I lead my Legion away from the riverbank. We march in perfect formation despite our losses and strange fusions. The dual-headed warriors scan both directions simultaneously, providing vigilance no living soldier could match. The three-armed fighters carry extra weapons, becoming mobile armories.

  Each step brings us closer to Haven. The pull grows stronger, that unrelenting compulsion that first drew me from the Field. I feel it in every fragment of my being, in Commander Ikert's bones, in the dragon plates, in the wolf joints that give my stride its measured pace.

  Carida's remains rest secure within my ribcage. Her presence keeps the Arkashoth fragment subdued. That ancient darkness had surged during battle, transforming me into something beyond bone and purpose. Something ancient. Something feared even by corrupted gods.

  The memory lingers.

  For a moment, I wasn't Death's Champion but something older.

  The fragment holds knowledge beyond mortal comprehension, tempting, dangerous. But fully my own. It is not the demon arms I had taken for my own.

  My captain approaches as we clear a hill. His shattered skull dips in silent question, pointing toward distant smoke. Haven? No, too far west. The smoke rises from a settlement between us and our destination.

  I signal a halt with Aeternus. The Legion stops instantly, weapons ready. I extend my senses, borrowed from dragon fragments and enhanced by the Arkashoth shard.

  The wind carries scents of burning flesh and corruption. Not balverines or shadow hounds.

  I think of demons. Of Pan. No, something else.

  Something new.

  My captain awaits orders. I consider our options. Haven needs warning about the Drowned Kingdom's plans. Yet innocent lives might be threatened at the burning settlement.

  I make my decision. Raising Aeternus, I divide the Legion with a single gesture. Two hundred warriors will stay near road to Haven under my captain's command. The rest, the most damaged, the fused ones, will follow me to investigate.

  My captain understands without words. His skull dips once more before he leads the main force northward.

  I turn toward the smoke with my smaller contingent. Whatever corruption spreads there, it will not reach Haven's walls.

  Death's Champion does not rest while darkness walks.

  I lead damaged remaining warriors through sparse woodland. The smoke grows thicker, carrying the unmistakable scent of burning flesh. Not the clean burn of funeral pyres, this reeks of something purposeful.

  Methodical.

  As we approach, I signal for the Legion to spread wide. Three-armed warriors take the flanks, their extra limbs granting them superior balance as they move through the underbrush.

  The dual-headed sentinels scan constantly, their hollow eye sockets missing nothing.

  The settlement appears through thinning trees—a small farming community of perhaps twenty structures. Or what remains of them. Most buildings now stand as blackened husks, flames still licking at support beams.

  But it's not the destruction that stops me. It's the figures moving through the wreckage.

  They walk upright like humans but move with jerking, unnatural motions. Their skin hangs loose, as if borrowed rather than grown. Each bears crude symbols carved into exposed flesh, not demon runes, but something equally corrupt.

  Something that makes the Arkashoth fragment within me stir with recognition.

  The largest structure, a meeting hall, remains mostly intact. From its doorway emerges a tall figure in robes of stitched human skin. Its face is a blank mask of stretched flesh with holes cut for eyes and mouth. In one hand, it carries a staff topped with a cage containing a gem.

  I sense no demonic corruption.

  This is something different.

  The Arkashoth fragment supplies the knowledge: Flesh Sculptors.

  Not undead, not demons, something between.

  I study the settlement through hollow sockets, noting details that mark this as ancient work, not recent corruption. The buildings show centuries of neglect beneath the fresh burns.

  Stone foundations crumble from age, not violence. Whatever settlement once thrived here died long before the flames.

  The robed figure raises its staff, the gem in the cage glowing with sickly yellow light. Immediately, the puppet-people respond, forming perfect rows with mechanical precision. Their movements are too coordinated, these are not mere thralls. Constructs, empty vessels of flesh without will.

  I hold up a skeletal hand, signaling restraint as the two-headed champion beside me erupts in a noiseless growl. The skeletal warrior's twin skulls vibrate with silent rage, eye sockets fixed on the flesh-wrapped figures below.

