[The First Day of Destruction, 20:35]
[The Courtyard — The Elite Detachment]
The order came down through the speaking crystals like a physical thunderclap.
Fifty men moved as one massive organism. There was no hesitation. There were no murmurs of dissent. There was only the heavy, synchronized clatter of enchanted steel and the rushing whisper of final rites.
Sir Kaelthas, the Vanguard Commander, stood in the shadow of the massive iron-wood gates. He adjusted the heavy leather strap of his tower shield. His thick, gauntleted fingers reached up to his collar. He carefully tucked a small, frayed blue ribbon his six-year-old daughter's hair tie deeper into the padded gap between his steel pauldron and his breastplate.
It fits,Kaelthas thought. The soft silk pressed against his collarbone, a tiny anchor of humanity in a sea of iron. She is close. She is safe.
"Shields!" Kaelthas bellowed. His gravel-pit roar echoed off the high courtyard walls. "Lock interval! We are the prow of the ship! Nothing stops the prow!"
Beside him, Seraphic Knight Elena stood perfectly still. Her eyes were closed. She was not praying. She was feeling the Seraphim above shift their immense weight. It was a terrifying sensation. It felt like electrified clouds gathering right before a localized hurricane.
"They are ready," Elena whispered.
A thin trail of dark blood leaked from her left nostril. It dripped down her pale chin.
"The feathers are hot." She tightened her two-handed grip on her crystal sword. She was the guidance system. Her mind was already soaring fifty feet above her own body.
A few paces behind the vanguard line, Ritewarden Father Oryn poured the last drops of his sanctified oil onto the spiked head of his mace. During the first hour of the siege, his hands had trembled so violently he had dropped his chalk. Now, his grip was iron. The terror had burned away. It left only a hollow, echoing clarity in its wake.
Salt for the spirit, Oryn recited silently. He pressed the cold, wet steel of the mace against his own forehead.
The holy oil mixed with his sweat. Iron for the flesh. Let me be the nail that breaks their wheel.
On the right flank of the wedge, Valerius of the Flame-Brand was already smoking.
He had fully engaged his [Inner Furnace] martial art. His skin was flushed a dangerous, blistered red. Thick white smoke curled from his mouth with every exhalation.
"Finally," Valerius hissed. A manic, terrifying smile stretched his cracked lips.
"Let me out of this cage."
He swung his massive flamberge in a casual, one-handed arc. The air around the blade instantly rippled with extreme thermal distortion. It smelled of burning hair and ozone.
Anchoring the left flank, Horgus the Stonebearer did not speak. The giant knelt. His tree-trunk legs ground into the cobblestones. He grabbed a handful of courtyard dirt and methodically rubbed the grit into the leather grip of his rectangular slab-shield.
Earth to earth, Horgus thought. The slow, tectonic rhythm of his heartbeat steadied the breathing of the men around him. We return. But not today.
Weaving through the tight, armored ranks, Sister Milla moved like a ghost of mercy. She did not have a single drop of mana left for healing spells. The flesh was beyond saving. She possessed only the [Blessing of the Martyr].
"Go with the Six," Milla whispered softly.
She stopped beside a pale, hyperventilating young knight in the second rank. His eyes were wide with raw panic. She pressed her bloodstained palm firmly against the center of his chest plate. The panic instantly drained from his facial muscles. A terrifying, peaceful void replaced it.
"Your soul is light," Milla promised.
"The pain cannot follow you there."
High above the inner courtyard, the Angel Commander raised his glowing lance. He signaled the celestial wings.
Thrum. Thrum.
A wave of intense atmospheric pressure pushed down on the courtyard. Feathers of solid light drifted down around the Paladins like radiant snow. They were singed at the edges and smelled strongly of ozone.
The lesser angels were returning from their deep-harassment runs. They limped through the air, their blinding light dimming to a sickly yellow. They were being mercilessly spent to clear the airspace for the hammer.
"Level Fours," the Commander signaled from the wall.
"Dive on the breach."
The massive, iron-reinforced oak gates groaned. The heavy counter-weight chains rattled like the bones of a dead god.
"OPEN!" Vane's magically amplified voice roared from the parapet above.
The heavy doors violently swung outward. They slammed against the stone with a deafening crash.
The view revealed the very bottom of hell.
A swirling vortex of sickly green fire burned in the plaza. Towering walls of black, jagged armor and a churning, endless sea of rotting grey flesh pressed right up to the threshold. The smell of a hundred thousand open graves washed over the pristine white armor of the Paladins.
"FOR THE LOST AND THE LIVING!" Kaelthas roared.
His voice tore his throat. He stepped out of the shadow of the gatehouse and directly into the corrupted light.
"WE MAKE A PATH!"
"FOR THE THEOCRACY!" fifty highly-trained, magically saturated voices screamed back in perfect, desperate unison.
The wedge charged.
They hit the undead vanguard with the kinetic force of a meteor strike. The physical collision was deafening.
Kaelthas drove his tower shield directly into the kneecap of a charging Blood-milk Hulk. The alchemically enhanced bone shattered with a sound like a snapping tree trunk.
Before the monstrosity could fall, Kaelthas drove his broadsword up through its translucent jaw. The holy steel boiled the white sludge in its skull.
To his right, Valerius became a localized sun. He did not just swing his sword; he became it.
He spun into a dense cluster of skeletal warriors. His [Inner Furnace] erupted outward. The undead did not even have time to catch fire. They flashed into gray ash as the superheated flamberge cleaved through ten of them in a single, roaring arc.
"BURN! BLEED AND BURN!" Valerius shrieked. He laughed as a Death Warrior's blade grazed his shoulder. His superheated blood instantly cauterized his own wound.
Oryn followed the wake of fire. His mace was a blur of crushing momentum. He mathematically targeted the skulls of the agile ghouls attempting to slip beneath the interlocking shields.
Horgus became a moving wall. He caught the devastating, sweeping strikes of a towering Death Knight on his slab-shield. The sheer impact drove the giant down to one knee, cracking the cobblestones beneath him. Horgus merely grunted. He absorbed the kinetic shock and violently shoved the massive creature backward, breaking its unholy rhythm.
The fifty Paladins carved a deep, blinding trench of white light directly into the center of the black iron legion.
But as the wedge drove deeper, pulling the aggression of the heaviest hitters, the perspective shifted. The tactical view expanded. The true scale of the horror became visible to the battered, blood-soaked Regulars watching from the elevated flanks of the wall.
It was a sight that broke the human mind.
The fifty Paladins were a magnificent, roaring spearhead of divine wrath. But they were driving into an ocean that had no shore.
From the macro-view of the ramparts, the battlefield was a canvas of apocalyptic despair. Hundreds of angels desperately illuminated the suffocating night sky. Their forms flickered and died like smothered candles as they tried to hold back the encroaching green fog. Below them, the sprawling plaza was entirely lost to the dark.
But worse was the colossal bridge spanning the river toward the Outer District.
The massive stone structure was no longer visible. It was entirely buried under a writhing, undulating carpet of the dead. Hundreds of thousands of corpses, skeletal cavalry, and multi-jointed ghouls crawled over one another. They formed a literal, surging river of rotting meat. It flowed endlessly toward the Inner Wall.
The soldiers on the ramparts stopped weeping. They stopped screaming. Men dropped their weapons. They fell to their knees. They merely stared down at the tiny wedge of white iron sinking slowly into the fathomless black sea.
Their minds were completely unable to process the sheer, impossible volume of death.
The Sorcerer Kingdom had not sent an army.
They had sent an extinction event.