The evacuation horns still echoed in the vast underground chambers as the last battalions formed their ranks. Mar'Dun stood at the forefront, his regal presence radiating both power and grim determination. Behind him stretched thousands of Drow—warriors, elders, scholars, craftspeople, and children—organized with military precision into swift-moving units.

  "We move without stopping until the first light," Mar'Dun announced, his voice carrying effortlessly through the caverns. "Pace yourselves, conserve energy when possible, and never fall behind."

  Styx materialized beside him, his dark cloak rippling like liquid shadow. "The surface patrols report clear pathways through the eastern tunnels. The weather grows unstable, as expected."

  Mar'Dun nodded, absorbing this information with the stoicism of a leader who had already calculated the cost this journey would exact. "Then we begin."

  “ALL FORCES, TO MAKHONJWA!”At his signal, the front battalions surged forward with fluid grace. The evacuation had begun not with chaos but with the terrible efficiency of a people who had survived countless catastrophes through discipline and unity.

  DAY ONE

  The eastern tunnels disgorged the Drow forces onto the surface just as twilight faded into night. What greeted them, however, was a sky unlike any they had witnessed in generations.

  Constellations were subtly shifted in ways that defied what always had been. And there, at the eastern horizon, a small dark shape was slowly occluding distant stars.

  "By the ancient pact," whispered Ronya as she stared upward. "They're truly coming."

  Mar'Dun's face remained impassive, though his eyes betrayed a flicker of alarm. "We may have even less time than feared."

  The realization rippled through the gathering forces. What had been planned as a brutal seven-day journey might now need to be compressed further. Every single second mattered.

  "Sixty miles per hour," Styx reminded them, his ancient eyes reflecting the distorted stars above. "Continuously. Over all terrain. With minimal rest. The mathematics are unforgiving."

  Mar'Dun turned to address his people. "We cannot slow. We cannot falter. Each moment spent at less than maximal speed means deaths when the waters rise."

  The Drow needed no further motivation. As one, they began to move across the landscape with supernatural speed. Even by the standards of the occulted bloodlines, the pace they set was extraordinary. Blurs of silver-white and midnight-blue flew across the ground like living moonlight and shadow.

  The front battalions, comprised of the kingdom's elite warriors, established a perimeter that moved with them. Scouts ranged ahead and to the sides, identifying obstacles and plotting course corrections in real-time. The central formations protected the scholars, the young that contained the three Drow Sovereigns, and the elderly.

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  True Lord Styx moved among them like a specter, sometimes at the front, sometimes at the rear, his presence both reassuring and terrifying. His aura—kept carefully controlled but still palpable—served as both warning to potential threats and grim reminder of what awaited if they failed.

  For the first eight hours, they maintained a pace that would have seemed impossible to human observers—a sustained sixty miles per hour across forests, hills, and open plains. Many of their bodies were already pushing beyond even their considerable limits.

  The first casualties came shortly before dawn. An elder whose heart simply gave out mid-stride. A young warrior who misjudged a leap across a ravine and fell to his death. A child whose tiny legs, despite being carried for hours, could no longer support her when set down during a brief water break.

  Each loss was marked with a moment of silence—no more than three heartbeats—before the relentless march continued. There was no time for proper mourning rituals, no opportunity to honor the fallen as tradition demanded. Those who fell were left where they lay, their souls commended to the ancestral stream with hastily whispered prayers.

  By sunrise, the cost was already becoming apparent. Dozens had already fallen behind or succumbed to exhaustion. The terrain ahead grew more challenging—a vast expanse of wetlands where the soft ground would slow their progress considerably.

  "We cannot go around," Mar'Dun determined, studying the maps his scouts had updated. "It would add hundreds of miles to our journey."

  "Then we go through," Styx said simply.

  And so they did. The Drow plunged into the wetlands, their feet barely touching the treacherous surface as they maintained their wicked pace. Some employed ancient techniques that distributed their weight across the unstable ground, while others simply powered through with brute strength, agility, and determination.

  The mud claimed more of them. The elderly, especially, found their strength failing as the sucking terrain demanded more energy with each step. Some of the younger warriors took to carrying not just children but the weakening elders as well, their own magnificent strength now pushed to the limit.

  By midday of the first day, the temperature had risen to unbearable levels. Weather patterns, destabilized by Nibiru's approach, created pockets of extreme heat and flash thunderstorms that materialized without warning. Lightning struck around them with unnatural frequency, the atmospheric discharge attracted to the collective energy of their moving forms.

  Three Drow were lost to direct lightning strikes. Dozens more suffered burns but pushed forward, their injuries ignored in favor of maintaining pace.

  "The weather is adapting too quickly," Styx observed, his form somehow untouched by both mud and lightning.

  Mar'Dun's expression darkened. "Then so must we."

  He moved through the ranks, his aura pulsing subtly—not as a weapon now, but as a tool. Where he passed, the Drow felt momentarily lighter, the crushing fatigue briefly lifting as his power countered Earth's gravitational pull on their exhausted bodies.

  He knew he couldn’t sustain his emanation in this way for more than an hour at most, but it was a testament to his immense control that he could even initiate this effect while continuing the punishing pace. Even Styx seemed impressed, though he showed it only in the faintest narrowing of his ancient eyes.

  Night fell again, bringing no relief. Nocturnal predators, their instincts distorted by the cosmic disturbances, grew unusually aggressive. Packs of wolves and other beasts, driven by inexplicable terror, attacked the moving columns despite the overwhelming numbers of the Drow force.

  The warriors dealt with these threats as efficiently as they could, never breaking stride as they dispatched creatures that would normally know better than to challenge them. But each engagement, however brief, exacted a toll in energy that none could afford to spend.

  As the first day closed and the second began, nearly a fifth of their ranks had already been lost or left behind.

  And they were not yet halfway to the mountains.