The advance into the metropolis's blind side started quietly and stayed that way for exactly four hours.
Then the land around them erupted.
A black wave of Narkals appeared on the horizon, swallowing the land as it surged toward their blockade like a raging ocean.
BOOM—!
The shields met the first wave and held firm, stopping its momentum in place.
Then steel met flesh.
Blades carved through bodies, bringing swift ends to the monsters' miserable lives.
Wave after wave, the Narkals poured endlessly into the siege, and the human army did everything in its power to halt their advance.
Hours later, a noticeably larger wave crashed into the human wall.
This time, the impact was far more devastating.
The frontline was torn apart under the sheer force of the assault, soldiers crushed and trampled as the formation was pushed back nearly a dozen meters.
But the true danger of this wave was not its size.
It was the presence of a class of Narkals that should never have been here.
Great Demons.
Thankfully, the human grand army had prepared for such a scenario.
A specialized unit was dispatched immediately, led by none other than Sabrina.
Each soldier locked onto a designated target, intercepting the hidden threats before they could wreak havoc within the human ranks.
At first, the strategy seemed to work.
The Great Demons were kept at bay through the coordinated efforts of the special unit. After all, every member was a third-step powerhouse.
But that did not last long.
These demons were not fighting for the thrill of slaughter or the pleasure of gorging themselves on human flesh.
They were miserable creatures running for their lives from calamities straight out of nightmares.
And survival was a far stronger motivator than entertainment.
It began with a single lapse in judgment.
A small mistake. One that a Great Demon fully exploited.
Its claws cleaved straight through its opponent, splitting the soldier in half and leaving behind a corpse so mangled it was barely recognizable as human.
The monster did not continue its escape after removing the obstacle.
It understood something crucial. Running alone did not necessarily improve its odds of survival. But with the support of its own kind, those odds would rise exponentially.
So instead of fleeing, it charged toward the nearest Great Demon locked in combat, intent on assisting its kin.
The gamble paid off.
Before long, two Great Demons were loose.
Despair began spreading across the frontline as the monstrous pair carved a bloody path toward their third kin.
Then the fourth.
They moved with terrifying purpose, ignoring all else as they systematically freed one another.
Before long, five Great Demons had formed a pack.
And they moved as one, tearing through the battlefield in pursuit of their remaining kin.
Sabrina felt a pressure wave rolling out from somewhere ahead, mana so dense it pressed against her skin like a physical hand. She had been moving with the army's left edge. Now that the edge had become the front.
She raised her head and found five Great Demons breaking from the treeline at once.
She could sense five, but only the three foremost were clearly visible, and these three were nothing alike.
One was built low and wide, with corded muscle and bone plating; it was the kind of brute that seemed to solve problems by walking through them. The second stood taller than a house, limbs too long for its torso, joints that bent in directions a human spine never could.
The third was smaller than the other two, almost slight by comparison, its body wrapped in something that looked like wet cloth until it moved, and then the cloth peeled back into a hundred narrow blades hovering around it in a slow orbit.
They didn't attack together.
The brute went straight for the shield line. The long-limbed one swept wide around the formation's flank. The bladed one held back entirely, watching.
"They're splitting our attention on purpose," Sabrina said, mostly to herself, already pulling her shadow out from beneath her feet.
She caught the brute's charge with a sheet of darkness that rose from the ground and wrapped around its forelegs, not enough to stop it, just enough to throw its weight forward at the wrong angle.
It stumbled, and that half-second was all the line needed to redirect its momentum into a kill zone the captains had marked earlier.
Frost followed the shadow. She layered Ice over the joints she'd already bound, and the brute's legs locked solid from the knee down. It roared and kept pulling, cracking the ice with raw strength, but by then three spears had already found its throat.
The ice did not seem to piece completely, leaving it injured but not dead.
The long-limbed one was harder. It didn't charge in straight lines. It moved sideways, diagonal, doubling back through its own afterimages, and every time a soldier committed to an angle, the creature had already left it.
A pathwalker on her left, one that has already archived third step, burning with enough aggression to make the air shimmer around him, finally got tired of chasing it and went for a direct intercept.
He read it wrong.
The creature's arm came down at an angle that shouldn't have been possible from its stance, and the soldier's torso separated from his hips before his sword finished its swing.
He didn't have time to make a sound. The body folded in on itself in a way Sabrina had never seen before; The long-limbed creature didn't pause to enjoy it.
It turned, found the nearest cluster of soldiers reeling from the loss, and moved toward them with the same savage brutality.
That was when the bladed one finally entered the fight.
Instead of charging, it simply let its orbiting blades extend outward, doubling their radius in a single motion, and the formation's right edge collapsed into a hail of cuts before anyone understood the range had changed. Two more soldiers went down. A third managed to block with a conjured ward, and the blades simply found the seams.
Sabrina realized, watching it, that these monsters wouldn't play by the rules and allow themselves to be separated now.
And then a fourth shape dropped from above, landing hard enough to crater the ground, and a fifth crawled up out of a fissure that hadn't been there a minute earlier.
And just like that, she found herself in a situation where five coordinated Great Demons patiently closing in on her.
But she couldn't even keep her focus on them. A beam of concentrated fire burst out from her front, forcing her to redirect her ice spell to block it.
Her own foe, the one she was assigned from the start, had broken the seal of shadowy ice she put him in, and it looked fully intent to keep her attention away from the more approaching threat.
sigh
'...It seems that today is going to be a long day.'
***
Two kilometers east, Ashen was finishing his hundredth kill of the hour when Alice's voice came through the link.
"One Great Demon on the southern edge of the battlefield is on the loose."
'Well, that's bad. But the beast is too far from my position.'
He thought that while entangled in a sea of Narkals.
"I understand."
Not even fifteen minutes later, his earpiece rang again with the same sweet voice. Unfortunately, there was nothing sweet about the content.
"Another Great Demon is on the loose. They are teaming up."
"Alright."
Ashen drove his spear through the chest of a Gorefiend, twisted the shaft to break free from the suction of muscle, and pulled it out in the same motion he used to pivot into his next kill.
Then Alice's voice came again.
"Five Great Demons are converging. They're heading toward Sabrina's position."
He didn't have the attention to spare for a real response.
"Noted." That was all he managed.
He kept fighting.
The mass in front of him had not thinned, and Alice's voice continued in a steady, clipped rhythm, feeding him updates the same way she had for the past hour… positions, counts, the gradual erosion of units.
Two more kills.
A third.
A Great Beast tried to flank him and lost an arm for the attempt before its head followed.
"They've broken the formation," Alice's voice rang out again. "Casualties are climbing fast. The bladed one is targeting officers specifically. It has already gone for Sabrina twice."
Ashen's spear pierced the next Narkal through the eye socket.
But instead of withdrawing for the follow-up, he simply loosened his grip and stepped past the falling body, leaving the weapon embedded while his hands fell empty.
"Position," he said.
Alice gave it to him instantly.
He didn't bother retrieving the spear by hand.
Instead, he reached for it through the mana saturating its shaft and pulled.
Mel answered its master happily.
The spear tore free from the corpse and arced through the air toward him in a long, hypnotic curve, gathering speed as he poured mana into its flight path.
Then he threw it again, this time, in earnest. The spar traveled with unseen speed toward Sabrina's coordinates.
And before it had fully left his hand… Ashen used BlindStep and vanished after it.