“Some cards are best kept in your hand until the final round, Princess,” he replied, his voice grim. He then turned to her, the general taking command once more. “The situation has changed. My initial theory was wrong. The plague is not just a biological agent. It has a necromantic component. The Abyssal Corruption I detected is not just killing them; it’s preparing them. The bodies of the dead are becoming incubators for these… things.” He had given her a part of the truth, the part she needed to understand the immediate tactical reality. The dead were now enemy combatants. “We need to accelerate the cleansing protocol,” Amina said, her mind instantly grasping the strategic implication. “We need to burn the bodies. All of them. Now.” “No,” Lloyd countered, his voice absolute. “Not yet. We still don’t know the full mechanism of the transformation. We don’t know the trigger. We don’t know the numbers. To go in blind now would be suicide. We would be walking into a trap.” A new, terrible, and utterly insane plan began to form in his mind, a plan born of cold, hard, military necessity. He had to see it for himself. He had to witness the birth of one of these monsters. He looked at Amina, his eyes hard. “You and the soldiers will remain here. Maintain the quarantine. At dawn, you will begin preparing the firebreak. But tonight… tonight, I am going back in. Alone.” He was no longer just a doctor or a general. He was a hunter, and he was going to spend the night in a graveyard, waiting for the ghosts to rise. He needed to see the harvest with his own eyes. Amina’s reaction was instantaneous and explosive. The strategist, the princess, the coolly analytical partner—all of it vanished, replaced by a woman staring at a man she cared for who was calmly announcing his intention to commit suicide. “Absolutely not,” she hissed, her voice a low, furious tremor. “Lloyd, that is not a strategic decision; it is an act of insanity. You just confirmed that the dead are rising as monsters, and your solution is to go and have a sleepover with them? You are the single most valuable asset in this entire operation. Your life is not yours to gamble with on a whim.” Her logic was flawless. Her reasoning was unassailable. And it was all completely, utterly irrelevant. “This is not a whim, Amina,” Lloyd replied, his voice calm, patient, the voice of a professor explaining a complex but fundamental theorem to a brilliant but struggling student. “It is a calculated risk, and it is a necessary one. We are fighting an enemy whose tactics we do not understand. Last night, we were lucky. We faced a single, newborn scout. What happens when we face ten? Or fifty? What happens when an entire village of two hundred corpses reanimates at once?” He let the horrifying image hang in the air between them. “I need to know how they are made. I need to witness the transformation process firsthand. Is it a gradual reanimation? Is it a sudden, explosive metamorphosis? What is the trigger? Is it proximity to the living? Is it a specific time of night? Is it tied to the lunar cycle? Is it a command from a remote master?” He ticked off the questions, each one a critical, unanswered variable in a life-or-death equation. “Every one of those questions is a tactical vulnerability we can exploit, or a fatal trap we will blunder into. To send a cleansing team in there now, armed with nothing but torches and ignorance, would not be a mission; it would be a massacre. I will not send men to their deaths because I was too cautious to gather the necessary intelligence myself.” His argument was a wall of cold, brutal, and undeniable military logic. He was not being reckless; he was being responsible. He was the only one with the power and the perception to survive such a mission, to be the observer in the heart of the storm. Amina stared at him, her face a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Her mind, the part of her that was a ruler and a strategist, knew he was right. The risk was immense, but the potential intelligence gain was incalculable. But the other part of her, the part that had watched him bleed in a jungle and had come to see him as a partner, a friend, was screaming in silent, terrified protest. “There has to be another way,” she whispered, the words a last, desperate plea. “There isn’t,” Lloyd said, his voice gentle but absolute. The debate was over. He spent the morning making his preparations, not for a battle, but for a long, cold, and dangerous vigil. He checked his equipment, packed rations, and briefed the ducal guard captain on the new protocols, giving him strict orders to maintain the perimeter and to trust Princess Amina’s command in his absence. As he was about to depart, he saw a small group of village watchmen, survivors who had been outside Oakhaven when the plague hit, huddled near the edge of the camp. They were speaking in hushed, terrified tones to one of the ducal soldiers. Lloyd, his senses preternaturally sharp, caught fragments of their conversation. He walked over, his presence immediately silencing them. He addressed the oldest of the group, a grizzled man with the haunted eyes of a survivor. “You have news from the village?” The man, terrified of the imposing ducal lord, flinched but found his voice. He recounted a chilling story. His cousin, who lived on a farm just outside the village proper, had sent a runner. The cousin had been watching the village from a distance with a spyglass. Last night, in the twilight, he had seen something impossible. He had seen one of the recently deceased, a man named Fendrel who had died two days ago, walking through the empty streets. The body was… different. Jerky. Unnatural. A vengeful ghost, the watchman stammered, had possessed the corpse, seeking retribution on the living for its unholy death. He claimed it was this ghost that had attacked the camp. Lloyd listened to the superstitious tale with a patient, professional calm. A ghost. A vengeful spirit. It was the only way their pre-modern minds could process the horrifying reality of a reanimated corpse. He publicly dismissed the “ghost” theory as a product of fear and shadow, a classic piece of battlefield folklore. He reassured the men that the ducal forces had the situation under control and that there were no such things as ghosts. But internally, his mind filed the information away with cold, analytical precision. The report, stripped of its superstitious hysteria, contained a critical piece of intelligence. The reanimation was not immediate. There was a latency period of at least two days between death and… rebirth. Another crucial variable slotted into place. He made his final decision. The risk was now an absolute necessity. He had to confirm the timeline. He had to see it for himself. He gave Amina a final, reassuring nod, a silent promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. “I will be back by dawn,” he said. Then, for the second time, he turned his back on the world of the living and walked alone into the silent, waiting graveyard that had once been the village of Oakhaven. He was no longer a doctor or a general. He was a hunter, and he was setting himself as bait, waiting for the ghosts to rise from their graves. The vigil had begun. New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡·𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖·𝔫𝔢𝔱 Lloyd moved through the empty, silent streets of Oakhaven like a ghost himself. The sun was high, but its light seemed thin and weak here, unable to penetrate the oppressive atmosphere of grief and decay that hung over the village like a shroud. The only sound was the wind, a low, mournful sigh that whispered through the empty cottages and rustled the red cloths of the plague-marked doors. It sounded like the world itself was weeping. He was a lone hunter in a graveyard, and his first objective was reconnaissance. He needed to find the perfect observation post, a location that offered a clear, defensible view of the village square, where he knew the dead would be brought, while keeping him hidden from both terrestrial and potentially aerial observation. His [All-Seeing Eye] became his surveyor’s tool. He scanned the architecture of the village, analyzing structural integrity, lines of sight, and potential points of entry and egress. He dismissed the bell tower of the small wooden chapel—too exposed. He considered the upper floor of the village longhouse, but its large windows offered insufficient cover. Finally, his gaze settled on a two-story building at the corner of the square: the lumber mill’s administrative office. It was a sturdy, stone-and-timber structure with a slate roof and small, shuttered windows on the second floor that provided perfect, discreet firing positions. It was a sniper’s nest. It was perfect.