Hastan felt his world coming apart.

He watched the Aegis become visible as it failed, cracks tearing through its vast, shimmering blanket like fissures spreading through ice under unbearable weight, each one widening by the instant, the barrier that had stood between them and annihilation since dawn finally beginning to surrender.

A howling wind swept through the widening gaps, carrying with it the heat and the smell of butchered gore, washing over him and drowning the city in it, a messenger announcing the carnage that was no longer approaching but arriving.

The roars of the rushing Devourer Beasts filled the air, their claws grinding against the earth as they surged forward.

The mechanical hiss of the surviving titans joined the sound, alongside the battle cries and curses of the demon army advancing behind them. The combined noise overwhelmed the senses like a physical force, pressing in from every direction at once.

"Go and hunt those who have run away," Leviathan's venomous voice cut cleanly through all of it, unhurried and precise as a blade finding a gap in armor. "Spare none."

The surviving demon captains, each one an Elemental Ruler, a rank of power that had been considered the absolute ceiling of human achievement only a year ago and was still a terror capable of leading armies to bring down entire cities, smiled with wicked, hungry expressions.

They began to spread out immediately, some tearing open rifts to swallow vast distances in a single step, others morphing and stretching the space around their forces so that their soldiers covered hundreds of meters with every passing moment, dissolving into the landscape.

The sight fed directly into the panic and hysteria consuming the walls. But the defenders were given no time to dwell on thoughts of their families and friends, because the horde of mutated monstrosities reached the white marble walls of Nova and began to scale them.

The profane existence of the Devourer Beasts bled into the human sanctuary like a plague given momentum, and swiftly drowned it in guttural snarls and human screams as they crested the walls and tore into the defenders, feeding on their flesh with the frenzied urgency of wolves that had been straving for days.

The human defenders broke free of their momentary daze not through courage or resolve but through the most fundamental instinct of all, the sheer, raw need to survive.

They cut into the iron-hard flesh of the creatures with panic-driven ferocity, tearing the beasts apart with a violence born not of training but of desperation.

Lieutenants and captains, Hastan among them, roared orders at the top of their lungs, rallying their soldiers, demanding that each of them make their death count, that every last drop of blood spilled purchase something worth the cost.

Within moments, there was no longer a choice to be made. Those who surrendered to terror or despair became Devourer Beast food within seconds.

Even those who fought were falling like birds in a storm, cut down faster than the gaps in their lines could be filled.

"BOOOOMMMMMM"

The thundering detonation rolled across the battlefield as two of the six Mana Pulse Magnums roared to life, firing energy beams so thick and powerful they tore clean through the fabric of space and slammed into the swelling giant, the Curse Bearer, which had scaled the tall outer wall like a twisted, grotesque spider.

What had been Emperor Melvin's face twisted into a grin, eyes narrowed to inhuman slits, tongues lashing from the vast maw splitting open across its torso, tasting the air as though savoring the fear of every defender within reach.

The thunderous lances detonated against the upper section of the wall, raising a tremendous cloud of dust and debris, chunks of stone and marble hurled outward alongside fine red mist and fragments of the nightmare creature itself.

The force behind the blasts was sufficient to eviscerate chunks off even that abominable form.

For one brief, desperate moment, the thought flickered through the defenders nearest to it that they might actually be able to kill it.

Then the tendrils came.

Vast, stretching limbs of twisted flesh and teeth uncoiled from its form, splitting into dozens of thinner, faster extensions that lashed outward and found the nearest defenders with horrifying precision, driving themselves into chests and through armor as though the steel were nothing more than rotten bark meeting the edge of an axe.

The soldiers dropped instantly to their knees, their groaning roars of agony swelling louder by the moment, building into something that filled the air alongside every other sound of dying.

Other tendrils swept outward in wide, whipping arcs, most finding their marks, lashing into screaming and roaring soldiers, dragging them down and apart.

A handful missed, unnoticed in the chaos, irrelevant against the hundreds that did not. And all the while, still other tendrils moved lower, slower, searching out the fallen beneath them, smothering their bodies beneath a spreading blanket of flesh, consuming everything, flesh and blood and armor alike, drinking it all down to feed its growth.

When the haze of dust and energy finally cleared, the monster stood revealed in its full and profane visage.

Taller now. Heavier. Stronger. The lances had not damaged it in any meaningful sense. They had fed it.

Erkin, head of the Royal Guard, a man in his early forties, ground his teeth until the sound of it was audible to those standing nearest him. Without hesitation, he issued his orders.

The palace gunners were directed to concentrate their fire on the Devourer Beasts scaling the walls, while the general commanding the airships received orders to pursue the demon captains spreading outward from the battlefield, sending a few vessels first to probe and then two-thirds of the fleet, leaving the remainder to spread across the city and support the ground forces below.

Across the broken ground, Leviathan stood without moving, both hands still braced against the torn Aegis, holding the cracks open, preventing the barrier from attempting to mend itself, ensuring that what he had broken stayed broken.

Erkin knew he could do nothing to the Curse Bearer through elemental attacks. Every blast he threw at it would only accelerate its growth, and so he held back, furious at the restraint it required.

