Back at the fortress, the air was thick with heated voices and clanging steel. Soldiers moved in doubled patrols along the walls. Fresh barricades rose at every gate. News of the Seethe's unnatural tactics — their eerie human mimicry, their split bodies birthing scuttling spawn — had spread like wildfire.
Inside the war room, Elric stood over a sprawling map littered with markers. Captain Daric leaned on the far table edge, arms crossed, jaw clenched. Captain Eryz waited by the door like a sheathed dagger — still, silent, eyes narrowed on Kael as he was ushered inside.
Kael stood before them, fresh from scrubbing blood from his hands and throat. His uniform still bore dark stains. Across from him, Mareen watched through her thin glasses, jotting quick notes on a slate.
Elric finally looked up.
"Tell me exactly what you witnessed."
---
Kael recounted it in clipped sentences. The clearing. The bodies gutted as if searched. The Seethe stepping out, armored and standing too straight, whispering in human sobs. The spawn that crawled from their opened guts.
He left out how close he came to losing all control. How good it felt, for one breathless instant, to let the Blight surge through him fully.
Mareen's pen scratched faster.
"They've never displayed such selective vivisection," she murmured. "Nor this… mimicry. It's possible the Blight inside them is adapting at a viral level, learning from observed behavior."
Daric spat on the floor. "Meaning every time we send men out there, we're teaching them how to kill us faster."
---
Elric nodded slowly.
"And it means your continued survival, Kael, is now more critical than ever. If these things are growing sharper, we'll need you at the front. Not just for slaughter — but to see if your own… strain evolves to counter theirs."
Kael felt a cold tremor slide through his spine.
"You want me to keep mutating. Until I'm like them."
"No," Mareen said mildly, not looking up from her slate. "We want you to stay just enough unlike them that we can still point you at them."
Captain Eryz gave a low grunt that might have been a laugh — or a snarl.
---
The meeting ended with swift orders. Daric would double scout patrols, Eryz would personally lead extermination runs to capture live Seethe specimens. Kael was told to report each dawn for physical assessments and new field trials.
As he left, Mareen called after him.
"Oh, and Kael? We'll be drawing more samples tomorrow. Your reaction to these evolved strains may be the key to replicating defensive Blight treatments for other soldiers."
Kael didn't reply. He stepped out into the corridor, the torchlight seeming to twist and stretch around him. Inside his veins, the Blight pulsed with a kind of hungry satisfaction — as if it understood far better than any Dominion scientist just how close he was to something monstrous.
---
Outside, he found Ayla sitting on the stone steps, hugging her knees. When she looked up, her eyes were red, lashes wet. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it. Kael sat down beside her, not touching her, not trusting himself to offer comfort with hands that still remembered ripping through bone.
They stayed like that until the bells rang out over the fortress, summoning soldiers to evening drill. Ayla finally stood, wiping her face. She didn't look at him as she walked off.
Kael remained seated a long while after, staring into the dying light, listening to the faint echoes of the drill sergeants barking orders.
Three days passed in a blur of shouted orders, rattling armor, and the heavy smell of boiled rations. Outside the fortress walls, the Dominion pushed patrol after patrol into the forests — only for many to stagger back bloodied, missing comrades, or sometimes not return at all.
Each night the courtyard filled with whispering soldiers. They spoke of Seethe that laid traps, corpses that rose again days later, gutted and hollow yet somehow still walking. Some began calling them Hollows, a new curse to haunt already broken nerves.
---
Kael sat alone on his bunk, rolling a small iron medallion between his fingers — a token Garrick had once won off a card game and gifted to him when they were still kids. The metal felt impossibly heavy now. Around him, the barracks was alive with quiet voices.
Just beyond the support beam, Garrick leaned close to Toma and Lyren, voice low but urgent.
"You saw what he did to those things," Garrick whispered. "But also how he looked after. His eyes weren't… right. Not even human. How long before he turns on us?"
"Don't be a fool," Toma muttered. "Kael's saved our hides more times than I can count. You think he wants this?"
Lyren didn't speak at all, just kept tightening and loosening his grip on his knee. His face was pale.
Kael closed his eyes. The Blight stirred inside, warm and watchful, almost amused. He clenched the medallion until the edges bit into his palm.
---
The next morning brought new horror.
