He paused, swallowing hard. “The blight… it is not natural, my lord. I have seen plague in the southern campaigns. It is a slow, dirty thing. This… this is different. It moves too fast. We’ve seen healthy men, strong lumberjacks, go from a cough at dawn to dead by dusk. And it spreads on the wind.” He gestured grimly toward a small, isolated tent at the edge of the camp. “We lost two of our own men on the initial perimeter patrol. They never even set foot in the village. Just got too close. The air itself is poison.” Amina’s face was pale, her analytical mind struggling to process a threat that defied all known rules of engagement. “Airborne transmission with such a high mortality rate?” she whispered, the question a stark, academic horror. Lloyd nodded grimly, his own mind already working, the cold, detached logic of an epidemiologist taking over. He had faced biological weapons before, in another lifetime, on another world. This was familiar, terrifying territory, and the captain’s report confirmed his worst fears. He turned to the commander of his own small retinue. “Unpack the medical supplies. Work with Captain Brolin to establish a triage tent here, well away from the main camp. Any soldier who so much as sneezes is to be isolated immediately. This is our clean zone.” Latest content publıshed on 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹✶𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲✶𝗻𝗲𝘁 He then began to don his own equipment, a grim ritual he had rehearsed in his mind a hundred times on the journey. He pulled on a pair of thick, oiled leather gloves that reached his elbows. He drew up the hood of his dark, heavy cloak. Finally, he secured a plain, bird-like leather mask over his face. It was a grotesque-looking thing, with a long beak stuffed with purifying herbs and thick, waxed canvas over the mouth and nose. It was a primitive but functional piece of personal protective equipment, the best this world could offer. “What are you doing?” Amina demanded, her voice sharp with genuine alarm as she realized his intent. “I am going in,” Lloyd stated, his voice muffled and distorted by the mask. Captain Brolin stepped forward, his face a mask of horrified disbelief. “My lord, it is suicide! We cannot guarantee your safety. My orders from the Arch Duke were to support you, not to let you walk into your own grave!” Amina was at his side in an instant, her hand gripping his arm, her regal authority flaring like a sudden fire. “Lloyd, this is madness. You are the commander of this operation. You are the only one who can analyze this threat. Your mind is the asset we need, not your life. Send a scout. Use a disposable asset to gather your samples.” Lloyd looked at her, his eyes the only part of him visible behind the strange, bird-like mask. They were cold, calm, and absolute. “Amina, this is not a curse that can be observed from a distance with a scrying crystal. It is a biological agent. I need fresh tissue samples. I need to observe the victims at different stages of the disease. I need to find Patient Zero and trace the path of infection. A scout would be a blind man in a dark room; they would not know what to look for. And,” he added, his voice hardening, “there is no such thing as a disposable asset.” His resolve was a wall of granite. He was a hunter, and the prey was a microscopic, invisible killer. To understand it, he had to enter its lair. He gave a final, brutal command to Captain Brolin. “Maintain the quarantine at all costs. No one enters or leaves Oakhaven. Anyone—soldier or civilian—who tries to cross this line without my direct authorization is to be cut down and their body burned. There are no exceptions. Is that understood?” The captain, stunned by the cold, absolute authority, stammered a reply. “Yes, my lord.” Against Amina’s frantic, whispered pleas of “Don’t do this, Lloyd,” he gently removed her hand from his arm. He turned and walked toward the silent, waiting village. He stepped across the invisible line that separated the living from the dying, a solitary, cloaked figure walking into a world that had been consumed by an unnatural, horrifying silence. The world on the other side of the quarantine line was a place scrubbed clean of life. The oppressive silence was the first and most terrifying assault on the senses. Lloyd’s entire existence, both in this life and the last, had been a symphony of ambient noise—the hum of a city, the whisper of wind through leaves, the distant call of an animal. Here, there was nothing. The birds had fallen silent. The insects had ceased their chirping. It was a dead zone, a vacuum where the only sound was the crunch of his own boots on the leaf-strewn path and the ragged, unnervingly loud sound of his own breathing inside the leather mask. Oakhaven was not a village; it was a tomb in the making. As he drew closer, the silence began to be punctuated by a single, horrifying counterpoint. A cough. A deep, wet, hacking sound that tore through the stillness, followed by another, and then another, echoing from the shuttered log cottages like a grim, percussive chorus. It was the only sign that anyone was still alive in this place, and it was the sound of them dying. The village itself was a ghost town, a perfectly preserved tableau of a life that had been abruptly, violently interrupted. A child’s wooden toy lay abandoned in the middle of the dusty main street. An axe was still embedded in a half-split log in a cottage yard. A line of washing hung limp and forgotten, the clothes swaying gently in the breeze. But it was the doors that held the most potent terror. Over half of them were marked with a piece of dark red cloth, a stark, desperate symbol of the plague within. It was a silent, screaming testament to the speed and ferocity of the blight’s conquest. Lloyd’s mind, the dispassionate engine of the general, ruthlessly suppressed the wave of human horror that threatened to overwhelm him. He could not afford pity. He could not afford grief. He was an instrument of analysis, a detective at the scene of a mass murder, and the killer was still at large. He bypassed the homes of the living dead. His goal was not to treat the sick; it was to learn from the dead. He made his way to the largest hut at the edge of the village square, a building with a crudely carved wooden sign of a mortar and pestle hanging above the door. The village healer’s hut. This was where the first battle against the blight had been fought and lost. The door was ajar, hanging crookedly on one hinge. It opened with a low, mournful creak. The scene inside was one of apocalyptic failure, a snapshot of a man’s final, desperate moments. The small, one-room hut was a warzone of failed alchemy. Vials and clay pots were shattered on the floor. Braziers had been overturned, their cold charcoal spilling across the wooden planks. The air was thick with the mingled, cloying scents of dozens of different herbs, a testament to the healer’s frantic, futile search for a cure. It was the smell of desperation. And on the floor, amidst the ruins of his life’s work, lay the healer himself. He was an old man with a kind, weathered face, now frozen in a mask of agony. His body was contorted, his hands still clutching a bundle of wilted, useless herbs. On two cots nearby lay two other bodies, likely patients who had come to him for a miracle and had found only a shared death. Lloyd stepped over the threshold, his boots crunching on shattered glass. The stench of sickness and death was a physical, cloying thing that coated the back of his throat. He ignored it. The doctor in him, the cold, clinical observer, took command. He knelt beside the dead healer, his gloved hand hovering a few inches above the corpse, not touching, just observing. He closed his eyes, shutting out the grim reality of the room, and plunged his consciousness into a world of far greater, more intricate horror. He activated his [All-Seeing Eye]. The world of sight and smell dissolved, replaced by a luminous, multi-layered schematic of pure biological data. His perception plunged through the healer’s cold skin, peeling back the layers of his biology like the pages of an ancient, forbidden text. He saw the man’s ravaged lungs, the tissue inflamed and saturated with a dark, bloody fluid. He saw the kidneys, swollen and failing, the liver under catastrophic assault. He saw the circulatory system, a raging warzone where the very walls of the veins and arteries were breaking down. The organ failure was systemic, absolute.