Two Shieldmaidens broke formation and rushed to the heavy iron wheels flanking the entrance.

They grabbed the thick wooden spokes with their magically enhanced muscles bulging against their iron bracers as they turned the massive gears. The thick iron chains pulled taut with a sharp clack.

With a deep, ear-splitting groan of heavy metal sliding against stone, the towering black steel gates of the Blessed Land slowly pulled apart.

The gap widened, revealing the dark ash-covered expanse of the Umbral Basin.

The roaring wall of the Tide was less than a hundred yards away.

A writhing mass of corrupted fur, jagged bone plating, and glowing red eyes charging directly toward the breach.

The ground literally shook beneath the weight of their stampede.

"Phalanx!" Brida roared, stepping directly into the center of the open gateway, her beautiful face twisting into a feral sneer. "Lock the threshold!"

The heavy infantry surged forward.

They didn’t just step outside into the mud... they formed a brutal, unyielding plug directly within the thirty-foot gap of the open gates.

Heavy iron tower shields slammed together, interlocking their reinforced edges to create a spiked wall of metal.

Spears and shortswords bristled from the narrow gaps between the shields, transforming the entrance into a lethal, waiting meat grinder.

The first wave of the horde slammed into the shield wall.

The concussive impact of dozens of mutated hounds and lesser beasts crashing headfirst against the iron sounded like a landslide of boulders.

CRASH!

The Vanguard didn’t yield a single inch.

Brida thrust her heavy blade forward through a gap, impaling a massive, charging beast directly through the skull.

She twisted the hilt, snapping the monster’s neck, while the girls beside her hacked and stabbed at the frenzied mass of fur and claws trying to squeeze through the chokepoint.

Black blood sprayed aggressively across the threshold, rapidly pooling on the pristine stone tiles of the courtyard.

"Hold the line!" Tamsin yelled, standing just behind the frontline.

Her twin chain-daggers spun in a metallic blur creating a whirlwind of steel waiting to sever the spine of any beast agile enough to slip past the top of the shields.

Silas watched the frontline hold for a fraction of a second, confirming the stability of the phalanx then, he immediately turned his attention upward.

The ground war was secured at the chokepoint, but the overwhelming volume of the horde was beginning to pile up against the outer walls.

The larger, heavier Tier 2 beasts were using the mounting corpses of the lesser monsters as crude ramps, trying to scramble up the smooth black steel of the palisade.

’I didn’t know these fucks were that smart...’

He bolted toward the scaffolding stairs.

He took them three at a time with his boots clattering against the metal until he reached the elevated ramparts encircling the courtyard.

Fenna and her twenty Bow-Splitters were lined up along the parapets, staring down into the abyss.

They were firing as fast as they could draw their strings with dozens of standard iron-tipped arrows rained down into the horde, embedding themselves in the mud, the ash, and the soft tissue of the lesser beasts.

But it wasn’t enough.

"My Lord!" Fenna shouted over her shoulder, gritting her teeth as she fired another shot that sparked uselessly off a target. "There are too many of the heavy-plated ones! Our arrows are bouncing off their bone armor! We can’t punch through the Tier 2s from this angle!"

Silas saw it.

The massive Bone-Plate Crawlers were ignoring the iron arrows, their thick exoskeletons deflecting the standard munitions like raindrops.

"Hold your fire!" Silas commanded with his voice booming over the chaos as he ran directly down the line of archers.

The girls paused, lowering their bows, looking at him in confusion as the roars of the beasts outside grew louder, the monsters scrabbling desperately at the steel walls just beneath their feet.

He stopped directly in front of Fenna. He reached out and grabbed the smooth, polished wooden grip of her standard recurve bow.

He accessed his massive hard-earned treasury of Upgrade Points.

[Action: Forced Evolution to Tier 3 Mythril-Weave Recurve.]

[Cost: 20 UP]

"Confirm," Silas stated, his blue eyes burning.

A blinding flash of golden light erupted from his hand, entirely consuming the basic wooden weapon.

