CHAPTER 255: THE WALL OF ASH

Dawn broke across the ash-covered plains, casting a pale, sickly light over the barren battleground where a dense forest had stood twenty-four hours prior, leaving only vast, open stretches of grey earth. Taking full advantage of the clear line of sight, the Nerathil host had arrived, stretching from horizon to horizon as a nightmare horde of clicking chitin, twisted limbs, and black iron armor.

Leading the vanguard were ten colossal Behemoths, thirty-foot-tall war-monsters lumbering forward on thick, pillar-like legs with rotting flesh violently fused directly into rusted iron plating. Behind them surged an endless tide of medium and small thralls whose screeching chatter vibrated straight through the bedrock.

At the city's perimeter, the heavy iron gates remained wide open because there was no retreating inside stone walls against a host of this scale, knowing that if the army fell here, the city and everyone inside would die with them. The twenty-five thousand Æthrynn warriors marched out onto the open plain, their sun-infused spears gleaming in the morning light as they deployed in a dense, two-tiered central phalanx where the front line comprised twelve and a half thousand warriors arranged into tight, thousand-man square cohorts, backed immediately by an identical second layer of twelve and a half thousand as depth.

Standing on a stone outcropping above the central formation, Caius pressed his fingers to the fourth-dimensional stud on his forehead, and space tore open as a brilliant, tear-shaped spatial rift erupted in the air behind the line, spilling golden light onto the grey earth. From the inner dimension marched twenty-one thousand Bead-Bound souls, their physical manifestations glowing with disciplined solar energy.

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At a single command from the red-haired general, the souls split down the center with ten thousand five hundred sweeping out to anchor the left wing and an identical number fanning out to form the right. Directly behind the Æthrynn center, standing as the ultimate reserve, were the thirteen hundred and fifty elite warriors of the Obsidian Legion, their weapons cold and silent alongside White Bones and Nyzekh, meaning forty-seven thousand solar-infused defenders stood locked in formation, facing an abyss of one hundred and twenty thousand nightmare beasts.

A suffocating silence hung over the plain as the two armies locked eyes across the ashen divide before the ten Behemoths unleashed a deafening, earth-shattering roar and the Nerathil made their move.

The ground buckled and split as the colossal Behemoths charged, their massive iron-fused limbs pulverizing the earth into geysers of dust and bone fragments as they slammed into the front ranks of the Æthrynn phalanx. Flesh and armor exploded in a horrific shower of crimson mist and jagged shrapnel as the leading square cohorts braced their tower shields, absorbing the mountain-like impact with roaring bursts of white-gold solar mana that seared and melted the flesh of the charging monsters down to sizzling, blackened bone.

The air instantly filled with the deafening shrieks of the dying, the wet, sickening crunch of snapping spines, and the choking stench of boiling blood as thousands of smaller thralls swarmed over the shattered shield walls, only to be impaled, torn apart, and incinerated into drifting heaps of white ash by the relentless, coordinated thrust of obsidian-tipped spears and roaring macuahuitl blades.

Limbs flew through the air in a wild spray of dark, arterial blood, and skulls cracked wide open under the heavy swings of the obsidian-edged clubs, painting the gray earth in a thick, slick mosaic of torn viscera, spilled entrails, and gore.