The Shieldmaidens at her flanks roared in response with their voices blending into a single battle cry.

"RAHHHHH!"

They didn’t just hold the line like they were supposed to... the girls weaponized it.

Spears thrust rapidly through the narrow gaps in their interlocked shields, puncturing the armored hides of the Bone-Plate Crawlers trying to ram the gates.

They moved like a singular machine, grinding the frontline of the horde into paste.

Brida on the other hand was similar to a tempest of iron.

She didn’t wait for the beasts to crash into her as she aggressively pushed the distance.

A massive mutated Iron-Boar charged her position with its jagged tusks aimed squarely at her knees.

"Come on!"

She dropped her center of gravity, pivoting on her heel, and slammed her tower shield downward like a guillotine.

BAM!

The heavy iron edge crushed the boar’s snout into the mud, pinning the beast for a fraction of a second.

Before it could thrash free, Brida stomped her iron-plated boot directly onto the back of its neck, feeling the vertebrae give way under her enhanced weight.

CRACK!

She ripped her shortsword across the throat of a leaping hound immediately after with the spray of black blood painting her chest piece.

But the terrifying volume of the enemy meant brute force alone wasn’t enough to hold the breach forever... The Tide was mindless and they needed crowd control.

Standing on the elevated flanks just behind the iron wall, Aeliana provided exactly that.

The Royal Elven Arcanist breathed in the sharp smell of blood and burning fur as her green eyes narrowed into cold slits.

’This is an opportunity...’

It was a very big opportunity, before her Lord left... perhaps if she managed to impress him he would get her some personal gifts!

The embarrassment from the office was gone, replaced entirely by the icy focus of a royal executioner.

She raised her pale palms, drawing on her massive, refined mana reserves.

Aeliana didn’t waste her energy on massive explosions that could risk destabilizing the shield wall as every single cast was meant to be deliberate and lethal too.

A pack of heavily armored Bone-Plate Crawlers tried to push through the right side of the gate, using their sheer mass to try and buckle the formation.

Aeliana’s hands ignited with blinding bluish-white starlight.

She fired a hyper-condensed beam of pure arcane energy.

WHOOSH!

The Arcane Piercer shrieked through the morning air, melting straight through the thick, magical bone armor of the lead crawler as if it were made of wax.

The beam didn’t stop there... It punched clean through the first beast, immediately piercing the skull of the second, and severing the thick spine of a third before finally detonating into the mud behind them.

Aeliana shifted her stance, pivoting slightly, and fired again.

WHOOSH!

And again...

WHOOSH!

Her beams acted as heavy sniper fire, blowing massive holes in the enemy’s pressure points to keep Brida’s shield wall from buckling under the weight.

Yet, even with the frontline holding the gap and Aeliana thinning the ranks, the Tide was relentless.

The beasts simply climbed over their own dead, using the growing mountain of corpses as a ramp with their frenzied numbers refusing to thin.

The Girls needed a meat grinder... They needed someone to step out of the heavy infantry formation and tear the center of the horde to shreds!

Tamsin stepped past the shield wall with her boots sinking deeply into the bloody mud.

"Sigh... What a way to start the morning." Tasmin said.

The Wilderness Huntress was tired of close-quarters dagger work.

Slitting throats one by one was far too slow for a siege of this magnitude... She rolled her shoulders, feeling the infinite stamina of Eluned’s Aura of Genesis burning like a sun in her veins, and reached for the new weapons strapped to her bracers.

Just two days prior, Silas had utilized the summoning portal to pull a High-Rank Forge-Maiden into the territory.

The artisan had taken one look at Tamsin’s standard iron hunting daggers, scoffed in disgust, and locked herself in the blazing forge that Silas made.

What she handed her the next morning was a masterpiece of engineering!

Tamsin gripped the hilts.

They were twin heavy mythril daggers, their blades curved slightly like the fangs of a predator, forged from a dark matte alloy that drank the ambient light.

