[color=#6ecff6][center][sub][h1][b]Siegfried Aschwin[/b][/h1][/sub][img]https://i.imgur.com/bYbIH9t.png[/img]
Location: The Wilds[/center][/color][hr]Siegfried read the battlefield the way a wolf reads wind.

Even as the blond mage's head was still finding the earth, his eyes were already moving. Eirún pulling back from Goldchain's scattered steel, blood weeping through the slash at her ribs. Aslan circling wide, the crossbow bolt still smoking in the mage knight's shoulder. Brig, gone, dissolved into snow and shadow the way only a Snowstalker could, her voice cutting through the chaos from somewhere near the bald-headed bastard. The wolf locked to the man's leg like a bear trap, savage and relentless.

And then Nika.

The pact knight's underhanded axe swing connected with the silent one and split the cuirass clean at the side. Siegfried heard the sound it made on impact—felt the wrongness of it before his mind had even processed what was wrong. Not the crack of parted flesh, not the wet resistance of muscle giving way. Too light. The impact had a hollow quality to it, like driving a blade into rotted timber.

[i]"This bastard doesn't bleed!"[/i]

Nika's shout reached him at the exact moment the silent knight reoriented, the crimson glow behind the visor tracking Nika's retreating silhouette as the pact knight turned to sprint toward Brig. The armored figure started to pivot on its heel with that same mechanical, airless precision it had shown from the start. No breath heaving in the chest. No grunt of exertion. No shift in weight that suggested a man compensating for an axe wound at the hip.

Siegfried was already moving.

He cut in from the knight's blindside, closing the distance in four hard strides. The silent knight was mid-pivot when Siegfried arrived, and rather than collide headlong with a fully plated opponent he dropped his shoulder into a crouch at the last heartbeat, catching the man not at the chest but at the hip and thigh. He drove through it, legs churning, using the exact momentum of the knight's own turning motion against its balance. Not a tackle meant to overpower, a lever, a fulcrum.

The silent knight left the ground.

They hit the snow hard, Siegfried riding the impact down, and he was already moving before the spray of white had settled. He shoved off the armored body and got a knee onto the breastplate, planting himself over the downed figure with his axe reversed in one hand, pommel first. His other hand reached out and gripped the helmet's rim.

Something was wrong.

It registered in his palm before his eyes could confirm it. The armor beneath him was hollow. Not hollow like empty—hollow like a drum, like a vessel filled with something that wasn't a man. He had pinned knights before, felt the frantic thrash of muscle and bone fighting back beneath him, the desperate animal need to survive that no amount of training fully extinguished. This thing did not writhe. It did not claw at him. The arms moved, yes, methodical and reaching, but there was no weight behind them. The full kit of a mailed knight should have been pressing into the snow at somewhere near sixteen stone. What Siegfried had driven to the earth felt like half that. Like grasping a suit hung on a frame of straw.

Siegfried stabbed down with his axe's spike, then the wind shifted.

It came from inside the armor. A seeping, slow exhale of trapped air disturbed by impact, forced up through the visor's grille and into Siegfried's face at point blank range. His nose caught it before his lungs could reject it: the deep, cloying sweetness of meat gone black, the ammonia bite of dissolved tissue, the faint underneath note of old earth and burial cold.

Rot.

Not the fresh blood stench of battle. Not the animal sweat of a fighting man. This was the smell of a thing that had been dead long enough that even the cold couldn't fully hold it together anymore.

Siegfried's pupils contracted to those thin, draconic slivers.

The gauntleted hands were still reaching for him, fingers flexing with that same mechanical patience, no faster and no slower than before, as if whatever was directing this thing inside the armor felt nothing of urgency or pain or fear. The eyes behind the visor were steady, unblinking, a cold ember of aura burning in a chest that did not rise or fall.

A corpse. Someone had put a corpse inside a suit of armor and filled it with enough aura to walk it around like a puppet. The axe strikes hadn't done nothing, there was simply nothing alive inside to injure.

Siegfried let out a low, disgusted sound through his teeth.

[color=#6ecff6]"What in the hells...?"[/color] he growled at the thing beneath him, jaw tight. It wasn't the dead man he was speaking to. It was whoever had made this, whoever had threaded aura through a cooling body and sent it north as a killing tool. A mage's work, rotten and arrogant in equal measure. The kind of magic that had no care for what it used. His head whipped to where the other two knights were. [color=#6ecff6]"KEEP ONE ALIVE FOR QUESTIONING! THEY'RE REANIMATING THE DEAD!"[/color]