[The First Day of Destruction, 19:45] [The Inner Wall — Northern Ramparts]
It did not begin with the disciplined blast of a war horn. It began with a scream.
It was a collective, ragged wail that tore the throat out of the night sky. The sound defied mortal lungs. It was the chorus of tens of thousands of dead throats vibrating with dark magic.
The viridian fog swallowing the Middle City did not merely drift. It boiled. It surged forward like a tidal wave of pressurized gas. It crashed against the sheer granite base of the Inner Wall with immense kinetic force.
The ancient foundations shook. The air instantly turned thick. Every man on the wall tasted rusted iron and spoiled meat on their tongues.
But the wave was not just gas. It was solid.
From the glowing mist, the vanguard spilled out. It was a grey, writhing carpet of accelerated decomposition. Tens of thousands of bodies clawed over one another in a frantic, mindless hunger. They were entirely stripped of their humanity. These were the abandoned citizens of the Outer Districts. They were the slaughtered merchants of the Middle City. Now, they were nothing more than ammunition.
"Contact!" a watchman shrieked from the parapet. His voice cracked into a terrified sob.
A zombie slammed face-first into the lower stonework. It still wore the scorched, bloodstained apron of a local baker.
The impact shattered its jaw, but it did not fall back. Instead, a skeletal warrior vaulted directly off the baker's ruined back. It drove a rusted pickaxe deep into the mortar.
Then another corpse climbed over the skeleton. It sank its rotting fingernails into the stone. Then another. And another.
They were building a siege ramp with their own bodies.
Grand Marshal Beren looked down from the elevated command tier. The sight was a complete violation of sanity. The sickly green light of the burning city illuminated the swarm. It turned their decaying skin the color of bruised plums.
The smell hit him a second later. It was a physical, suffocating wall of rot and sulfur that made the bile rise sharply in his throat.
"Hold the center!" Beren roared.
His magically amplified voice cut cleanly through the rising panic. He knew the militia's morale was fracturing. He could see men recognizing the faces of the dead. They were looking at their former neighbors, their butchers, and their weavers.
"Brace your spears!" Beren commanded, projecting his absolute authority over their fear.
"Do not look at their faces! They are not your people anymore! They are meat! Treat them like meat!"
He gripped the cold stone of the parapet. He watched the relentless tide rise higher against the wall. The militia thrust their spears downward. Iron tips sank deep into dead muscle.
It did no good. The corpses felt no pain. They simply pushed forward along the shafts of the spears. The militiamen were forced to drop their weapons or be dragged over the edge by the sheer physical weight of the swarm.
Lord of Light, forgive us, Beren thought. He clenched his jaw tight enough to crack his teeth.
We are butchering our own children.
"Marshal!" his lieutenant cried out. The man pointed frantically down the walkway.
"The eastern bastion reports climbing claws! Ghoul variants are scaling the sheer drops! They are bypassing the main ramp!"
Beren snapped his gaze eastward. He could see the twisted, emaciated shapes of ghouls scrambling up the vertical masonry. They moved like spiders. Their elongated claws carved deep gouges into the ancient stone.
"Deploy the Second Cohort to the eastern stairwell!" Beren ordered. His eyes never left the central sea of the dead.
"Keep the Paladin Reserves back! I repeat, do not commit the Paladins!"
"But sir!" the lieutenant pleaded. His voice cracked as a wave of armored skeletons crested the far battlements.
"The regulars are breaking! They can't stop the physical pressure! We are losing the merlons!"
"Let them break if they must. Hold the Reserves!" Beren snarled. He turned a terrifying, unyielding glare on the officer.
It was a butcher's calculus. The Paladin Corps stood in the courtyard below. They were the heavy, elite infantry directly blessed by the Six Gods. They were the only force capable of stopping a concentrated breakthrough by high-tier undead.
If Beren threw them into the meat grinder now, they would waste their strength on mindless chaff. Their divine magic would bleed dry. When the true horrors of the Sorcerer Kingdom finally arrived, the Death Knights, the Soul Eaters, and the demons, the city would be entirely defenseless.
He had to sacrifice the militia to save the Paladins.
I am trading human lives for minutes, Beren calculated grimly.
He watched a young militiaman thrust his spear into a bloated corpse. The weapon became lodged in the ribcage. Before the boy could let go, three grasping, rotting hands seized his wrists. The boy was violently jerked forward.
He screamed all the way down until the green fog swallowed him whole. The wet, sickening crunch of his armor hitting the cobblestones below was lost in the roaring of the dead.
I am spending these men like cheap copper coins.
Beren looked up. The sky was their only immediate hope.
"Signal the Choir," Beren commanded. He raised his armored hand.
"Light them up."
High above the wall, the suspended legion of Archangel Flames shifted in perfect unison. They were faceless constructs of divine wrath. Their wings were rigid blades of blinding white light. At Beren's command, they angled sharply downward toward the surging ramp of bodies.
"[Holy Ray]!"
It was not a single voice. It was a chorus of hundreds. The angelic incantation rang across the battlefield with merciless judgment.
Beams of searing white light lanced down from the heavens. They struck the living ramp of bodies with the concussive force of kinetic hammers. Rotten flesh instantly vaporized into foul-smelling steam. Armored skeletal warriors shattered into fine, scorched dust.
For a fleeting, glorious moment, the entire length of the wall was bathed in blinding, purifying brilliance. The holy light banished the viridian gloom.
"Push them back!" a line sergeant screamed. He rallied his terrified men in the sudden, divine light.
"The Gods are watching! Push!"
A forest of reserve spears thrust viciously downward. At the sergeant's command, heavy iron cauldrons were tipped over the crenellations. Cascading waterfalls of boiling oil poured directly onto the climbing dead.
The undead did not feel the burning oil, but the extreme heat melted their rotting muscles right off the bone. It destroyed their structural integrity. Hundreds of corpses collapsed into a sliding avalanche of loose limbs and ruined armor. The smell of searing rot was atrocious. It clung to the back of the throat like tar.
But the sheer brutality of the counterattack worked. The ramp collapsed. The line held.
The militia erupted into exhausted, ragged cheers.
Beren did not cheer. He stood silently on the command step, performing a lethal mental countdown.
The angels are already dimming, he observed coldly.
Every celestial volley cost a massive amount of mana. The summoners hidden in the catacombs could not sustain this level of output forever. Every minute of this blinding light brought them one step closer to the absolute dark. The Sorcerer King was simply bleeding their mana reserves dry with worthless corpses.
Beren pressed his thumb hard into an old, silver scar on his forearm. He grounded his mind in the sharp, physical pain. He refused to look away from the slaughter below. He owed the dying that much.
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