He landed in an empty field halfway between Veldara and the approaching army.
No one around for kilometres. Just grass, wind, and the faint smudge of smoke on the northern horizon where villages had been burning.
He pulled the steel from storage. Crates of Dominion swords, spearheads, crossbow bolts, armour plates — tonnes of military-grade iron and steel, dumped onto the grass in a heap that glinted dully in the afternoon sun.
Then he got to work.
Fire first. He melted everything — swords liquefying, armour plates running together, the entire pile becoming a lake of molten metal hovering above the scorched ground. Then he shaped it.
Shurikens. Hundreds of them. Traditional palm-sized throwing stars, four-pointed, razor-edged. Each one forged, cooled, and sharpened in seconds. They stacked in the air beside him in neat columns.
Then the big ones. Circular saw blades — flat discs with serrated edges, designed to spin at high velocity and cut through anything in their path. He made them in varying sizes. Small ones the diameter of a dinner plate. Medium ones the size of wagon wheels. And the large ones — table-sized discs of spinning steel that could bisect a horse and rider without slowing down.
Daggers too. His signature weapon. Another hundred, added to the arsenal already in storage.
The mental math was simple. His parallel mind capacity had exploded after the naval absorption. Where he'd once topped out at twenty threads, he could now sustain over fifty. Each thread could independently control a dozen projectiles. Fifty threads times twelve projectiles — that was six hundred weapons under simultaneous, independent guidance.
He didn't need six hundred. But having the option felt appropriate given the ten thousand men he would soon be facing marching toward Veldara.
He did practice runs. Launched a spread of saw blades across the empty field — the discs screaming through the air, carving trenches in the earth, banking and returning on command. The shurikens moved faster — lighter, more agile, perfect for precision targeting. The daggers were old friends.
Everything worked. Everything was fast.
After a few hours of forging and testing, he stored the arsenal and lifted off.
After this is over, they'll retaliate. The Dominion won't accept losing a fleet and an army without a response. Which means I'll need to visit their capital eventually. Pay the pope a visit. Cause some problems on their end before they can mount another offensive.
But that was later. Right now — ten thousand men.
He found them from his perch floating over twelve thousand feet in the air, nearly two miles above them all, well out of the way of any detection spells.
The army was a dark smear on the landscape, moving south along a road that cut through farmland. From this altitude, individual soldiers were invisible — just a mass, like a column of ants, trailing dust and destruction.
Behind them — smoke. Villages. The remains of settlements the army had passed through. Some were still burning. Others were just ash and foundations.
I can only hope the people fled in time.
He descended.
Fast. Very fast. A streak from the sky that hit the ground in the centre of the column with enough force to crater the road.
He hadn't meant to hit that hard. The impact blew a ring of soldiers off their feet and sent a shockwave through the nearest ranks. Dust and debris erupted. Men shouted, stumbled, grabbed weapons.
Yuki stepped out of the crater. Mask on. Hood up. Surrounded by ten thousand hostile soldiers and the silence that comes right before everything goes wrong.
"I'd like to speak to your leader."
The general came to him. Not the other way around.
He pushed through the ranks — a big man, heavily armoured, radiating a mana signature that put him in Platinum territory. Strong jaw, scarred face, the easy confidence of someone who'd been winning wars his entire career. Two officers flanked him, both powerful in their own right.
The general looked at the masked figure standing in a crater. Smiled.
"A powerful fighter. I felt you coming from a kilometre up." He spread his hands. "I won't waste time with threats. Join us. A man of your abilities belongs on the winning side."
"What would I get?"
"That's the beauty of the Dominion. Whatever you want, you take."
Yuki nodded slowly. "Then I want your lives."
The smile died.
The shurikens launched first.
They erupted from his storage in every direction — hundreds of spinning steel stars radiating outward from Yuki's position like a deadly bloom. They moved at speeds the human eye couldn't track, guided by dozens of parallel minds working in concert.
The soldiers closest to the crater never saw them. Shurikens passed through necks, torsos, limbs — clean, fast, surgical. Men dropped mid-step. The ones behind them had maybe two seconds to register the falling bodies before the blades reached them too.
Then the saw blades.
The large ones went first — table-sized discs of spinning steel launching outward at waist height. They hit the column's mass and didn't stop. Armour split. Shields parted. The blades carved through ranks like ploughs through soil, leaving trenches of devastation behind them. The sound was terrible — metal on metal, metal on flesh, the screaming of men who'd seen something they couldn't process.
The medium blades followed. Then the small ones. Different sizes for different densities — the big discs for packed formations, the medium for scattered groups, the small ones for runners.
Yuki sent his daggers after the cavalry. Over a hundred blades, each one guided to a specific rider. The horses were five thousand strong — war-trained, armoured, carrying the army's mobile strike force. The daggers found the riders' throats with surgical precision, dropping them from their saddles without touching the animals.
Riderless horses screamed and bolted. The formation collapsed.
The general stood twenty metres from Yuki. He'd drawn his sword — a massive, runed blade that pulsed with mana. His two officers flanked him, weapons ready.
Around them, their army was being mowed down like blades of grass. The blades moved too fast to block. The shurikens came from every angle. Soldiers who raised shields found the projectiles curving around them. Men who ran found the blades faster.
The general didn't tremble. He was Platinum-class. He'd survived things that would have killed lesser men a hundred times over. But his face — that smug, confident face — was white.
His officers dropped their weapons. Raised their hands. Mouths opening to form the word surrender.
The blades didn't slow.
Yuki watched from behind his mask. He didn't feel the rage he'd expected. He didn't feel the righteous fury of a hero cutting down evil. He felt cold. Precise. Mechanical. Like operating a machine that happened to produce death.
The saw blades swept the field. The shurikens picked off stragglers. The daggers cleared the cavalry.
It took seven minutes.
When it was done, the field was quiet.
Yuki stood in the centre. Around him — nothing. He'd already cast the disintegration spell to avoid seeing and smelling the gory aftermath. The corpses were gone. Dust and empty armour and weapons scattered across trampled grass. It looked less like a battlefield and more like a thousand soldiers had simply vanished mid-march, leaving their gear behind.
Nearly seven thousand dead. The rest — roughly three thousand — had surrendered in time or been non-combatants. Supply chain workers, logistics personnel, cooks, and farriers. They knelt in the grass with their hands up and their faces in the dirt.
The general was alive. He assumed that a general would have valuable information so he chose to keep him alive. However, he was missing a leg below the knee — Yuki had taken it to ensure compliance, then healed the wound to keep him from bleeding out. His second-in-command was the same. Both were very strong men, with the general being a platinum-level fighter. He had doubts about whether the Veldaran prisoner guards could subdue him if needed. This way just seemed safer. Both kneeling, cauterised stumps where legs had been, alive and in agony.
Yuki looked at them and felt nothing he wanted to examine closely.
He turned to the surrendered men. Three thousand faces pressed into the grass.
"Gather the equipment. All of it. Weapons, armour, supplies, horses. Everything your dead comrades left behind." His voice was flat through the mask. "You will not speak of what happened here. You will say only that you were defeated. If I learn that anyone has described the details — I will come for you."
They obeyed. Terrified, shaking, they obeyed.