Chapter 131: The Sky Answers the Wall

The Bulwark of Ash had stood for a thousand years as humanity’s first and last line of defense, and it was never left unguarded.

Garrisons from both great empires and all seven kingdoms were stationed along its length, rotating in and out through the seasons, bound by a shared oath to keep the dead from the lands behind them.

Whatever the realms thought of each other in times of peace, at this wall they stood as one.

Elara carried a particular weight here.

She had come as the royal house of Northvale’s own representative, and the moment she arrived, an aide in the colors of the garrison met her at the gate and led her through a series of vaulted corridors into a vast council hall.

The room was packed. The wall’s resident commanders stood shoulder to shoulder with high-ranking officers who had been teleported in from the empires and kingdoms that morning, voices overlapping, maps unrolled across long tables, runners moving in and out with fresh reports.

Intelligence was being traded as fast as it arrived, and combat assignments were being handed down in rapid, clipped sentences.

Kael had no interest in councils. He’d spent the whole night fighting, he hadn’t eaten, and his stomach was making its opinion known.

With more than half an hour still left before the event officially began, he told Elara where he was going and slipped out of the hall alone.

He found a quiet corner, logged off, ate a proper breakfast, and returned to the game with less than ten minutes remaining on the clock.

Elara’s location came to him instantly through the bond. He called Stormwing Sovereign down from the pale morning air, swung onto its back, and took to the sky above the wall.

The view from altitude took his breath for a moment.

Behind the wall, a fortified town stretched in tight rows against the stone, crowded with soldiers from every realm in the south, regiments forming up in orderly blocks and marching toward their assigned stretches of battlement.

Griffins and giant eagles swept back and forth between the ground and the ramparts, carrying crates of supplies in their talons.

Waygates scattered through the town flared again and again with bright white light, each flash delivering another group of players straight from the capitals, where soldiers in the garrison’s colors waited to guide them to their posts.

The wall itself rose a hundred meters from the frozen earth, and it was far more than a single rampart.

Five tiers of defense had been carved into its mass, each one a long gallery cut through the stone and facing north, stocked with troops and heavy weapons, designed so that any enemy force breaking through one level would immediately find itself under fire from the next.

Most of the players had been assigned to the first three galleries. The fourth was manned by the organized guilds and a portion of the standing legions.

Only after chewing through all four, in sequence, could the Hollow Legion reach the top of the wall itself.

The best troops from every capital held the central stretches, forming the real backbone of the defense.

Elara stood on a section of rampart garrisoned by Northvale’s own soldiers, in full military dress, walking the line, speaking to the men, her presence a banner in itself.

Beyond Sir Gareth Thorne and her personal guard, few of the wall’s senior NPCs were nearby to protect her.

Kael dropped lightly from Stormwing Sovereign’s back and landed at her side, his gaze turning north.

Beyond the wall, for miles, nothing but snow.

And in the snow, the dead.

An endless sea of them stood in perfect stillness across the white plain, a dark carpet that stretched out to the horizon, wind tugging at their tattered cloaks.

Not one made a sound. The silence from so many was worse than any war cry, as if every one of them were waiting on a single signal that hadn’t yet been given.

Seconds crawled past.

With a hundred seconds remaining, an enormous countdown unfurled across the sky, numerals glowing gold against the gray. The numbers dropped one at a time, steady and unhurried.

When the last of them reached zero, a vast golden panel visible only to players slid down out of the clouds and hung above the battlefield. A faint, distant roar rolled over the plains.

In the snow, every head in the dead army lifted at once.Pale fire flickered in ten thousand empty sockets, and then the whole host surged forward in a single motion, a black tide rolling across the white, screaming as it came.

"Fire!" the garrison commander bellowed, and his sword came down.

Along the wall, for hundreds of miles in either direction, rows of crystal cannons opened up as one.

Their dark barrels spat flame, the roar of the volley rolling across the sky like thunder, and shells packed with volatile magic arced out over the snow and dropped into the oncoming mass. Violet storms of raw force tore through the dead, ripping whole ranks apart.

The Hollow Legion had committed its entire strength. Its common foot soldiers were effectively endless, and for every body torn to pieces by the cannons, three more surged forward to take its place, climbing over the wreckage of their own.

As the leading edge of the horde closed into bow range, the archers on the galleries and ramparts let fly, a hail of skill-lit arrows arcing down into the tide and sending numbers blooming across the field.

Overhead, the golden panel came alive. Names and point totals scrambled, shifted, and climbed in a blur, the rankings rewriting themselves with every kill.

Kael was not about to be outdone.

He loosed his companions, and each went to work. The Hollow Emissary slipped out of sight the instant it appeared, leaving nothing behind but a faint ripple in the air.

Lyra strode to the edge of the parapet, bow rising in a single smooth motion, and let an arrow fly.

Nebulastorm Shot.

The arrow burst on impact, blooming into a swirling storm of nebula light that swept over a wide swath of the field, damage numbers tumbling across the dead as it passed.

Stormwing Sovereign wheeled out over the thickest part of the horde, golden lightning crackling off its wings, and screamed.

Tempest Judgment.

Every point of its mana drained away in a single pulse.

The sky above the northern plain darkened as swirling storm clouds drew in from every direction at once, golden light forking through them in great branching veins, the lightning knitting itself together into the vast, shadowy outline of a colossal bird, wings spread across half the horizon.

It dove.

The roar of the strike shook the wall itself. The image slammed into the densest knot of the Hollow Legion’s advance, and a dome of lightning ripped outward across several hundred meters, swallowing everything in its path.

The pure, burning gold of Stormcrown was nature’s own enemy of the undead, and the dead reacted accordingly.

They howled as the light tore through them, health bars collapsing wholesale, thousands of the weakened simply bursting apart where they stood.

Columns of white light rose from the shredded front line and streamed upward into Stormwing Sovereign, a rain of experience pouring into its body.

On the walls, on the galleries, across the whole length of the defense, everyone who had witnessed it had stopped to stare.

For a long moment, there was no sound from the battlements but the wind.

Then the cheering broke out.