As soon as Kai commanded it, it felt like the world itself caught on fire.

  For a heartbeat, there was silence—almost as if the fort drew in one last breath.

  Then everything erupted.

  Every mana cannon across Fort Kaelgrim exploded at once. Not one after another, but all together, like the entire fortress had been turned into a single giant bomb. A roar louder than thunder ripped across the land, shaking the hills and cracking the sky itself. The shockwave hit so hard that Kai felt it even through his wind armour.

  The walls of the fort buckled instantly. Towers bent as if someone had pressed down on them with a giant hand. Stone didn’t just break—it melted, glowing bright orange before bursting outward in chunks.

  The soldiers closest to the cannons never even screamed. They were swallowed by fire in a single flash. The ward surrounding the fort flared, flickered, and shattered like a glass bowl dropped from the heavens, falling apart into glittering pieces of mana that vanished before touching the ground.

  Up in the sky, the kraels shrieked in panic. The explosions lit their wings from below, throwing their shadows across the clouds. Some were caught directly in the flames. Their feathers ignited and the beasts crashed in spirals, leaving smoking trails behind them. Others fled the moment the first cannon blew up, especially the alpha krael, which let out a terrified roar and shot away from the fort like a streak of black lightning.

  Kai watched it run for only a second before turning his focus back to the fort.

  Flames burst out from every opening—windows, cracks, gatehouses—and thick smoke rolled out, swallowing everything. He could feel heat even from where he hovered above the wall, heat strong enough to sting his face.

  Then he saw the wave of fire rushing outward, pouring toward him and his army like the breath of a volcano.

  The earth wall they had made wouldn’t hold. Not even for a minute.

  Kai’s instincts screamed at him.

  He snapped his arm out and pulled mana into a spell, shaping it fast enough that his fingertips burned. A solid sheet of ice surged up in front of the wall, thick enough to block a dragon’s breath. The next second, the flames slammed into it.

  A deafening hiss tore through the air as fire and ice collided. Steam exploded outward, blasting across the hillside and covering everything in blinding white fog. The shock of it rattled Kai’s bones.

  “Get back!” Kai shouted. “The explosion’s bigger than I expected! Run as far as possible!”

  He didn’t turn to see if they heard him.

  He poured more mana into the ice wall to keep it from collapsing instantly, then pushed wind outward, sweeping the smoke aside so his soldiers wouldn’t get blinded.

  Only once he sensed they were safely outside the blast range did he release the spells and shoot higher into the sky, rising above the steam cloud.

  From there, he finally saw the full destruction.

  Fort Kaelgrim no longer looked like a fort. It looked like something pulled straight from the depths of hell.

  Huge sections of the walls were simply gone, replaced with fiery craters. The central keep had folded in on itself, its stones melted together like wax dripping from a candle. Flames roared where courtyards once stood, shooting up so high that they touched the clouds. Parts of the inner buildings were nothing but glowing rubble. The entire structure trembled, ready to collapse at any moment.

  Even from far above, Kai felt the heat pulse like the world’s angriest heartbeat.

  The trap had worked a little too well.

  Screams still poured out of the ruined fort, rising and falling through the smoke like echoes from a nightmare. Men were scrambling everywhere—some running blindly through the fire, others dragging themselves over shattered stone, and others were simply crying for help. Kai hovered for a breath, wind swirling around him, and hoped—truly hoped—that Palman had run the moment he got the chance. Kai did not want his ally dying in this inferno.

  He doubted Thalric or Duke Raktor were alive after that blast. The centre of the fort looked as if a hell demon had spawned right there. But even if the commanders were dead, the common soldiers didn’t deserve to burn. The ones standing near the walls might have died in an instant… but hundreds more had been stationed deeper inside.

  Kai tightened the layers of his wind armour until they hummed around him like a living shell, and then he dove straight into the fire and smoke.

  Heat slammed into him the moment he crossed the boundary of the ward that used to protect Fort Kaelgrim. Half of the structure had collapsed downward, forming a jagged pit full of fire. Roofs had caved in. Towers were leaning aside like drunken giants, ready to crumble. Entire floors had torn loose and hung suspended in the air by nothing more than broken beams.

  Through the flames, Kai spotted movement—shapes clinging to the edges of a shattered floor where the outer wall had completely fallen away. Soldiers, six of them, hanging by their fingertips over a drop of twenty meters. They screamed as the stone under their hands started to crumble.

  Kai reacted instantly.

  He formed a spell structure. A heartbeat later, tendrils of wind snapped outward like invisible ropes, coiling around each soldier’s waist. They cried out—some in fear, some in relief—as Kai lifted them from the collapsing floor.

  He carried them out of the flames, flying far from the burning fort before lowering them gently onto the grass. As soon as their boots hit the ground, all six stared at him with wide, disbelieving eyes. Some looked terrified. Others looked grateful. None of them seemed to understood how the man they had been ordered to kill was now saving their lives.

