Chapter 614 — Activation

Berke Loren had brought intelligence of the Eastern Control Zone and the Eastern Legion; Suo Jilin had obtained firsthand accounts of the Kingdom army. All the reports corroborated one another and fitted into a whole—the main contaminated belts, the distribution of the crystal "monsters" and their many characteristics, the places where survivors might hide and the routes of their flight... all of it came together.

Gao Yang turned to look at Philip, who stood before him with a solemn face—the young knight was waiting for orders.

"The First Combat Corps and its attached mechanized corps—move out at once. Objective: the Holy Spirit Plain."

"Yes, sir!"

After a moment's thought, Gao Yang continued: "This time, I will ride out as well."

"You're going out?" The first to stare wide-eyed was not Philip but Amber, standing at Gao Yang's side. "Didn't you..."

The disgrace of the elves bit off her words midway, just managing to restrain herself from saying "the last time you rode out you dropped dead on the spot and left a psychological scar," but the way her eyes bulged made abundantly clear what she was thinking.

"The situation is different now," Gao Yang could guess what Amber meant to say, but this time he was not the least angry—he only smiled faintly. "As things stand, only by securing victory in this war as utterly as we can do we have any future or hope to speak of."

Then he paused, and gave a soft sigh.

"This kingdom has, after all, become an unmanageable mess—and it's about time a fellow who crawled out of his own coffin came along to tidy it up for them."

Ten minutes later, Philip left the lord's residence; he was bound for the military district, to summon his adjutants and staff officers, to comb through every scrap of intelligence afresh, and to draw up a more thorough and workable plan of advance before setting out north. Amber left the residence as well, to set in order the affairs of the Military Intelligence Bureau and ensure that wartime intelligence, rear-area public sentiment, and every other matter ran in orderly fashion. Gao Yang, for his part, left his study and made his way to Tyre's chamber—

The siren maiden was not at present soaking in the great pool she loved best, but lay coiled along the western side of the room, occupying the vast space ring upon ring; when the door opened, she was gently swaying the tip of her tail and humming an unknown song.

It was no sound a human throat could produce: the melody was threaded through with great quantities of ethereal echo and harmonies like rolling surf. It sounded lovely and mysterious, yet beyond the frequencies a human ear could register there seemed to lie richer, more complex registers audible only to the children of the deep sea.

Gao Yang had come to consult the siren on a matter; he had not expected that she was not only awake but singing—and frankly, it was rare indeed that she did anything befitting her identity as a "siren," rare enough that Gao Yang could not help asking, "I didn't know you could sing?"

"I'm a siren—it's our instinct, all right?" Tyre jabbed the floor with the tip of her tail, producing a thumping sound to express her displeasure at Gao Yang's doubt, and only then asked curiously, "So, you're looking for me about something? With that grave face of yours... it can't be anything small, I'll bet."

Gao Yang nodded and came straight to the point: "About what you mentioned last time—sensing the scent of 'food' to the northeast—I'd like to hear the details."

"Ah..." Tyre breathed a soft sigh, her serpentine tail sliding across the floor as she shifted her bulk little by little until she was before Gao Yang. "So it really isn't anything small..."

...

In the deepest recesses of Fortress Defiance, past the bounds of the material world, past the Shadow Realm that mirrors the world of the living, beside the bastion of Defiance in the Gloom Realm, a body of colossal scale kept its silence as it had through the past thousand years and more.

The giant stag, towering like a small mountain, floated quietly amid shattered floating isles and broken stone; countless warped metal wrecks crisscrossed the space around the divine corpse, sealing it off. About the stag, a layer of radiance replete with a sense of the holy and the mighty drifted faintly, as though it would never be extinguished; and farther off, most of the ancient magical devices within and without Fortress Defiance—devices a thousand years old—had gone dark, leaving only a faint glow of runes flickering slowly in the darkness, keeping company with the body of the giant stag Amorn, fallen these three thousand years.

It seemed this unchanging stillness would endure forever.

But all at once, change came—

Upon that vast divine corpse, a faint light began slowly to flow, and the giant stag Amorn's tightly shut eyes quietly opened a little way.