The cart creaked along the dirt road, wooden wheels complaining every time we hit a rut. Katar sat at the front, reins loose in his hands, eyes fixed forward. He had probably decided that a conversation about gods was none of his business.

  Shingo was sprawled out beside him, dead to the world, the aftermath of his morning run. Every bump made his head thump softly against the side of the cart, and somehow he slept through all of it. He had already lost a few pounds and was starting to grow more muscle.

  Ja’a sat cross-legged near the back, stylus scratching steadily across her notebook. She was working on something that looked complex and hadn’t looked up once.

  I was riding next to Vena, my copy of History of the Holy Faith by Gray Crownerson open in my lap. Vena sat close beside me, looking at the book over my shoulder.

  I had been ranting about the Lord Unholy for a few minutes now. Sadly, I also had to explain concepts like grooming and power imbalance in relationships to an audience who barely knew anything about social studies.

  “I don’t like him,” I said with certainty.

  Vena frowned. “I don’t think he’s evil.”

  Raik, Kan, and Calr had also leaned in just a little, casually listening in curiosity.

  “He isn’t good either,” I said.

  Vena frowned deeper. “You said the word grooming earlier. I still don’t understand how that applies. When they met in the past, they were both nineteen.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “That part, by itself, isn’t grooming.”

  “There was also a power imbalance on the other side,” Calr added thoughtfully. “She trained him when he was fifteen to eighteen.”

  “Right,” I said, pointing at him. “That also muddies the waters.”

  “But her past self,” Vena insisted, “the one who fell in love with him, she didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I agree,” I said quickly. “Her past self is basically blameless.”

  Vena blinked. “Then why are you upset?”

  I sighed and leaned back against the cart’s rail. “Because time travel breaks human ethics in half and then sets them on fire.”

  Raik chuckled. “Thank goodness we don’t have a time affinity in the Bloodline Realm.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying again. “Imagine this from Laurel’s perspective. She meets the Forgotten Knight first. Falls in love with him. Fights beside him. Then loses him.”

  Vena nodded slowly.

  “Then, a thousand years later, she meets a kid who looks just like him. Same face. Same soul shape. She assumes they must be related somehow. A descendant, maybe, or a reincarnation. She trains him, protects him, and basically raises him.”

  “That part is fine,” Vena said. “She had no bad intent.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Assuming no malice, nor any hidden desire to recreate her lover. She separates the two of them in her head.”

  Calr frowned. “But he doesn’t.”

  “Nope,” I said. “To him, she’s always Laurel. His youthful crush, his teacher, a woman he loves. The woman who loved him while not knowing he was a time traveler.”

  Vena went quiet.

  “The Lord Holy-Unholy at the end,” I continued, “isn’t the boy she trained. Not to her. He’s the Forgotten Knight, her past lover, restored. That’s how she justifies it to herself.”

  “He, however,” I finally concluded, “I don’t know how he can justify his actions to himself.”

  “And that’s why he’s Unholy,” Vena said softly, nodding. “Selfish and self-centered. He bends the world so he never has to let go of his love for her.”

  Kan, who had been quiet this whole time, finally said, “The man you love doesn’t need to be perfect. He only needs to be there for you when you need him the most.”

  Raik very deliberately looked away, pretending he hadn’t heard a thing.

  How cute, those two were good for each other.

  The cart stopped near a shallow stream, the burdrasses snorting softly as Katar pulled on the reins. I slid the book back into my bag of holding and stretched my legs, joints popping in relief.

  The boys, minus Shingo, who was still dead asleep, unlatched the three-hooved animals and led them down to the water. The animals drank greedily, muzzles breaking the surface with noisy splashes.

  I noticed we weren’t alone in this watering spot.

  A small caravan had stopped a short distance downstream, doing the same. Three carts, bigger than ours, their wood stained dark from long use, dragged by ox-looking beasts. A handful of merchants stood nearby, watching the road more than the water. Cautious, even if none of them looked much like fighters.

  I wandered over and struck up a conversation with the youngest of them, who looked barely older than Vena. He had some white dust in his hair and worry in his eyes.

  “You are heading toward Ectamel?” I asked.

  “No, from it,” he corrected. “We’re bound for Hano.”

  He let out a breath. “Did you notice golems while traveling the road?” he asked, looking worried. ”Some of the traveling merchants were attacked by one. And lost some of their cargo.”

