The reason most people abhor chaos is that it can’t be predicted.

~Balor, The Primordial God of Chaos

Eight days after the beast tide left, the real trouble came. At first, it was small pockets of the undead with maybe a hundred of the rotting things in each group. Crow stared at the forest they’d cut back away from the walls of Rosdoe and saw undead pouring out from every meter of the treeline.

“How did it turn out like this?” Crow muttered and felt Faelan’s cool hand wrap around his arm. The sisters had talked and decreed that he must have one of them at his side at all times. At first, Crow thought they were joking, but they were dead set on it. He suspected their actual goal was to make sure he didn’t find a new woman, but outwardly, they wanted to make sure Crow didn’t blame himself. Either way, he grinned at their silliness, and their care made him feel blessed.

“I overheard the council earlier, and they believe it’s because of how many people are here. More importantly, it’s about the number of cultivators here. So smaller towns with ordinary mortals won’t attract them like this. It has something to do with our Body or vital energy. With this many people here, Rosdoe is lit up like an undead beacon.”

“Is that true?” Crow asked.

“Sounds plausible. I’m not as knowledgeable as you are. I do know that as we cultivate and increase in power, it improves our overall Body, leading to higher vital energy. Even without a Shield, it is how we can instinctively sense when someone is more powerful than us.”

Crow continued to draw his bow and release arrow after arrow. He lost count of how many he’d put down at this point. Faelan also used Snow Wolf’s Bite, and he could feel the coldness emanating from it. Crow wasn’t sure what possessed him when he made that bow, but it really was a thing of beauty.

Faelan snorted from beside him.

“What?”

“I can practically hear your internal dialog praising yourself as you stare at my bow,” Faelan giggled. “But I admit it is my most prized possession. Thank you, little bird.”

“How can you two flirt with this stench?” Acco complained. “So many dead things and then the fire squads burning them, and—just… nevermind.”

“You here for a reason?” Crow laughed but kept firing his bow.

“Drock wants you. They found a cluster of powerful undead.”

“Let’s go.”

Acco placed his hand on Crow and Faelan’s shoulder, and they disappeared into the void. Crow didn’t like teleportation because, unlike them, his Sage’s Mind captured the entire trip, so it didn’t pass in a blink for him. The void was nauseating if experienced too long because his constitution wasn’t strong enough to withstand its pressure. Acco and the others didn’t mind it because the moment passed so fast that they only felt a momentary dizziness.

They popped out of the void on top of the Central Tower. Since they shaped the wall like a parabola, the westernmost point was at the top of that arc. This was where they built the tower, and it commanded a view of the entire wall. The central gate into the city was right underneath them. Crow knew this event had reshaped Rosdoe for future generations.

There were two more towers called North and South Towers. The naming sequence was rather dull, but the structures were impressive. They built those two towers where the wall butted into the mountain, which supported towers twice as tall as the Central Tower. They didn’t have gates under them, but part of the wall nearby was designed for them. Currently, those places were filled in walls, but it wouldn’t take much to tear those sections out and rebuild them.

“Crow, over here,” Drock’s deep voice boomed over the arguing voices the moment they arrived. As they approached, he pointed toward a dense part of the horde below. “See it? I’m not sure what that thing is, but it doesn’t look human.”

Crow’s eyes shifted, and he picked out the monster below. It wasn’t human, but he recognized a Rootless when he saw one. Even demonized by the Hunger Curse, it still retained the shape of a dryad. He found the thought of Rootless becoming undead to be disturbing. To make it worse, it seemed to have a higher level of intelligence than the other undead. Those cursed things were obeying its commands.

“You aren’t seeing things,” Drock confirmed. “We aren’t sure what is happening, but that thing is definitely commanding the surrounding undead.”

“Not anymore,” Crow muttered under his breath. He held out his hand, and Saighead Rionnag, his Star Arrow, materialized in it. He expended one charge of the arrow’s explosive power once a day for occasions like this and was why they called him over. Usually, he’d hop on a flying beast with a Beastlord to approach his target, but this one actually came close to the wall.

Crow’s Shield lit up under his shirt as he pulled the string of his bow back as far as he could. The arrow’s fletching tickled his cheek as he slowly exhaled and sighted in on his target. At the end of his exhale, he released, and the white arrow shot out like a beam of light.