A battered Dominion squad returned dragging a soldier by the wrists — not one of theirs, but an officer from another fortress garrison. His armor was cracked open, chest half-seamed with black veins, eyes milky and staring. Yet he breathed, shallow and rattling.
Chief Mareen examined him in the open courtyard. When she sliced open a shallow line across his ribs, black ichor bubbled up instead of blood. The man didn't even flinch.
"This," she announced, loud enough for dozens of soldiers to hear, "is what uncontrolled Blight progression looks like. We will be studying his reaction closely."
Two of her assistants hauled the poor creature away, legs dragging. Garrick cursed under his breath, Toma turned away to spit. Kael stood rigid, every muscle locked.
---
That evening, Kael was summoned to the stone hall where Elric and Mareen waited.
"We've begun field trials," Elric said without ceremony. "Controlled micro-injections into select infantry. If we can harness the Blight partially — give them Seethe resilience without full transformation — we might survive this new escalation."
Kael's stomach twisted. "You're turning them into me."
Mareen's eyes glittered behind her lenses. "Into something like you, yes. But with fewer… variables."
"And if it goes wrong?"
"Then we'll learn." She offered a cold, clinical smile. "Your blood's given us more insight in two months than any vivisection ever did."
Kael wanted to shout, to rip the table in two. Instead he simply nodded once, because anything else would have been treason — or an admission he was no longer under control. Inside, the Blight seemed to pulse in dark pleasure, as if it relished the Dominion's creeping desperation.
---
Later that night, he found Ayla by the torchlit wall, cleaning her sword in long, steady strokes. She didn't look up when he stopped near her.
"They're going to make more like me," Kael said, voice hollow.
Ayla's hand paused. Then she resumed her slow work, blade scraping against the rag.
"Then we'll have more monsters to fight the other monsters. Isn't that what the Dominion always wanted?"
He couldn't argue. Couldn't offer hope. So he just stood there, listening to the wind whisper across the parapets, carrying the faint scent of rot from beyond the walls.
Kael didn't sleep that night. He lay on his cot, eyes fixed on the ceiling's cracked beams, counting each breath to keep from drowning in darker thoughts. Somewhere across the barracks, someone whimpered in their sleep. Another man muttered frantic prayers, voice breaking on each syllable. It was the same every night now — dread sunk into the stone itself, as if the fortress walls might be absorbing all their fear.
When he finally sat up, sweat chilling on his back, he found Nell standing awkwardly by the post at the foot of his bed. Her hands were wringing the hem of her shirt, eyes darting anywhere but at him.
"Thank you," she whispered finally. "Back in the woods… with Ayla. If you hadn't —"
Kael shook his head sharply. "Don't. It's… not something I did. Not really. It's what's inside me."
Nell opened her mouth, then closed it again, tears pooling. She turned and fled before he could say anything else, leaving Kael alone with the pounding of his pulse — and that quiet, coiling satisfaction from the Blight that seemed to murmur, she fears you too.
Two days later, word filtered through the ranks that another outpost had gone silent — no signals, no runners returned. The courtyard buzzed with men and women packing crates of arrows, stacking barrels of pitch. Every soldier's face was drawn tight, shoulders hunched as if expecting an attack at any moment.
Kael found Garrick by the water trough, splashing his face. When he looked up, there was a wild, haunted gleam in his eyes Kael didn't recognize.
"If it comes to it," Garrick muttered low, "promise me you'll kill me before I end up like that officer. Or worse… like them."
Kael stared at him, throat tight, then managed a hoarse, "Don't talk like that. We're not there yet."
Garrick just laughed — a thin, broken sound. "Aren't we? Look around, Kael. Smell the rot in the air. It's already here."
---
By evening, the fortress gates closed with a heavy echo that seemed to ripple all the way through Kael's bones. Torches flared along the walls, their greasy smoke mixing with the ever-present tang of iron and oil. Somewhere high above, crows gathered on the watch spires, hundreds of them, staring down with pitiless black eyes.
Kael stood under their shadow for a long time, trying to remember simpler days — shared bread after training drills, Lyren telling dumb jokes that made Nell snort ale through her nose, Garrick boasting about girls he'd never actually spoken to. It all felt like fragments from someone else's life, half-lost in the dark blood that coiled warmly through his chest.
When he finally turned back toward the barracks, he thought he heard faint scratching behind the walls, like claws testing the stone. He paused, listening hard, but it faded — leaving only the far-off clamor of the training yard and the cold whisper of wind through the ramparts.