Damian began to walk forward almost by instinct, his body moving before his mind had fully processed what he intended to do.
His eyes were immensely cold, the lightning-like tendrils of Mana still crackling around his pupils as he spoke without turning to face Uncle Adam.
"Enemies have already found the tribe."
His voice was calm in a way that didn’t match the fury building beneath his skin!
"Can you break down some thick branches of trees and bring them toward the clearing?"
...!
He said words that didn’t seem to go together, a warning of danger followed by a request for lumber, and the combination made no sense to ears that hadn’t witnessed what Damian had just perceived through his newly awakened senses.
Uncle Adam was astonished as first he became serious at the news that enemies had found them, his hand tightening on his spear and his body shifting into the ready stance of a soldier preparing for battle.
But then his brow furrowed with confusion.
Why was his Young Lugal asking for thick tree branches?
What possible use could wood serve when Warriors were approaching with intent to kill?
He wanted to ask, wanted to demand an explanation, but something in the way Damian moved stopped the words before they could form. There was a certainty in his Young Lugal’s bearing that wanted no questioning, a confidence that seemed to know something Uncle Adam couldn’t perceive.
Damian led them through the Mana-rich forest of the mountain’s base, past Spirit Stones that pulsed with purple light and Ancestor Pillars whose crowns had been drained of their usual luminescence by the massive absorption he’d just performed.
He found what he was looking for quickly.
An elevated clearing sat partway up the slope, a natural platform of stone and sparse grass that offered an unobstructed view of the lands stretching out below. A sizable purple stone jutted up from the center of this clearing like a marker left by the Ancestors themselves, its crystalline veins catching the morning light and scattering it in faint rainbows across the surrounding rock.
Here, their two figures were no longer shrouded by trees.
They were exposed to the skies of the Lands of Stone, visible to anything that might be watching from above, but more importantly, Damian had a direct line of sight to the Warriors far from the tribe who had begun to silently make their way toward their unsuspecting prey.
"Uncle Adam."
Damian called out again as if reminding the old soldier of his request, his gaze never leaving the distant signatures of Mana that only he could perceive.
Uncle Adam moved toward a nearby tree without further hesitation, trusting his Young Lugal even when understanding eluded him. His spear sang through the air three times in quick succession, the stone blade severing branches as thick as a man’s torso with the ease of decades of practice. He gathered the three massive limbs in his arms, their weight considerable even for a Bone Tempering Warrior, and brought them over to where Damian stood.
He wanted to ask what his Young Lugal planned to do.
He wanted to know how they should go meet the enemies, whether they should rush down the mountain to intercept them or set an ambush along their path of approach.
But the questions died in his throat as he observed what happened next.
His Young Lugal’s body instantly pulsed with tendrils and rivers of Mana, the blue energy flowing across his skin like water finding channels carved specifically for its passage. The power that radiated from Damian in that moment was unlike anything Uncle Adam had witnessed in his decades of warfare, a density and purity of Mana that seemed to belong to someone far, far beyond the Second Circle!
Damian’s right hand reached out toward the log branch closest to him, and his fingers didn’t grasp the wood so much as pierce into it, sinking through bark and fiber as if the solid timber had the consistency of wet clay. He lifted the massive branch as if it were a weightless feather, the muscles of his arm showing no strain despite holding something that should have required both hands and considerable effort.
Then he pulled his hand back, his body shifting into a position that Uncle Adam recognized.
A throwing stance.
The same fundamental posture used to hurl spears at charging beasts or fleeing enemies, refined over generations of warfare into something that maximized power and accuracy.
But this wasn’t a spear.
This was an entire tree branch.
Uncle Adam watched what happened next as if time itself had slowed to allow him to comprehend the incomprehensible!
He saw the tendrils of Mana flowing over his Young Lugal’s body begin to move with purpose, gathering and condensing and traveling down Damian’s arm toward the hand that gripped the log. The blue energy transferred into the wood like water being poured from one vessel to another, and as it did, the log itself seemed to change.
It hardened.
It condensed.
It became something more than mere timber, transformed by the Mana saturating its fibers into a projectile that hummed with barely contained force.
And under his gaze, Damian threw!
BOOM!
The log shot out as if it were a heavy volley of metal launched from siege weapons, leaving Damian’s hand with a speed that the eye could barely track. A visible blast of air erupted from the point of release, a shockwave of displaced atmosphere that pushed Uncle Adam backward despite his Bone Tempering physique and made him stumble for balance on the elevated stone.
He looked at this scene with incredulous eyes, barely able to follow the log as it flew over the tribe far below like a lightning strike made of wood and thunder. It became a blur of blue-tinged motion, a streak across the sky that seemed to defy everything he understood about the limitations of mortal strength.
And then it disappeared toward the periphery where Uncle Adam couldn’t even see its destination, couldn’t track its flight, couldn’t comprehend how far it had traveled or what it would do when it arrived.
But Damian could!
His eyes, still crackling with lightning-like tendrils of Mana, had already locked onto the Bone Tempering Warrior and two Flesh Awakening Warriors who were moving together as one of the groups approaching the tribe. They thought themselves hunters, predators stalking toward prey that didn’t know death was coming.
They didn’t know that something far worse than death was already in flight!