  “Just one,” I said casually. “A metal golem. We took care of it.”

  His shoulders sagged in visible relief. “Thank the Holy.” He waved me over. “Come, you should tell the caravan leader.”

  I followed him alongside the cart until he called out to a sturdier man with a trimmed beard and weathered hands.

  “Ranear! They cleared the road.”

  The leader looked me over, then nodded. “You have my thanks, miss. Every delay costs us coins.”

  “What are you hauling?” I asked.

  Instead of answering directly, Ranear gestured to the nearest cart. “Show her.”

  The young merchant had a grin on his face as he climbed up and pulled back the tarp.

  Rows and rows of bones lay stacked inside.

  They were uniform; femurs, all of them. Perfectly cleaned, same length, and same thickness, like they were forged from the same mold or 3D-printed using the same design file.

  They were laid out with unsettling precision, like someone had copied and pasted the same bone over and over again.

  I blinked.

  Ranear laughed at my expression. “That look never gets old.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Undead dead zone,” he said. “Hordes of skeletons keep attacking Ectamel every day. And we take some of the bones to Hano for some profit.”

  “What for…?” I prompted.

  “Fertilizer factories,” he said matter-of-factly. “Bones are added to all the organic material they throw in the compost pails.”

  It made sense. Bone is rich in phosphorus, which is needed for good fertilizer.

  Another merchant chimed in from behind us. “We’ve also got bone dust and a crate of death-affinity monster cores in the second cart.”

  “Monster cores for the decay magic in the fertilizer factory, too, right?” I asked.

  “Yep, that’s how Hano keeps grain cheap,” Ranear continued. “Ectamel keeps Hano fertile. Life from death and all that.”

  That was a Holy saying, if I wasn’t mistaken. They were probably Holy Faithful, especially if you looked at the rosary necklace with a jar of golden sand attached to his belt, which was ironic for someone dealing in bones, but hey, everyone must make a living somehow.

  I looked back at the bones. At how clean they were. How standardized. They probably never lived in the first place; some sort of spawned monster, just like the golem Kan fought.

  “Efficient,” I said.

  “Necessary,” he corrected. “Without this, bread prices would triple, and the poor would starve first.”

  The stream burbled beside us, clear and innocent, completely indifferent to the economics of death.

  I nodded slowly. “Safe travels.”

  “And to you,” Ranear said. “If you’re headed into Ectamel… keep your weapons close. Undead are always nearby.”

  I walked back to our cart, thinking of other uses of bone and whether I could contribute something useful using Earth knowledge. Sadly, I came up short.

  We heard Ectamel before we saw it. The road was clear from monster undead under the blue sun of the Waterday. Yet a soft sound of chimes drifted on the wind, faint and constant, like distant glass brushing against glass. At first, I thought I was imagining it, then the road curved, the land dipped slightly, and the city rose into view.

  It wasn’t really a city.

  It was a fortress.

  Ten-meter-high walls dominated the landscape, thick and unbroken, formed from a pale material that looked like cement at a distance but lacked the sharp uniformity of poured stone. Up close, the surface had a faint organic texture, smooth in some places, fibrous in others.

  “Is that bone?” I asked.

  Raik nodded. “Yeah. The combination of earth and death affinity makes for strong bone mages.”

  He gestured toward the wall. “It’s not as common or as flexible as wood manipulation, but in Ectamel, where bone is abundant, it becomes another story.”

  Now that I knew what I was looking at, I couldn’t unsee it. The wall wasn’t carved from stone. It was grown, layered, and reinforced in places where stress would gather, thicker around corners and gatehouses, thinner but denser along straight stretches. Pale white, almost bleached, as if the entire city had been scrubbed clean by the sun.

  Silver bells hung everywhere.

  They were small, no bigger than my thumb, strung along the wall in dense lines, hundreds of them swaying gently in the breeze. Each movement produced a soft chime, overlapping into a constant whisper of sound that never fully faded.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Guards paced the ramparts above, silhouettes against the sky, their armor muted and practical, with no banners or bright colors. Everything here felt restrained and purposeful.

  “It’s to ward against ghosts and wraiths,” Calr explained when he noticed my stare. “Silver is one of their few weaknesses.”

