterate a tight column of men. There were no demons in sight—and even fewer lesser beasts.

“What in the...” the Swordmaster murmured.

They filed through a split in the wall and entered the ruins. What they found inside stilled their voices. The earth had been chewed down to its bones and then broken. The fortress buildings, which should have stood up to siege engines, had been erased so fully that their foundations looked like old scars.

A battle had taken place here, and not a skirmish, not a brief raid to probe strength, but a fight so large it bent common sense. The Swordmaster moved deeper and froze.

“Corpses...,” he said quietly.

Demon corpses lay scattered across the ruins, broken and flung like dolls. Their wounds looked like something had seized them and torn until the seams gave way. That was grotesque, but it was not what made his stomach tighten.

“How are they dead?” he said, no one and everyone his audience.

When demons suffered enough damage, the rules of the world snatched them back to Hell. The Mortal Realm did not keep their corpses. That was a comfort built into the design. Yet demon bodies lay here without any sign of departure, as if the laws had been unplugged.

He knelt and turned a head so he could see the face. He turned another and another, and the same truth met him every time. Their features were folded around a single shape. Every face kept the look of fear. His mouth thinned. He had seen courage, and he had seen hate, but it was rare to see fear appear so honestly on a demon.

They advanced toward the heart of the outpost, and at last he saw the ones who had made it so.

“Ashen-haired... barbarians?” the Swordmaster murmured.

For an instant, he thought Ketal had arrived—the hair, the eyes, the way power draped over their shoulders like an invisible pelt. The rumors made it easy to match the sight to a familiar name. Then he saw what the rumors hadn’t mentioned. There were three of them—two men and one woman.

“Sir...,” a soldier whispered, swallowing. “What should we do?”

The Swordmaster narrowed his eyes and let the silence answer while he measured. Something about them felt wrong. Their clothes were half ruined, torn into rags by a fight that would have pulped ordinary bodies. Their skin, however, kept not a single mark. The sense he trusted, the one that had kept him alive in fights he had no right to win, rang a bell in his skull.

They are more dangerous than demons

, he thought.

He ignored that warning because he had to; Hell had come ashore, the northern barbarians had forged alliances with other continents, and the entire world had twisted itself around the single goal of survival, so in such a world, treating the ones who destroyed a demon outpost as enemies was simply against all common sense. He lowered his blade and stepped forward with open hands.

“Greetings. I am the Swordmaster of the Kingdom of Bultoron. My name is Arcane.” He took a breath to ask who they were, but then he stopped.

They were playing with a round object, tossing it back and forth like a ball. He had thought it a ball. Up close, he saw what sat in their hands. It was the head of the ranked demon Meris, and they had been entertaining themselves with it as if it were nothing more than a toy.

“Who are you...?” Arcane said softly.

The thoughtful barbarian wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something sour. “You are on our land. You should leave.”

“L-leave? What are you talking about?” Arcane said. He kept his voice civil through an effort. The barbarian did not care. He studied Arcane the way a hunter studies a new kind of track, and something like delight lit his eyes.

“You are strong,” he said. “The last one was enjoyable. You will be, too.”

The thoughtful barbarian tossed Meris’s head aside, lifted his axe, and bared his teeth in a smile that climbed too high up his cheeks.

“Let us kill and be killed!”

The barbarian charged. The earth broke under his feet, and the air cracked. Arcane ripped his blade free and met him. Metal collided with a sound like a bell the size of a city. A wave of force spread out, grabbed the ground, and shook it until it split. Arcane skidded, boots plowing two straight lines through the dust.

“Everyone, fall back!” he snapped. “Out! Now!”

“Y-yes, sir!”

The soldiers sprinted for the gate. Arcane reset his stance, drew in a long breath, and tried to talk.

“We are not your enemies,” he called. “Our enemy is the demons. We are on the same side.”

“The same side?” the barbarian said, then barked out a laugh bright with contempt. “Us? With you? Arrogant.”

The axe came again. Arcane parried, teeth bared, as confusion frayed the edges of his focus. Why attack now, why attack at all—none of it made sense, and the logic refused to settle.

The barbarian was not alone. There were three of them in total, and from the sensations he felt, their strength seemed roughly equal. The only fortunate point was that the other two did not seem inclined to attack him for now.

“

Ugh,

I wanted to fight him. But does this count as self-defense, too?” the woman asked.

“He approached us first. That makes it self-defense,” the scowling barbarian answered.

“Is that so? As expected of our brain, so smart!”

Self-defense, my ass!

Arcane cursed inwardly.

I don’t know what these bastards are, but...

First, he would subdue one of them. If he could take one hostage and force a conversation, the others would have no choice but to listen. Myst surged through Arcane as he channeled it into his flesh, strengthening himself with the intent to overpower them through sheer force.

“Good!” the barbarian laughed, showing all his teeth. “You are strong after all! I can go harder.”

Axe and sword collided again, and the thunderclap of the impact rippled through the ruin. Arcane’s boots slid a long furrow through broken earth, and he coughed blood into his palm.

Wait!

