Ten Minutes to Midnight - The Ambush at the Carriage

Plain was suff

Ambush at the

Plain was suffocatingly quiet at midnight.Miles away from

Aethelgard’s suspended bridges and the quiet humming of its iron zip-lines, the southern trade road cut through a marshy depression known as the

Here, the warm basin air didn’t feel gentle; it hung heavy and stagnant, thick with the smell of rotted water-lilies, wet clay, and sulfur fumes rising from subterranean vents.Barnaby “Old

Bear” Vance sat on the driver’s bench of his battered wooden wagon, his knees wrapped in a frayed wool blanket.The two grey horses pulled the carriage along at a sluggish, rhythmic trot, their hooves squelching in the black mud.

A single oil lamp flickered on the front dash, casting long, wavering shadows across the high, yellowing reeds that lined both sides of the trail.Barnaby wasn’t sleeping.

His hands—scratched, thick-knuckled, and permanently stained with tobacco juice and axle grease—rested loosely on the reins.

Underneath his threadbare, faded grey coat, his chest moved in a low, slow cadence.Suddenly, the grey horse on the left gave a short, wet snort and shied sideways, its ears flattening against its skull.Barnaby didn’t pull the reins.

He didn’t call out a command.

His hands simply stopped moving.The swamp went dead silent.

The crickets in the reeds cut off mid-chirp, and the low, bubbling hiss of the sulfur vents seemed to vanish into the damp fog.From the dark thicket twenty paces ahead, five figures glided out onto the mud.They didn’t wear the silk tunics of capital merchants or the heavy plate of imperial road constables.

They were wrapped in high-collared, form-fitting black cloaks made of oiled silk that absorbed the lamp’s amber light.

Each man carried a short, curved sabre sheathed in dark leather, and their faces were obscured by black linen wraps that exposed only their cold, unblinking eyes.A rival academy’s hit squad.

Sent south from the

Domain to clear up any

Ends leaving

Aethelgard’s outer perimeter.”Old man,” the leader in the center said.

His voice was muffled, sounding like dry gravel dragging over slate. “Leave the wagon.

Step into the ditch with your hands behind your head, and you might live long enough to die of old age.”Barnaby looked at the five men.

His scarred, weather-beaten face didn’t register fear.

It didn’t even register annoyance.

He just looked tired—the soul-deep fatigue of a man who had seen this exact same theater played out in forty different ditches over thirty years of border warfare.”I’m sixty-two,” Barnaby said rasply.

His voice was gravelly, unhurried. “My shins ache when it rains, and

I’ve got three miles left before the river inn.

I don’t have time to lie in a ditch.”The leader’s eyes narrowed. “Kill him.

Burn the carriage.”The two men on the flanks moved instantly.They didn’t shout.

They didn’t swing their blades with dramatic flair.

They surged forward across the wet clay with terrifying, silent speed, their boots barely skimming the slop—a high-tier

Weaver’s wind-stepping technique.

Two curved sabres flashed in the lamplight, aimed precisely at

Barnaby’s throat and ribcage.Barnaby didn’t dodge.He reached up with his left hand, grabbed his threadbare grey coat by the lapel, and yoked it off his shoulders in one violent, sweeping motion.Underneath the rags, he wasn’t wearing a linen tunic.He wore a tight, fitted vest of

Armor—forged from overlapping plates of dragon-lizard hide and

Black-Iron rivets, stained the deep, dried-blood crimson of the

Vanguard.CLANG!The assassin’s sabre struck

Barnaby’s exposed shoulder, but instead of cutting through flesh, the blade shattered into three jagged shards of steel with a blinding shower of red sparks.

Aether pulse locked inside the

Red-Scale armor repelled the strike instantly.Before the assassin could recover his balance,

Barnaby’s right hand moved.It wasn’t the slow, clumsy arm of a wagon driver.

It was the blinding, lethal strike of a veteran

Vanguard operative.

Barnaby’s thick fist—enveloped in a dark, crimson light of concentrated

Aether—punched straight through the assassin’s linen face-wrap, shattering his jawbone and driving the splintered skull fragments straight back into the brain.The man collapsed into the mud like a sack of wet grain without making a sound.” Vanguard

Master!” the leader hissed, his voice cracking in sheer, unadulterated panic. “He’s an

Cadre veteran!

Retreat!””Too late for the border,” Barnaby growled.He didn’t draw a sword.

He reached under the wagon bench and yanked out a heavy, iron-headed trench mace—a brutal, blunt instrument three feet long, its head studded with square steel spikes.Barnaby leapt off the bench.

His heavy boots slammed into the mud, sending a wave of black slop ten feet into the air.The remaining four assassins tried to scatter into the high reeds, but

Barnaby moved like a crimson streak through the dark.

Core, locked and crystalline, flared to life, sending waves of heat through his legs.CRACK!The iron mace caught the second assassin mid-stride, crushing his chest cavity and sending him flying sideways into the swamp water.Barnaby spun, the heavy iron weapon whistling through the damp air.

The third man raised his curved sabre to block, but

Barnaby’s strike blew right through the steel blade, caving the assassin’s collarbone and shoulder straight down into his lungs.The fourth man tried to throw a handful of blinding flash-dust, but

Barnaby simply closed his eyes, stepped through the sparkling cloud, grabbed the man by his throat with his bare left hand, and snapped his neck with a quick, sickening SNAP .Silence returned to the

Sinks.The leader of the hit squad was ten paces away, scrambling frantically through the mud toward the safety of the thickets, his black cloak soaked in swamp water.Barnaby didn’t run after him.

He calmly picked up a heavy, steel-tipped iron spike from the wagon’s toolkit, balanced it in his palm, and threw it.The six-inch spike whistled through the night air, passing straight through the leader’s spine and pinning him to a fence post at the edge of the trail.

The man gave one short, wet gasp, his boots twitching twice in the mud before going completely still.Barnaby walked slowly over to the fence post.

He wiped his bloody hands on the leader’s silk cloak, unpinned the iron spike, and wiped it clean on the grass.He looked around at the five corpses scattered across the marshy road.

The whole fight had lasted less than twenty seconds.”Rival academy trash,” Barnaby muttered under his breath, spitting a dark glob of tobacco juice onto the leader’s chest. “They don’t even teach these kids how to check a driver’s wrists before they jump a wagon.”He walked back to his carriage, picked up his threadbare grey coat from the mud, and draped it back over his

Red-Scale armor.He checked his grey horses, patted the lead mare on her nose to calm her down, and climbed back up onto the driver’s bench.

He picked up the reins, popped his whip softly in the air, and continued his long, quiet journey south toward

Oakhaven, leaving the five dead ghosts behind in the black mud of the plains.