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Chapter 1270: A Battle at the Front

The City of Tusk, Wolfheart’s capital, had not recovered. From the castle watchtower, the outer districts were still rubble — empty window frames, collapsed rooflines, the architectural grammar of a city the church had been through. But there were no bodies in the wells. No stacked remains in the drainage channels. Compared to Broken Tooth Castle, where the demonic plague had reached its final conclusions, this counted as good.

A few months ago the Tusk Family had still been running this city, one branch of Wolfheart’s splintered royal line. Iron Axe had originally planned to evacuate the surrounding towns before engaging the three noble families directly — the Tusk, Token, and Redstone Gates — and letting them exhaust each other before he stepped in. Then the Red Mist had moved the schedule. Tusk City connected Wolfheart’s north and south, and the army retreating from Everwinter needed to pass through it.

What followed was quick and unremarkable in the way that overwhelming military superiority produces unremarkable battles. Five temporary units, five hundred soldiers, no Longsong Cannon — only mortars and anti-demon grenades. They breached the castle. Lord Hilburke died on the battlements while supervising his defenders. The city fell before the noble coalition managed a coherent response, and one by one the surviving lords surrendered. The three great families of Wolfheart ended on a Thursday afternoon.

Iron Axe felt no pride in this.

He had fought alongside Roland since the first skirmish in Border Town, had watched the First Army grow from a militia that struggled to hold off the Longsong Duke into a force that could take any city on the continent in days. He knew the gulf. He also knew the gulf between the First Army and the demons, and it was wider than the first gulf had been by an order that made comparison almost useless.

The Red Mist came south relentlessly. Everwinter was mostly gone. Every withdrawal from Everwinter to Wolfheart meant casualties — not from pitched engagements but from harassment: demons materializing on roads that scouts had confirmed clear, hitting units before they could form up, disappearing. The pattern was intelligence — somehow the demons knew which paths the retreating columns would use, which made the intelligence either a leak or a demon capability he didn’t understand yet.

Sustained retreat destroyed morale. He knew this. He also knew His Majesty’s order: keep pushing south, keep extracting people, and do not stop.

There was only one alternative to morale death, and it was a successful attack. Hit the demons where they weren’t expecting it. Prove to his soldiers that the retreat was tactical, not total.

He had chosen Tusk City as the anchor for this.

“They’re getting comfortable,” Brian said, the telescope to his eye.

“The comfort started at the Everwinter border,” Iron Axe said. Brian had come north from the Southernmost Region with fifteen hundred Mojin warriors — the first formal Sand Nation army in Graycastle’s history. “Edith was right. The Obelisk on the continental ridge cuts in both directions. Good cover for us. Hard passage for them going south.”

To the north, the sky was wrong: dark crimson clouds spreading edge to edge, the Red Mist’s permanent ceiling. It had already crossed the Wolfheart border and was pressing toward Tusk City at the pace of a slow tide. Below the cloud line, Goldwater Town sat half-swallowed. A few Devilbeasts circled high, perfunctory. No Fortified Monstrous Beasts. In the early days of the war, this area would have been thick with them.

The General Staff’s picture had sharpened over months of painful study. The demons wanted what Roland wanted: populated cities, working hands, mass labor. Every military operation was aimed at preventing the First Army from extracting people before the Red Mist arrived. To take territory fast, the demons used Fortified Monstrous Beasts to project small Red Mist zones ahead of their main line — frogs leaping from pad to pad — and struck the cities before the mist had fully settled. It was efficient. It had worked through most of Everwinter.

But efficiency at scale runs into the same logistics problem every expanding empire runs into. As their territory grew, their forces spread thinner. Managing captured encampments and forcing men to work required troops on the ground, permanently. The front had expanded by hundreds of kilometers. Monitoring it all without reinforcement was arithmetically impossible.

Iron Axe had watched this play out from the watchtower. The demons’ rhythm had slowed. Their harassment continued but their massed attacks had thinned. Whether by design or by overextension, the pressure was not what it had been.

That was the opening.

“Sir — the supplies from Neverwinter have arrived.”

Iron Axe turned from the northern sky.

In the clearing before the city gate: several hundred iron barrels, round, about chest-height on a man, a cubit in diameter, seamless. No handles. No apparent use. They squatted in the afternoon light with the dense, implacable presence of objects that have traveled a long distance and expect to be taken seriously.

Brian crouched beside one and pushed. It did not move. He straightened and looked at it the way a man looks at a riddle.

“What are they?”

“His Majesty’s newest invention.” Iron Axe allowed himself a small, anticipatory smile. “You were in the Southernmost Region during the tests. These barrels are the key to this engagement.” He looked across the rows of them. “If they work in the field the way they worked in testing, we’ll be able to hit the demons in mobile warfare — something they’ve never had to plan for.”

Brian looked at the barrels again with different eyes.

“Then let’s get them forward.”

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