The dark tide of nightmares covered the distance between them and the city with terrifying speed, a churning, shrieking mass of claws and teeth rushing toward the white walls of Nova.

Yet they were stopped cold, mere meters from the stone, slamming into something unseen and immovable.

The force of the collision was immense. Dozens of the creatures at the front of the horde were crushed instantly on impact, their bodies reduced to bloody pulp that smeared across the invisible surface in streaks of dark ichor, painting the face of the shield high above the ground.

The sight drew a fierce eruption of cheers from the soldiers standing atop the walls, raw and defiant, the sound of men and women who had been waiting to fight back.

In that same breath, the mighty cannons of the airships pulsed to life. Nearly a hundred shots fired in unison, white beams of blazing plasma screaming downward through the dawn sky toward the still-swelling horde below.

The volley descended like a rain of falling stars, and the roar of each impact rang out for a dozen seconds without pause. Every beam that found its mark detonated into a towering dome of incinerating fire, the blasts stretching from the base of the city walls all the way back toward the towering tear in reality still yawning open across the plains.

For a breathless moment, it appeared as though the entire horde had been turned to ash, erased where they stood beneath the white inferno.

Then the fire faded.

And the nightmare remained.

The hundred or so shots had killed roughly a hundred or so creatures, and burned many times more, leaving the thick, gagging stench of charred flesh hanging heavy in the air.

But that was the full measure of the damage done.

A drop cast into an ocean.

Because by now the number of Devourer Beasts had swelled well past ten thousand, and from the great gaping rift behind them, more were still pouring through without any sign of slowing.

They crashed against the invisible wall in a continuous, maddened press, their corrupted eyes burning bright as they stared up hungrily at the soldiers standing above them, bodies piling against the barrier as though sheer weight and hatred alone might be enough to bring it down.

Hastan drew a slow breath and steadied himself, pushing his emotions back into silence and replacing them with singular focus.

He reminded himself that the Aegis would hold. The shield had been a gift from the saviors of the Malefis Domain, a barrier designed to stop enemy firepower cold while allowing Nova’s own forces to pour their attacks outward freely.

Even against what stood before them now, it would hold.

The unnecessary thought dissolved, and in its place came clarity. Hastan raised his bow. Between his fingers, an arrow of pure white flame materialized, burning hot and sharp, radiating scorching heat that shimmered the air around his hand.

"Fire at will!" His voice rolled down the length of the wall, and the moment the order left his lips, he loosed the arrow himself.

It vanished into the writhing mass of Devourer Beasts below and detonated a heartbeat later, erupting into a raging inferno that incinerated a swathe of the hateful creatures where they stood.

The other soldiers answered instantly. Arrows blotted out the sky in dark, sweeping curtains, volley after volley raining down into the horde for a long, unrelenting minute. Behind them, the airships fired a second round of plasma lances, the twin assault hammering the mass of beasts without mercy.

The Devourer Beasts raged and writhed and hurled themselves against the invisible wall with every ounce of their corrupted strength. Yet for all their fury and all their numbers, they could not put so much as a scratch into the great Aegis.

’Even your Demon General will need tremendous effort to break through this barrier,’ Hastan thought, his gaze drifting upward toward Leviathan, still hovering above the battlefield with that practiced, elegant stillness.

Then Leviathan looked back.

Hastan nearly stepped away from the battlements. Those cold, drowning blue eyes found him across the entire span of the battlefield, cutting through the chaos and the smoke and the screaming horde as though nothing else existed.

The Sin Duke held his gaze for just a moment.

And smiled. Not the broad, theatrical smile he had worn for the crowd, but something quieter and more deliberate, aimed at Hastan alone, as if the two of them shared a private understanding that no one else on the wall was privy to.

Then that terror moved.

Hastan felt the chill before he could explain it, a cold that started at the base of his spine and crawled upward, spreading through his chest and into his throat.

Before he could reach for the steady certainty he had built around himself, the acceptance of death that had kept him standing until now, Leviathan moved.

He crossed the entire span of the battlefield in a single blink and stood before the barrier.

He was no longer empty-handed.

