Three hundred million.
It was a number vast enough that simply counting it aloud, one digit at a time, would have consumed days without pause, and that was only the number.
Now try to picture the city that number actually belonged to, three hundred million souls, young and old, strong and frail, filling a landscape too vast to take in from any single vantage point, each life its own small variation on the same shared fear.
Now picture that same city under siege. An army numbering in the tens of millions pressing against its gates, close enough to see, close enough to hear. It was a soul-crushing image even for the steadiest hearts to hold.
It grew considerably worse once one understood that the army in question wasn't made up of soldiers in any conventional sense at all, but of abominable horrors that had once been something else entirely.
For the people of the capital city, Nova, none of this required imagination.
