[The First Day of Destruction, 20:35]
[The Inner Wall — Forward Command Post]
The grinding noise was the worst.
It was not the sharp, clean ring of dueling steel. It was not the booming thunder of artillery. It was the sound of the enemy's front line methodically chewing on the Theocracy's shield. It was a relentless, wet rasp of rusted metal scraping against enchanted stone. It was punctuated by the dull snap of ash-wood spears and the gargling, wet screams of dying men.
Commander Vane leaned his heavy, armored palms over the map table. His head bowed.
The parchment was useless. It was smeared with soot and the arterial blood of a dead courier. The grand strategies had burned away. The only geography that mattered now was the kill zone below: a hundred meters of corpse-choked plaza where the Regulars were dying by the agonizing inch.
Vane looked up, forcing his eyes to track the macroscopic flow of the slaughter. The battlefield was a terrifying canvas of ruin. Tens of thousands of rotting corpses pressed against the stone, a churning ocean of dead meat driven by singular, hateful malice.
Down in the eastern quadrant, the Second Cohort's phalanx was physically buckling.
Vane watched a Death Warrior blur into the human formation. The creature moved with impossible, hyper-lethal speed. Its dual jagged blades became a windmill of rusted iron. It did not just kill; it dismantled.
The undead monstrosity severed spear shafts, sheared through iron breastplates, and amputated limbs in a single, fluid rotation. The human line collapsed inward, screaming as the unyielding weight of the horde poured into the fresh breach.
"Report!" Vane barked.
He turned back to the command post. His voice was raw. It was shredded by smoke, sulfur, and an hour of ceaseless shouting.
"Second Cohort is combat-ineffective!" a young lieutenant yelled.
The boy's voice barely carried over the concussive roar of a [Fireball] detonating against a siege shield nearby. The lieutenant's face was half-covered in black ash. His eyes were wide, tracking unseen horrors in the smoke.
"The Death Warriors are shredding the phalanx flanks, sir! They move too fast for the pikemen! We have lost containment on the eastern barricade!"
Vane stepped to the parapet. He felt the residual heat of magical crossfire singe his eyelashes. Black ash fell from the boiling sky like dirty rain.
The view was a localized nightmare. The dark was illuminated only by the strobing flash-fire of dying spells.
The Death Knights, those towering monoliths of black iron and trapped souls, were not rushing. They were wading. They stepped over the growing mounds of human dead. Every lazy swing of their massive flamberges sent armored human bodies flying through the air like discarded ragdolls.
Behind the heavy infantry, the skeletal Soul Eaters prowled. They did not strike with hooves or teeth. They inhaled. The magical residue of the defenders' spells and the fading life force of the dying funneled directly into their unhinged equine maws. With every necrotic breath, the suffocating purple aura wreathing their forms grew thicker, brighter, and more terrible.
We are bleeding out, Vane realized.
The thought was entirely cold. It was impossibly sharp, slicing cleanly through his rising panic. He possessed the clinical detachment of a man watching sand drain from a broken hourglass.
If we stay defensive, we lose. If we keep trying to plug these holes with mortal flesh, the wall breaks in twenty minutes. The subterranean vaults fall. The evacuation dies.
He looked over his shoulder. and peered down into the sprawling inner courtyard behind the gatehouse.
The evacuation lanes were utterly gridlocked. Thousands of terrified civilians, carts overloaded with sacred relics, and weeping children clutching the skirts of battered priestesses formed a massive, terrified bottleneck. Hollow prayers echoed up to the command post. The civilians needed time. They needed physical space to breathe and run.
Vane looked away from the innocents. He fixed his eyes on the courtyard's staging ground. He looked at the Elite Paladin Detachment.
Fifty men. That was all that remained of the capital's finest. The six archetype leaders, including Sir Kaelthas and Valerius, stood with their hand-picked personal retinues. They stood entirely apart from the chaotic rout of the regular army. They were fresh. Their heavy plate armor gleamed pristine white in the viridian gloom. They physically vibrated with pent-up, volatile holy energy.
They were the diamond tip of the Theocracy's drill. A concentrated reservoir of divine wrath.
I have to spend them, Vane thought. The acid in his stomach churned. Right here. Right now. I have to spend the miracle.
It was a moral calculus that made Vane's jaw clench until the roots of his teeth ached. To send fifty men, even men touched by the Gods, into the teeth of an endless meat grinder was a death sentence. But keeping them in reserve, waiting for an inevitable breach,h was suicide for the entire city.
"Signal Officer!" Vane roared.
He spun away from the parapet. He slammed his gauntleted fist down onto the cracked stone of the map table.
"Change of plan! We are not waiting for the breach to reach us. We are making one!"