In his right hand, he held a spear, and yet the spear felt like an insufficient word for what it was. The weapon was forged from metal that was neither silver nor black but something between deep red and the darkest shade that still bordered on color, a crimson so deep it was almost an absence of light.

And the metal itself was wrong.

It did not appear cast or hammered as metal should be, but woven, countless fine threads wound and layered over one another until they formed something dense and purposeful and deeply unsettling.

A broad blade crowned its head, the edge bearing irregular teeth like the jaw of something that had never known mercy. And at the very center of that blade, a slit opened, vertical and narrow, the shape of an animal’s eye, and it blinked.

It blinked.

’That thing is alive.’ The thought detonated through Hastan’s mind like a signal fire.

Every instinct he possessed, every buried reflex, every animal part of him that had kept him breathing through years of war, screamed at him to run and put distance between himself and that unknown nightmare.

He looked down and saw his hand shaking. Then he realized it was not just his hand. It was his entire body, trembling against his will.

"You all believe," Leviathan said, his voice reaching every ear within the city as effortlessly as if he stood beside each soldier personally, "that there is nothing worse than death."

He let the statement linger, unhurried, allowing the silence to do its work for several long, unbearable seconds.

Hastan was not alone in his trembling. He was, in fact, among the few still standing.

As many as half the soldiers along the wall had buckled or staggered, some stumbling backward, others dropping heavily onto their hands and knees, a handful collapsing entirely into unconsciousness where they stood. A few unlucky souls near the edge pitched forward and fell from the wall altogether.

It looked like a curse had swept through the brave defenders in a single wave, draining the strength from their bodies and replacing it with something hollow and cold. But it was nothing so clean as a curse.

It was far worse than that.

"Let me show you," Leviathan said, his voice dropping to something that was almost quiet, almost gentle, "what is worse than death."

He drove the tip of the living spear into the barrier.

The great Aegis did not react. Not a flicker crossed its vast surface. Not a tremor passed through the air around it. The barrier stood as indifferent and immovable as the sky itself, giving no more acknowledgment to the blow than stone gives to rain.

If anything, it almost mirrored the outcome of throwing a pebble at the sky.

The sky does not notice. The sky does not care.

And the spear, hurled against something so absolute, crumpled. The tip bent on impact as though it had struck something inconceivably harder than itself, and then the rest of the shaft followed the example of its head, collapsing and compressing until the weapon was no longer a weapon at all, only a shapeless slug of squirming, dark flesh pressed flat against the surface of the barrier.

To every eye along the walls, nothing had happened to the Aegis. It stood pristine and untouched. And yet the trembling in their bodies refused to stop, and the fear burrowing through their bones told an entirely different story, one that their eyes could not yet read but their instincts already understood.

The mass of flesh clinging to the barrier began to move.

It writhed slowly at first, like something waking from a deep sleep, and then with growing urgency, its bulk swelling outward as tendrils of glistening flesh pushed free of the central mass.

Fangs jutted from the tendrils, not one kind but dozens, the teeth of different creatures layered atop one another in profane combination, as the spreading horror crawled across the near-invisible surface of the Aegis like a parasite taking hold of a host.

The defenders swore, loudly and viscerally, recoiling from the sight.

The massive pulse cannons mounted along the city wall turned as one, their vast maws filling with churning white light before four tremendous lances of energy thundered outward, each shot carrying force enough to bring down a heavy airship or reduce a mountainside to rubble.

They passed through the barrier without resistance and struck the writhing mass dead center.

The crimson flesh swelled.

It absorbed the impacts the way an overfilled balloon absorbs pressure, bulging grotesquely outward before snapping back, and in the moment after, it was larger.

Significantly larger.

New tendrils erupted from the mass, each lined with spiraling, needle-like teeth and the fangs of a dozen different beasts, lashing against the surface of the barrier with horrible force, spreading outward, covering more and more of its face with every passing second.

It was unmistakable now what they were watching.

The thing was feeding. A parasite latched onto the surface of the Aegis, drinking from its power and using every drop to grow itself larger, stronger, hungrier, its profane existence swelling on the strength of the very shield meant to protect them.