The weather worsened overnight.

By dawn, heavy snowfall had reduced visibility to a matter of meters, muffling sound and turning the forest into sea of white. The extermination squad departed shortly after sunrise — formation disciplined, veterans at key positions, apprentices near the center. Few days in the Ancient Wildlands had stripped away most of the youthful restlessness that had accompanied their departure from Ravenhold. Now they moved like frontier soldiers. Alert. Watchful. Learning.

Ethan walked near the center with his cloak pulled tight. Aura circulated steadily through his circulation pathways, pushing back the cold while keeping his awareness sharp. Around him, several veterans did the same — on the Northern Frontier, aura wasn’t always reserved for combat. Sometimes it was simply another tool for survival.

Far deeper within the forest, the young silver creature moved through the snow. Its pace was slower than usual — a dull ache spreading through its left flank with every movement, the wound still frustratingly slow to close. Hunger accompanied the pain. The creature ignored both. Its brilliant blue eyes scanned the forest ahead before shifting, as they increasingly did, toward a familiar direction. Toward the camp. Toward the black-haired boy.

It found a ridge above the narrow valley the humans were moving toward and settled there, silver fur pressed flat against the snow, and watched.

-----

Several hours later, the extermination squad entered the valley. The terrain forced the formation to compress — tighter spacing, reduced visibility, no room to maneuver. Gareth’s gaze swept the ridgelines without comment.

"Maintain formation."

Veterans subtly adjusted positions. Hands moved to hilts. Aura circulated more actively throughout the squad. The atmosphere shifted the way it did when experienced soldiers recognized ground they didn’t like.

Then everything changed.

A sharp whistle cut through the storm. Every veteran reacted instantly. A scout emerged at full speed from the treeline, his horse skidding violently as it stopped beside Gareth.

"Commander." His voice was tight. "Monsters incoming. At least twelve."

A pause. Then the word that changed everything.

"Dire Wolves."

Several apprentices went pale. Frost Wolves were manageable — dangerous, but within the range of what they had trained for. Dire Wolves were two full realms above that. Dire Beasts, equivalent to Knight Commanders in combat power. The kind of monsters that hit defensive lines like battering rams and kept going.

Gareth remained completely unmoved. What interested him was not the wolves themselves — it was the fact that they were here at all. Everything the expedition had discovered so far suggested predators were abandoning territory. The appearance of a Dire Wolf pack only added another contradictory piece to a mystery already full of them.

"Defensive formation."

He remained at the center rather than moving to the front. The decision was deliberate — the veterans could handle this, and if they couldn’t, he was here. Until that line was crossed, the battle belonged to his subordinates.

The squad locked into position. Wagons anchored the rear. Veterans formed the outer ring. Apprentices compressed inward.

The forest beyond stayed hidden behind white curtains. Then the first howl rolled through the valley — deep, resonant, the kind that settled into the chest rather than just the ears. A second followed immediately. A third. Already close.

Ethan drew the Eternal Sovereign Blade.

-----

The first wolf didn’t announce itself. One moment the snowfall was empty and the next a shape came through it at full speed, low to the ground, three meters of muscle and gray fur that hit the defensive line before the knight in its path had finished raising his shield. The impact threw the man backward despite his aura reinforcement. He kept his footing by a narrow margin.

Then the rest of the pack was there.

They spread across the valley floor without slowing, fanning wide to force the formation to respond in multiple directions at once. The veterans met them — steel and aura against hide and fang — and immediately it became clear that the Frost Wolf encounter had not prepared anyone for this. Owen struck a wolf across the shoulder hard enough to draw blood and the animal barely flinched, snapping back with enough force to buckle his guard. A second wolf drove a veteran knight straight to one knee, and Roland had to abandon his own target to intercept it.

Ethan was already moving.

Northern Gale Steps — First Form, Drifting Snow.

He didn’t anchor to any fixed point. He read the gaps — the split-second opening to counter where a wolf had picked its target and the person behind it hadn’t realized yet — and moved into them before the collision happened. A wolf cut hard toward an injured apprentice on the left flank. Ethan stepped into the path and drove the Eternal Sovereign Blade low and outward, redirecting the claw rather than stopping it. The force traveled straight up his arm to the shoulder and his back foot slid in the churned snow, almost costing him his footing. He’d been hit harder. He let the momentum carry past him and the apprentice retreated.

The wolves were patient in a way the Frost Wolves hadn’t been. They rotated pressure and pulled back when resistance stiffened, immediately pressed harder somewhere else. Ethan tracked the pattern and recognized it from his previous life, the way a pack with numbers and coordination used attrition rather than brute force. They weren’t trying to break through any single point. They were trying to tire everything at once.

Three wolves began angling toward the eastern edge where the apprentices were thinnest, spacing apart deliberately — far enough that committing to stop one meant leaving the other two open. Ethan saw it developing two seconds before it arrived.

Northern Heaven War Art — Second Form, Raven Wing Sweep.

He drove a wide horizontal arc through the air in front of the lead wolf, aura compressed hard into the swing, and the shockwave hit all three animals across the chest. Not a wounding blow — he didn’t have the strength for that — but enough to interrupt their stride, scatter their timing. The lead wolf staggered sideways into churned snow. Roland and two veterans filled the gap before it could reform.

