Chapter 80: A Losing Battle

"Mad! Mad!! This is Insane!! When last in my old years have I seen someone move like that! Surely, the Old Gods have not forsaken us! They’ve sent a savior!"

Marrick sounded like some crazy old man that believed in some chosen one prophecy, he watched Theo with so much excitement like he had found hidden treasures all of a sudden.

And it contrasted the atmosphere that he currently was in.

There were about ten soldiers who stood around the cart, holding their swords with locked jaws and white knuckles, breathing hard through their teeth and not stepping back.

"Mr Marrick please can you not keep leaning over like that, you’ll make the cart fall!"

"Oh, ohh, forgive me. I got a bit carried away there, didn’t I?"

He grinned shamelessly and settled calmly over the cart, sitting in front of his anvil with a pile of swords stacked crossways at his knee like firewood.

He picked one of them and raised a strange hammer, it was different from the conventional thing and seemed to have been carved from glass. As he slammed it on the sword, a bright silvery light exploded from it, ran down the blade from the guard to the tip, and dimmed immediately.

"Hmm, a success, any more would break it so it seems. This can only condone a one-star enhancement, get it out of my face!"

He smacked the sword away from his anvil. And yet the soldiers went after it before it had finished sliding across the cobbles, three hands closing on the same hilt. The two that lost turned straight back to the anvil and waited for the next one.

"A one-star enhancement! I hear it is like holding a Rare-grade weapon. If the Old Gods permit me to survive this experience, I will save this as a family heirloom!"

"Give it to me!"

Marrick did not concern himself with them. He had picked up another sword and was already beating the enhancement into it with his magical hammer, glass ringing on steel in a thin flat note that carried further than it had any right to. His hands were black to the wrist and his sleeves were rolled past the elbow, and the pile at his knee was going down faster than the pile behind him was going up.

While he continued to increase the quality of the weapons, sweating through his collar as he did so, the soldiers fought at the top of their lungs to collapse the frontline.

The new round of soldiers that Marrick had armed collided with the first line of the Inheritors and as they brought their weapons down, it went through like a hot knife going through bread.

It gave each and every single one of them an almost amusing experience of cutting. The enhancement on each sword was so brutal that it cut through the rusted weapons and armor of the Inheritors with disturbing ease. A stroke aimed at a shoulder came out somewhere near the hip. A block took the blocking arm off at the elbow and kept going.

Many of the soldiers after a cut had to pause and look at their swords with shock. Then reminded themselves not to bring it anywhere near their own body. For the few that failed to keep that promise, they were maimed by their own weapons sometimes. One man opened his own thigh turning too fast in the press. Another took the ear off the comrade beside him and did not notice until the shouting started.

As the Inheritors were being slaughtered, felled, so were some of the survivors from the Sixth Wall falling. They went down in ones and twos, pulled under and not coming up, and the line closed over the gaps where they had been standing. But they were fewer in number.

Still, the battle was appalling to watch. The Inheritors were like a sea that washed upon multiple streets, filling the gaps between the buildings, coming around corners the defenders had not thought to watch, and there were just about a few hundred men and women fighting desperately to push them back.

Pushing them back was in and of itself a stupid statement to use. How were they supposed to push an ocean back with just a bucket of sand?

That had been the source of their anguish, the reason why they had thought it better to wait and enjoy their last days and die. Even now, as they fought viciously, mangling the Inheritors, tearing apart men who had once been their comrades with pain and vigor, calling some of them by name while they did it, that truth still existed.

They were still fighting a losing battle.

And yet, none of them cared. They were full of hope and fought like armies that were ready to cross hell, shouting over each other, laughing in places where laughing made no sense.

Perhaps, it was the reason why they were so blind to their rapidly reducing numbers.

At some point, the Inheritance seemed to have changed strategy.

Somewhere in the center of its horde, two of its Legatees were facing Theo, but it did not hold for long. Theo, who could barely survive one Legatee, overpowered two of them with destructive power.

One of them now had a mangled belly, wet and open and still walking, and the Inheritance had thrown several Inheritors at Theo to prevent him from finishing that one off, while the other Legatee came from behind.

But it still was unable to catch Theo off guard. Theo had blocked the attack from behind with the shield, taking the weight of it on his forearm and giving one step to the shock of it, then easily counterattacked and took the head of the other one. It came off cleanly and went into the crowd, and the body walked two more paces before anything in it understood. It had played out like he planned it that way, as if the Inheritance was merely falling into his trap.

This unsettled the Inheritance greatly, even though it was being attacked fair and square from all sides, there seemed to be only one thing that it was vehemently furious and worried about.

And because of this, the creature did something that it had never done before.

It started killing off its own vessels.