"If you swear to follow every order I give, and never question my judgment—no matter what—then I will grant you an hour of instruction for every day I remain in Ragguard. Do we have an agreement?"
"Agreed!" Rosalyn interjected, the word escaping her lips before he'd even finished.
"Ugh... child," the magis sighed, the weight of his new burden settling upon his shoulders.
"Lesson one: never give your word so easily, and never bind yourself to a pact with such reckless haste. You're a target now."
"Lesson second, if you want to grow strong fast, stop hunting monsters that are out of your league—like those Crawlers. Focus on the lesser demons: the undead, the goblins, the stone imps. Stay behind the war-golems and rain arrows from the walls. You'll help the defence and stay alive long enough to actually learn something. That is how you survive a meat-grinder."
He hesitated for a fleeting heartbeat, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial rasp.
"This is the secret to my standing," Seraph whispered, the words barely ghosting through the air. "Focus your efforts on the slaughter of the masses. Drain your mana reserves until the well is dry, then gorge on potions to sustain a relentless, rhythmic cull. The moment a breed of demon feels easy—when the risk is gone—you move to something deadlier. Repeat the cycle. In seven days, you will witness a surge in your potency and a threshold of mageia power that defies all reason."
The young man's whisper carried the weight of a sequestered truth, as if he were granting her a fragment of a dark mystery he wasn't ready to unveil.
"It sounds like a secret order... I'll follow every word, Master!" Rosalyn declared, her voice ringing with renewed vigor.
"I am not your Master..."
"I'm off to the walls! I won't waste another second of my Master's time!" Rosalyn cried, already sprinting away with a jubilant gait.
"Maidens are a burden worse than any demon... ugh," Seraph sighed, the sound lost to the wind.
✧ . ✶ . ❂ . ✶ . ✧
Time bled away with a predatory haste. Twilight began its slow, bruised descent upon the frontier, the firmament over the Ragguard Fortress bleeding into a deep, regal violet.
The scarlet glare from the tower-crystals intensified, casting a jagged, rhythmic strobe across the township. It birthed a stifling atmosphere of oppression within the inner circuit.
The day was rarely the theatre for a demonic breach; the abyss harbored a visceral revulsion for the unblinking eye of the sun and the searing heat of the meridian. Thus, the interval from the first stroke of dusk until the gray of dawn was the preferred season for their incursions—the hours when the light was thinned and the shadows long.
Even now, beyond the curtain walls, the discordant roar and low, rhythmic moans of the host rose in a sickening chorus. The air itself was saturated with a harrowing wail that drifted in on the gale.
The curtain walls groaned under a ceaseless pounding, shuddering beneath the rhythmic, tectonic violence of a siege in full swing. From the rear of the demon horde, Bigfoots hurled massive timbers and boulders against the stone. The impact vibrated through Ragguard's foundations as if the bastion were ready to crumble at any second.
The Demon Legion had their own dark artefacts, but they lacked the innovative spark and sophisticated artifice of the human mind. They had no traditional siege engines; even if the complex war-machines of men fell into their talons, the demons remained utterly clueless about how to work them.
However, the Demon Legion possessed assets far more potent than mere timber and iron. They commanded specific breeds of horror that functioned as biological siege engines—beasts of absolute, mindless obedience that served the whims of the high-tier demons. Chief among these living batteries were the Bigfoot thralls currently battering the Ragguard skyline.
A Bigfoot was an abomination resembling a big ape or a primeval gorilla, standing well over three metres tall. These simian titans moved with a bipedal gait, their long forearms dangling past their knees. Their frames were shrouded in thick, tawny fur, beneath which lay a hide so dense it mocked the bite of ordinary steel. With a physical build as unyielding as their strength was immense, they had long been a recurring nightmare for the realms of men.
They were creatures of blunt intellect, their wits as stagnant as a marsh. Yet, this very stupidity was their greatest status in the theatre of war; their simple-minded nature made them the most subservient of thralls, executing the orders of their demon superiors without a second thought.
While they lacked the speed for the front lines, their massive, calloused palms were broad enough to hurl boulders with the force of a trebuchet. They were deployed as living artillery—the Demon Legion's answer to the cannon and the catapult in their crusade against the Barriers of humanity.
The demon's ranged were useless in a fist-fight, but reaching them across that killing field was a pipe dream. They were tucked away behind a protective ring of several thousand demons at the absolute rearguard. Right now, they stood behind a churning sea of over a million Legionaries, forcing the human defenders into a state of frustrated endurance. All they could do was watch the massive stones batter the masonry without a prayer of stopping them.
Once the city's inner districts were cleared, Seraph ascended the battlements. Standing on the high curtain wall, his mageia sight scanned the horizon for a gap in the demonic formation and the exact positions of the remaining Crawler packs.
The arrival of the Bloody Hunting Arkdreadnought had been the signal for total war. From the moment their boots hit the stone, the demon hunters had been denied any hope of a break; the tide of battle offered no time to recover.
Nearly a million demons had now encircled the Ragguard Fortress on all four sides. Worse still, several hundred thousand reinforcements were even now surging from the blackened horizon to bolster the siege. The sheer weight of the host pressing against this single frontier bastion was enough to boggle the mind.
The young magis looked down toward the Western approaches. Below him, a sub-host of nearly three hundred thousand demons writhed like a vast carpet of death—a literal swarm of ants. Even at the limit of his vision, the rearguard was hidden by the rising dust of the abyss. The blockade was total; the human garrison was effectively entombed within their own walls.
A constant stream of undead and low-tier demons clawed their way up the thirty-five-metre masonry, forgetting the need for ladders. Their claws were sharp enough to find a grip in the stone, allowing them to scale the heights like a swarm of spiders.
Beyond this climbing tide, Seraph spotted the silhouettes of over a hundred Crawlers lurking in the shadows of the main host. They crouched low, their muscles tensed as they waited for a single crack in the human defence—a moment of weakness they could exploit to leap onto the battlements and turn the walls into a slaughterhouse.