The hissing sound of the hybrid animals' paws against the wet gravel was the only metronome dictating the rhythm of that funeral march. Behind the dark wooden vault advancing with indecent haste, the remnants of the once-numerous mercenary horde now resembled a procession of specters. The Subject walked with a steady cadence, attempting to hide the internal turbulence occurring beneath his rags. Beside him, Espetinho moved with the agitation of a cornered animal, his short legs struggling to keep up, and terror was evident in his eyes, which never fixed on a single point. Of the hundred men who had left the square of the porcelain metropolis, only forty-three could still put one foot in front of the other. More than half the contingent had been wiped out in a time span no longer than a candle’s flame, transformed into maneuver mass and consolation snacks for the beasts.
What remained of this group was no longer a combat unit. The gaze of these men had changed; they no longer watched each other for an opportunity to increase personal profit. Greed had been replaced by a survival instinct so primitive it made them almost blind to anything but the tree line to the left or the bamboo slope to the right. The Subject observed the destruction of morale and the severity of the situation, calculating how long it would take for them to be consumed by their own despair.
The air was saturated with the metallic odor of fresh blood still dripping from the carriage wheels and the sickening scent of jasmine emanating from the elite guards. These guards maintained an immaculate formation around the armored vehicle, acting as if the massacre just kilometers away had been merely a hole in the road—an irregularity in the journey. Their icy indifference was the primary contributor to the atmosphere of desolation enveloping the survivors. The atmosphere of fear was almost palpable, an invisible mass compressing the chest of every member of the caravan. Every snap of a dry branch or the sound of an invisible night bird caused the survivors to flinch, their poorly maintained steel weapons raised in random directions. They were prey who had just escaped a trap, aware that the predator was still in the darkness, merely awaiting the moment when exhaustion would overcome adrenaline. The forest's silence was deceptive, where the grinding of the carriage wheels seemed like a signal for any hungry creature patrolling the misty valleys.
The Subject observed the napes of the mercenaries in front of him, seeing how their shoulders were hunched and how their hands trembled around the spear handles. He understood that the next attack was no longer a matter of "if," but "when". The road continued its serpentine path, squeezed by limestone walls that reflected the hissing sound of the hybrids' lizard paws, creating echoes that disoriented the senses after more than twenty-six hours of uninterrupted walking for the men. Even while tired, the Subject had to keep the rear guard vigilant, the weight of the tactical boots hitting the ground. The sun had already begun to sink on the horizon, tinting the mist in deep moss and amber tones; the beauty of this scenery was an insult to the forty-three survivors. Darkness would bring the true test, where the lights of the guards' thin paper lanterns would be mere beacons attracting whatever lived in the heart of that forest.
The transition from the green claustrophobia of the bamboo to the arduous slope of the mountain foothills occurred under a veil of moisture that seemed to drain the residual temperature from the environment. The remaining group of forty-three men left behind the vegetable tunnels, feeling the air grow thinner and colder as the dirt road began its tortuous ascent. The vegetation changed drastically; the hollow colossi gave way to twisted pines and ancient oaks whose branches looked like bony fingers trying to capture the remaining fragments of light. The dark wooden carriage maintained its hissing cadence, the hybrid animals' claws digging into the stony ground with a force suggesting a silent and absolute urgency.
No one dared to close their eyes. The trauma of the forest was etched into the hunched posture of the surviving mercenaries. Their gazes, once filled with homicidal greed directed at each other, now focused obsessively on the tree line and the mist beginning to bubble from the ground. The atmosphere of the vigil was dense; any snap of a branch or movement of foliage caused forty-three pairs of hands to tighten around old metal weapons with a dread bordering on nervous collapse. As they gained altitude, the mist transformed into a physical entity. It was no longer an ethereal phenomenon but an opaque, gray mass that seemed to possess its own weight, reducing visibility to little more than a meter. It was a substance that seeped into armor crevices and saturated linen cloaks, creating an isolation chamber where each man felt swallowed by a white void. The mist was so thick it seemed possible to cut it with a blade, a sensory barrier that made the guards' paper lanterns mere diffuse glows in the growing darkness.
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The elite guards, in their porcelain perfection, remained motionless and silent around the armored vault, their indifference acting as a catalyst for the mercenaries' fear. They were figures of marble and silk ignoring the fatigue of men of flesh, their long-handled spears positioned with a discipline suggesting they did not fear what the mist hid. The mercenary group, conversely, huddled in a disorganized mass, trying to find safety in each other's body heat. This joint vigil lasted for hours of silent tension. The perception of time became elastic; each minute felt like an eternity of waiting for a strike everyone knew would come. The silence was so deep that the men's heartbeats seemed to resonate in the silence of the night—a symphony of anxiety.