  The city had multiple gates, which struck me as strange. Gates were weaknesses in defensive structures, points where walls had to break continuity. Yet here, there were many of them, evenly spaced around the perimeter.

  Most were sealed.

  Only two were open. One for entry. One for exit.

  “There are no inns outside the walls,” I murmured.

  “No farms either,” Raik confirmed. “Everything stays inside.”

  That alone told me more about Ectamel than the walls ever could. This wasn’t a city that expanded outward. Always ready for siege. Always assuming tomorrow might be worse than today.

  We lined up behind a food merchant, his cart stacked high with sacks of grain and dried root vegetables. No one complained about the wait. Guards inspected every cart thoroughly, checking seals, tapping crates, and watching for movement that shouldn’t exist.

  When our turn came, we passed through the first gate.

  The space beyond it wasn’t the city.

  It was a courtyard.

  Wide, bare, and surrounded by high walls on all sides, with narrow slits cut into the bone above. The ground was packed hard and smooth, sloped subtly inward. I could picture it instantly, filled with undead, trapped, funneled, and torn apart from every angle.

  A killing zone.

  If the outer wall fell, nothing would pass through this space alive.

  The second gate opened only after the first was sealed behind us.

  Beyond it, Ectamel finally revealed itself.

  The buildings were utilitarian and squat, built low and close together, forming tight streets that offered little open space. Everything shared the same pale coloration as the walls, bone-white and sun-bleached, broken only by dark doors, iron shutters, and the occasional splash of cloth marking a shop or guildhall.

  At the far edges of the city stood two massive windmills, positioned opposite each other like sentinels. Their blades turned steadily, slow and relentless, day and night. Both of them were also white, their frames reinforced with bone plating, designed to keep working even under attack.

  The air smelled faintly of dust, oil, and the dry scent of chalk.

  This was the first place that felt like it could never exist on Earth. Even the lake-based village we passed, I could imagine existing somewhere, but not this.

  This was a city that had learned how to live next to an endless onslaught of undead.

  But looking at the people’s faces, they seemed happy and cheerful despite the setting. Children played in the streets without adult supervision. I saw civilians walking on top of the inner defensive wall next to the ever-watchful guards. The walls were wide enough for two carriages and were apparently a good spot for couples to go for a promenade. And everyone had a small silver bell attached to their belt, chiming softly with movement.

  We made our way to the freelancer guild building near the center of the city.

  Compared to Verraden, the difference was almost embarrassing. There, the “guild branch” had been little more than a tavern run by a retired freelancer whose wife still remembered enough paperwork to keep things semi-legal. Here, Ectamel’s guild hall was unmistakably official.

  The building was broad and solid, its bone-white exterior reinforced with darker bands of metal at the corners. Wide doors stood open, letting warm light spill out into the street along with the smell of cooked food and cheap alcohol.

  Inside, several freelancer teams were already seated, some drinking, others arguing quietly over maps spread across tables, armor leaned against chairs, and weapons rested within arm’s reach.

  A large mission board dominated one wall, thick with parchment. Rows upon rows of postings, neatly categorized and regularly updated. Someone had gone through the effort of organizing them by threat level, time of day, and risk of casualty.

  We took a table close enough to the front desk to hear without obviously eavesdropping.

  Raik stepped up to the receptionist, a woman with tired eyes and a sharp posture. She listened as he explained the one-month, thirty-mission challenge, mentioning that Head Receptionist Nada had specifically recommended Ectamel for teams looking to build experience quickly.

  Her expression shifted at that.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, already standing. “I’ll call in Captain Osar.”

  She glanced back at us. “You can sit and grab a drink.”

  Raik nodded and returned to the table. A few minutes later, a man joined us.

  He looked to be in his early thirties, with white hair cut short and tied back loosely at the nape of his neck. His movements were relaxed, unhurried, the kind of ease that came from long familiarity with danger. His eyes were sharp, though, missing nothing as he pulled out a chair and sat backward on it, resting his arms across the backrest.

  Raik rose slightly as he introduced us.

  “This is Katar, swordsman. Ja’a, soul seer. Calr, marksman. Kan, crowd control. Shingo, frontline. Alice, teleporter. And Vena, a holy cleric.” He paused, then added, “I’m Raik Agame. I lead the team.”

  Captain Osar’s gaze flicked from face to face as names were spoken.