But the true terror of the weapons lay at the pommels... Anchored to the base of each dagger was a long, magically reinforced dark-steel chain that wrapped securely around Tamsin’s leather-clad forearms, locking the weapons to her wrists.

She walked ten paces ahead of Brida’s shield wall, stepping directly into the open expanse of the basin, drawing the absolute fury of the Tide toward herself.

Dozens of mutated hounds and void-black Stalkers immediately abandoned the shields and lunged at the isolated Huntress.

Tamsin let out a breathless laugh.

"Come on then... I’ll use you to impress my Lord." Tasmin said with a smile, she was going to impress him just so that in the future when Lord Silas wanted a child with a strong woman.

She would be considered.

Tasmin threw her arms out, releasing her grip on the hilts and letting the heavy mythril daggers drop.

The dark steel chains rattled loudly against her gauntlets.

CRRK!

She spun her torso, channeling her Level 15 agility and the divine stamina buff, and snapped her arms in a sweeping horizontal arc.

The centrifugal force ripped the mythril daggers through the air at terrifying speeds.

The heavy chains acted as deadly extensions of her reach, turning her into a walking hurricane of slicing metal.

The curved mythril blades caught the first wave of leaping hounds mid-air as the sharp metal effortlessly sheared through thick muscle, bone, and sinew.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Blood sprayed in a massive, circular radius as beasts were literally cut in half with their severed torsos crashing heavily into the mud.

Tamsin didn’t stop.

She moved her arms in a brutal frenzy, spinning the heavy chain-blades like a certain god of war.

She whipped her right arm forward, the chain extending fully, and buried a mythril dagger deep into the skull of a Shadow Stalker thirty feet away.

With a violent yank on the chain, she ripped the beast off its feet, dragging its bleeding corpse through the mud before snapping her wrist to free the blade and transitioning straight into another sweeping cyclone.

She wasn’t just relying on the physical blades.

Tamsin channeled her own mana down the dark steel chains.

The mythril daggers ignited with a sharp aura of pressurized air, extending the cutting edge of the weapons by another three feet.

She created a massive, thirty-foot dead zone right in front of the gates and any monster that stepped into the radius of her spinning, mana-infused chains was instantly reduced to diced meat.

"Come on!" Tamsin screamed, entirely bathed in the dark blood of her enemies.

Her eyes were wild with the thrill of the slaughter with her feral nature completely unleashed. "Who else wants some?!"

While the center and the main breach held strong under the combined pressure of Brida’s iron and Tamsin’s chains, the edges of the battlefield were beginning to dissolve into chaos.

The Tide was vast, and the massive Tier 3 Boss lumbering in the distance was actively directing the flow of the siege.

Realizing the main gates were completely blocked by Tamsin’s spinning cyclone and Brida’s impenetrable shields, a secondary pack of heavy beasts violently broke off from the main charge.

They banked hard to the west, scrambling over the slick mud and dodging the craters, seeking a weak point in the perimeter.

They found the spellcaster lines that had been moving.

Rowena stood near the western scaffolding with a handful of newer recruits who were designated to throw basic elemental spells... small fireballs and low-tier wind blasts over the wall.

They were entirely unprotected by the heavy infantry phalanx, relying on the height of the palisade to keep them safe but leading the flanking pack was a terrifying Mini-Boss.

It was a Siege-Beetle mutation... a hulking rhino-sized monstrosity covered in thick, jagged obsidian carapace plates.

Its massive mandibles clacked aggressively as it lowered its head, preparing to ram its massive armored body directly through the smaller group of girls stationed near the wall’s edge.

The newer recruits panicked.

They stepped back with their basic iron weapons lowering as the massive beetle tore through the mud, building terrifying momentum however Rowena didn’t run.

She gritted her teeth, stepping to the front of the terrified recruits, placing her fragile body between them and the charging behemoth as she raised her basic wooden staff, channeling every drop of her now Level 14 mana into the core of the wood, desperately trying to form a gravity well dense enough to stop a charging boulder of solid armor.

