"When are getting the Fort Ice?" Gazei asked the woman.
"We should reach there in a couple of hours my word." Lola his personal maid for today was a pretty woman. She was wearing the maid uniform. A beauty mark under her left eye. A pair of silver-framed glasses resting atop her face. Her brown hair was cut short, just past her ears. Her eyes were a deep hazel, her skin pale and freckled. Her figure was petite, slender, and feminine. She was cute. Very cute.
Tonya and Katarina are sleeping next to each in the bed in the carriage. The technological level of this world confused him greatly. It mixes some magical high tech like look like sci-fi and medieval fantasy. The Wolfe Carriage for example is powered by magical beasts the Giga Horse: A breed of gigantic horse that can grow to 200 meters in height and 600 meters in length. Make them one the smallest horse breed around.
Giga Horses have brilliant white coats and blonde manes. Despite their large size, they can still be tamed through unknown methods and maintain a calm and passive behavior around humans and other creatures that show them no threat. Giga Horses are used to pull gigantic vessels and carriers as their giant size and strength make them ideal for the role.
[Warlord System Daily Update][The Koris Mountains]
The Warlord System.
Like so many isekai clichés come to life, he too had been granted a cheat system when he was spat out into this beautiful disaster of a world. But unlike the horny farming simulators or immortal waifu-collecting nonsense he used to scroll past on Earth, his system wasn't indulgent.
It was militaristic. Cold. Efficient.
The Warlord System was a ruthless strategic engine. A black-box oracle of conquest. It whispered tactical truths into his mind and marked them as divine. It gave him data—on factions, terrain, supply lines, weather cycles, enemy morale, beast migration, and even partial enemy battle plans—though it rarely explained why those plans existed. The system gave options, never answers. And always in the language of war.
No quest prompts. No map markers. Just a single iron rule:
Victory favors the prepared.
And it hadn't been wrong yet.
A year ago, the system activated the moment his soul was dragged into the blood-soaked crucible that was Gazei D. Wolfe's body. Since then? Not a single battle lost. Every skirmish ended with heads on spikes or cities kneeling. Whether leading mercenaries, beasts, slave-born conscripts, or rogue mages, Gazei's instincts had always been just a little bit too good—because they weren't really his.
So simple. So clean.
But it had limits. The Warlord System was tactical, not magical. Which made the powers of his two wives—much more terrifying.
Tonya and Katarina had cheat items, too. The kind of reality-warping relics you'd expect the gods to lose sleep over.
Tonya's item was the Gothic Grimoire. A true copy of the Book of Solomon—not the neutered library version, but the original apocryphal blasphemy. This book allows her to record and use any magic spells she is capable of performing and allowing her access to the 72 Demons of Solomon.
Bound in demonhide. Inked in angelic choir. Pages that rearranged themselves when the moon changed phase. Tonya used it like a murder diary crossed with a cosplay wardrobe. Every time she bonded with a summoned spirit or beast, her outfit would requip—transmuting her body and power to match her newest pet's style.
When she summoned the Spirit of War-Eagle?She grew wings, feathers, talons. Her eyes glowed gold, and her dress shredded itself into arcane leathers that made tribal warlords bow instinctively.
When she summoned the Spirit of Baphomet?Her horns grew in, her dress became bondage-leather lace, and her spells turned flesh into pleasure-wracked putty.
Tonya didn't just use her summons. She became them.
Each one gave her an elemental domain, new abilities, and a small portion of godhood. The Gothic Grimoire remembered every form. She could mix and match if she was bored.
And Tonya was often very bored.
Then there was Katarina.
She was given the Catalytic Spiral—an alchemical horror that is straight unfair.
The Spiral lived in her bloodstream. It gave her the mind of a chemical warlord and the body of a combat engine. She could break down any substance, weaponize it, and reconstruct it as a neurotoxic hell cocktail delivered via arrow, bolt, or gas. With a single sniff of a new material, she could figure out how to kill someone with it.
Hydra venom? Weaponized in five minutes.Mana crystals? Reconstituted into arcane bullets.Rotting fruit? Refined into a plaguesteam that made the weak eat their own hands.
Her Crossgun—a repeating siege-weapon styled after Van Helsing's bastardized church-blaster—was built around her personal alchemy.
Unlike Gazei's system, which required him to act on the options it gave, Tonya and Katarina were their abilities. Their power lived in their flesh, mutated them, enhanced them.
Gazei barely twitched as the translucent blue runes shimmered into view in his left eye, visible only to him. The information on the landed straight into brain.