The undead dryad looked up as if sensing something, but unlike a live one, its sensitivity to wood was dulled. It couldn’t react before the arrow struck its chest and black flames exploded outward. The Night Fire within his arrow rippled outward like a stone tossed into a still pond. Something within the curse fed his Night Flames as if it were oil. The destruction it caused among the dead was horrifying. Those closest to the point of impact exploded because the heat boiled their insides so much that it couldn’t be contained.

There was no sign of the dryad, and corpses fell by the thousands. So many undead were in that one region that the rest of the current battlefield felt empty after burning and turning to ash. A form of displacement occurred, creating a lull in the fighting as more undead tried to fill the gap like water flowing into a hole.

The Star Arrow hadn’t been that powerful previously. Even Crow was shocked at its effectiveness this time and could only attribute it to both the dryad and the tightly packed undead. He rubbed the back of his head nervously and coughed a few times as he felt countless eyes on him.

Mara appeared beside him, but he felt her coming, so he wasn’t startled like the others were. However, he was surprised.

“What the hell was that?”

“You learned it?”

Crow and Mara asked their questions at the same time and laughed.

“That was the Star Arrow, but no idea why that happened.”

“Really?” Mara looked over the battlefield and felt like her Void Penetrating Needle from the Trial of the Six Dragon Gods might need to be nurtured more. She knew that part of the reason his was so powerful was that it absorbed his Night Fire, but it still made her a little envious after seeing what he just did.

“You finally learned StarSlide?”

“Acco was worthless, but yes.”

“I’m right fucking here. Don’t pretend you can’t see me,” Acco growled, but Mara and Crow pretended he didn’t exist.

“Not sure what teaching method they used for him, but he kept claiming I had to will myself through the void,” Mara explained, knowing that Crow would use this information later. “That isn’t what I did at all. However, the spell setup is still the same; it was just that the intent was wrong. It is easier to visualize yourself where you want to be and then just activate the spell.”

“To be fair, don’t ignore Acco’s advice either. If I’m not wrong, his method is more advanced because you’d control your path through the void, even during that split second of transference.”

Mara nodded, feeling that what Crow said made sense. And it gave her a focus for advancing her skill with it. First, since she could StarSlide, she needed to study the process in more detail. Once she figured that out, she might be able to reverse engineer Acco’s way of doing it.

Mara kept talking while Crow re-summoned his Star Arrow and stored it away. He refused to use more than one charge a day and didn’t let anyone know he had more charges because he saved them from when things went sideways. His people knew, but no one else, and he would keep it that way.

Crow chuckled as she discussed her discovery excitedly and rubbed her head. Song Xue stood beside him, a silent warrior who gave him comfort with just her presence. Personality-wise, they were like exact opposites.

“Drock, I’m heading back to my position,” Crow informed him.

“Yes…” the commander muttered back, but his eyes were still staring at the destruction Crow caused. The ripple effect of the fire was still happening even if it had weakened.

Acco and Mara brought them all back to the position Crow was in command of, and several people came to report really fast. It was the same everywhere he looked. People fought to protect their homes and loved ones, and he struggled to watch the people he commanded losing their lives. He felt that war was terrible, but some battles had to be fought.

Occasionally, men had to be sent below to clear away the undead from the walls so they could burn the corpses to ash. During those times, they lost the most people, and their wails of grief as they struggled to survive those battles were sounds that haunted his sleep. Even though he went down there with them and did everything he could to protect them, people died.

Despite the sadness and the grief, there were also moments of bravery and heroism. People come together in a time of crisis and form bonds that would follow them unto death. If they survived, he could see a distant future where the survivors had children who married each other, and the bonds of brothership were strengthened through those kids. Blood begets blood.

“Stop thinking about it so much,” Song Xue said when she noticed Crow’s pensive silence.

“I wasn’t self-pitying. We often see a forest fire, and the first thing we think about is how wrong it is. Even now, the thought of a forest burning to ash bothers me, but sometimes it is necessary for the health of the forest as a whole. Clears out the bad and allows for new growth. It makes me—”

“Idiot!” Mara slapped Crow on the back of the head. “That kind of thinking is exactly why we are watching you. Now take this.”

Mara pulled out two boxes from her Shield and gave one to Crow and Song Xue.

“What is this?”

“Lunch—or maybe dinner. Song Lin made it and used medicinal herbs to help boost your Mind, Body, and Spirit. So eat up. Have you seen Otto?”

Crow and Song Xue pointed below.

“Nevermind, I’m not going down there to give him his food,” Mara laughed. She wasn’t saying that because she was cowardly but because she’d been down there a dozen or so times and distractions were deadly. It was best not to disrupt them.