Fenna gasped, nearly dropping the bow as the steel violently transmuted beneath her fingers.

The basic timber rapidly darkened, shifting into sleek, cold, deep-purple metal.

Intricate silver runes etched themselves deeply into the sweeping limbs of the weapon, glowing with power.

The standard hemp string snapped, instantly replaced by a glowing, tightly wound cord of pure arcane energy that hummed against the air like a live wire.

Silas didn’t stop to admire his work. He moved like a blur down the rampart.

He placed his heavy hand on the next archer’s bow.

Flash!

Another Tier 3 weapon forged from thin air.

He grabbed the next.

Flash!

Another one...

[Current Balance: 2200 UP]

[Current Balance: 2180 UP]

[Current Balance: 2160 UP]

He aggressively expended his massive wealth, completely ignoring the rapid drain on his treasury.

In less than thirty seconds, he ran down the entire line of twenty girls, forcefully evolving every single one of their Tier 2 hunting bows into highly advanced, destructive magical artillery pieces.

The Bow-Splitters stared at the sleek mythril weapons in their hands, their mouths hanging open in complete shock.

The bows radiated a heavy magical pressure, adapting instantly to their grip, feeling perfectly balanced and terrifyingly lethal.

"Nock your arrows!" Silas roared, standing at the end of the line.

Fenna snapped out of her trance.

She pulled an ordinary iron-tipped arrow from her quiver and laid it across the cold mythril shelf of her new bow.

The moment the wooden shaft touched the glowing arcane string, the magic violently took hold.

The silver runes on the bow flared with blinding intensity.

The entire ordinary arrow ignited with a crackling aura of compressed blue mana, transforming the basic wood and iron into a missile.

"Fire!" Silas commanded, dropping his hand.

Fenna released the glowing string.

The arrow didn’t just fly... it shrieked!

It tore through the morning air with a deafening crack, leaving a visible, rippling vacuum trail in its wake.

It struck the thick, impenetrable bone-plating of a massive Tier 2 beast attempting to climb the wall directly below her.

The impact was catastrophic.

The arrow didn’t just pierce the armor as the hyper-compressed mana violently detonated on contact.

An explosion of blue fire and force ripped through the beast, completely vaporizing its upper torso and blowing a massive, smoking crater into the horde packed tightly below.

Chunks of burning bone and boiling black blood rained down on the monsters behind it, igniting the muddy earth.

Fenna stared down at the smoking crater she had just created with a single shot. A wide, completely unhinged grin spread across her face, the adrenaline of pure destruction washing over her.

"Oh, by the gods," Fenna breathed out, her eyes shining with manic glee.

She looked down the line at her girls with her voice rising to a frantic pitch. "You heard the Lord! Rain hell on them!"

The ramparts erupted into absolute chaos.

Twenty archers drew back their glowing arcane strings in perfect unison. Twenty ordinary arrows ignited with blinding blue mana.

They angled their shots and fired directly into the absolute densest pockets of the Gore-Tide pushing against the walls.

The resulting volley sounded like a carpet-bombing run.

BOOM! BOOM! KRA-THOOM!

Explosion after explosion rocked the outer perimeter of the Blessed Land.

The ground shook violently as massive, flaming craters were blown into the mud, sending mangled, burning beast corpses flying high into the air.

The archers went absolutely crazy, laughing and cheering as they fired shot after shot.

They were entirely sustained by Eluned’s infinite stamina buff so they didn’t have to worry about drawing a heavy string until their fingers bled... their muscles refused to tire.

They had become tireless, rapid-fire siege engines, raining blue death upon the basin.

Down in the courtyard, the massive continuous explosions outside caused the charging horde to falter.

The deafening blasts and the raining fire shattered their frenzied momentum, creating brief critical pockets of hesitation in the tide.

Tamsin, watching the gateway from behind the shield wall, saw the gap in the pressure.

"Push!" Tamsin roared, her voice cracking like a whip over the noise of the explosions.

