When the largest serpent let out its ear-splitting roar, the forest seemed to lean away from the sheer volume of it. But where a normal man would have been paralyzed by fear of being hunted by mountain-sized predators, Antares felt a surge of ecstatic, violent clarity.
"CHARGE!" Antares screamed, his voice a jagged edge that cut through the serpent's roar.
He and Yanrid didn't just run; they became blurs of motion, their feet carving deep furrows into the blood-stained snow. Antares led the spearhead, the Knight Force flaring around him like as if he was on fire, while Yanrid kept pace at his left flank, his eyes glowing with an icy blue aura.
They were twenty meters into the clearing when the ground itself seemed to heave.
A Stonefang serpent, smaller but more cunning than the others, had buried itself beneath the frozen peat, waiting for someone to pass over its head. It erupted from the snow in a fountain of dirt and ice, its jaws wide enough to swallow Antares and Yanrid in a single gulp.
Antares didn't flinch, but he knew he didn't have to worry about the cunning reptile.
Yanrid's reaction was a masterpiece of lethal grace. Without breaking his stride, gripped his massive great sword and swung it in a violent, low arc.
"Ice spike," Yanrid hissed.
As the blade connected with the air, a massive pillar of jagged, crystalline ice erupted from the earth beneath the hidden serpent. It wasn't a slow growth; it was a physical explosion of frost. The ice spike, three feet thick and honed to a needle-point, slammed into the soft underbelly of the snake, piercing through its stone-crusted spine and lifting the ten-ton beast five meters into the air.
The serpent died instantly, its body frozen into a grotesque, vertical monument of ice. Yanrid didn't even look back at his kill; he was already scanning for the next threat.
Behind them, the two personal guards Levi and Eli were not content to let the King and the General have all the glory. Their bodies twitched in unison, sensing the approach of two more serpents from the high branches.
With a synchronized clack-snap, their insectoid wings unfurled. These weren't the feathered wings of birds, but shimmering, translucent membranes that vibrated with such high frequency they blurred into a red-tinted haze.
They launched themselves into the air, bypassing the mud and the carnage below. They reached the serpents before Antares had even finished his second sprint.
Levi took the lead, his dual serrated daggers spinning in his grip like the rotors of a helicopter. He dived at a serpent coiling around an Iron-Oak. The beast tried to lash out with its spiked tail, but Levi performed a mid-air roll. He landed on the serpent's head and, with a roar of effort, drove both blades into its skull.
Eli followed a split second later. As Levi grounded the beast, Eli flew in a low, tight circle, his own blades carving a continuous, spiraling wound along the serpent's length. By the time Eli reached the tail, the serpent had been practically unzipped, its stone scales falling away like broken shingles. They moved like a single organism, a two-headed cyclone of silver steel.
The serpent didn't even have time to hiss before it slumped, a mangled heap of meat and stone, into the snow.
Behind the elite guard, the twenty Ashfang warriors engaged the remaining smaller snakes. These were seasoned veterans. They fought with a terrifying, mechanical efficiency.
They used their shields to pin the serpents' tails, then swarmed the heads with serrated spears. The clearing was filled with the rhythmic the screams of dying beasts.
Antares ignored the smaller skirmishes but he did decapitate the smaller snake that had the terrible luck of finding themselves in his way.
but His eyes were always locked on the Alpha.
The massive beast, nearly eighty meters of armored muscle, seemed to realize the tide had turned. Its kin were being slaughtered with a speed it had never witnessed. It let out a low, vibrating hiss and began to coil back toward the shadows of the Iron-Oaks, intending to slither into the deeper layer of the forest and wait for the battle to end.
"Oh, no you don't," Antares growled.
He poured pure mana into Helios. The mana-crystal flared with a violent, solar intensity. Antares didn't just use it to this extent to start a fire, he fed his own Knight Force into the gauntlet, to create hotter and deadlier flames.
"BURN!"
He swept his arm out. A literal wave of scorching, orange-red flame erupted from the gauntlet , fanning out in a thirty-foot cone. It hit the Alpha's tail and flank, the heat so intense that the stone scales began to glow dull red before cracking and popping like corn.
The Alpha shrieked, its retreat halted by the searing agony.
It turned back, its amber eyes now reflecting nothing but a pure, unadulterated hatred for the creature that had dared to burn it.