Across the valley, the tension was adding up.

One veteran had a gash across his forearm that he was pretending wasn’t slowing his guard arm. An apprentice on the western edge had taken a strike that left his shield side unreliable, and the soldier beside him was overextending to compensate, which opened a gap of its own. A wolf had pushed through the western line for three full seconds before being driven back — long enough to send two men sprawling into the snow. They were back on their feet, but that section was held together by stubbornness now, not structure.

-----

The western edge gave first.

A Dire Wolf hit the weakened formation at full momentum and the line broke apart — two apprentices went down hard into the snow, a third stumbled trying to fill the gap and caught a glancing blow across the ribs that folded him completely. The wolf was inside the formation before anyone could close around it, and the two soldiers trying to contain it were visibly outmatched. Across the valley, Roland was locked with two wolves simultaneously, unable to disengage. Owen was fighting with a bleeding sword arm, slower than before.

Ethan moved toward the breach and already knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He could at most buy a few seconds.

Then Gareth stepped forward.

The pressure hit the ridge like the leading edge of a storm — vast, heavy, displacing the air ahead of it. Every hair along the silver creature’s spine rose at once. Its wound forgotten, its hunger forgotten, every instinct it possessed fired simultaneously to flee.

It pressed itself flat against the snow and stopped breathing.

Below, the Dire Wolves stopped.

Every wolf in the valley went still at the same moment, the way animals go still when something overrides their instincts. The wolf inside the formation retreated without any human touching it. The ones circling the rear pressed low against the churned snow. Twelve sets of crimson eyes turned toward Gareth, and what lived in them now had nothing to do with hunting.

Gareth moved and the nearest wolf was dead before anyone registered the blur. Then another. Then a third, in a different part of the valley entirely. He didn’t chase— he simply appeared where they were and they stopped being threats, and the ones still standing were gripped with fear and ran into the wilderness at full speed, every instinct they possessed told them this is something beyond their control.

He watched them go without following.

"The battle is over."

For several moments, silence dominated the valley. Many of the apprentices simply stared. Minutes earlier, veteran knights and apprentices had been fighting desperately to maintain the formation. Dire Wolves that had seemed unstoppable moments ago had died without offering meaningful resistance. Only now did they truly understand the difference between realms — the gap between a Knight and a Great Knight felt enormous, yet the gap between a Great Knight and an Earth Knight felt insurmountable.

High above the ridge, the small silver creature watched from the shelter of an elevated ridge, its wound throbbing as the cold deepened around it.

The battle had confused it. Some humans were weak. The powerful one had changed the entire battlefield with a single movement — that instinctively felt natural, the law of the jungle it understood. The strange one was harder to explain. Weaker than many of the others, yet he never stopped moving, never stopped advancing, never stopped positioning himself between danger and those around him.

-----

As soldiers moved through the battlefield treating the wounded, Ethan quietly approached one of the fallen Dire Wolves. The corpse lay partially buried in churned snow, its massive body still radiating the fading warmth of powerful vitality. He crouched beside it and carefully drove the Eternal Sovereign Blade into the beast’s side.

Nothing happened immediately. Several seconds passed. Then a familiar pulse traveled up through the weapon.

-----

[Blood Essence Acquired]

Dire Beast Vitality Absorbed

Blood Essence +18

Current Blood Essence: 3 → 21

-----

Ethan studied the notification thoughtfully. The beast had already been dead for several minutes when he drove the blade into it, yet the pulse still came. The blade wasn’t absorbing death itself — it was absorbing the lingering vitality that remained after death. As long as enough vitality persisted within the corpse, Blood Essence could still be extracted.

The realization immediately simplified several questions he had been considering since the first kills. His gaze swept briefly across the other Dire Wolf corpses scattered throughout the valley. The temptation to test the blade on all of them was real, but too many eyes remained on him. Driving a mysterious black blade into multiple corpses without explanation would invite unnecessary attention from veterans like Gareth and Roland. One experiment could be dismissed as curiosity. Repeating it several times would be far harder to explain.

A beginning, then. Enough to confirm the principle.

Nearby, Roland and several veterans were already working through the apprentices’ performance — pointing out errors, demonstrating corrections. Unlike previous days, the younger soldiers listened without defending themselves. A Frost Wolf battle taught caution. A Dire Wolf battle taught something harder to name.

High above the valley, the silver creature watched from the shelter of the ridge as the camp below began to take shape. Then Gareth lifted his head.

His gaze swept slowly across the ridgeline — not searching, not alarmed. Just aware.

The silver creature froze. The creature stopped breathing again. It pressed itself flat and held every muscle still, the fear from before surging back without warning, sharper than the wound, sharper than the cold. The powerful human had sensed something. Not enough to locate it, not enough to identify it, but enough to make its instincts sharpen uncomfortably.

Several moments passed before Gareth looked away.

The creature relaxed slightly. Then, after one final glance toward Ethan, it turned and retreated silently into the snowfall.

As darkness settled across the Ancient Wildlands and the extermination squad made camp, the mystery surrounding the abandoned territories continued to deepen. The small silver creature moved through the darkness alone, wounded and hungry, its instincts at war with a pull it still couldn’t name.

And although neither side realized it yet, the distance between them was growing smaller with every passing day.