First cleansing operation at Fort Sky

First cleansing operation at Fort Sky is the first major undead-clearing action associated with Fort Sky: a defensive engagement that turns a dangerous concentration of monsters into a battlefield victory, but not a clean one. Viviane Saint-Lys uses her black mana and the spell “Yoink” to destroy the most dangerous attackers while Jor, Benetti, and Cernit hold the formation together. The operation establishes that survival in the Deadlands depends on coordinated sacrifice as much as individual power, and its aftermath binds victory to grief, guilt, and the unfinished work of caring for the dead.

Causes and Setting

The operation begins near an abandoned settlement in the Deadlands, where Viviane Saint-Lys, Benetti, Jor, and two other cavalrymen stop roughly fifty meters from the nearest house and face the only street. The surrounding ruins offer no safety from the undead concentration. Viviane removes the nearby Revenants with “Yoink” and waits for a larger threat to reveal itself, while the group’s position and limited range make the engagement a controlled attempt to draw enemies into a fight rather than an accidental encounter.

Benetti deliberately rides forward alone, draws a rapier-like sword, and clangs his push-blade. The provocation works immediately. Revenants crash through the floor of a nearby hovel, followed by a massive, obese Gut spiller whose strangely horned face identifies it as a specialized and more dangerous undead creature. Benetti retreats with the creatures behind him, but the pursuit expands: more Gut spillers join the chase, along with two much faster Crawlers. Their differing movement becomes tactically important. The Gut spillers are ponderous, whereas the Crawlers’ unnatural gait lets them cover ground with alarming speed.

Course of the Engagement

The three cavalrymen turn and circle the mass of Gut spillers at the edge of Viviane Saint-Lys’s range. The undead stumble over one another in their eagerness to reach their living targets. While the cavalrymen focus on pushing back nearby Revenants, Viviane concentrates on the specialized attackers. Her spells repeatedly find soft tissue and pull unlife from the monsters, and the black mana returned by the attacks exceeds what she can immediately consume. The excess pressure burns through her mana channels until she vents mana from the conduits on her back, producing two wings of darkness that resemble demonic regalia.

The battle turns sharply when a gigantic undead bat attacks from behind. Its rotten skin is stretched taut between skeletal fingers, and its strength is far beyond that of the other monsters. Jor sees the danger, leaps onto his saddle, turns, and throws himself into the attack with his polearm. Viviane slows time and lashes the creature across the face with a tendril, creating the instant of distraction Jor needs. His crescent blade penetrates the beast’s chest before his feet touch the ground, but the strike alone cannot finish it. The bat continues to flail, held back and blinded by Jor’s enormous strength and Viviane’s refusal to stop.

Viviane’s attack becomes a contest of endurance. The bat’s deep conduits resist her mana so strongly that filling them feels like forcing water through a narrow hose into a bathtub. She nevertheless continues until her mana occupies more than half of the creature’s conduits. At that threshold, the resistance collapses. She screams the command “Die!” and casts “Yoink,” finally stripping the creature of its remaining resistance. The victory is achieved through the combination of Jor’s physical intervention, Viviane’s time manipulation and black-mana control, and the cavalrymen’s containment of the surrounding undead.

Immediate Consequences

The effort nearly destroys Viviane’s ability to remain conscious. After finding her balance, she collapses forward into darkness. She later wakes in bed with Arthur’s jaws shining crimson above her and blood on her chest, an image that emphasizes how close the aftermath remains to further danger. Her first concern is not personal recovery but Jor. When she asks whether he is still alive, she learns that he survived being brought back but was wounded by an undead creature.

Jor’s injuries include gashes across his deltoid, abdominals, and quadriceps. In a small house attached to the barracks, Benetti prays beside him while three soldiers hold their hands over the wounds, pushing back the black taint with a softly glowing white force. Viviane approaches the man who protected her without hesitation and places a hand over one of his wounds. The attempt teaches her something new: she gains mana sense at Beginner 1 and can perceive the difference between the familiar black mana and the foreign life-aligned mana being used to heal Jor. The operation therefore produces not only a military result but also a concrete expansion of her abilities.

Moral Cost and Aftermath

The operation’s victory does not erase its losses. After Fort Sky is saved, the survivors retrieve pieces of their friends from the deserted battlefield. The monsters must be piled and burned before the black mana entering through the breached gate can reach critical mass and reanimate the fallen army. The dead are divided with care: enemy remains are treated as a threat to be neutralized, while the remains of comrades are gathered separately as people who must still be honored.

Viviane tries to find Jor but cannot identify where he fell beneath the layers of corpses. Benetti is found, or what remains of him is found, and Viviane and Cernit gather his parts with reverence. Cernit retrieves Benetti’s enchanted sword, still embedded in the face of a dead Crawler, sheathes it, and ties a rope around the hilt. When Cernit says “Family,” the gesture becomes a memorial act rather than a simple recovery of equipment. Benetti’s sacrifice is remembered as the act of a man who redeemed himself through the life he gave, even though Viviane recognizes that the woman he once harmed might not accept that redemption.

Benetti had already articulated the operation’s moral contradiction. Passing the dead, he says that they do not deserve to be in the Deadlands and that only he deserves to be there. He explains that he was sent there after harassing women with his friends, and that a victim’s testimony during his trial forced him to recognize the harm he had done. His proposed answer is collective service: the guilty protect those who should not have been condemned to the same place. The cleansing operation gives that belief its hardest test. Benetti does protect Viviane and the others, but the result is not absolution without remainder; it is a costly act whose meaning remains entangled with the damage he caused.

Narrative Significance

The First cleansing operation at Fort Sky transforms combat from a question of Viviane Saint-Lys’s private survival into a shared ethical obligation. Earlier, her survival logic is brutally practical: the Deadlands lack rain, renewable food, and water, and she must leave before the environment or its monsters kill her. At Fort Sky, however, survival depends on standing inside a formation where one person’s hesitation can become another person’s death. Jor’s intervention and Benetti’s sacrifice make protection reciprocal, even when the participants do not possess equal histories or equal moral standing.

The operation also exposes the institutional scale of the crisis. The defenders are not merely hunting isolated Revenants; they are preventing a mass reanimation event in which black mana could return an entire fallen army to unlife. The cleansing is thus both a tactical battle and a containment measure within a larger Deadlands equilibrium, where vast numbers of undead generate a black field that makes the region extraordinarily difficult to reclaim. Its first success saves Fort Sky without solving the underlying catastrophe. The battlefield is cleared, the dead are burned, and the survivors continue onward carrying weapons, wounds, new skills, and the memory of those who made their escape possible.