The Koris Mountains. A frozen sawblade of jagged peaks that split Vulonn into two brutal hemispheres. Over five thousand feet tall in some places, black-rock cliffs laced with shimmering veins of glowing minerals. It was rich country—iron, silver, gold, mercury, platinum, methylite, orichalc, void-glass, and the real prize: raw mana dust. Dangerous to mine. Worth more than cities. And every tribe, beast, and self-proclaimed warlord within a hundred miles would try to kill for it.
There are over 10,000 rivers and lakes in the Koris Mountain region. The Koris Mountains region is a vast mineral rich area noted because of the rocks in the central lake, Koris Grand Lake at the center of the region. The rocks was a strong field around them making the moons effect on the waters of the region have little effect. And as a result most salt and heavier minerals stay settled at very bottom of most bodies of water. This makes all water in Koris clear and drinkable. Not only that Koris waters are very high in mineral content and alkaline.
Because of the high mineral content, the areas in Koris are mostly inhabited by hundreds of different species of predatory beasts that often fight one another or are eaten by the native King Mammoths. Whenever the King Mammoth finishes eating hundreds of the countless native wildlife, it spits out their bones and leaves them on the ground, leaving behind entire valleys filled with bones and mammoth-sized footprints.
No one in the Empire or anyone in general except for the native people Asgard. Gazei still doesn't understand how much a vast area is covered in snow and ice like all the other areas in the north.
[New Location Unlocked: The Jirah Jungle]
He leaned back, letting the system babble in the background like a loyal scribe. The Jirah Jungle lay northwest of of Koris, a mutated tangle of vine and bones where everything was bigger, louder, and deadlier than it needed to be. Trees the size of fortresses. Bugs that could eat iron. Plants that eat beasts the size of whales. Half the animals there bled mana instead of blood. The other half didn't bleed at all.
The Jirah Jungle, is the oldest jungles of the planet and planet life that's very rich in nutrients. Separated by a large body of ice, the Ice Wall a massive structure of True Ice an element that doesn't melt even by lava lays the Muspelheim Caldera area that never stop erupting. When the Muspelheim Volcanos erupted—as it did daily—volcanic ash floats up down to ground level, it freezes with the cold air and freezing ground and mixes with the soil due the constant earthquakes natural and beast made and the nutrients in it are absorbed.
The plants then have enough nutrients to grow. By nearing next door to Muspelheim Caldera most of the Jirah Jungle Manga Vents—geothermal cracks of manga near the jungle's spine—caused the area to bet far warmer than any other location with the exception of one place.
The vegetation in this Jungle is very fresh and savory and packed with much fiber and moisture in them. One bite into them and it makes all the vegetables eaten until now to feel like they were rotten. Apart from having minerals and vitamins, the vegetables are also low fat and the nutritional value is very high. The body digests it with no burdens and it cleanses the bowels.
[New Location Unlocked: Banhu Swamplands and Marsh Swamp]
Banhu. Filthy, wet, humid Banhu. To the southwest—beyond the jungle, below the mountains. The Banhu and Marsh lands are one the few areas the Empire knows about.The Banhu tribe has repeatedly fought against the Empire forces to collect resources. Banhu Jungle knights have the well-deserved reputation of being the deadliest practitioners of jungle & wetlands warfare for decades. Highly skilled at combat in especially hazardous terrain and in carrying out guerilla and asymmetric warfare.
The Marsh Swamp, also known as Death Swamp due to the viciousness of the creatures that live there. The ecosystem shifts violently within the same square kilometer—quicksand beds that float on methane pockets, brackish acid-water, venomous lilies, and luminescent sludge known to crawl up into the eyes of sleeping travelers. The soil composition varies dramatically, thanks to underground tectonic friction, centuries of corpse decay, and the mingling of fungal supercolonies that form something like a hive mind. This makes the Marsh Swamp lands a perfect place for fertilizer if you survive the trip there and back.
[New Location Unlocked: Eitrspine Forest]To the east of Jirah, where the rain never stops and the moon hides behind rotting clouds, lies the Eitrspine.
The trees here are long-dead but refuse to fall, sustained by the corrupted mana that seeps up from deep below the crust. Their trunks weep black resin, and their branches spiral skyward like broken limbs clawing for mercy. Beneath the canopy, the forest floor pulses with violet bioluminescence, not from plants, but from the fungal bloodrot that infests nearly everything living.
The air is thick with pollen clouds and toxic mists. Breathing without a specialized mask leads to slow neurological decay—first you hear singing, then you see faces, then you forget how to blink. Wildlife here includes spined wolves with hollow eyes, insects large enough to crack ribs, and the dreaded Eitr Serpents, which mimic human voices to lure prey. Rain falls constantly, and when it strikes exposed skin, it burns with a slow chemical reaction like being kissed by boiling vinegar.