Antares stood his ground. He was a terrifying sight. His bear-fur coat was soaked through with the black, foul-smelling blood of the first serpent he had killed. His face was splattered with gore, and his long black hair was matted with ice and red slush.
To any observer, he didn't look like a King. He looked like a sycophant—a blood-drunk butcher who had lost his mind to the thrill of the kill.
"Where do you think you're going?" Antares asked, his voice low and vibrating with a dangerous mirth. "The party is just starting."
The Alpha lunged at him.
It was faster than the others, the speed of the strike was like a lightning bolt.
Antares didn't sidestep this time. He planted his feet, channeled every ounce of his strength into his legs and core, and met the collision head on.
BOOM.
The shockwave of the impact cleared the snow for ten meters in every direction. Antares's boots sank six inches into the frozen earth, but he didn't move back. He had caught the Alpha's upper jaw with his bare left hand.
The reason why Antares still standing was because he had brought out his external chitin armor that covered his whole body by still the alpha serpent's charge had done damage to him and his armor was starting to crack and fall apart.
He used his left hand that had the armor chitin over it to dig into the stone-like gums of the serpent, while his right hand held Eos braced against the beast's lower throat.
The Alpha's weight was staggering. Antares could hear his own armor cracking under the pressure. His muscles screamed as he fought against the downward force of forty tons of muscle.
Antares didn't care about the weight or if his bones would crack under pressure.
He only cared about the kill.
He let out a roar, his aura flaring so bright it turned the falling snow into steam. With a surge of strength that defied his human frame, he wrenched the serpent's head to the side, throwing the massive beast off-balance.
As the Alpha's neck was exposed, Antares didn't hesitate. He leapt onto the serpent's snout, ran up its massive, spiked head, and jumped high into the air.
He unfurled his wings for a single, powerful flap, hovering at the apex of his jump. He gripped Eos with both hands, the sword glowing with a blinding crimson light that rivaled the sun.
"DIE!"
He dived.
He became a vertical streak of red light. Eos didn't just cut; it vaporized the space it occupied. The blade struck the Alpha's neck at the exact point where the skull met the spine.
Antares felt the resistance of the stony scales, then the grind of the bone, and then... nothing.
The blade sheared through the serpent's neck with a sound like a guillotine falling through silk.
Antares landed in a three-point stance on the other side, the momentum carrying him forward.
Behind him, the Alpha's massive head slid slowly off its body, hitting the ground with a dull, wet thud that vibrated through the very roots of the Iron-Oaks. The body followed a moment later, thrashing in its death throes, fountain-heads of black blood drenching the clearing.
Antares stayed in his crouching position for a long moment, his chest heaving, steam rising from his blood-soaked shoulders. His vision was still swimming in red.
Slowly, he stood up. He climbed atop the massive, headless corpse of the Alpha, using it as a pedestal.
He looked back at the clearing.
The battle was over. The eight bigger serpents were all down—some impaled by Yanrid's ice, some butchered by the twins, and while the smaller ones were systematically dismantled by the warriors.
His men were standing amongst the carnage, breathing hard, their weapons dripping with blood.
Yanrid approached the base of the Alpha's corpse, looking up at his King. He saw the way Antares looked—covered in gore, eyes glowing, a terrifying silhouette that could give anyone nightmares.
Even Yanrid, who had known him since his awakening, felt a flicker of genuine fear.
"Sire," Yanrid called out softly. "The serpents have been exterminated. Victory is ours."
Antares blinked. The red glow in his irises began to fade, going back to their normal red color. He took a long, shaky breath, the cold air finally cooling the fire in his blood.
He looked down at his hands—the blood was already starting to freeze. He looked at the massacre he had led. He had come here for a walk, for a "small hunt." He had ended up causing a massacre.
He let out a short, jagged laugh that turned into a weary sigh. He wiped a streak of blood from his forehead and looked at the sky through the gaps in the Iron-Oak canopy.
"Good," Antares said, his voice returning to its calm, regal authority. "Collect the valuable parts. I want the Alpha's skull mounted on the North Gate the moment we go back. Let the world know... that we are back."
He stepped off the corpse, his boots squelching in the red slush. He was exhausted, he was filthy, and he was starving. But as he looked at his loyal soldiers, he knew one thing for certain.
His conquest had begun with a slaughter. And he was just getting started.