The sound that woke M'lod wasn't birdsong or the gentle morning wind through Tra'tze'the trees.
It was drums.
War drums. Deep bass rhythm that vibrated through the earth itself. The synchronized thunder of thousands of boots striking ground in perfect cadence. The metallic rattle of armor and weapons moving in formation. And beneath it all, the low rumble of voices—soldiers chanting marching songs in the old military style.
Misaki's eyes snapped open in pre-dawn darkness. For one heartbeat he thought he was dreaming. Then the drums hit again—BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—and reality crashed down like a hammer.
"LYRIA!" He rolled off his sleeping mat, grabbing his weapons. "LYRIA, WAKE UP!"
The healer burst from her sleeping alcove, already alert. "I hear it. How close?"
"Close enough to wake us. Two kilometers, maybe less." Misaki's mind raced through evacuation protocols they'd discussed but never truly believed they'd need this soon. "Get Feya. Get every woman and child you can find. The lumberjack company has that shelter prepared fifteen kilometers north in the forest—GO. Now. Right now."
"Misaki—"
"NOW!" His voice cracked with urgency. "This isn't a raid. This isn't a skirmish. That's the Central Army. They sent everything. You have maybe thirty minutes before they're in archer range."
Lyria's face went pale, but she didn't waste time arguing. She sprinted out into M'lod's streets, already shouting. "WOMEN AND CHILDREN! EVACUATION PROTOCOL! NORTHERN FOREST! MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!"
Chaos erupted across the village. Mothers grabbing infants. Children crying. Elderly women herding the young toward the northern gate where the lumberjack company waited with carts and emergency supplies. Feya appeared from the temple, her timid nature buried under adrenaline as she helped organize the exodus.
Misaki ran to the village center where Shy'yao was already rallying the fighters. Every man capable of holding a weapon assembled—farmers with pitchforks, craftsmen with hammers, adventurers with proper combat gear. Eighty-three men total. Maybe one hundred if you counted the elderly who refused to evacuate.
Against an army that sounded like it numbered in the thousands.
"Archers to the prepared positions!" Shy'yao's voice boomed with command authority. "Earth-users to the southern chokepoint! Fire-users with Misaki! Everyone else, defensive formations behind the barricades!"
The village transformed in minutes. Twenty-one archers—including Deylos—scrambled to rooftops and concealed positions they'd constructed the previous day. Wooden platforms hidden behind false walls. Murder holes in reinforced buildings. Elevated positions with clear sight lines to the southern approach.
The earth-chakra users—seven men total, including Riyeak—sprinted to the village's southern edge where the main road entered M'lod. Their Muladhara chakras flared to life simultaneously, and the ground responded like living clay. Earth rose in ridges. Stone formations erupted to narrow the road from twenty feet wide to barely eight. Natural chokepoint constructed in seconds, forcing any approaching force into a killing corridor.
Misaki positioned himself on the central barricade with his oil bombs—twenty clay pots filled with rendered animal fat mixed with pitch and strips of cloth for fuses. Primitive but effective. Torran had worked through the night producing them after the initial scare.
The drums grew louder. Closer. And then, as Ulth'rk's first light broke over the eastern horizon, Misaki saw them.
The Central Army of Ul'varh'mir.
They filled the southern plain like a living sea. Rank upon rank of soldiers in standardized armor, moving with the mechanical precision of professional military force. Cavalry units on the flanks. Supply wagons in the rear. Command banners visible above the formation—the seven-pointed chakra star of the kingdom, rendered in gold thread on purple cloth.
Misaki's heat-sense vision tried to count individual thermal signatures and failed. Too many. Thousands. Maybe five thousand. Maybe more.
"ARCHERS!" A voice boomed from the army formation—amplified by chakra, carrying across the distance with unnatural clarity. "DEMONSTRATION VOLLEY! TARGET THE VILLAGE CENTER! FIRE!"
The sky darkened.
Five hundred arrows arced upward simultaneously, blotting out the dawn light, descending toward M'lod like a curtain of death.
"COVER!" Misaki screamed, diving behind the barricade.
The arrows hit.
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK—hundreds of impacts in rapid succession. Arrows punched through wooden roofs. Embedded in walls. Shattered windows. Three struck the barricade directly in front of Misaki, their iron heads punching through the wood and stopping inches from his face.
