Chapter 110 - 109: Names We Carry
The battlefield was silent.
Ash floated in the wind like mourning snow. Corpses, friend and foe, littered the ground. The Earl’s army had been annihilated, their banners torn, their chain of command shattered. There were no survivors left to surrender.
It was finished. The war, the charge, the dying, it was all done.
Lumberling stood amid the wreckage, his cracked spear digging into the earth just to keep himself upright. Smoke stung his eyes, and every breath tasted of iron and ash. Around him, the wounded groaned, and medics moved swiftly among the fallen. Shade lay nearby, a web of blood drying across his dark carapace, mandibles twitching in exhaustion. Skitz slumped against a half-burnt log, one eye swollen shut, the other watching.
And then came footsteps, rhythmic, disciplined, alive.
From the treeline, shapes emerged through the haze, blood-streaked, weapons drawn. Alive. Krivex led them, his red armor flaring in the smoke-glow like an omen. Gobo1 and Gobo2 carried wounded over their shoulders, still blood-slick but grinning.
"You bastards took your sweet time," Skitz muttered, voice rasping through cracked lips. "Another minute and we’d have been party favors."
Krivex chuckled as he approached, his blood-red armor streaked with soot and gore. "Didn’t know you lot loved inviting chaos," he said, his tone playful, but his eyes scanned the field with quiet gravity. "Rejoice. The great us arrived to bail you out."
Despite the bravado, Lumberling caught the tension in his voice, the relief. They had made it. Barely.
"If you’d come any later..." Lumberling said, still staring past them, his voice barely above a whisper, "we would’ve all been corpses."
Krivex nodded solemnly, then looked over to Jason’s body, now still, empty, speared through the chest. "So... that was a True Knight," he muttered, almost in disbelief. "He bled like any other man."