But he also knew that someone needed to be standing here, ready, when Leviathan finally decided to move. That moment was coming, and when it did, whoever faced the Sin General alone would likely be dead within minutes.

He knew that. He accepted it without drama or ceremony.

But until that moment arrived, he would not throw his life away on a fruitless gesture. He would focus on what was in front of him, hold the line that remained, and meet what was coming when it came.

-----

Hastan watched as screams of agony drowned out the last laurels of defiance around him.

Dozens fell each second. He himself shot and killed one with each breath he drew, yet his sight had become a bloody blur and his breathing a ragged rasp torn between rage and helplessness.

Tens of thousands of Devourer Beasts had rushed into the city, most pouring through the vast tear in the Aegis at the front, others circling left and right like ants swarming around prey, digging into every crack and gap in the defenses with vicious, relentless speed.

Their hunger drove them beyond pain, beyond anything resembling hesitation or remorse, as those abominations sank their teeth into the crying and cursing defenders around him.

Armor of even the highest quality bent and cracked beneath their assault. Even the greatest weapon masters and most powerful mages were being swallowed beneath the sheer, suffocating weight of numbers, dragged under and apart before they could unleash everything they had.

Elemental storms engulfed entire sectors as dying warriors released their powers in furious, final defiance, doing tremendous damage to their killers but catching many of their own in the blaze as well.

The Devourer Beasts were paying in blood and bodies of their own, but they had more bodies to throw forward than the defenders could ever hope to count.

And the Curse Bearer was the worst nightmare walking the land. Its touch announced a fate beyond death, as warriors succumbed to untold agony and their bodies contorted into monstrous forms resembling the mindless creatures tearing through the city all around them.

Minutes dissolved into one another in the endless, grinding slaughter.

Hastan had suffered wounds and attacks that had nearly claimed his life several times over. One such strike had thrown him from the wall entirely, hurling him two hundred meters deep into the city before he hit the ground.

He now stood within the wreckage of a half-destroyed house, loosing fire-born arrows into the eyes of the Devourer Beasts rushing at him from every direction, burning through their skulls and snuffing their lives before their claws could reach him.

But he could feel his mana depleting steadily, draining with every arrow conjured, and he knew that the moment he reached into that well and found it empty, death would be waiting for him on the other side.

The thought did not frighten him. It made him feel something closer to satisfaction, knowing he had killed these damned animals until his very last breath.

In his situation, that was the best he could have asked for.

He had thought of Nmairis many times. Had even considered abandoning his post and racing home to find her, to see her one final time. But the thought of arriving and finding her dead, or worse, finding her gone and not knowing what had become of her, burned through him in a way he could not endure.

He had seen her for the last time when he walked out of their home. He had never planned to return, and he decided to keep it that way. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The memory of her face as it had been, alive and real and furious with love for him, was the one thing he would not risk losing to something worse.

The thought was fleeting, and before he knew it, Hastan was no longer shooting. His bow was gone. He had a butcher knife in his hand instead, the blade chipped and dark with blood, driving it into the thick skull of a Devourer Beast as he slipped beneath the snapping jaws of another and kept moving, kept breathing, kept fighting.

"Come then, you pathetic, mindless bastards," Hastan growled through clenched teeth, the floor slick and wet with his own blood from the dozen wounds he carried. "Let me be the salvation of your misery."

He lunged, plunging the blade into the eye of one beast, and kicked hard at another coming from the front, barely slowing its advance. He turned in the same motion and drove the knife in a backhand swing into the skull of a third.

"GRIIII." The sound tore out of him as he heard and felt the bones of his left arm crack, the jaws of a particularly hideous beast snapping shut around it.

He dragged together the last scraps of mana he had and conjured a single arrow, tearing the creature apart from the inside.

"OAAhhh." Another jaw snapped at his shoulder, dragging him backward and down. A second closed around his thigh. He hit the ground hard and smiled through bloody teeth, driving the knife into another beast's skull even as he fell, destroying its brain and ending it.

'That was my last kill, I think,' Hastan whispered to himself, feeling it in his bones even as he thought it.

A claw found his chest and pinned him to the ground. His right arm cracked. The twisting of his armor rang out sharp and clear among the growls and the snapping of bones, a strange, small sound to hear at the end of everything.

Darkness began to creep into the edges of his vision as the beasts dug into him, the pain flooding every nerve and setting them ablaze, a fire that ran from his fingertips to the base of his skull.

But he did not rage against it. He let his mind move instead, drifting back through the life he had lived, and found, to his own quiet surprise, that it had been beautiful.

There had been hard times. Stretches so dark and so long that ending things had seemed like the only door left open to him. But he had walked through those times and out the other side, and now here he was, dying a warrior's death in service to the empire that had given an orphan boy everything he had ever known.

He had not achieved what many others had. He had not risen as far or burned as bright. But he was proud of what he had done with what he had been given.

Maybe that was how any individual was supposed to live. Not in the scale of what they achieved, but in the fullness of how they faced it.

And then, between one breath and the next, the color bled out of everything.

Not darkness. Not the simple absence of light that death was supposed to bring, it was something else entirely.

A presence so vast and so complete that the sky, the beasts, the burning ruins of the city, the pain, all of it was simply drowned beneath it, swallowed without sound, as though the world itself was made to hold its breadth.