Chương 134: Horses in the Fog

With the slow, lazy retreat of the night's blackness and the sky's dome beginning to take on a cold and dreary gray, the dawn carried with it none of the hope of a new day or the promise of life that it usually brings. Instead, it carried, palpably, unmistakably, the harbinger of creeping, certain death, advancing with heavy footsteps from the north.

Falus Forest, which normally buzzed with thousands of vital sounds at every sunrise, the singing of colorful birds, the movement of small creatures through the undergrowth, even the rustle of dense leaves in the morning breeze, was today drowned in a heavy funeral silence, suffocating and terrifying. The birds did not sing; they hid in their nests and trembled. The forest animals had retreated to the deepest recesses of their burrows.

Even the rustling of the enormous trees had stopped entirely, as though nature itself, in every last detail, were holding its breath in pure dread, afraid of what was coming, what was inevitable. At the northern edges of the forest, emerging with slow and terrifying discipline, appeared a long, extended line of cavalry. This was the Imperial First Reconnaissance Unit, the absolute elite, known and feared among enemies by the title "The Hawk Eyes."

One hundred riders, exactly to the man, each selected with painstaking care and brutal rigor from among the finest graduates of the Empire's harshest military academies. They rode massive war horses, hybrid breeds magically enhanced for increased endurance and speed, armored in plates of light enchanted steel that gleamed with a lethal coldness in the faint morning light, as though they absorbed the light rather than reflecting it.

At the head of this perfect formation, shaped like the tip of a spear, rode Captain Valerius, a battle-hardened warrior in his middle years, bearing the high B-rank classification in the Imperial power ranking. He was a man who embodied discipline and cruelty; deep scars from past wars and campaigns of annihilation decorated his stern face like bloody medals of honor.

He wore heavy armor, black in color, engraved with complex protective enchantments that pulsed with a faint red flicker, and in his powerful right hand he held a long lance that throbbed with a dim blue mana energy, ready to pierce at any second. Valerius halted his massive black warhorse at the precise boundary where the thick white fog began, the forest's usual morning mist, yet today something was profoundly different.

The fog that clung to the forest's edges was not merely natural water vapor that would dissolve with the rise of the sun. It appeared to be a solid wall, viscous and dense, drawing a decisive line between the open world of the living and an unknown world that might at any moment become a mass grave.

"Halt!" Valerius raised his left hand, sheathed in a heavy iron gauntlet, sharply into the air. In a fraction of a second, the one hundred horses behind him stopped in terrifying unison, in a single near-mechanical motion. The sound of the riders' armor clinking and their weapons scraping against each other at the sudden stop cut through the forest's deathly silence like enormous knives being sharpened against a hard stone, sending a shiver through every body present.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Captain Valerius studied the thick fog before him with intense suspicion, his eyes narrowing. As a seasoned soldier who had lived through and survived more ambushes than he could count, his trained instincts were screaming inside his mind that something was wrong, fatally wrong.

The fog was unnaturally dense, physically impossible for this time of year, and it moved with a slow, viscous crawl along the ground, as though it possessed its own awareness, reaching out white arms to embrace them.

"Activate the Vision Stones! Now!" Valerius barked in a booming, harsh voice that shook the stagnant air around them. In immediate response, and in a synchronized motion that would have stunned any observer, the one hundred riders struck their right fists, sheathed in iron, against their chests with force, directly over their armor. This strike was the activation signal for the blue magical crystals mounted precisely on the front of their helmets.

An immediate, sharp and penetrating blue light burst from the eye-slits of their helms, light engineered both physically and magically to pierce through any illusion, dispel any fog, and expose any ambush however masterfully concealed. This was the Empire's standard advanced Illusion-Dispelling technique, the technology that had granted them absolute supremacy and made the Hawk Eyes an undefeatable legend in reconnaissance and infiltration missions.

With the stones activated, they advanced with extreme caution, step by step, into the white wall of fog. But for the first, terrifying time in the history of this elite unit, the superior Imperial magic did not work as it should. The opposite happened entirely. Rather than the white fog dissolving and visibility clearing before the blazing blue light, the fog appeared to absorb the light with hungry greed.

The magical illumination, which should have lit the way for a hundred meters ahead, lit nothing beyond a single meter in front of the noses of their frightened horses, which had begun to whinny in low, muffled sounds. Within seconds, the world around the one hundred riders transformed into absolute whiteness and total blindness. A heavy whiteness that swallowed directions, absorbed sounds and distorted them, rendering each rider unable to see even the comrade riding directly beside him.

A whiteness that consumed even the sense of time and place.

"Stay close! Don't spread out!" Valerius commanded fiercely, struggling to maintain control of the situation, but his voice sounded muffled and weak, as though he were shouting from beneath tons of dense water.

"Don't break formation no matter what! Hold your positions! This is ancient and complex elf magic, but we will cut through it with discipline. Advance, slowly!" What Captain Valerius did not know, in his arrogance, was that they had not merely ridden into a thick magical fog designed for concealment. They had ridden, of their own full free will, with all their weapons, directly into the belly of a hungry beast that had prepared its trap with consummate care.

The sound of the heavy horses' hooves striking the damp ground covered in dead leaves was the only sound that could be heard and distinguished in this white void. The heartbeats of the riders, which had always remained steady in battle, had begun to quicken, hammering in their chests like war drums, while cold sweat formed heavily beneath their heavy helms, stinging their eyes.

They were moving slowly and blindly toward the unknown, driven by hollow Imperial pride and their own sightless discipline, unaware, not even for a single moment, that every step they took, every inch they advanced into the forest, had been mapped out in advance with mathematical precision, calculated to the millimeter, by the one who was waiting for them.