  Kai didn’t stay to explain.

  He shot back into the smoke.

  More sections of the fort were collapsing with the deep, angry groans of dying stone. Every second counted. The screams guided him—sharp cries, coughing, men calling for help through the roar of fire. Kai swooped from place to place, pulling survivors from broken staircases, using bursts of wind to blow away falling debris, catching men mid-fall before they hit the ground.

  He even found a few nobles—lucky fools—who had survived because they hadn’t been stationed on the walls. Kai lifted them out of the burning corridors too, though his voice sharpened once he got them to safety, “Stay still. Don’t run. My forces won’t hurt you unless you try something stupid.”

  They nodded quickly, their faces pale under the soot.

  But even as he moved to save more people, the fire wasn’t slowing. It clawed across every inch of the fort, eating through wood and melting stone. Thick black smoke choked the air until even Kai struggled to see.

  So he changed tactics.

  He raised both hands and shaped another spell. Sheets of solid ice formed in the air above the fort, huge slabs the size of rooftops. Then—using heat from the surrounding fires—Kai forced the ice to melt in a controlled stream.

  A cold rain poured down over the fort. Hissing. Splattering. Cutting through smoke. Clearing his vision enough to spot the next pocket of survivors.

  It wasn’t perfect, and the fort was far too large for one man to save everyone.

  But Kai wasn’t planning to leave until the flames died or his mana ran dry.

  Slowly, the screaming died down. One by one, Kai pulled the injured out of the wreckage, pouring his own potions down the throats of those whose breaths were shallow and fading. Every time someone coughed weakly or blinked awake, a knot in his chest loosened. But soon, there were no more voices calling for help. No more movement under the broken stone.

  Only fire… and silence.

  He floated down toward the ruined heart of the fort, heading for the place where Thalric and Duke Raktor had stood last. Flames still licked at the collapsed battlements, turning stone into glowing embers. Kai raised a hand, sweeping aside the heat with a burst of wind, then landed on a mound of shattered rock.

  He inhaled slowly and stretched out both hands. Lines of light snapped into place as a spell structure formed—[Galegrasp], a fourth-circle wind spell. The air in front of him thickened, twisted, then shaped itself into two enormous translucent hands.

  The moment the spell activated, a harsh blast of wind threw dust and soot at him, whipping his hair into a tangled mess. Kai ignored it. His focus narrowed to the rubble.

  Piece by piece, the giant wind-hands lifted stones—some the size of wagons—and placed them to the side with careful precision. A single wrong move could bring the whole broken structure crashing down. Parts of the fort still burned, and the remaining walls trembled, as if one more shift might send everything collapsing into itself.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Kai worked slowly, breathing steadily, moving each slab as gently as if it were glass. Ten minutes passed like that, the world reduced to fire, wind, and falling dust.

  Then a body appeared.

  A soldier—burned, crushed, unrecognizable except for the uniform. Kai’s throat tightened. He used one of the wind-hands to lift the corpse and place it respectfully on clear ground. Another body followed. And another. Most were common soldiers… men who had simply followed orders.

  He set each of them down gently, refusing to toss them aside like broken debris. They will all get a funeral, he told himself. It was the least he owed them. Whatever side they had been on, they had still been men who fought because they were ordered to, and deserved peace in death.

  He kept going, making a quiet pile of the dead, the guilt settling heavier on his shoulders with each one he found. He hadn’t hesitated to destroy the fort. It had been necessary. War always demanded choices like this.

  But knowing those truths didn’t make the weight any easier.

  He kept clearing bodies one after another, the wind-hands moving like extensions of his own arms. The air around him grew heavy with the smell of smoke and scorched stone, and every corpse he lifted added a quiet weight to his chest. Some were burnt beyond recognition, others still had shocked expressions.

  Minutes passed—long, dragging ones that blurred together as sweat mixed with soot on his forehead.

  Then he froze.

  Half-buried under a slab of stone, slumped upright as if still guarding the wall, sat Duke Raktor.

  A jagged metal rod jutted clean through his ribs, pinning what remained of his torso to the stone. The upper half of his skull had been crushed, the edges blackened by the explosion’s heat. For a moment, Kai simply stood there, staring. The duke’s death had been instant—the kind that didn’t even allow a man to scream.

  He let out a slow exhale and guided the wind-hands to lift the corpse. “You were too close to the cannon…” he muttered, mostly to himself. A pointless observation for a man who would never hear it. Raktor had chosen his battlefield, chosen his side, and Kai doubted he had even realised the blast coming before it consumed him.

  He set the duke’s body beside the pile. House Raktor would receive it. Whether they would want revenge or submit to him afterward… that was a problem for another day.

  Kai turned back to the wreckage, pushing deeper into the collapsed section. As he shifted aside more stone, a few other noble corpses began to surface—recognisable faces turned pale and dust-covered, armour cracked open like eggshells. He moved them aside as well, but none made him stop.

  Until he reached the bottom.