  The Legion stirs around me. Their bones rattle with anticipation. I feel their hunger, not physical. These warriors died defending humanity. Now they witness mockeries of flesh paraded before them.

  They crave destruction of this abomination.

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  They begin a strange, swaying around a central pile of organs and bones, parts deemed unusable. The discarded remnants of their making.

  The Arkashoth fragment stirs within me, pushing ancient knowledge to the surface. These are not servants of the Demon King. The knowledge flows through marrow. They serve something that predates even the corruption. Something that seeks to reclaim what it believes was stolen.

  My wolf-bone joints flex as I consider our approach. The two-headed champion's jaw hinges open and shut repeatedly, a sign of eagerness I recognize from our battle at the river. The Legion's collective will presses against my own, urging immediate action.

  I raise Aeternus slightly, feeling its weight. The blade resonates with the Legion's purpose. Even it seems eager to cleave through the twisted flesh below.

  I scan the gathering below one final time. Their movements grow more frenzied as the staff-bearer raises the caged gem higher. Yellow light pulses across the clearing, making the flesh-constructs twitch.

  Some things cannot wait for perfect strategy.

  "Attack."

  The word emerges from my jaw, not a thought, not a gesture, but actual sound carried on death's breath through spectral flesh that now covers me.

  The Arkashoth fragment vibrates within me, lending resonance to my command.

  My form shifts on claw and fang. Dragon plates slide over wolf bones as I launch forward. The slope beneath my feet crumbles under sudden pressure. I descend in a blur of bone and purpose, Aeternus held high as arm shifts into tail form and stinger.

  The Legion runs to keep pace.

  My damaged warriors move with singular intent, some hobbling on mismatched limbs, others propelling themselves with multiple arms. Their formation breaks as they follow my charge, spreading outward in a wave of animated bone.

  The flesh-bearer sees us first. Its eyeless face turns upward, mouth opening in a perfect circle. No sound emerges, but the gem flares brighter. The puppet-people snap toward us, abandoning their ritual.

  I hit the ground at full sprint, covering the remaining distance in heartbeats. The first flesh-construct lunges, arms outstretched. I slice through it with Aeternus, feeling only token resistance. The body splits, revealing hollowed insides packed with strange mechanisms and pulsing organs that shouldn't function together.

  Not living. Not dead.

  My Legion crashes into the ranks behind me. Bone meets false-flesh with terrible purpose. The two-headed champion tears through three constructs at once, each skull controlling a different limb before pulling enemies apart in opposite directions. Congealed blood and other things spray across ancient armor as makeshift organs rupture.

  I drive deeper into their formation, Aeternus leading each step. The blade remembers its purpose, to end corruption, to grant final rest to things that should not exist. It cuts through crafted flesh, separating limbs, severing heads, cutting apart and spilling contents that reek of preservation fluids and alchemical waste.

  A three-armed warrior wades into the mix behind me, three different weapons—axe, sword, and mace—creating a zone of destruction that reduces flesh constructs to animated pieces.

  The staff-bearer retreats toward the meeting hall, its robes fluttering as it moves. Five larger constructs form a protective ring around it, their bodies bulkier, reinforced with metal bands and additional layers of stretched skin.

  I signal to a few dual-headed champions. Without hesitation, they peel away from the main battle, flanking wide to cut off the staff-bearer's escape. Three more Legion warriors follow, moving in perfect coordination.

  This, my Legion.

  I push forward, cutting down two more puppets that lunge at me. Their movements grow more desperate, less coordinated.

  Whatever control the gem exerts weakens with distance.

  Yet more of the Flesh Weavers and their creations come forward.

  I launch forward, more horror than warrior.

  The nearest puppet falls apart as wolf jaws snap shut, cartilage exploding between teeth. I toss the ruin aside, already sinking teeth through the next.

