The skyline was choked with the heavy ordnance of Sanctum engineering: the magis, the Rune-Architects tethered to their groaning war-golems, and the batteries of ballistae, catapults, and mageia cannons. These massive engines of war vomited spectral fire and iron across the horizon, clawing for the rearguard of the host.
Beneath the cacophony laboured the unsung backbone of the garrison—the sappers of the Engineer Corps, the maintenance levies, the Abjurationists weaving counter-hexes, and the tireless choirs of healers. Together, they were the unyielding marrow of the Ragguard defence.
Seraph looked down into the abyss below.
The undead were a rising tide of filth, their fingers scrabbling for human ankles, desperate to drag the living into the meat-grinder. The spearmen answered with a guttural roar, transfixing the climbers and hurling them back into the dark. Overhead, a thousand shafts and bolts traced luminous arcs across the sky, seeking the vitals of the damned.
With every heartbeat, the mound of demonic offal at the foot of the wall grew. But the human toll was far from light. The arithmetic of this war was a cruel mistress; the abyss spawned its progeny with a speed that mocked the slow, fragile lineage of man. In a century of ceaseless slaughter, the realms of humanity had been bled so pale they could barely keep their footing against the encroaching night.
Without a word, the young magis launched himself from the stone.
He vaulted into the open air—a forty-metre descent that would have meant a casket for any ordinary man. But for a warrior wreathed in mageia, gravity was just another law to be broken.
The abyss beneath the curtain walls was a churning sea of the damned—a million skeletal hands reaching up in a macabre, rhythmic prayer for meat. Falling past the Ragguard line meant being torn into a spray of gristle and marrow in a heartbeat. The Legion didn't just kill; it consumed.
The garrison watched Seraph's descent with wide-eyed horror, their breath hitching in a collective spasm of disbelief. When word spread that a magis had joined the defence, the men pictured him entrenched on the battlements, weaving spells from the safety of the stone. Nobody expected this leap into the void—a move that looked like a deliberate suicide pact to anyone watching.
There was no safety in the air. The lands around Ragguard, once lush meadows, had been scoured bald by decades of war; not a single tree or rock remained to offer a mid-air footing.
Throughout his fall, the Bigfoot batteries kept up their rhythmic bombardment, massy boulders whistling past the magis with enough force to make the very air bleed.
The empty glass phial slipped from Seraph's fingers, shattering on the blood-soaked earth like a death knell for the coming slaughter. The moment a human form dared to leave the 'tortoise shell' of the masonry, the Bigfoot thralls pivoted with a primal, collective instinct. They abandoned the walls, their focus snapping toward the solitary figure suspended in the air. With a precision that defied their dullard nature, they loosed a hundred flaming stones, each one tracking the young man as if pulled by a malevolent magnet.
The roar of the projectiles tearing through the atmosphere was a rhythmic thunder—a storm of man-made meteors that mirrored the most devastating fire-aspected liturgies.
"NO!!!!" The cry erupted from the battlements, a wave of raw terror that nearly stopped the hearts of the onlookers.
Seraph drifted through the gale, his ivory mageia cloak snapping like a violent shroud against the wind. His face remained a mask of glacial indifference, even as the furnace-heat of the approaching boulders began to singe the very air around him.
A rhythmic, archaic roar erupted from the young man, his voice a clarion over the din of slaughter.
"Flamus Repulso!" Seraph commanded, his Art surging outward in a violent expansion.
[VROOOOM!]
A tidal wave of incandescent heat bled from his form—a roar of molten fury that met the hundred oncoming boulders mid-air. The stones slammed into the vermillion perimeter with a sequence of concussions that echoed for miles.
The Repulso ward caught the kinetic mass, shattering the projectiles into a fine, glowing scree that rained down like dying stars. The impact was a metallic death knell, like a massive war-bell tolling in the heart of the sky.
The orbital wards continued to revolve around Seraph, a celestial guard tethered to their primary star. The Repulso liturgy had intercepted the strike with such surgical precision that the threat was dead before it could even singe his clothes.
But this Legion wasn't the disjointed rabble of previous seasons. Even from his high vantage, Seraph spotted a blur of sable shadows threading through the million-strong crowd, closing in on his position with predatory intent.
Suspended forty metres above the mud, the magis was acutely aware of the breeds that mocked gravity. The rhythmic cadence of his incantations echoed against the Wall's masonry—
"Flamus Pressurus!"
In that heartbeat, a dozen onyx shadows launched themselves from the earth, vaulting toward him as if the air were a staircase to heaven.
"Ventus—"
"No... Flamus Chainblasz!" the young man corrected, his intent shifting with the fluidity of a striking adder.
[KRA-zap-zap-zap-zap!]
Seraph lashed out with the Rubyflame in a wide, rhythmic arc. A jagged whip of tethered furnace-fire and static discharge snaked toward the shadows that had reached his altitude with terrifying speed.
Needle-thin talons, long as ice-picks, tore at the air from every side. The Linkblaze fell on them with a merciless butchery. The sound of rupturing chitin and cooking meat was absolute.
[CRAACK-BOOM!—KRA-KOOOM!]
The Crawlers were caught in a chain reaction of cascading detonations, the mageia leaping from one beast to the next in a sequence of thermal ruptures. The conflagration seared their hides, flaying them alive; yet, their innate toughness was so great they refused to die.
[SKREEE-AAAAAGH!]
Their dissonant shrieks pierced the night as the explosions hurled them back toward the earth, their broken forms plummeting in a chorus of agonised wails.
A cold, rhythmic sweat soaked Seraph's tunic, the biting frontier gale doing nothing to cool the adrenaline surging through his veins. In that suspended heartbeat, he stood on the very edge of the grave. The realisation that a single slip in concentration would get his heart ripped from his chest was a raw, rhythmic thrum in his mind.
He understood now, with a clarity born of steel and fire, that he was in a war of total attrition. Even the lowliest demon in this million-strong horde had a predatory cunning forged in a century of slaughter. These scions of the abyss were ready to trade their lives for a taste of human marrow; having already sold their souls to the dark, they didn't give a damn about heaven or hell.
Though the first wave of Crawlers had been kicked back into the mud, a fresh tide of inky shadows surged through the Legion's ranks—a rhythmic, undulating river of malice.
Seraph couldn't make out their individual forms through the murk, but the predatory speed of their approach gave them away: they were the assassins of the pit, the apex stalkers of the Crawler hives.