And yet, there are reasons to risk Eitrspine. The forest is one of the last known natural sources of Eitrglass, a mineralized mana-crystal formed from liquefied corruption. Alchemists crave it. Warlords hoard it. A single shard the size of a coin can power a fortress for a week—or melt the minds of five men. Botanists whisper about saplings called Necrowood Trees, whose bark can store living souls. The Empire has tried thrice to burn the forest down. It always grows back—twisted, angrier, and closer to their forts.
[New Location Unlocked: Frostveil Peninsula]Far north, past the edge of the known frostline, where the sea freezes into sheets of obsidian and even dragons slow their wings, stretches the Frostveil Peninsula. It is a jagged blade of land plunging into the Icelocked Ocean, with cliffs that bleed salt and blizzards that tear the skin from your bones. The entire region exists in a state of suspended super winter—perpetual twilight, howling winds, and snowfall made of razor-edged crystals called glassflakes.
Beneath its glacial skin lies an ancient seabed, layered with fossilized leviathans, frozen petroleum, and veins of Deepmana—an oceanic mana variant known to boil better than coal.
The frost itself is a threat; true permafrost overlays the terrain in sheets dozens of meters thick, and within it are trapped organisms, parasites, and strange things with too many eyes and teeth. Locals call them "Sleeperkin." No one dares wake them.
Despite the horrors, Frostveil remains vital to empire-building. The ice can be harvested for its purity—one shard from the central glacial shelf sells for more than gold, prized in ritual alchemy and arcane filtration systems. The native plants, like Snowthorn and Cryobloom, are near-legendary for their ability to slow aging or halt mana corruption. Dominion over Frostveil is not only a symbol of survival, but a source of power coveted by every noble house willing to gamble men against the cold.
[New Location Unlocked: Droskar Cradle]Beneath the southern mountains of Vulonn lies a region known only to the mad, the desperate, and the devout: the Droskar Cradle. This is not a valley but a wound—a sunken crater of unknown origin, veiled in ash and brimstone, surrounded by scorched cliffs that pulse with veins of molten stone. Here, the sky never clears. Red lightning crawls across the clouds like veins in a sick eye. Thunder echoes like war drums, and the earth trembles with the breath of something below.
The soil is obsidian dust and fire-touched clay, cracked and cursed by hundreds of years of subterranean conflict. It is said the Droskar Cradle was once the furnace-heart of a forgotten Forge God, and his children—the Flameborn—still walk here in the form of armored titans and burning beasts. Lava vents split the ground like infected scars, and yet, between them, strange flora blooms: heat-fed mushrooms, metallic moss, and the elusive Smolderthorn Tree, whose roots can be boiled to extract an anti-magic toxin.
The Cradle's true treasure, however, is the volcanic gemstone known as Droskarite. When properly refined, it allows weapons and armor to freeze armor and break against the consent winter cold. But it's volatile—exploding violently if handled by anyone without flame-tuned blood or heavy protective rituals. A thousand men have died trying to mine it. Another thousand will likely follow.
[New Location Unlocked: Varthyr Chasm]Varthyr Chasm is where the land forgot itself. A rift of black stone and hollow echo, it splits the mid-eastern plateaus in a jagged, seemingly endless gash—nearly fifty kilometers long, yet narrow enough in some places to jump across, though no one sane ever tries. The Chasm pulses with low, rhythmic tones at night, like a slumbering throat murmuring ancient curses. Birds do not fly here. Shadows move the wrong direction. Time feels untrustworthy.
The terrain on either side is riddled with stone plateaus, moss fields, and broken ruins of pre-human origin. Varthyr is wrapped in a geomagnetic fog that renders compasses and warps spells useless. Travelers have reported seeing themselves from the past—or the future—standing silently across the gap. Deep in the chasm, there are rumors of inverted temples, gravity wells, and liquid obsidian lakes where thought itself becomes physical.
What makes Varthyr valuable—if suicidal—is the presence of Mindglass, a translucent mineral that forms inside the chasm walls. When forged into lenses, it allows the user to perceive mana—ideal for finding Magical Beasts.
[New Location Unlocked: Vexgrave Expanse and the Drowned Bastion]The Vexgrave Expanse is an ancient battlefield turned desert flatland, choked with wreckage from forgotten wars. The landscape is dry, cracked, and shimmering with heat distortion, but it was once fertile—a place of great cities, dragon roosts, and colossal spell-forges. What killed it? No one is sure. Some say a failed god-ritual scorched the mana from the soil. Others whisper that the Bastion drowned the land from below.