  “You have an impressive team,” he said at last, nodding once. “Sit and relax, young Agame. I’m Osar. Osar of Clan Lore.”

  Another of Nada’s relatives.

  “I’m divergent,” Osar continued casually. “The Lore clan usually produces water manipulators. I am not.”

  He lifted one hand, palm up, as white crystal formed in his hand.

  “I have salt magic.”

  I blinked. “Salt magic?”

  “Yep.” He smiled faintly at my reaction. “Water and earth affinity. For some people, it manifests as waves, sand, or mud. For me, it crystallized into salt.”

  He shrugged. “My family was… disappointed. They couldn’t imagine how it would ever be useful.”

  Katar tilted his head. “Is it?”

  Osar’s smile widened, just a little. “Here, it’s perfect.”

  He leaned forward, elbows resting on the chair back.

  “Salt is brutal against incorporeal undead: ghosts, wraiths, anything that doesn’t truly have a body. It disrupts their cohesion.” With a flick of his fingers, grains of salt shimmered briefly in the air. “Because of that, I advanced fast, pushed my power further, and learned to weaponize every aspect of my magic.”

  Kan nodded slowly. “Makes sense they’d put you here.”

  “No one put me here,” Osar laughed. “When you’re born divergent in a bloodline clan, you need to find a place for yourself.”

  Raik grimaced, then nodded in confirmation. He brought the conversation back to why we were here.

  “What do you recommend we do?” Raik asked the more experienced freelancer.

  Osar gestured around the hall. “In Ectamel, there are two kinds of work. Day missions and night missions.”

  He tapped the table once. “Day missions are outside the walls. You head into the undead zone to eliminate specific threats or harvest resources; special aberration monsters, dense mana plants, maybe crystalline bone growths. The undead are less active under sunlight, slower, less coordinated. So it’s mostly safe-ish.”

  Then his expression hardened.

  “Night missions are defense. The undead come in waves. You hold the walls, plug breaches, respond to flare signals, and make sure the city is still standing when morning comes.”

  “And if it isn’t?” Calr asked quietly.

  Osar met his gaze. “It will be. It has endured for a thousand years. With you or without you, it’s not falling now.”

  Osar straightened and exhaled. “If you’re serious about the thirty missions, Ectamel will give you more work than you can comfortably handle. And I’ll make sure to slip in a good word for you in my report.”

  He glanced at Vena, then at Shingo, still half-asleep at the table.

  “Thank you, Captain Osar,” Raik said, bowing slightly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the captain waved it off. “Why don’t you observe a city siege first, then decide whether you want day work or night missions?”

  We stood atop the inner wall, looking out over the gatehouse below.

  We weren’t the only ones.

  The tops of the gatehouses had been deliberately widened into viewing platforms, complete with low railings and smooth stone flooring. Civilians were already gathering there in small groups, some leaning against the wall, others sitting casually on blankets they had brought with them. A few even had baskets of food.

  It took me a moment to process that.

  This city was about to be besieged by the undead, and people were treating it like an evening outing.

  Children ran between adults, chased away from the edge with practiced tugs and half-hearted scolding. Couples sat shoulder to shoulder. An elderly man poured tea from a metal kettle, the steam drifting lazily into the night air.

  A flag rose above the central tower.

  Green.

  A collective murmur rippled through the crowd.

  “Only green,” a preteen boy groaned beside us, his arms crossed dramatically. “I was hoping for orange.”

  “No, you don’t,” his older sister said immediately, flicking the back of his head. “You remember last time. When the orange flag turned red, and they made us leave the viewing area?”

  The boy scowled. “That was still cool.”

  “That was terrifying,” she corrected. Then she noticed me watching them.

  I hesitated before asking, “Is it safe to assume the flag indicates the severity of the attack?”

  She nodded easily. “Green means light pressure. Yellow means either something big or something strange. Orange is both.” She grimaced. “Red means evacuate to the center of town.”

  “You’re new here, right?” She smiled again, bright and excited. “You’re in for a surprise, then. This is way better than Hano’s arena. You get to see real freelancers going all out, no holding back, no worrying about hurting an opponent.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I knew that freelancers are treated like celebrities, but I never expected people to want to watch them in action.

  The bells along the wall chimed softly as the wind shifted.