  There, half-buried under a ridge of burned timber and rock, lay Thalric.

  Kai felt something twist inside him—not hesitation exactly, but a sudden jolt of disbelief. He stepped off the rubble, letting the wind-hands fade, and dropped to the ground beside the fallen prince.

  Thalric’s body was a ruin. Cuts deep enough to show bone, gashes still bleeding sluggishly, armour warped as if something had crushed him with a giant fist. Yet… the man’s chest rose. Barely, but enough.

  Impossible, Kai thought until he noticed the faint glow from Thalric’s rings, the subtle shimmer on the shattered pieces of armour still clinging to him.

  So he came wrapped in every artifact he owns…

  The defensive enchantments must have held long enough to keep him alive in the middle of an explosion that should have turned him into ash. Fear was a powerful motivator, and Thalric—always terrified of losing—had clearly worn every protection he could find.

  Kai crouched closer, brushing debris away from the man’s shoulder.

  Against all odds, Thalric lived.

  It was a good deduction by him to think that Kai would directly target hjn, but Thalric had never thought that he could pull off something like this. Even then, him being alive was shocking to him.

  The defensive artifacts must have been the highest grade in the entire kingdom.

  Before he could think further, Thalric stirred. His eyelids fluttered, and with effort, he turned his head. Pain flashed across his face, but his gaze sharpened when he finally saw Kai leaning over him.

  His lips parted, the start of a question forming, but Kai cut him off.

  “You lost. The mana cannons blew up and you went down with it. Duke Raktor and most of your soldiers are dead. I believe you are going to die soon. You probably have internal injuries despite the damage all your shields soaked up.”

  Thalric stared up at him, chest heaving as he slowly processed the words. Then, with blood gathering at the corner of his mouth, he rasped: “Fuck you.”

  He coughed, red splattering across his chin. Kai only frowned.

  “It's just the natural result of you going forward with this civil war. You shouldn't have started it. Unfortunately, I have no intention of keeping you alive like Aldrin. I know that if you are alive, you are going to be waging war again.”

  Thalric clenched his teeth, blood bubbling in his throat before he whispered.

  “Kill… me. Just know that this is not the end… You might kill me but you aren't going to be able to peacefully take over this region either.”

  “I’m not in the mood for warnings at the moment,” Kai said flatly.

  He raised his hand, mana swirling around his fingers like a tightening storm. Thalric’s eyes stayed locked onto his for a moment—defiant, stubborn to the end—then slowly closed, as if accepting the inevitable.

  Kai formed the spell structure slowly, lines of wind-mana threading together in front of his palm. Even now, with Thalric broken beneath him, he felt a thin thread of respect tug at him. The man wasn’t begging. He wasn’t screaming. He simply kept his jaw set and accepted what waited for him. More dignity than Vhailor ever had, Kai thought.

  When the spell completed, a sharp [Wind Blade] hummed to life. Kai exhaled once. Then the blade flashed.

  Thalric’s head dropped into the dust without a sound.

  For a few seconds Kai just stood there, wind stirring the burned rubble around him as he looked down at the body. War demanded victories like this, but victory never felt clean. He reached down, grabbed Thalric by the armour, and lifted off into the smoky air.

  The grasslands beyond the ruined fort stretched wide and quiet, dotted with soldiers, nobles, and recovering Lombards. Every head turned when they saw him descending with a body in his arms. Kai landed gently, lowering Thalric onto the ground. Leopold, Viscountess Vaessa, and Chieftain Yafgar hurried forward, their expressions tightening when they recognized the fallen prince.

  Kai straightened and said, “Thalric is dead. Duke Raktor is dead. We need to spread the news and reclaim all forts, cities, towns, and villages in the western region. But first, we heal the injured.”

  Viscountess Vaessa gave a short nod, but Kai wasn’t finished. He looked directly at her.

  “Also… you guessed right. Thalric left me with a warning. So we can’t relax.”

  Leopold raised an eyebrow, pushing his hair back with a sigh. “You mean the hibernating beasts?”

  Kai nodded. “Yes. There’s nothing else he could have meant.”

  Leopold clicked his tongue. “Then shouldn’t we send Mages and Enforcers to deal with it? Honestly, you should go to the border yourself, or a lot of people will die.”

  Yafgar crossed his arms. “If you want warriors, I can lead the Lombards to deal with it.”

  Kai shook his head, a small confident smile forming despite the chaos of the burning fort behind them. “No. There’s no need. I already sent a messenger drone last week when the matter came up in one of my meetings with Viscountess Vaessa. Plans are already in motion. If I’m right, the beasts will stay asleep for a while.”

  ***

  A/N - You can read 30 chapters (15 Magus Reborn and 15 Dao of money) on my patreon. Annual subscription is now on too.

  PS:

  Book 3 is officially launched!If you’re on Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free—and even if you’re not buying, a quick rating helps more than you think. Also, it's free to rate and please download the book if you have Kindle unlimited. It helps with algorithm.