Arcane shouted inwardly. Horror flickered behind his eyes. In raw strength, he had been driven back completely, cleanly. He had no time to dwell on the realization. The barbarian was already on him again. Arcane steadied his breath, redirected his footing, and met the next blow with a storm of counter-cuts.

The shock hurled him aside. He gritted his teeth and, even as his ribs ached, studied the foe in front of him. He was a Hero, a Swordmaster among Swordmasters, yet the barbarian was pressing him without flagging. Then the truth became clear: this opponent was a Hero as well.

But how? That barbarian does not even wield Myst!

Arcane thought.

No one without Myst could prevail over one who wielded it. That axiom held everywhere across the continent. As he watched more closely, a different detail surfaced. Something was wrapped around the barbarian’s body.

It was not Myst, nor any technique the Swordmaster knew. It clung to the man like a shroud, a distortion that made Arcane think of a bent, unnatural creature wearing a human’s mannerisms like a mask.

Where in the world did such things come from?

he thought.

He shifted his angle, gaining a sightline past his foe. That was when the look of their hair and eyes truly registered. All three barbarians had wind-tossed hair the color of ash and irises to match, pupils wide and unblinking.

No... Could it be?

His thoughts shattered under the next strike. Pain rocked his chest, and he had to give ground or have his sternum split. The barbarian flashed in again, and Arcane understood that there would be no time to craft a negotiation. A hostage was out of the question. He would have to commit fully to lethal intent, even if the opponent died.

He pivoted, caught the axe on his guard, and hurled himself backward with the rebound. His blade bit into the ground and locked in place as he poured Aura through the hilt.

He was a Swordmaster, one who had climbed to the summit by walking a path of his own. His sword art was the embodiment of sword energy made manifest.

“Cut them down,” Arcane ordered.

The world around him rang like glass. Manifested sword energy rippled into overlapping blades of light that churned the space ahead. The barbarian’s eyes flew wide.

“Oh, wow!”

The axe swung into a tight guard, shielding chest and throat, but the condensed barrage shattered through it, lifting the barbarian off his feet and hurling him backward. Arcane surged after him, Aura blazing along his sword, and drove a precise thrust into the chest that rose to meet him. The blade pierced through with a brutal, unerring strike.

One down,

he thought as he wrenched the sword to withdraw and pivot for the next incoming threat.

“Wait...”

The weapon did not budge. Something held it, an unyielding resistance like an iron vice clamping the blade. And then the barbarian who had been skewered through the heart drew a long, delighted breath.

“As expected, you are strong! Is that the strange power from Outside? Fascinating,” the barbarian exclaimed.

Arcane blinked, stunned. He had driven steel clean through the chest; he had felt the heart yield on the point. By every law of combat and the world itself, that should have been the end.

Why is he still alive? How is he speaking as if nothing has happened?

A slow, steady thump traveled down the blade into Arcane’s grip—the unmistakable beat of a heart. The realization sent a cold shiver crawling across his skin.

“This is fun! Show me more!”

Still impaled, the barbarian lifted his axe with almost playful eagerness. Arcane let go of the sword, sprang backward, and opened space, refusing to be chained to his own blade.

***

“I heard something strange,” the Tower Master said.

“Strange?” Ketal tilted his head. He and the Tower Master had just repelled one wave of Necrobix’s assault and were taking a brief rest, catching their breath in the lee of a shattered wall.

“There is trouble along the front near the eastern shore,” the Tower Master continued.

“Has Necrobix descended there as well?”

“No. It is the opposite. Every demon that descended there has already been dealt with.”

“That sounds like good news.”

“It would be, except that the allied forces stationed there were attacked right afterward.”

Ketal’s brows drew together. The world was split between those of the Mortal Realm and those of Hell, and everything moving on the board belonged to one side or the other. If the demons had been destroyed, there should have been no reason for the mortal forces to be targeted.

“That is certainly odd,” Ketal murmured.

“What troubles me most is that a Swordmaster of Hero class holds that line. Under ordinary circumstances, nothing should breach his command. The fact that word reached even my ears means the situation has outgrown what he can contain.”

Ketal opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again.

“What is it?” the Tower Master asked him.

“It is nothing,” Ketal said, shaking his head. His eyes had gone distant, fixed not on the Tower Master but on a point in empty air.

[Quest# 790]

[Find the Anomaly that has appeared in the East.]

He weighed the implication for a heartbeat, then nodded.

“I should go and take a look,” Ketal said.

“You intend to go yourself?”

“It seems worth the trouble.”

“So you have a guess,” the Tower Master murmured. “Very well. I will prepare a jump.”

He began the complex weave of runes that would bend space, while Ketal crossed his arms and exhaled slowly.

What now?

he wondered.

There had been no System warning, which suggested that it was not a calamity on the level that demanded immediate containment. Judging by the location, there was a high chance the problem had something to do with the White Snowfield.

Maybe another Whitie has shown up again.

With the boundaries between realms fraying, such aberrations could appear. Ketal did not think beyond that, not yet. At least for the moment, that was as far as the matter deserved to be taken.