Brida slammed her heavy iron shield forward, bashing a stunned Shadow Stalker directly into the dirt, crushing its skull beneath the rim. "Advance!"

The Shieldmaidens didn’t just hold the threshold anymore.

Empowered by the divine green light etching their skin and the massive artillery support raining down from the walls above them, the fifty-woman phalanx aggressively pushed forward.

They stepped over the growing mountain of bleeding corpses clogging the gateway.

Their iron boots crunched against shattered bone as they marched out of the gates and directly into the meat grinder of the Umbral Basin, expanding the perimeter through sheer, brutal force.

Silas stood on the elevated scaffolding with the wind whipping his dark robes as he watched his army systematically dismantle a horde that would have slaughtered a hundred normal Lords.

The blue tabs in his peripheral vision began to cascade like a waterfall, replacing the UP he had just spent on the bows.

[Target Eliminated: Tier 1 Mutated Hound. +0.5 UP]

[Target Eliminated: Tier 2 Bone-Plate Crawler. +2 UP]

[Target Eliminated: Tier 1 Shadow Stalker. +0.5 UP]

The wealth was flooding back into his core faster than he had spent i as the girls were operating flawlessly as usual... a meat grinder of iron and magic but the trial wasn’t over.

"RAHHHHHHH!"

A deafening earth-shattering roar echoed from the deep back of the horde, a sound so loud it rattled the heavy steel plates of the palisade and made the archers flinch.

The lesser beasts violently parted, scrambling desperately out of the way.

Stepping through the sea of mangled bodies and smoking blue craters was the colossal Tier 3 Boss.

It was an abomination of gray, rotting flesh and exposed jagged bone.

It raised the club, its sickly yellow eyes locking directly onto the open gates of the Blessed Land, completely ignoring the blue explosions tearing through its lesser kin.

Silas’s expression hardened.

He gripped the hilt of his dark mythril blade, drawing it from the scabbard with a sharp hiss.

...

The open gates of the Blessed Land had become an absolute slaughterhouse.

Outside the towering black steel walls, the ground was no longer made of dirt and ash.

The earth had been entirely churned into an ankle-deep swamp of corrosive black blood, severed limbs, and crushed bone.

The Tide continued to throw hundreds of mutated beasts directly into the chokepoint, trying to bury the girls under overwhelming mass, relying on the infinite pressure of the horde to break the iron wall.

Standing at the absolute dead center of the breach, bathed in the green light of the Genesis Rune and the spray of monster blood, was Brida.

The heavy-infantry captain had evolved into an unyielding juggernaut.

At Level 17 now, her musculature had coiled into dense iron-hard cords of raw power.

The heavy iron tower shield she held didn’t just feel like a piece of armor anymore... It felt like an extension of her own arm.

She didn’t just absorb the massive impacts of the charging beasts... she broke their momentum completely.

A massive, void-black Shadow Stalker leaped from the back of the pack, using a dying boar as a springboard.

Its six glowing red eyes locked directly on Brida’s exposed throat.

It moved with terrifying agility, clearing the heads of the lesser hounds with its jagged claws extended for the kill.

"Heh..."

Brida didn’t even brace neither did she didn’t step back to absorb the blow.

She stepped forward, dropping her center of gravity, and drove her heavy iron shield upward in a brutal bone-shattering arc.

CRUNCH!

The thick edge of the iron shield caught the Stalker mid-leap, slamming directly under its jaw.

The sickening crunch of a snapping neck echoed sharply over the roar of the horde as the beast’s momentum was instantly arrested.

Brida followed the shield bash seamlessly.

She drove her heavy iron shortsword deep into the beast’s chest cavity, twisting the blade to shred its corrupted heart.

She ripped the blade free and kicked the heavy twitching corpse back into the mud, clearing her space in the line.

"Push them back!" Brida roared, her voice carrying a deafening authority that anchored the entire frontline of fifty women. "Do not let them breathe! Bleed them dry! They die against our iron!"

’I need to impress my Lord...’