As the first ripples of panic hit the ranks, the formation dissolved into total chaos. The battlefield became a slaughterhouse of the Legion's own making, as demons were trampled into the mud by their own horde in a desperate, mindless stampede.
The roar of the mageia mixed with the agonizing shrieks of the dying—a sound so loud it pierced the very heart of the Ragguard Fortress. Inside the walls, men's hearts tightened with raw dread; never in the history of the frontier had they heard anything so haunting, so utterly stripped of mercy.
The primal frenzy that defined the demons had, at last, been turned into absolute terror.
The million-fold deluge of flaming shafts shrieked past Seraph as if he were a phantom in the gale, but his face was a mask of harrowing strain. A cold sweat traced a path down his jaw, dripping from his chin into the void. In his grip, the Rubyflame Sceptre thrashed with a feral, recalcitrant energy, straining to wrench itself free from fingers that had turned bone-white from the effort.
At last, the magis understood the raw wisdom behind the Sanctus's warnings: a practitioner must never loose a power that eclipses their own constitution. Right now, his own mageia was a mutinous beast, struggling to break his hold and turn its destructive fury back upon its master.
Governing the trajectory of the Flame Arrowrain had become a feat of agonizing complexity. Despite his absolute focus, the spell began to bleed across the margins; stray shafts of fire started to perforate the Ragguard Fortress itself.
Initially, a flicker of dark amusement had touched him at the sight of Leonis's frantic preparations, but that levity was now ash in his mouth. He realised, with a sharp pang of regret, that the General's paranoia had been dead on the mark.
The mageia was no longer a surgical tool; it was an untethered calamity. Stray fire arrows plummeted into the urban sprawl, and soon, it wasn't just the demonic horde letting out shrieks of agony.
Within the walls of Ragguard, the cries of the innocent rose to meet the thunder of the Art. Several hundred shafts had strayed into the city's heart, igniting homes and birthing massive conflagrations in the midnight gloom. Below, the support levies were forced into a desperate scramble to quench the fires birthed by their supposed saviour.
This collateral ruin weighed on Seraph's conscience like a leaden weight—a visceral reminder of the price of his ambition.
To keep the deluge going, he was forced to drain mana potions in a ceaseless, mechanical sequence. In the brief span of the fight, he'd already tossed more than a dozen empty vials into the abyss, his internal reserves a parched well that only a steady intake of alchemy could keep from running dry.
The magis was hemmed in by the limits of his gear. To carry a dozen concealed throwing blades—essential tools for his specialized transmutations—he'd been forced to cut back on the amount of alchemical draughts he could pack. That trade-off was now bearing bitter fruit.
In a single, harrowing hour, he'd drained nearly twenty phials of mana to the dregs. The internal pressure had finally become an unendurable strain, threatening to fracture his very soul.
Seraph began to unpick the threads of the spell, letting the Arrowrain dissolve into a fading glimmer of ash against the horizon. Pale as a corpse, he glided back toward the fortress, his boots hitting the stone battlements with a heavy, desperate finality.
He stood there swaying on the edge of collapse. the Sanctus's history was littered with the bleached bones of those who'd let their own Art suck the marrow from their lives.
But as he cast a leaden gaze back toward the Western approaches, the sight was one of absolute, primeval devastation.
Even though the incantation had stopped, the heavens remained a bruised, furnace-red. The cloud layer continued to haemorrhage a sleet of embers that turned into jagged shafts of fire as they fell—a self-sustaining disaster born from sorcerous residue.
The lands outside Ragguard had been forged into a literal lake of fire. Coal-black plumes and the reek of charred flesh rose from the smouldering morass where over a hundred thousand demons lay in silent, blackened heaps. The carpet of the dead wasn't just made of undead, goblins, and stone-imps; among the offal lay the scorched hulks of dozens of Bigfoots.
Their hides had been thick enough to deflect the physical bite of the arrows, but the persistent heat of the Flamus mageia had ignited their shaggy, tawny pelts. They'd been turned into living pyres, their own formidable protection becoming the fuel for their agonizing end.
It turned out the Bigfoots hadn't died from the impact of the arrows. They'd been cooked alive, trapped inside their own impenetrable hides as their shaggy pelts turned into a forest fire.
More than half the demonic horde hadn't even perished by fire. They'd been crushed under the frantic boots of their own kin, then suffocated by the toxic fumes or swallowed by the encroaching furnace.
Seraph had bankrupted his mana reserves to keep that one composite spell going, but the payoff was absolute.
Beneath the mask of his exhaustion, a transformation took place—one invisible to the naked eye. The magis watched a torrential flood of Origin Light Dust—a thick, ivory mist of essence—siphon from the piles of the dead and anchor itself within his own frame.
'Maybe,' Seraph mused with a flicker of grim satisfaction, 'this is the real bounty for the months of slaughter I've endured during this Bloody Hunting mandate.'
Within heartbeats, his spiritual wellspring surged, filled to the brim. He felt a seismic jump in his own power. The essence of a single undead was a pathetic spark compared to his current level, but the collective soul-stream of a hundred thousand was a river that could carve through mountains.
He stood in silent vigil under a sky of bruised violet and copper, surveying the ruin he'd made. Below the walls, the only sound was the crackle of dying embers. Even the clamour of the assault on the other gates had faded into a stark, heavy silence.
The sub-hosts at the Northern and Southern fronts had broken just from being near the cataclysm. Though the fire arrows had fallen thinner there than on the Western side, the sheer terror was enough to trigger a total, messy rout.
Tens of thousands of demon carcasses now lay in mangled heaps across every front—a testament to a legion that had no doctrine for retreat, only the instinct to run for their lives amidst a fiery extinction.
The chaos spawned by the Arrowrain had reduced the Legion to such primal, mindless panic that their retreat turned into a self-inflicted slaughter.
In their frantic bid to escape the fire, tens of thousands were trampled into the muck by their own kin. Ironically, the carcasses littering the Northern and Southern reaches stayed more intact than the charred remains on the Western front.
The killing fields surrounding the fortress now looked so alien and disturbing that even Seraph, the architect of this ruin, could hardly believe the sight.