Harven.

Blonde hair, sharp eyes, a face that carried enough resemblance to the king that you didn’t need anyone to tell you whose blood he shared. The second son of the royal family, given this role several years ago, and by most accounts he’d handled it well enough.

He delivered judgments. Fairly, usually.

The Silfords had never given him reason to do otherwise; they were one of the few noble families that had no dirt on them, nothing to dig up, nothing to hold over their heads.

Until now apparently.

He frowned, eyes moving across the file in front of him.

"I am certainly sure he did," he said. "The evidence before us is quite clear."

He turned a page.

"Furthermore." He paused, letting the weight of what came next land properly. "Two S ranks lost their lives at the hands of the Nine Tails; a beast directly connected to your son."

The hall erupted.

"Wait—" someone said. "S ranks? Dead?"

"The Nine Tails? That Nine Tails?"

"The Calamity Fox is involved in this?"

"If she’s connected to the Silfords then we’re all—"

"She could attack the capital at any moment—"

The panic spread through the gathered crowd fast and messy, the way panic always does when it has something genuinely terrifying to attach itself to.

Arlott stood through all of it without moving.

’Deliberate,’ he thought; they’d released that information on purpose, calculated it, timed it perfectly. The Nine Tails was not a name anyone in this continent took lightly; two S ranks reduced to ash was not something anyone here was going to shrug off.

They wanted the room afraid.

He kept his eyes on Harven.

"That was their fault," Arlott said.

His voice was measured; not loud, not aggressive, just completely certain.

"While it is true that she is the Nine Tails, I had no knowledge of this; not one member of our family did, except my son. And she only acted to protect him."

He turned and pointed directly at the church representatives seated to the side of the hall.

"Because these fools were attempting to take my son into custody for experimentation."

The silence that followed lasted exactly one second.

Then the hall found its voice again.

"Such disrespect—"

"Did he just point at the church—"

"He’s a Silford alright..."

"Wait." One voice cut through the rest, genuinely confused. "Why would the church want to experiment on an E rank?"

A fair question honestly; the kind that hung in the air waiting for an answer.

Arlott gave them one.

He straightened slightly and let his voice carry to every corner of the hall.

"Because he controls a power that is not magic."

The murmuring dropped immediately.

"As you all witnessed during the hunting festival, he had the strength to crush mountains; that was his power. He calls it ki."

He let that sit for a moment.

"And he is not an E rank." His tone didn’t rise but something in it sharpened. "I would like this to be the last time anyone in this room refers to him as such."

He turned back to Harven directly.

"Tell me," he said. "Have you ever seen an E rank, or even an A rank for that matter, with the strength to crush mountains?"

Harven couldn’t immediately respond.

Because Arlott was right and everyone in the room knew it; you couldn’t argue with mountains.

He composed himself after a moment, shuffled the file in front of him, and pressed forward anyway.

"Regardless," he said. "Your son housed a calamity within the Silford estate; that alone is a crime deserving of death under the kingdom’s law."

Before Arlott could respond, the hall doors opened.

Several figures came in quickly, the kind of urgency on their faces that didn’t belong in a courtroom.

Harven received the report, read it, and looked up.

"Beastglade," he said, his voice carrying differently now; less judicial, more troubled. "Is currently in complete disarray."

The hall stirred.

"Adventurers can no longer enter the forest; the conditions have changed drastically and rapidly." He set the report flat on the table. "This occurred the same day the Nine Tails left the capital. We believe she is responsible."

He opened a second file.

"Six C ranks. Ten B ranks. Five A ranks." He read it without looking up. "These were the adventurers who entered Beastglade to investigate. Most of the C ranks did not return; the survivors gave their reports before being treated."

He finally looked up at the hall.

"Monsters are moving in formations and coordinated patterns far beyond their natural intelligence. Something is directing them." He paused. "While it was true that the monster tide was projected to occur several years from now."

He closed the file.

"It has been accelerated."

The hall erupted.

"A Monster Tide now?"

"The city isn’t prepared for this—"

"How many years early are we talking?"

"If the Nine Tails caused this then the Silfords are responsible—"

"We’re all going to die—"

Harven let it run for a moment.

Then looked at Arlott.

"That is precisely why the S ranks were gathered today," Harven said.

The hall quieted enough for him to continue.

"This will be your mission, Arlott Silford;" he said it plainly, no room for argument in his tone. "Enter Beastglade and conduct your own investigation. Find the source of the problem."

Everyone looked at Arlott.

And honestly, Harven’s logic was sound; an S rank’s report would be leagues above anything the investigation teams had produced so far. No C rank survivor account could compare to what Arlott Silford’s eyes would find in that forest.

Arlott didn’t argue.

He nodded once and that was that.

...

That was why he was currently in Beastglade.

He’d encountered the first group of beasts within minutes of entering; the report hadn’t exaggerated. They were moving in formations, coordinated, deliberate, the kind of organization that monsters simply did not possess on their own.

’Something is driving this,’ he thought.

He needed to find what.

His sword caught fire; flame element wrapping the blade clean from hilt to tip as he moved through the first cluster. They fell like paper, which said less about him and more about the rank difference, but he didn’t slow down to appreciate it.

He pushed deeper.

The forest changed around him the further he went; denser, heavier, the mana in the air sitting differently, pressing down with a weight that had no business being there.

Then the A ranks appeared.

Not one or two; multiple, emerging from the treeline on three sides simultaneously, which confirmed what he already suspected.

They were coordinating.

He exhaled once and moved.

Flame and fluid; that was the Silford way, fire element through a sword that never stopped moving, technique layered on technique, the Silford Sword Craft cutting clean lines through the chaos around him. An A rank came from the left and he redirected its momentum into the one behind it, following through with a strike that left both on the ground. Two more from the right met the same efficiency.

It was getting harder the deeper he went.

’The source has to be further in,’ he thought, dispatching another A rank without breaking stride.