"Forgive me... I have to get this antidote to the others," Seraph said softly, his tone heavy with genuine regret.
He lowered her head with delicate grace, cushioning her on a small timber.
Without wasting a second, he vaulted toward Robin, unsealing three more antidote potions to stop the slaughter in its tracks.
The veterans of the Bloody Hunting mandate were built different—ten times tougher than any common sentry. Their massive mageia power let them stay on their feet, even as their faces turned a sickly, graveyard pale and dripped with frantic sweat. Having personally hunted the livestock for the feast, they'd dived into the party without a shred of suspicion, giving themselves over to the joy.
Seraph surged forward, his fingers clamping onto Robin's shoulder with an iron grip, brandishing the alchemical vials in a race against the clock.
"Can you stay on your feet?" the young man snapped, thrusting the antidote toward his comrade.
"Lord Seraph! By the Goddess, I owe you one!" Robin managed to choke out, his voice thick with delirious relief. His eyes flared with a desperate light at the sight of the three vessels.
"These are just minor potions... and I've only got three left," Seraph commanded with clinical speed. "Down one now and give the other two to the others! We need to raid the Ragguard armouries and the Arkdreadnought stores for the rest. They should have a massive stockpile of antitoxins in their vaults."
"On it! Thank the Goddess you had the sense to keep a stash on you," Robin replied, unsealing a vial with trembling haste.
He downed the herbal liquid in a single gulp. While a minor potion couldn't completely scrub the corruption from his system, it was enough to kickstart his vitality and push his mageia back past the seventh threshold.
"I don't have enough to save the whole army... you've got to move fast. Get more draughts and hold the line," Seraph said, his brow furrowed with deepening anxiety.
"You got it!" Robin barked in acknowledgement.
With his strength partially back, he sprinted toward his closest kin, carrying the last two antidotes like a lifeline into the heart of the chaos.
Seraph wasn't the only one who'd kept a stash of antidotes. A handful of healers and medics, seeing his quick thinking, followed suit with desperate speed to stem the tide of the crisis.
Not everyone was down for the count. A few sentries had bodies tough enough to resist the demon curse for a while—mostly veterans with a natural knack for tanking toxins.
Others, who'd skipped the feast like Seraph, were completely unscathed. These survivors scrambled toward the fortress vaults, hauling crates of antitoxins to the writhing crowds.
Even General Leonis, his strength partially back thanks to the potion, let out an authoritative roar. He barked orders to secure the armouries and started a frantic hunt for the traitor. As commands clashed with pleas for help, a spark of hope began to flicker in the dark.
Then, the world split open.
[KRA-BOOOOM—!]
Without a second's warning, a subterranean blast rocked the very foundations of the fortress.
The heavy iron manholes were launched into the sky by the concussive force. From the bowels of the city, several hundred obsidian shadows erupted into the starlight. Their speed, masked by the midnight gloom, made them nothing but blurs of homicidal intent—the Legion's ultimate assassins.
[SHING-SKREEE!]
In a heartbeat, a Crawler's talons shrieked through the dark. Serrated blades, reflecting the glow of the dying bonfire, lunged for Leonis's throat with a speed that bypassed his weakened reflexes.
"Flamus Shellux!" A crystalline command cut through the air.
[Vroooom-PWACK!]
A barrier of incandescent fire erupted around the High General like an optical illusion. The Crawler slammed into the thermal perimeter with a violent crash, the resulting explosion hurling the beast back into the shadows as a scorched, mangled husk.
The Crawler hit the fire shield, its entire body a thrashing pyre of white-hot embers. It rolled across the stone floor in a desperate, futile bid to quench the flamus mageia, letting out a high-pitched shriek that pierced the very marrow. A nauseating reek of scorched meat and sulphuric demonic miasma rose from its charred remains, leaving Leonis to stare in wide-eyed shock.
In that heartbeat, the General realised just how close he'd come to the grave. He'd been snatched from the edge of death by Seraph's split-second ward. But as he turned to offer his thanks, the air was torn apart by a cacophony so loud it felt as if the abyss itself had erupted in the heart of the Ragguard Fortress.
"AAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
The town square was turned into a slaughterhouse in a single, sickening pulse of horror.
More than three hundred Crawlers vaulted from the sewers—a shadow tide emerging from the one place no one thought to look. They began a systematic harvest of the poisoned and the dying, their cruelty amplified by the sick delight they took in human weakness.
Leonis remained under the sanctuary of Seraph's protection, but others weren't so lucky.
The main square, once a place for grand celebrations and feasts, became a death trap. Over ten thousand Ragguard soldiers were packed there, caught in the middle of their revelry around the massive bonfire.
Suddenly, hundreds of demons exploded from the underground tunnels. Their roars hit before anyone could even see them. Each beast launched into a frenzy, hunting and butchering the humans. They could clear sixty feet in a single bound. One leap was enough to tear through a dozen soldiers and demon hunters at once. The sounds of ripping flesh and splashing blood echoed through the night, the stench of gore flowing like the tears of a dying earth.
The Crawler talons were instruments of surgical malice, capable of piercing a heart or shearing through a throat in a single, predatory pass. They bifurcated the primary arteries of townsfolk and sentries alike with clinical precision, as if possessed of an innate knowledge of every fatal weakness in the mortal frame.
Had the Ragguard sentries and demon hunters been at full strength, they might have parried the strikes or even put the beasts down. But right now, even finding the strength to hoist a blade in self-defence was an agonizing feat.
Their hands betrayed them, trembling under the aftershocks of the toxin.
Their limbs buckled, vibrating with primal dread.
Their hearts constricted, denied the steady rhythm needed to muster a coherent defence.
To even talk about a counter-offensive was an absurdity; they lacked the very marrow to pull it off.
The sounds of death saturated the square as the fallen were turned into silent, mangled heaps. Bodies were hewn asunder; heads were ripped from their shoulders; a torrential spray of copper-scented lifeblood and viscera painted the stones. The steel blades of the fallen were trampled into the muck, twisted and broken beneath the weight of the slaughter. It was a total, unopposed eradication, finished before a single shield could even be raised.
"Vile demons!" Leonis bellowed, wrenching his broadsword from the uneven ground with desperate ferocity.
The antidote had begun its grueling work, reclaiming enough of his vitality to let the arc of his blade find demonic flesh. In his wake, the few warriors who had secured a draught of the alchemical mercy scrambled to seize spear and buckler, their resolve igniting amidst the slaughterhouse.