I wasn't a fool.
I had known, from the morning the military's orders moved, that Ferraclysm would come for me. A guild that size doesn't lose forty percent of its business and write a strongly worded letter. And I had known roughly where. Not in Avalon, behind my own walls. Somewhere I was far from home, with people I cared about, where a man like Maxwell could tell himself I'd grown careless.
The Southern continent had been the obvious place.
Ferraclysm had every right to its arrogance. In raw strength, it was the stronger guild by a distance. A century of accumulated power, a private army big enough to fight a war on its own, and at its head a mid Immortal-ranker with decades of real fighting behind him. I was a high Ascendant-ranker who'd built a guild in a little over three years, mostly by being right about things before anyone else.
On paper, there was no way I should win this.
Fortunately, I had never intended to fight it on paper.