At its heart lies the Drowned Bastion—a half-sunken citadel of stone and brass, buried in glassy black salt. It was once a floating fortress, orbiting the planet's leyline nexus, before it fell like a star into Vexgrave. The impact crater is miles wide, and the entire structure is now riddled with mana-scarred architecture, collapsed war golems, and traps still alive after thousands of years. The lower levels are underwater, though no lake exists—just a pressure-sealed abyss of liquid mana, drawn up from the leylines.
Explorers who enter the Bastion find relics untouched by time, arcane weapons still humming, and sometimes strange, preserved corpses that speak in unison. The true prize is the Manacore Engine, a theoretical heart-core that powered the floating fortress. If recovered, it could lift a city into the sky—or level a continent. The Expanse surrounding it is littered with sentient scrap, mutated fauna, and glassfields that cut through armor like silk.
Together, the series of lands—Eitrspine Forest, Frostveil Peninsula, Droskar Cradle, Varthyr Chasm, and the Vexgrave Expanse—were collectively known in old maps and half-burned imperial treatises as the Yamir Providence.
And he was going to tame it.
Not because he wanted to. Not because he was feeling particularly heroic or ambitious. But because the other option—being chained to the Wolfe estate and slowly dissolved in a vat of ceremonial acid for "disobedience"—was somehow less appealing than wrestling sentient swamps and volcano gods.
At least the swamp didn't hold grudges for missing family dinners.
Besides, even the so-called 'lesser' provinces were already claimed by nobles who were only slightly less insane than his family. Those places might've been safer, but they were boring. And boring was dangerous when you were born with blood that boiled without conflict.
"My lord, we've arrived. Fort Ice is ahead," the driver called out over the wind.
Gazei stirred. The two girls beside him—if they even qualified as "girls" anymore—were curled under military blankets, reeking of sex and sweat.
At the sound of the driver's voice, both stirred like predatory cats—Tonya first, eyes snapping open, followed by Katarina, who yawned and gave her husband a wake up kiss.
Fort Ice, despite its name, wasn't made of ice. It was iron and steel—Coldsteel, to be precise. A blue-black alloy found only in frost-scarred mines north, south, east, and west of the Asgard and Vanaheim. Not as valuable as Deepmana, but easier to work with and nearly indestructible in subzero hellscapes.
The walls were twenty meters high and bristled with anti-beast harpoons the size of cathedral bells. Heat vents lined the structure's spine like a dragon's dorsal fins, venting steam in pulses that hissed with arcane pressure.
Gazei poked his head out of the caravan's small porthole window—
And immediately wanted to die.
Looming next to the fortress like a forgotten deity was a Fortress Rhino—one of the three titanic war-beasts controlled by the Ice Family, whose domain extended across the White Reaches. The thing was a continent with legs, easily the size of an island. Its body was a slab of nature's hatred: thick, pale, leathery hide fused with armored plates of deep obsidian, crisscrossed with ritual bindings and battle scars the size of ox carts.
Its three horns—two curling like scimitars over its sunken, magma-colored eyes and one massive blade jutting from its nose—were made of reinforced magesteel, and each breath it exhaled fogged the air like a locomotive warming up for war. The backplate armor was an entire fortress of its own, and somewhere under it, Gazei swore he saw a launch platform with catapults and a siege cannon bolted into its shoulder.
Even asleep, the creature radiated presence. It didn't need to move to dominate the landscape. It was the landscape.
The Wolfe convoy halted nearly a kilometer away, their horses, guards, slaves, and soldiers falling to silence as they beheld the beast.
No one cheered. No one gasped. They just stared.
With awe. And mostly fear.
"What is that…?" one of the younger footmen whispered. He wanted to fight that thing.
"That's a Fortress Rhino," Gazei said, voice dry. "And it's sleeping. Now get moving!"
The convoy resumed crawling forward, hooves crunching over froststone and wheels grinding against frozen sediment. As they approached the gate, carved into the mountain-face wall of Fort Ice, a single man stepped out. Human. Maybe. At least at first glance.
He wore a heavy white cloak dusted with rune-frost, his boots laced with direwolf leather, his skin tan from long exposure under pale sun. His face was clean-shaven, and two strange, black glass rods hovered over his shoulders like spectral wings, held aloft by a humming, flickering field of magnetic energy.
He radiated that terrifying, quiet kind of competence. Like someone who could kill you with a shovel and write a poem about it after.