Upon reaching the final point of that stage of the ascent, a rocky plateau where the road seemed to hesitate, the mist reached its peak density. It was in that instant that shadows appeared. They did not emerge from the forest as heavy animals; they simply materialized in the mist—figures of superhuman speed that defied the mercenaries' perception. They were agile, silent silhouettes moving like black blurs against the absolute gray—a tide of aggressors that did not emit a single war cry or warning snarl. The Subject noted with surprise that he had not even seen them appear in thermal vision.
The attack was one of surgical and discriminatory precision. While the mercenaries still tried to stand or draw their swords, the attackers had already begun their destruction. However, no shadow approached the mass of ragged men. The targets were exclusively the elite guards. With a fluidity suggesting training, the figures fired short, heavy-tipped arrows and daggers gleaming like ice needles. The shadows focused on vulnerabilities that common human eyes could not detect under the mist, hitting the gaps in the polished plate armor: the space under the chin, the elbow joints, and the visor openings. Each strike was delivered with a force and precision that ignored the sterile defense of the porcelain guards.
The guards fell or retreated as needles and blades found their flesh. The porcelain figures' blood stained the immaculate silk cloaks. The mercenaries watched in shock, paralyzed by the sight of their usual executioners being humiliated by a force they could barely see. As quickly as they had appeared, the shadows vanished, retreating back into the impenetrable mist before even the last of the mercenaries was fully upright. There was no pursuit or looting; most disturbingly, no shadow even touched or looked at the men in rags. The attack was directed exclusively at the elite security cord, leaving behind a trail of wounded guards and silence.
The mist remained dense, hiding the aggressors' whereabouts and leaving the caravan in absolute disorientation. The carriage's movement resumed with a jolt that echoed through the limestone walls of the mountain—a dry, metallic sound that seemed to protest the very existence of that mission. As the reinforced wheels returned to grinding gravel, the silence was broken only by the hissing of the hybrid animals' paws. The elite guards were now pulling short needles and arrows from their flesh with an indifference suggesting an absence of sensitivity, eroding the survivors' last shred of confidence.
The objective of each mercenary had been reduced to leaving that corridor of shadows alive. As the night progressed and the climb grew steeper, the symptoms in the guards became impossible to ignore. On the thermal spectrum, their heat signatures fluctuated chaotically. Their eyes were losing focus, pupils dilating until they swallowed the color. Their respiratory rhythm became a symphony of irregularities; air was pulled in series of rapid, shallow gasps followed by long periods of apnea. Heartbeats were becoming abnormal as pulses accelerated into a frenetic hum only to almost stop. This erratic behavior plunged the mercenaries into absolute nervousness. They huddled near the black carriage wheels, focusing only on the decline of those who should have been their shield.
Tension reached the breaking point when the moonlight was blocked by heavy clouds. One of the elite guards walking on the left side of the carriage stopped abruptly. His body entered absolute rigidity, muscles tensing with such violence that the sound of armor joints groaning was audible. He did not scream but emitted a muffled sound of air being expelled. Before any mercenary could react, the guard fell, his porcelain skull hitting the gravel with a thud. A severe seizure followed; a dense, rosy foam stained with fresh blood began to leak from his mouth, staining the blue silk collar. The other guards did not stop. Instead, the polished armor official gave a sharp signal, and the caravan's pace accelerated even more, the wheels passing inches from the body still twitching in the mud, leaving the companion behind in the mountain's devouring shadows.
The first lights of the third and final day tore through the dense mist. The horizon revealed the final destination of that funeral march: a giant stone portal carved directly into the mountain's bowels. It was a monument of titanic granite rising like an open jaw toward the thin sky. The impenetrable vault stopped with a metallic creak a few meters from the structure's base. The original elite guards were now ruins, most barely standing, bodies trembling under polished armor as rosy foam and blood leaked through the metal gaps. Only the ragged mercenaries remained—a mass of men exuding the acrid odor of fear.
In that instant, seventy men emerged from the other side of the portal in perfect formation. They wore varied silks so fine they seemed to float, and their armor gleamed with an offensive purity. The symmetry of their faces was absolute—a sterile beauty. They were perfectly armed, moving with a synchronicity the exhausted mercenaries could not imagine. They were the pursuers come to deliver the coup de grace. The mission had never been about delivering a cargo safely, but about ensuring no one who had seen the content or the route remained alive to tell the story. The Subject analyzed the miserable situation: these forces had come to kill the survivors or seize the vault. Only one way out remained: to kill them all.
