Chapter 1

Chapter 1.

The earth was a gigantic corpse.

The plain, which must once have been covered in greenery, now groaned with dark-red blood and black mud tangled together. The sky was murky gray, filled with smoke from burning corpses and rising dust. The sharp crack of steel striking steel, the dull sounds of flesh tearing and bones breaking, and the desperate screams of the dying mingled together, playing a vast symphony of hell.

The steel tide of the Gale Empire was swallowing the Kaien Kingdom’s precarious defensive line. The charge of the imperial knights, wearing helmets adorned with feathers, split the kingdom army’s ranks as if cleaving rotten wood, and the infantry following behind trampled over fallen corpses as they lunged in like starving wolves.

“Hold them back! Stop that monster!”

Leonard, a centurion of the Kaien Kingdom, screamed in a hoarse voice. But his cry was buried beneath the noise of the battlefield and scattered emptily.

Before his eyes, from the heart of the imperial host, hell itself was walking out.

Gideon, the Great General known as the “Butcher of the Plains.”

A two-handed greatsword larger than a man’s head flashed as it drank in blood. Each step he took seemed to make the earth tremble, and his massive steel armor was caked with blood and scraps of flesh.

“Kahahaha! You insect-like bastards!”

With Gideon’s roar, the greatsword swung horizontally with a dreadful howl of wind.

CRUNCH!

The upper bodies of three or four Kaien soldiers who had raised their shields to face him were torn away along with their armor, as if they were sheets of paper. Blood surged up like a fountain and drenched his helmet, but Gideon did not even flinch. Instead, he inhaled deeply, as if savoring the reek of blood.

Before that overwhelming destructive force, the kingdom soldiers’ will to fight vanished like melting snow. Once their terror-stricken eyes met, they began screaming and turning their backs to flee.

“Do not run, you cowards!”

Leonard shouted, but the levee had already broken. The terror of facing the butcher swallowed even military discipline. Gideon mercilessly swung his sword at the backs of those fleeing.

The tide of battle had completely turned. The Kaien Kingdom’s defeat was now only a matter of time.

***

On a quiet hill overlooking the battlefield, which was like a scene of utter carnage.

There, where all the noise and screams did not reach as if by some lie, a man stood silently.

Black light armor that seemed to melt into the darkness. The cloak draped over it did not stir even in the wind. Only the enormous kingdom-style composite bow on his back and the sword at his waist offered a guess at his identity.

The man, Rian, held the battlefield’s horrors in his eyes, but no emotion showed within them. There was no anger, no sorrow, not even agitation. They were cold and hollow, like an abyss whose depth could not be known.

Rian slowly closed his eyes.

And when he opened them again, the world had lost all color.

Over the world turned ash-gray, tens of thousands of red lines spread like a net. The vital points of every living enemy, the predicted paths of their next movements, the weaknesses of the siege weapons, and the positions of the commanders were etched clearly into his vision like burning threads.

[Highest-Grade Insight]

The divine sight that pierced through all principles of the world activated.

‘Target: Gideon. Obstacles along elimination route: seventeen.’

Rian’s lips did not move, but every calculation had already finished inside his head. His eyes shifted by the faintest margin, finalizing the most efficient order of elimination.

Shrrk. 

Rian took out the kingdom-style composite bow from his back. It was a masterpiece made by layering ash wood, the horns of beasts, and animal sinew. In his hands, the bow looked natural, as if it had been a part of him from the beginning.

He nocked an arrow to the string. Even the sound of him drawing the bow seemed to be absorbed by the surrounding air.

Ping!

There was no sharp metallic sound scraping the eardrums, nor any loud noise of something cutting through the wind. Only a faint sound of pierced air, no louder than the whine of a mosquito. A single arrow with black fletching vanished as if sucked into the darkness.

At the rear of the battlefield, hundreds of meters away.

A small hole opened between the brows of the imperial siege soldier’s helmet as he adjusted the launch angle of the massive catapult, the “Steel Crusher.”

Thud!

With a dull sound, the soldier fell backward without even realizing he had died. The control rod that slipped from his hand spun in the wrong direction, and the enormous boulder flew into the middle of the allied formation, carving out a horrific crater.

But no one noticed that small change. The chaos of the battlefield swallowed an accident of that degree as if it were nothing.

Rian’s hands moved like a machine.

Ping! Ping! Ping!

The arrows that left his hands flew along different trajectories. One drew an arc and pierced the throat of a centurion commanding from behind a shield wall, while another flew straight ahead and accurately burst the heart of a messenger communicating with headquarters. The imperial mages preparing magic on a hill collapsed one after another with arrows lodged in their foreheads and chests before they could even finish their chants.

“Headquarters! Headquarters! Communications are down!”

“The Third Magic Support Unit has been wiped out! Cause unknown!”

“Damn it! Someone find the sniper’s position!”