One scream. An elderly man who'd refused evacuation, caught in the open, struck through the shoulder. He went down hard.
"RETURN FIRE!" Deylos roared from his rooftop position.
Twenty-one arrows answered. Far fewer than the enemy volley, but Deylos had trained these archers well. Each shot was aimed, calculated, precise. Seventeen struck home—soldiers in the front rank going down with arrows through throats, eyes, gaps in armor where veteran archers knew to aim.
"RELOAD! STAGGERED VOLLEYS! MAINTAIN PRESSURE!"
The archers split into three groups of seven, firing in rotation. One group releases, second group draws, third group nocks. Continuous harassment. Twenty-one archers producing fire output that seemed like sixty.
"OIL READY!" Misaki shouted to Riyeak, who'd positioned himself at the barricade's strongest point.
The massive shield-bearer grabbed the first oil pot—a clay vessel roughly the size of a human head, heavy with its volatile contents. He wound up like a shot-putter and hurled it with his earth-chakra-enhanced strength.
The pot arced through the air, spinning end over end, reaching an apex fifty feet above the advancing army formation.
"DEYLOS! NOW!"
The archer's eyes tracked the pot's trajectory with supernatural focus. His Anahata chakra—air element—flowed into his arrow, and he released.
The arrow flew true, struck the clay pot mid-air, and shattered it.
Oil exploded outward in a spreading cloud. Thick, viscous animal fat mixed with sticky pitch, raining down across a thirty-foot radius. It splashed across armor, soaked into cloth padding, coated faces and hands. Soldiers cursed, slipped, tried to wipe the substance from their eyes.
Then Misaki snapped his fingers.
WHOOOOOOOOOM.
The oil ignited all at once—not gradual spreading flames but instant conflagration. Thirty soldiers became human torches simultaneously. Their screams were immediate and horrible, men clawing at burning armor that had become ovens cooking them from the outside in. The formation broke around the flames, soldiers stumbling away from their burning comrades, discipline fracturing.
"AGAIN!" Misaki grabbed another pot. Riyeak threw. Deylos shot. Oil spread. Misaki ignited.
Another section of the formation erupted in flames.
"AGAIN!"
Third pot. Third explosion. Forty more soldiers burning.
The enemy commander—whoever he was—hadn't expected this. Hadn't prepared for aerial oil bombs. The tactic was pure Earth warfare methodology, something no Vulcanite army had conceptual framework for countering.
But they learned fast.
"SHIELDS UP! DEFENSIVE FORMATION! CHAKRA USERS TO THE FRONT!"
The army's advance halted. Shields locked together in overlapping patterns. And then the real devastation began.
A soldier stepped forward from the ranks—his Muladhara chakra blazing like a brown star around his body. He slammed both fists into the ground, and a ripple of earth chakra exploded outward. The ground beneath M'lod's barricades simply liquefied, turned to quicksand, and the wooden fortifications began sinking.
"STABILIZE IT!" Riyeak roared, pouring his own earth chakra into the ground to re-solidify it.
But he was one man against twenty enemy earth-users now advancing as a coordinated unit.
Another soldier—fire chakra user—clapped his hands together and created a fireball the size of a small house. He hurled it at M'lod's northern wall. The explosion when it hit was cataclysmic, blowing a fifteen-foot section of wall to splinters and setting three buildings ablaze.
A water-chakra user created a pressurized stream that blasted one of Deylos's archer positions, the force of the water cannon literally tearing apart the wooden platform and sending the archer falling two stories to the ground below. Bones broke with audible cracks.
An air-chakra user created a vortex that caught M'lod's returning arrows mid-flight and flung them harmlessly aside. Twenty-one archers reduced to zero effectiveness in a single move.
"WE CAN'T HOLD THIS!" someone screamed.
Misaki looked at the burning wall sections, the sinking barricades, the enemy chakra users systematically dismantling every defense they'd prepared. His mind raced through tactical options and found nothing. They were outmatched. Outgunned. Out-everything.
The Central Army hadn't come to negotiate. Hadn't come for a fair fight.
They'd come to erase M'lod from existence.
And unless something changed in the next five minutes, they were going to succeed.