  About thirty minutes after dusk on Waterday, one of the longer nights, the undead appeared.

  At first, it was just movement at the edge of vision. Pale shapes emerging from the dark, entering the lit area near the wall one after another, until the land beyond the outer wall seemed to crawl.

  Skeletons.

  They walked straight toward the walls without hesitation, disappearing from view as they pressed close to the base. Soon, the sound reached us; dull, rhythmic impacts, like a thousand sticks striking stone in uneven time. Rusted weapons scraped and cracked against bone-reinforced gates.

  It reminded me of infantry units attacking a structure in old strategy games.

  Mostly ineffective.

  The outer wall didn’t even shudder. The bone structure absorbed the blows, thick and solid, layered to resist exactly this kind of pressure. The skeletons’ weapons, rotted spears and chipped swords, barely did any damage.

  “Each skeleton is maybe three to five SB,” Ja’a scoffed. “Weaklings.”

  “Numbers are a strength all on their own,” Raik replied, shaking his head.

  What surprised me was what didn’t happen.

  The archers didn’t fire.

  The mages didn’t cast.

  No one rained destruction down from the walls.

  Instead, they waited.

  The undead continued to gather until roughly fifty had clustered near the outer gatehouse closest to us. Packed tight. Pressed forward by those behind them.

  Then I noticed movement in the courtyard between the two defensive walls.

  A gate opened.

  Five freelancers stepped into the killing field.

  Two were melee fighters, heavily armored, weapons already drawn. The third moved differently, lighter, lower, constantly shifting position. A rogue of some sort. The remaining two stayed back: mages.

  The inner gate slammed shut behind them.

  The outer gate creaked open just long enough to let the skeletons spill inside.

  Then it closed again.

  The undead surged forward.

  The first clash was brutal and fast.

  The front-line fighters met the skeletons head-on, shields slamming into bone, blades flashing in tight arcs. They didn’t overextend, moving in a practiced rhythm, creating space for each other. The rogue vanished into motion, darting in to shatter knees, sever spines, and disappear before counterattacks could land. Hit and run.

  The first mage raised a hand, and frost raced across the ground, locking skeletons in place mid-step. The second mage followed immediately, stone spears erupting upward, pinning enemies like insects on display.

  Skeletons shattered, bone flew, and mana flared briefly, then faded as efficiently as it had been spent.

  It was clean, methodical, and almost boring.

  Within minutes, nothing moved.

  The crowd cheered the freelancers, calling them by name as they stepped back into the gatehouse.

  Workers entered the courtyard immediately after, dozens of them moving with practiced efficiency. They gathered bones into carts, collected death monster cores, swept fragments into piles, clearing the killing zone until it looked untouched.

  “Those undead,” Vena frowned, “they feel unholy.”

  “Isn’t all death-related magic unholy?” Ja’a asked.

  “No,” Vena said. “They feel like ancient evil. Not just elemental bloodline death mana. But something mythic, like Izair’s Sword “Malifice”.”

  Katar scowled at Izair’s name, still wanting some payback against the swordsman.

  “Last we heard, Todor and Izair ran into the undead zone when they escaped,” I said. “Do you think he’s still out there?”

  “Probably not,” Raik replied without hesitation. “That place isn’t safe, even for the likes of them.”

  I looked westward, toward the unseen heart of the undead zone, where the land itself seemed to drink in the dark.

  “How does a place like that even come to exist?” I asked.

  Raik exhaled slowly. “You really don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “This is where Merumom fell,” he said. “Lord of Bones. The ancient Dravac. The pinnacle of Death mana.”

  “He was slain here,” calr added, eyes fogging over, “slain by your ancestor, Kitchi Agame, First of His Name.”

  I turned toward him.

  “Proving once and for all,” Calr continued, voice quiet but reverent, “that even a Dravac could die.”

  Raik nodded. “Merumom didn’t just die here. He bled death into the land. Too much power, released all at once.”

  I swallowed. “So the undead…”

  “They're just the side effects,” Raik said. “Too much death mana…”

  The discussion was interrupted by the gate opening again.

  Another wave entered.

  Sixty this time.

  The crowd leaned forward as the same band of freelancers took their positions once more.

  The bells chimed.

  And Ectamel did what it had clearly done a thousand times before,

  turning the remnants of an ancient Demon Lord into industry and entertainment.