An invisible fear began spreading through the imperial camp. The elation of seizing victory turned into confusion in an instant. Commanders collapsed without understanding why, and the chain of command began to fall apart like a spiderweb being severed.

Rian looked down at all that confusion with numb eyes. In his vision, only the next target marked by a red line existed.

After removing the final obstacle, he slung the bow over his back again.

Then, without hesitation, he kicked off the hill and leapt silently into the battlefield. His movement was like a black stream flowing down the hill. There was not a single trace of hesitation, not a moment of reluctance.

“There! It’s him!”

Imperial soldiers who noticed his appearance surged toward him with shouts. Bloodshot eyes turned toward him.

Rian took out his bow again. This time, however, there was no time to aim. He unleashed rapid shots at close range toward the soldiers charging at him.

Thuk! Thuk-thuk!

The arrows did not pierce the enemies’ hearts or throats, but struck their knees, ankles, and shoulder joints with precision. Blows that avoided vital points did not cause instant death, but they sealed the enemies’ movements even more effectively.

“Gaaah!”

“My leg!”

Soldiers struck by arrows screamed and toppled over in a tangled heap. When one man fell, the soldiers following behind tripped over his body and collapsed in a chain. In an instant, a human wall screaming in agony formed in front of Rian. He slipped leisurely through the gap.

At that moment, a heavily armored infantryman with a shield broke through the net and approached right in front of Rian, roaring like a beast. The massive shield came flying toward him with enough force to crush his upper body.

In that instant, there was no space to dodge and no time to block.

As Rian slung the bow behind his back, he drew the sword at his waist. Every one of his movements flowed together without a single break, like water.

Shriiik!

A flash flared in the darkness, as if lightning had struck once.

The soldier froze in place along with his enormous shield. He did not even realize he had been cut. He merely tilted his head at the sensation of something hot welling up from his throat. Soon, a red line was drawn straight from his neck to his chest, and his heavy body collapsed as if splitting in half.

[Special-Grade Swordsmanship]

‘Three seconds until the royal guard forms an encirclement. A frontal breakthrough is inefficient.’

Rian’s judgment was complete. In his eyes, Gideon’s personal guards were closing the encirclement with fierce momentum. 

***

Rian stopped and lowered his body.

Srrrrrk…….

His body began melting like a haze into the surrounding dark shadows and blood mist. His black light armor became darkness, and his bloodstained cloak became blood mist. His form completely assimilated with the surrounding environment and disappeared without a trace.

[Shadow Stealth]

“What the……?”

When the threatening presence that had been charging straight at him until a moment ago evaporated before his eyes, bewilderment crossed Gideon’s face for the first time. Despite decades of battlefield experience, this was the first time he had seen such a bizarre phenomenon.

“Where did he go?! Where did that rat bastard disappear to?!”

Gideon bellowed. At his roar, the royal guards around him hurriedly watched every direction and tightened their grips on their weapons. But all they could see were one another’s backs and the terrified faces of their allies.

That was the very moment.

Behind Gideon, from within the shadow cast by his enormous armor, Rian’s upper body rose silently. Like a ghost, like fog. His lips came close enough to touch the ear of Gideon’s helmet.

A low whisper pierced through the noise of the battlefield and burrowed into his ear.

“You’re too loud.”

Slice!

That was the last sound Gideon heard.

The dagger in Rian’s hand slipped into the joint between helmet and armor, the sole gap in the armor made by human hands, without the slightest margin of error, and cut his throat.

There was not even time to resist.

The massive great general known as the “Butcher of the Plains” collapsed, spraying blood like a fountain. His eyes remained empty and wide open until the end, unable to understand what had just happened.

The roar that had shaken the battlefield ceased.

When the empire’s butcher fell, a strange silence flowed across the battlefield, as if every sound in the world had stopped at once. The soldiers who had been fighting, the knights who had been charging, and even the wounded who had been screaming all stopped moving, and every gaze turned toward the fallen, gigantic great general.

Rian grabbed Gideon’s head, which had fallen to the ground with a thud, and lifted it by the hair. Blood dripped steadily, wetting his glove.

Holding the severed head, he looked at the frozen imperial troops surrounding him and spoke in a low voice. His voice was his own, yet it was strangely mingled with those of the countless dead he had swallowed, creating an eerie resonance.

“……The empire ends here today.”

At the same moment as that declaration, text that only Rian could see surfaced in his mind.

[Absorbing [Highest-Grade Talent: Lord of the Battlefield] from corpse ‘Gideon’.]

[Existing talent [Intermediate Command] will disappear.]

Rian casually threw away Gideon’s head, which was dripping blood. As if discarding leftover food waste. He slowly swept his gaze over the imperial troops who surrounded him yet could not even properly hold their weapons, their will to fight lost.

His eyes were the numb eyes of a predator looking at the prey that remained after the hunt was over.