Chapter 64: BATTLE OF THE SWAMP

Back in the smoldering ruins of the Golden Camp, Aurelius was doing his own brutal math.

He stood in the center of the command tent, staring at his interface. The wailing of his sick Paladins echoed through the canvas. Six thousand men. Half his legendary army, crippled by a single, rotting weed.

“Heal them, sire,” Sir Valerius pleaded, kneeling in his tarnished armor. “A mass [ MIRACLE: SOLAR PURGE ] will cleanse their blood! We can still march at full strength!”

Aurelius glared at his High Paladin.

“Do you know what it costs to cast a Tier 8 Purge on six thousand soldiers?” Aurelius hissed, pointing a trembling, golden finger at his DP counter. “It would drain my entire war chest! If I heal them, I will have no miracles left for the siege! When I face the Spiral, I will be fighting with a sword instead of the Sun!”

“But… they are your faithful—”

“They are liabilities!” Aurelius snapped. He slammed his fist on the map table, cracking the wood.

“Order the sick to break camp,” Aurelius commanded. “They are to march back to the Sun Spire. The priests can tend to them there.”

Valerius looked horrified. “And the rest of us, my King? Our rations are dust. The water is poisoned.”

“Then you hunt!” Aurelius roared. “We are in the wilds! Send hunting parties to slaughter whatever beasts crawl in this mud. Dig fresh wells deep enough to bypass the surface rot. We do not starve because a tree threw a tantrum!”

Aurelius paced around the map table, his mind spinning.

He looked at the smoldering ash where the Treant had been burned.

A creature of moss, wood, and decay.

“The God of the Spiral is an industrialist,” Aurelius muttered to himself. “He builds. He wears suits.”

He looked south on the map, toward the dense, uncharted ancient forests.

“A Treant is a creature of the Rotting Druid,” Aurelius deduced, his eyes narrowing. “That Rank 4 coward. He pretended to be neutral, but he sent his pet to poison my camp. He is allied with the Spiral.”

Aurelius’s golden aura flared with vengeful heat.

“Valerius!” Aurelius barked.

“Yes, my King?”

“We have seven thousand healthy Paladins remaining,” Aurelius pointed his baton at the map. “Send three battalions—three thousand men. March south.”

“South? But Bastion is East!”

“We do not leave an enemy at our back,” Aurelius declared coldly. “The Rotting Druid owns that forest. March into his territory. Burn every tree. Slaughter his monsters. Claim his land in my name.”

Aurelius grinned, a terrifying, manic expression.

“This works to our advantage. Expanding our domain southward allows us to completely encircle the Spiral’s swamp. The Druid will pay for the Treant’s sabotage, and his territory will fuel my descent.”

Up in the Void, Red was watching the Omni-Web map intently.

For a day, the massive cluster of golden dots had remained stationary at the edge of his vision. Then, the seismic vibrations shifted.

The massive dot cluster broke apart.

[ TACTICAL UPDATE ]

Hostile Force A (~6,000 Units): Retreating West to Sun Spire.

Hostile Force B (3,000 Units): Moving South towards the Druid’s Forest).

Hostile Force C (4,000 Units): Stationary.

Red blinked. He looked at the data again.

“He sent the sick home,” Red realized, a slow, predatory smile spreading across his shadowy face. “He preserved his DP instead of healing his men. Typical rich kid. Too greedy to spend the capital.”

But it was the second movement that made Red lean forward.

Three thousand heavy cavalry were marching straight south into the deep woods toward the Rotting Druid.

“Aurelius thinks the Treant was the Druid’s assassin,” Red deduced, clapping his hands together once in the silent Void. The sound echoed like a gunshot. “He thinks I’m allied with the moss-head.”

Aurelius had just divided his forces. He was sitting on the edge of the swamp with only 4,000 Paladins—down from 16,000—waiting for his hunting parties to find food, while sending 3,000 men to pick a fight with a Rank 4 God in his own forest.

Red opened the communication channel to the war room in Bastion.

[ KRUG. IRON-SCALE. GORAK. ]

Down in the city, the Inquisitor and the Warlord snapped to attention.

[ The Golden King has divided his army, ] Red announced. [ He has 4,000 men sitting at our border, starving, digging wells, and hunting for food. ]

Red looked at the scattered dots of Aurelius’s hunting parties on the map, wandering blindly into the outer edges of the swamp.

[ Let the huntsmen find the Troglodyte trenches. Let them find the Crawler’s Kiss. ] Red commanded. [ Start the meat grinder. ]

A hunting party of fifty Golden Paladins trudged through the knee-deep muck. They were elite soldiers, infused with Aurelius’s [ DIVINE SHARE ], but their divine stamina was failing. They hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours, their canteens were empty, and their heavy, gold-plated armor, which normally felt as light as a feather thanks to enchantment, now felt like lead coffins dragging them down.

“Keep moving!” Captain Drusus barked, swatting a massive locust away from his visor. “The King demands meat. There has to be boar in this wretched filth.”

“Captain, my boots…” a young Paladin groaned, struggling to pull his leg free from the sucking mud. “The water is foul. It smells of rot.”

“Then don’t drink it, idiot,” Drusus snapped. He raised his hand, summoning a small orb of solar light to cut through the oppressive, unnatural smog. The light hissed against the damp air. “Find solid ground. The horses ran this way.”

Ahead of them, the dense wall of mangrove roots parted, revealing a wide, flat clearing covered in thick, green ferns and solid-looking moss.

“There,” Drusus pointed with his heavy broadsword. “Solid earth. We make camp there, dry our socks, and fan out.”

The Paladins sighed in collective relief. The heavy cavalrymen, reduced to trudging infantry, hurried forward toward the inviting green clearing. They ran, desperate to get out of the acidic mud.

Drusus stepped onto the ferns. It felt solid.

Up in the canopy, hidden entirely by the shadows, Sludge the Mud-Skipper blinked his large, wet eyes. He held a heavy clay pot, his webbed fingers gripping the coarse baked mud. Beside him, a dozen Kobold slingers notched armor-piercing Star-Iron bolts into their crossbows.

Deep in the mud, buried beneath the roots, Warlord Gorak gripped his Star-Iron maul, watching the glowing golden boots walk right over his ceiling.

Drusus took his fifth step into the clearing.

CRACK.

The ’solid stone’ beneath his feet—thin slate laid by Old-Shell and camouflaged by the late Root-Father’s vines—shattered under the combined weight of fifty armored men.

“What in the—”

Drusus couldn’t finish the sentence as the entire clearing collapsed.

“Welcome to the swamp, golden boy,” Red muttered to the void.

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