The Coreless Vanguard - The March to the Ruined City

The three-day march south in

March to the

The three-day march south into the

Gorge wasn’t a hero’s progress.

It was a long, muddy funeral procession.By the afternoon of the third day, the crisp air of the

Crest was a distant memory.

Down in the floor of the basalt rift, the world shrank to twenty yards of visibility.

A relentless, greasy drizzle fell from an overcast sky the color of dirty tin, soaking through

Silas’s heavy woolen coat until the canvas backing smelled like a drowned dog.Silas walked at the very front of the column.He didn’t walk fast, but he didn’t stop.

Every three or four miles, the spatial distortion along the

Gorge floor would shift—a sudden, sickening drop in local gravity that made a man feel like he was stepping into a flooded ditch, followed by a heavy, anvil-like weight that pressed his heels two inches deep into the red clay.Silas’s left knee gave a dull, dry click with every twentieth step.

He didn’t limper, but he adjusted his gait, leaning his upper torso forward, letting the heavy canvas pack on his back act as a counterweight.Ten paces behind him walked the

Phalanx vanguard.There were twelve of them, commanded by a sergeant named

Gort—a man with a jaw like a mason’s hammer and pale, colorless eyes that never seemed to blink.

They walked four abreast in thick boar-hide doublets, their round, iron-bound shields strapped to their left shoulders.

They didn’t talk.

They didn’t sing marching songs or complain about the rain.The only sound from their rank was the rhythmic, metallic rasp of their heavy iron war-picks bumping against their thigh-guards with every stride.CLANK.

CLACK.And their eyes.Whenever

Silas paused to adjust the straps on his pack, he could feel

Gort’s gaze on the back of his neck.

It wasn’t the proud, arrogant disdain of

Vane or the spiteful annoyance of

It was the cold, professional evaluation of a butcher looking at a fat steer in a slaughterhouse chute.They weren’t hiding it.

Phalanx soldiers kept their right hands resting casually on the ash-wood grips of their weapons.

They kept their distance—just far enough behind the

Order’s initiates to let the scholars feel the wind, but close enough that a three-step lunge would put an iron pick through a weaver’s collarbone before a frost-sigil could even catch light.Farther back, huddled together like sheep under a leaking barn roof, walked the six initiates of the

Order.Julian of

Vane was miserable.

His silver-embroidered cloak was splattered to the waist with foul red mud, the fur trim hanging in wet, ratty clumps around his ears.

He spent half his breath cursing the trail and the other half complaining about the dampness ruining his reagent pouches.”Look at them,” Julian muttered to

Marcus, his voice hushed, raspy with a cold he’d picked up on the second night. “They’re crowding us.

Marcus, tell them to fall back ten yards.

Their pack-mules are breathing down my neck.”Marcus didn’t answer.

He just tightened his cloak around his throat, his face gray, his eyes wide and bloodshot as he stared at the back of

Gort’s iron breastplate.Elara

Croft walked near the center of the initiate rank.Her white coat was ruined—stained dark around the hem by the alkali clay—but she kept her posture straight.

Her fingers were wrapped tight around her cobalt-steel focus-wand, her knuckles red from the biting chill.

Silas’s boots gave a heavy, flat thud in the mud ahead, her eyes flicked toward his broad, soot-stained back.She couldn’t see the

Fourteen-Node

It was hidden beneath his coat and shirt, but whenever the wind dropped, a faint, unnatural warmth seemed to radiate off

Silas’s frame.

It cut through the cold drizzle in a way that made the hair on her forearms stand up.It bothered her.

Everything about

Vance bothered her now.He didn’t belong here.

He shouldn’t have survived the

He shouldn’t have survived the deep pits.

A boy with no

Core, no bloodline aura, and no formal geometry should have broken his back over

Vulcan’s anvil within a week.Yet there he was, five yards ahead, stepping through the spatial distortion as if the mountain’s shifting gravity were nothing more than a heavy sack of oats he’d been hired to carry across a yard.”Silas,” Elara called out, her voice thin in the damp air.Silas didn’t stop.

He slowed his stride by half a pace, his head turning slightly. “What?””The ridge ahead,” she said, quickening her step to close the gap, though she stayed three feet away, careful not to let her white coat brush his mud-caked sleeve. “My survey map shows the

Gate should be past that basalt spur.

Phalanx scouts marking the trail?” “No,” Silas said.”What do you mean, no?” Julian snapped from behind her, stumbling over a buried root, his boot squelching deep into a mud-hole. “They have three scouts out front!

They’re supposed to be clearing the path!” Silas stopped.He turned his body slowly, his bad left knee clicking into place.

He looked past

Julian, straight into the colorless eyes of

Gort.The

Phalanx sergeant didn’t stop either.

He brought his twelve men to a halt six feet away, his ironbound boots making a single, synchronized STOMP in the red clay.“Your scouts haven’t dropped a trail-marker in two miles,

Sergeant,” Silas said, his voice flat, raspy, completely unbothered by the giant standing in front of him. “And you’ve been forcing us toward the low creekbed since noon.

The high road is fifty feet up on the basalt shelf.” A heavy, suffocating quiet fell over the gorge.The rain kept falling, pattering softly against the iron bosses of the

Phalanx shields.Sergeant

Gort didn’t draw his war-pick.

He didn’t sneer.

He simply raised his thick, scarred hand and pushed his iron helmet back an inch, revealing a forehead crisscrossed with pale, jagged knife-scars.”The shelf is slick with ice, soot-boy,” Gort grunted, his gravelly voice barely louder than the drizzle.”The mules can’t take the slope.””The mules are carrying two cedar chests of tea and three spare cloaks,” Silas said. “They don’t care about ice.”Julian’s face flushed an indignant, blotchy red. “How dare you—””Shut up,

Julian,” Elara said suddenly, her voice sharp as a broken glass rod.She looked at the low creekbed ahead.

The canyon narrowed there, forced between two sheer walls of black basalt that rose eighty feet straight into the low fog.

The red mud in the creekbed was dark, almost black, and covered in a thin, shimmering skim of oily water.It was a natural funnel.

A place where a squad of three hundred men could be pinned down by ten archers on the rim—or where a team of six mages could be butchered in thirty seconds if the iron shields behind them suddenly decided to stop advancing.Elara looked at

Phalanx sergeant didn’t look back at her.

He kept his colorless eyes fixed on

Silas—on the broad, stooped shoulders of the forge-hand who smelled of charcoal and old blood.”You talk a lot for an apprentice,” Gort said softly.”I carry heavy things,” Silas replied, his right hand resting casually inside his coat pocket, his fingers feeling the cold, jagged edge of his blue-iron dagger resting against his ribs. “You learn to watch where your feet land.”Gort stared at

Silas for three long seconds.

Then, without a word, the sergeant raised two fingers and jerked his hand toward the steep, icy track leading up to the basalt shelf.”Take the high road,” Gort barked to his men. “The soot-boy wants to climb.”The twelve

Phalanx soldiers turned as one man, their iron boots crunching into the frozen gravel of the upper slope.As the column began to haul itself up the steep ridge,

Elara stepped closer to

Her face was pale, a thin thread of cold sweat trickling down the side of her neck despite the freezing rain.”Did you see something in the creekbed?” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the crunch of iron greaves.Silas didn’t look at her.

He turned his eyes back to the foggy trail ahead, his jaw tightening as his broken back molar dug into his inner cheek.”I didn’t see anything,” Silas said, stepping onto the icy rocks. “That’s why it’s a trap.”