Eight hours into the battle, and more than a hundred of the Light Empire's four hundred-plus giant military fortresses had fallen.
Each one had been built to match Havenloch City's defensive strength. Each one had fallen anyway. The castle faction's forces were too large, too varied, and too self-replenishing. Especially the undead contingent among them had introduced a compounding factor the Light Empire's commanders hadn't fully accounted for.
Every corpse on the battlefield was a resource. The Skeleton Mages, Liches, Skeletal Dragons, Necromancers, and other undead troops under the evil and undead faction Castle Lords with the abilities of a necromancer were continuously converting fallen bodies, both their own and the Light Empire's dead, into new undead creatures, feeding them directly back into the assault.
The total size of the Castle Faction had barely diminished despite enormous losses because the losses kept standing back up.
This was one expression of the Castle Faction's broadest structural advantage: their arms came from virtually every race and faction in the Endless Continent. Holy and Light, Undead and Evil, Neutral and Chaos, the full spectrum, all represented.
Against any specific enemy, the Castle Lords could field whatever countered them most effectively. Against the Light Empire, the most effective counters were Dark, Evil, and Undead types, and the castle faction had an abundance of all three.
The dark and undead lords pushed their armies to the front of every assault, cutting through the defensive formations with inherent elemental advantage, while the other Castle Lords attacked from the flanks. The Light Empire's defenders were being hit from the direction they were weakest before the flanking pressure even registered.
Inside the remaining fortresses and defensive positions, the supernaturals of the Light Empire fought from behind their war weapons, magic cannons, trebuchets, heavy repeating crossbows, trying to thin the waves. For every ten million killed, twenty million or thirty million more arrived from the rear. The math was openly hopeless and everyone inside the fortifications knew it.
…
By afternoon, the cracks in morale had become visible. The empire's regular legions, one-third of the two trillion total, held. Their training held them. The remaining two-thirds were ordinary supernaturals who had volunteered or answered the call without formal military conditioning.
They had fought through the day. Now, with night coming and the Blood Moon rising to bathe the battlefield in red light, the Castle Faction somehow intensified rather than slowing, and they started to crack.
The conversations spreading through the defensive lines were quiet, but everywhere, with statements like these:
[They don't get tired. They don't slow down. Every time they ascend, their strength restores. They're stronger now than they were this morning. We're weaker.]
[Half our fortresses are gone. Hundreds of billions of us are dead. The supernaturals who surrendered to the Great Aetherium have become fanatical loyalists, they fight against us now, as crazy as the Castle Faction troops. The Angels must have some kind of spell that instills faith.]
[Even the Peak Demigods can't make a difference here. What hope do the rest of us have?]
[The Gods of the empire are in the Imperial Capital. They can't come to the battlefield—the Great Aetherium's Supreme God Tier Angels would kill them the moment they arrive. We're fighting alone.]
[I've done my part. I killed dozens of Castle Faction troops today. I can leave with my conscience clear.]
Under cover of the Blood Moon's darkness, the teleportation arrays in the fortresses began flashing. Those with authorization using them, those without slipping away on foot toward the empire's core area. The legion commanders saw it happening and didn't stop it.
Their own families were being quietly evacuated. The soldiers who fled had already lost the will to fight; forcing them to stay would only produce more bodies or more defectors once the walls broke. It was better to let them go.
The commanders themselves stayed. They had obligations that came with their positions, and their families were under protection contingent on their service. They watched their armies thin and said nothing.
Even through the night, as time passed, the attack intensified even further, as if the Castle Lords were desperate to destroy the Light Empire, even if it meant trillions of dead troops.
Because of this, troops that had been at the King Tier at dawn were Demigods by evening, and many even reached the peak of the Demigod Tier throughout the night. Even more importantly, many troops, Castle Lords and Rangers who had been Peak Demigods were ascending to Godhood regularly.
------------------
Become A Member At My Patreon For Access To Bonus Chapters Or Even Multiple Chapters A Day!
» Patreon.com/LordArchduke