He wore a heavy white cloak dusted with rune-frost, his boots laced with direwolf leather, his skin tan from long exposure under pale sun. His face was clean-shaven, and two strange, black glass rods hovered over his shoulders like spectral wings, held aloft by a humming, flickering field of magnetic energy. His eyes glowed with dull violet light—psionic tattoos, perhaps, or surgical runes designed to interface with his hardware.
He radiated that terrifying, quiet kind of competence. Like someone who could kill you with a shovel and write a poem about it after. Gazei lazily eyed the man and recognized the crest on his cloak—the Triple Talon Cross, symbol of the Ice Family's household agents. He was a Stonehead, the elite administrative combat butlers that had once assassinated an entire rebel court by poisoning the wind. The Ice were one of the three remaining noble families within the Iron Empire whose loyalty had never faltered. Not once. Not in thousands of years. That made them extremely reliable. And extremely dangerous. And extremely fucking annoying.
"Lord Gazei Wolfe of House Wolfe. The Ice Family has prepared quarters. Lord Ashton Ice wishes to meet with you, Lady Katarina, and Lady Tonya in his quarters. I am Pennyworth Stonehead, Head Butler to the Ice Family."
He bowed, fluidly and deeply, in perfect synchronization with the opening of the gates behind him. That bow wasn't just etiquette—it was practiced diplomacy. It was also the exact moment he began assessing them. Pennyworth reaserched everything he could learn about the trio.
First it was Gazei himself. First impression: wild blood. Not untamed, just uncaring. The look of a young dragon kept in a vault too long—awkward in polish but honed underneath. Not educated in the traditional sense, but dangerous all the same. His body language lacks discipline, but his pupils react to movement in a way that betrays a predator's mind. No armor, no formal weapon, yet carries himself with total disinterest in threats.
Tonya was next. An Armstrong Summoner, beyond doubt. Her aura is wrapped in coils of arcane energy that flow in deliberate, sadistic spirals—she's not just capable of summoning; she enjoys domination. The posture is too loose to be trained military, but the way she scans with her peripheral vision suggests special forces or tribal war training. Eyes of a priestess. Smile of a poisoner.
Lastly it was Katarina she walks like she's been trained to be ignored. Assassin style. Every movement chosen for least friction with the world around her. But her weapons are too visible, and her hair too glossy—this one wants to be seen now. That's a terrifying transition. People who kill in shadows are predictable. People who decide to stop hiding are messy.
Confirmed equipment: Bow, Crossgun, Chemical Satchel.
"Lead the way," the three said in unison, like a choir of pretty demons. Whether they rehearsed it or not, it unsettled even Pennyworth a fraction. That meant it worked.
He turned on his heel and began walking through the inner gates, the trio following behind like highborn cats with knives. The Fortress City opened before them in levels—stone terraces and platforms carved directly into the permafrost cliffs, reinforced with Coldsteel beams and insulated with mana-threaded fur. Thick pipelines pulsed with geothermic energy. Every hundred meters, a vertical lift churned steam upward through spiral rails, carrying ore, weapons, and workers to and from the smelting chambers that dotted the spine of the city.
Gazei watched it all with the narrowed eyes of someone who had never seen civilization functioning this efficiently before.
House Wolfe didn't build municipal authority places.
They didn't maintain fortresses, or invest in infrastructure. At best, they conquered them, used them, burned them down, and moved on. A stronghold, to a Wolfe, was four walls, a sleeping mat, and a map of who to kill next. The idea of maintaining a waterworks system or regulating bread taxes was… deeply suspicious.
"You're quiet," Tonya whispered, eyeing the arcane lifts carrying a dozen armed soldiers to the top ramparts.
"I'm trying to figure out if I'm impressed or terrified," Gazei muttered.
"Why not both?" Katarina smiled, licking frost from her glove. "It smells like order. I hate it already."
The truth? Gazei had no idea how to run a city. No clue how taxes worked, or if there were standardized road signs in this world. Every time someone mentioned "civil law," his eyes glazed over like a man being forced to recite pie crust recipes at gunpoint.
Meanwhile, every soldier, mage, or knight in the Ice Family was required to serve four years minimum in the Imperial Army before returning to Fort Ice. They called it "Returning from the Crack." Because the war front they were sent to was called The Ice Crack of the Damned—an endless trench filled with monsters that didn't understand fear and didn't stay dead the first time.
That meant everyone here—everyone—had seen war. Real war. Not duels or mercenary skirmishes, but the kind of nightmare that carved trenches into your soul and whispered prayers in your sleep.