By the time the order came to establish a forward camp, it was already overdue.

  The routes had stretched too far inward for clean return. Half-day marches became full-day pushes. Patrol windows overlapped in ways that left no margin for backtracking before nightfall. What had once been within reach of the main camp now sat beyond it, too distant to pull back without losing ground.

  So the camp moved.

  Not far—just deep enough.

  Tents went up fast between older trees where the canopy ran thick and the ground held firm. Supply lines were shortened, patrol paths redrawn. The new camp wasn’t meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be closer.

  The forest didn’t object.

  Boar pressure intensified almost immediately.

  They weren’t aggressive. Just numerous. Whole sections of slope were churned to mud, root networks torn open and left exposed. Teams drove them off once, then twice, then again before the land had time to settle. Every engagement left the ground looser, footing less certain.

  Fatigue crept in sideways.

  Wrists ached. Shoulders burned. Bruises layered beneath armor where impacts landed in the same places. Lifewards worked fast, resetting fingers, binding cuts, keeping people moving with minimal interruption.

  By the fourth day, encounters began to overlap.

  And then the air fractured.

  The first Glasswing Drake broke from the canopy without warning, its wings catching the light in a sharp, prismatic flash that split vision and depth alike. The second followed a heartbeat later, call tearing through the forest—high, piercing, meant to disorient rather than threaten.

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  “Up—!”

  The warning barely cleared before the first pass.

  Shards of light scattered as the drake banked hard, wing membranes slicing air close enough to shear bark from branches. Leaves exploded outward. Shields came up instinctively, angles snapping into place as training took over.

  Formation held.

  Fire and impact spells were timed low—grounding strikes meant to force descent, not kill. The drakes circled high, glass-veined wings throwing fractured sunlight across the forest floor, every movement spectacular and lethal in equal measure.

  Known threat.

  No panic.

  The second drake dove.

  Its talons raked across the line, tearing into armor and flesh alike before momentum carried it through. Blood sprayed hot across bark and stone. Someone went down hard, breath knocked clean from their lungs.

  Lysara and the senior lifeward were already moving—hands steady, voices low—binding, splinting, stabilizing.

  They recovered fast.

  A weighted spear took the first drake through the shoulder joint as it banked too slow, glass membrane shattering on impact. The sound rang like breaking crystal. The creature screamed, crashing through branches in a storm of leaves and shards before slamming into the ground hard enough to shake the clearing.

  The second drake wheeled back, wounded but still airborne.

  It didn’t linger.

  A final pass tore a shallow trench through the forest floor before it vanished into height, its retreat marked by scattered blood and drifting fragments that caught the light as they fell.

  Silence followed—thick, ringing.

  They counted heads.

  No losses. Several injuries. One fractured forearm. Deep lacerations. Burns where heat had bled through armor.

  While they counted heads, Lysara checked them as they stood, hands on shoulders, wrists, ribs, then nodded them forward.

  The fallen drake lay twisted among the roots, its glassy wings shattered, ichor seeping dark and sticky into the soil. Blood—human and drake alike—spattered armor, hands, faces. Resinous residue clung to skin and cloth, sharp-smelling and difficult to scrape away.

  No one suggested returning to camp.

  It was too far now.

  Instead, they pushed downslope, following the natural drop of the land toward water. The forest thinned as they moved, the air cooling, the scent of resin giving way to stone and wet earth.

  Someone heard it first. Xyrion gave the order, and armor shifted as they broke formation to wash the afternoon’s stench away.