The first wave was not three monsters in a street. It was a flood.

They came down the avenue from the cathedral end, a crowd of them, and the front of the crowd was barely human anymore.

[Consumed Pilgrim — Level 28]

Rotten skin, split lips, fingers worn down to the bone from praying at something long after it stopped answering. Behind them came worse.

[Rotten Devotee — Level 31]

[Hollow Knight — Level 36]

The Devotees’ flesh hung off them, black and sagging, hollowed out from the inside. The Hollow Knights wore rusted armor over bodies that should not have been able to stand, and still they fell into ranks as they came, a memory of formation running a corpse.

The raid met them, and the front of the wave came apart wetly under the first exchange.

CRUNCH.

A pilgrim burst under a shield-line strike and kept crawling, the torso dragging itself forward on bone fingers after the legs were gone. The blood did not pool. It ran, thin and dark, between the cracks in the marble, and it ran the wrong way — up the slope, toward the cathedral.

Then the heavier things pushed through the crowd.

[Lust-Touched Knight — Level 45]

[Choir Wraith — Level 43]

[Cathedral Beast — Level 52]

The Lust-Touched Knights shoved the weaker bodies aside to get to the line. From the broken windows above the street, the Choir Wraiths began to sing. And under a collapsed archway, something huge dragged itself out into the avenue on too many limbs.

The S-ranks answered, and James finally saw the size of the gap he was standing in.

Marcus went through the low-level bodies without slowing, every cut landing somewhere that ended a thing, and then a Lust-Touched Knight came at him and he took its head off so fast James lost the blade between one frame and the next.

SHNK.

Saoirse Doyle killed one from an angle James had not even known she was standing in. He saw the Knight drop, found her after, and not before.

A battlemage off the left flank pulled his hands apart and burned a clean orange line straight down a column of the wave.

FWOOOM.

And when the Cathedral Beast lowered its bulk and charged the line, an Ironwall frontliner set his shield and took the whole weight of it head-on, boots grinding back across the marble a meter and no more.

BOOM.

James did not try to match any of it. That was not the job, and trying would have gotten him killed.

A Rotten Devotee slipped the front and came at the healers in the center, and James was the one in its path.

He did not spend mana on it. He stepped, cut it across the neck with the sword, and let it drop.

[CHALLENGER KILL]

Then he used what it left behind.

The corpse did not dissolve the way Tower kills usually did. It stayed. James filed that, fast, and shifted two steps so the next body would fall inside his reach instead of outside it.

[GRAVE COMMAND]

The Dark Knight came up on his right, the Abyssal Venom Python poured forward low along the marble, and the wolf swung wide to the flank, all three sliding into the gaps the front line couldn’t cover.

A Lust-Touched Knight took a hit from one of the guild elites and staggered, its side opening for half a second. James put a Necro Blast into the wounded joint.

[NECRO BLAST]

[Lust-Touched Knight — joint rotted]

The leg gave under it. The elite’s next swing finished what the rot started.

James was not the strongest blade on the avenue. He was the one watching where every body fell, where the strong enemies shrugged off damage, and where the floor kept pulling the blood.

Finn was a wall against the weak ones.

He waded into the Hollow Knights and broke them apart, axe through rusted plate and the rot under it, and for a while he was exactly where the front needed him.

Then he chased one kill a step too far.

A Lust-Touched Knight read the opening and came at the side Marcus had pointed at before the gate, the strap Finn had pulled tight, the guard that swung wide when his axe was committed.

Marcus killed it before it reached him.

One cut, from the side, clean.

"Left side," Marcus said, already moving past, already facing the next thing.

Finn’s grip tightened on the axe haft. He had felt the guard open the same second the Knight had. He said nothing, and Marcus did not wait around to be thanked or argued with, because he had not done it to be either.

The Choir Wraiths’ song crawled into the backline, and the supports started to drift.

Maeve did not waste a breath explaining it.

[RADIANT FIELD]

She put the resistance up over the center and held it steady, and the drifting stopped where the field reached.

"You," she said to the battlemage’s support, sharp, not asking. "You’re three casts deep and we’re four minutes in. Pace it. You burn out now and you’re a body I have to cover instead of a caster I can use."

The support pulled the next spell back.

A healer two steps over had her hands full of light, pouring it into a frontliner who had taken a glancing hit and did not need half of what she was spending.

"Stop. He’s at eighty percent." Maeve’s voice didn’t rise. "Save it. You’ll want it in an hour and you won’t have it."

She was not staring at the cathedral like it would tell her the future. She was watching hands, and breathing, and how deep into their mana each of them already was, four minutes into a floor that hadn’t shown its teeth yet.

The raid won the wave.

It cost them. Frontliners were bleeding, a support was grey and shaking, half the casters had spent more than they should have. But the formation held, and nobody died, and for a moment it looked like just another floor they could win.

Then the field of bodies did not behave.

The consumed dead did not dissolve. They lay where they fell, and their broken mouths kept moving, shaping whispers with no breath behind them.

The blood ran uphill. All of it, every thin dark line of it, crawling up the marble slope toward the distant cathedral.

A Hollow Knight that had lost its head did not fall flat. It sank down onto its knees and stayed there, facing the spires.

Then another. Then a row of them.

A Choir Wraith lay dead against a wall, and its song went on without it, coming up now from inside the stone.

The System spoke, and it did not pay them for the win.

[FIRST OFFERING WAVE DEFEATED]

[OBJECTIVE UNCHANGED: KILL THE FIRST DISCIPLE]

[TWENTY DESIRES CONFIRMED]

[OUTER COURT OPENING]

James read twenty desires confirmed twice.

Twenty. One for each of them.

Ahead of them, the marble avenue split down its center with a long low grind of stone, and across the ruined city, one after another, red chapel doors swung open in the broken walls.

The floor had not been trying to stop them with that wave.

It had been counting them