The timber of her staff groaned loudly.

The wood began to splinter and crack under the intense magical strain, entirely unable to handle the required arcane output.

CRACK!

A massive fissure split the wood down the middle. Rowena’s eyes widened in horror.

She was going to fail... The beetle was fifty feet away and closing fast, its massive hooves tearing deep trenches in the mud.

Before the staff could completely shatter in her hands, Silas acted.

He was standing on the elevated ramparts of the Watchtower, fifty yards away, watching the perimeter.

He saw the flanking maneuver.

He didn’t have time to reposition Brida’s heavy infantry, and he didn’t have time to run across the courtyard to intercept the beast with his blade... he also didn’t want Eluned to one-shot everything because nobody would get EXP.

Silas extended his hand toward the western line with his blue eyes locking onto the splintering wood in Rowena’s hands.

He accessed his system, targeting the weapon remotely.

[Action: Forced Evolution to Tier 3 Arcane-Weave Scepter.]

[Cost: 40 UP]

"I’ve got you...!" Silas yelled out. "Show them what you can do."

A blinding pillar of liquid gold light erupted not from his hand, but directly from the splintering wood in Rowena’s grip.

The cracking timber violently transmuted right before her eyes.

The organic material rapidly darkened, compressing into a heavy dense alloy that looked like forged starlight.

The top of the staff twisted and expanded, forming a jagged, multi-faceted crystal that pulsed with a terrifying arcane pressure.

The transformation finished in a microsecond, leaving the heavy weapon in her grip.

Rowena gasped with her knees nearly buckling under the power radiating from the Tier 3 Arcane-Weave Scepter.

’My Lord has done it again...’

The deep-purple runes carved into the dark metal instantly linked with her spiritual pathways.

Her mana didn’t just flow into the weapon... it was violently magnified, multiplying her output by a factor of ten!

The Siege-Beetle Mini-Boss was twenty feet away with its massive hooves tearing up the mud as it prepared to crush her into paste.

Rowena’s grip tightened on the cold metal.

She had spent the last week quietly supporting the Vanguard.

She dropped gravity wells to slow down hounds, she helped carry supplies from the logistical wing, and she watched from the background while Aeliana fired explosive beams and Eluned altered the landscape but as she felt the heat lingering on the metal from Silas’s upgrade, a fierce ambition ignited in her chest.

’I will not be a background asset,’ Rowena thought with her blue eyes narrowing as the massive beast barreled toward her. ’I have to impress my Lord.’

Rowena didn’t cast a spell from a distance nor did she didn’t drop a gravity well and step back.

She charged instead.

The newer recruits screamed in terror as the delicate Arcanist ran directly toward the rhino-sized beetle.

Rowena closed the distance in three long strides and she swung the Arcane-Weave Scepter like a heavy mace.

WHOOSH!

As she swung, she channeled her gravity magic directly into the head of the staff.

She slammed the butt of the scepter directly into the side of the beetle’s massive jaw.

BOOM!

The impact sounded like a cannon firing.

The gravity field multiplied the physical weight of her swing by fifty, turning the delicate strike into a concussive sledgehammer.

The massive monstrosity was literally knocked sideways.

Its thick legs kicked frantically at the air as its forward momentum was violently derailed.

It crashed heavily into the mud, tearing a deep trench as it slid past the spellcaster lines but Rowena wasn’t done.

The lesser beasts following the Mini-Boss collided with one another, staring at the fallen leader in dumbfounded terror.

Rowena didn’t give them time to process the physics as she spun around with her blue eyes glowing with deep purple arcane light.

She raised the scepter high into the air, abandoning gravity magic and channeling pure elemental force.

The crystal at the top of the scepter flared from deep purple to a blinding crackling white.

She slammed the tip of the scepter into the mud.

"Burn!"