Built for Forever (2min)

Battle of the East

The air in Aethelgard, the kingdom famously known as the strongest, was thick with the scent of copper and burned earth. The battlefield, once a proud borderland, was now a stark landscape of crumbling fortresses and blackened mud. Here, the remnants of ancient magic—not of salvation, but of chaos—still clung to the air like residual poison.

Lee Minho, a soldier both respected and feared, stood swaying amidst the fallen. As the King's third, most talented son, he was blessed with a rare, devastating talent for battle but cursed with an aura of cold, detached efficiency that made him virtually untouchable, even by his peers.

His erratic heartbeat was the only loud sound in the sudden silence, echoing in his ears louder than the ghosts of the cries that had just ceased. Lifeless bodies—comrades who fought alongside him, and enemies who invaded with a pathetic excuse of inferiority—now shared the same scorched ground.

He stared out across the destruction. It dawned on him that the world he thought he knew from the bottom of his heart now bore less of a familiarity and more of an ascending nightmare.

Aethelgard had won the battle, but the victory tasted like ash. And for all the blood spent on Aethelgard's soil, the only tally that mattered was his sister's bone-chilling death.

A harsh shout, sharp as shattered stone, ripped through the haze of silence.

"Minho! Lee Minho! Get the hell moving!"

It was Captain Bang, his face smeared with grime, his silver eyes hard. As the Queen's favored nephew, Captain Bang Chan carried a quiet, undeniable authority that stemmed from his own royal bloodline.

The sound was a whipcrack, forcing Minho's head up from his frozen stupor.

Rage—cold, deep, and searing—hit him like a blow to the chest. He didn't move toward his superior; he simply turned, his body a weapon poised to strike, and his voice was a raw snarl, defying the military discipline that had defined his life.

"Don't talk to me about moving," Minho bit out. His fist clenched until his knuckles cracked. "The war took my fucking sister. Not a dagger, not a sword, but this pathetic, war!"

The captain stiffened, shocked by the insubordination of his closest aide, his own authority crumbling in the face of Minho's grief.

"She was the Ghost Blade of this kingdom—the most skilled soldier we had. There is no weapon that came close to her!" Minho's voice cracked, not from weakness, but from pure frustration. "I was there, Captain. We were there! It happened in a blink, I swear nothing touched her, yet she was burnt alive! Just...fire consuming her up while she choked in silence."

Minho's eyes stung but he locked his glare onto his superior's face, steeling it against the grief.

"Tell me, where were the reinforcements? Where was the goddamn cavalry? Aside from me and my brothers, who the hell came to protect her?!"

Minho took one final, devastating step forward, his ragged breath close enough to his superior's face to be felt. He wasn't demanding answers; he was spitting accusations, the shattering realisation that, to them, his family had been nothing more than disposable shields.

The air was left brittle and charged with Minho's betrayal. The other surviving soldiers, already reeling from the brutality of the fight, grew even more distant from him now. His raw, volatile grief was a contagious poison they dared not touch. Minho, the respected leader, had become an untouchable pariah—too sensitive, too broken, too dangerous.

The Captain, however, did not flinch or order an immediate arrest. He let the silent weight of the accusation settle.

"You're right, Minho," the Captain finally said, his voice low and steady, cutting through the silence without needing to raise the volume. "You're right to be angry. And you're right about Ghost Blade. Her death makes no goddamn sense."

Captain Bang stepped back, gesturing toward the battlefield where the strange magic lingered. "But you need to look past the smoke and the rage and see what's actually happening. You said it yourself: nothing touched her, just fire. That's not the enemy's work. That's not a common weapon."

The Captain's eyes narrowed, looking far into the haze. "That is not the familiar chaos of war. There is something fundamentally wrong with this battle, starting with the way that unnatural magic is sitting on this soil. If you want justice for your sister, you won't find it screaming at me. You'll find it by doing what you do best: investigating the objective truth. I need you to help me find out exactly what killed the Ghost Blade of Aethelgard."