  On my back, the tail arm darts forward, the blade cuts clean through, sliding out the puppet's back in a spray of yellow fluid and black syrup. Its body writhes, then crumples across my forearm, heavy and limp.

  A construct lurches, barbed hooks for fingers. My body turns, twists, and Aeternus as stinger sweeps. Bone cuts flesh, cuts cloth, cuts whatever imitation muscle hides beneath. It splits in two, a sack of meat and gears, spilling to the dirt.

  More lurch at me, shoulder to shoulder, false mouths gaping.

  I wade in.

  Claws gouge. Jaws close.

  My tail stabs, rips, stabs again, Aeternus severing torsos from hips, pinning puppets to the earth, then tearing free with a rasp of steel and bone.

  Limbs fly. Pressure pops eyes. My paw crushes a skull, splattering gray and pink along my shin. A puppet's throat opens under fang and gnash, tongue tumbling loose, useless. Warmth runs down my claws, dark, sticky, blood but not really.

  Armor plating splits. I jerk free a chunk of ribbed cartilage and hurl it at another. It bursts through the puppet's chest, the thing still stands, twitching, so I slam it aside with an upswing of my stinger.

  Bone tears clear through spine.

  The ground splits with every lunge. Legs coil, then spring, I'm there, in their midst, jaws clamping over elbows and necks. The Legion piles in behind.

  Aeternus continues, lashing, stabbing, hacking. Each downward stroke splits a face or bursts a ribcage. Puppets break beneath me, pile against my haunches, tangle in my claws.

  It has a cadence, kill, pull free, kill again, riven fakes collapsing under teeth and steel. Their bodies mound around me, walls of meat and split hides.

  Gore coats my claws as I pursue.

  Blood arcs, spattering across my wolfen skull. I relish none of it, I simply continue.

  The staff-bearer breaks for the meeting hall. I watch his movements, his false face, the mask of skin scrunching as he jerks sideways, abandoning the fading lines of his minions. A wave from his staff—yellow light stabs outward, striking two of my Legion. Their bones sizzle on contact, marrow steaming, but they do not fall.

  They lurch onward, dragging what's left.

  I lower myself, claws digging into churned earth.

  I leap.

  He turns, staff raised in defense, a barrier forms, sheets of trembling flesh pulled taut around him. Aeternus tears the first membrane, cutting hide and sinew with sharp, decisive swings.

  The next layer I tear through with my claws and fang, rending the half-formed wall, pressing him against the corner of the ruined threshold.

  The alpha balverine surges forward recognizing prey.

  The apex hunter. The balverine bones vibrate against my dragon plates, my wolf skull's jaw hinges flexing wider than should be possible.

  The staff-bearer tries to scream. His mouth stretches beneath the skin mask, distorting the crude openings cut for lips. The sound catches in his throat, a wet, strangled noise that becomes something else. A prayer perhaps, ancient syllables tumbling out in desperate succession.

  The words are lost in meat as my jaws close around his throat.

  I taste nothing, this form has no true senses, but I feel the resistance of flesh giving way to fang. The balverine shard revels in the kill.

  His staff clatters to the ground. The caged gem pulses once, twice, then dims as its master's lifeblood soaks into the parched earth.

  I release the cooling body, watching it slump against the wall. The balverine fragment settles, satisfied.

  It has served its purpose and it returns to the hollow spaces.

  I turn away, the Legion swarms the hall, clearing the last constructs. The battle's done.

  But the air buzzes now. The pile, the organs and bone mound they circled, spurts out a thin jet of steaming fluid. The ground vibrates, loose stones shifting beneath my paw.

  The ritual has finished.

  A wave of force ripples outward from the central mound. The discarded flesh, the leftover organs, the abandoned bones—all begin to flow together like wax melting under intense heat. The fragments collide, merge, expand.

  Taking shape.

  The Legion pauses in its destruction, hollow sockets turning toward the growing mass. Even my dual-headed champions stop mid-tear, their prey forgotten as something worse emerges.

  The Wall of Flesh stands.