Chapter 90: The Wall

Chapter 90: Chapter 90: The Wall

The northern edge of Genesis City used to be a chain-link fence and a toll booth.

Now it was a wall of reinforced steel, fifty feet tall, with four hundred armed Awakeners standing along the top of it. Above them, the blue, hexagonal hard-light of the Aegis Wards stretched across the whole sky.

Donald stepped out of the transport vehicle and fixed the cuffs of his tactical jacket. Nyx sat on his shoulder without wobbling once.

Beside him, Evelyn cracked her knuckles. She still didn’t have her silver sword. She was in full combat armor with nothing in her hands, and she looked ready to hit the first thing that got close to her.

"Hold the line!" a TIG squad leader shouted from the top of the wall. "Archers, nock your arrows! Mages, charge your cores!"

The four hundred C-Rank and D-Rank Awakeners were scared. Donald could see it on their faces. But none of them ran.

To be fair, they were being paid triple overtime. And twenty minutes ago, they had watched their boss call down a beam from space.

Donald walked up the metal stairs to the top of the wall.

Outside the dome, the thirty-five thousand surviving demons were closing in. The ground shook under the weight of the Orcs and the eleven Siege Golems that were still left.

"Reminder, the shield is one-way!" Aris’s voice came through the comms in Donald’s ear. "We can shoot out. They can’t shoot in!"

"Open fire," Donald said.

The wall lit up.

Hundreds of fireballs, ice lances, and armor-piercing arrows flew out through the blue barrier and came down on the front of the Abyssal army. Orcs were blown backward off their feet. A Hellhound took three glowing arrows through the side and was pinned to the dirt.

But there were too many of them. The demons kept running through the barrage, climbing over their own dead, until the front line slammed into the Aegis Wards.

The dome flashed.

Thousands of demons hacked at it with axes, swords, and dark spells. Sparks of black magic burst off the hard-light everywhere they hit. The shield didn’t dent.

The Awakeners on the wall cheered.

"Don’t celebrate yet," Donald said, watching through the blue.

Three Siege Golems pushed their way to the front. Each one was over thirty feet tall, built from jagged iron, and each one carried a spiked iron pillar instead of a ram. They lifted the pillars together and brought them down on the same spot of the barrier.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

Everyone on the wall felt it in their teeth. The shield held, but the blue light rippled where the pillars hit, and the ripples were getting wider each time.

"They’re going for the physical threshold," Sylvia said, now standing at Donald’s other side. "Magic slides off. Weight doesn’t. If they keep hitting that same spot, the hard-light will break."

"Then we take away their hammers," Evelyn said. Her blue eyes lit up. "Donald. Let me out."

Donald tapped a command into his tablet.

A ten-foot section of the dome, right in front of the three Golems, flickered off.

Evelyn jumped off the wall.

She fell straight down into the crowd of demons, and halfway down, her sapphire-and-gold wings burst out of her back. The light from them blinded every Orc looking up at her.

She hit the ground hard enough to crack it. The shockwave threw two dozen demons into the air.

A Void Knight came at her with an eight-foot halberd, swinging it down at her head.

Evelyn stepped aside. The blade hit dirt. Before the Knight could pull it back up, she grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off the ground, and threw him into a pack of Hellhounds.

The halberd was left standing in the ground. She pulled it out and looked at it.

It was heavy, jagged, and ugly.

"It’s not my sword," Evelyn said.

Holy fire came up from her hands and spread along the black metal. The demonic iron hissed and smoked as the fire burned the darkness out of it. In a few seconds, the whole halberd was glowing white-gold.

"But it’ll do."

She swung it in a wide circle. The holy fire went straight through armor. The ring of Orcs around her fell apart in halves, their shields melted in their hands.

Then she ran at the first Golem.

It saw her coming and lifted its pillar to crush her.

Evelyn didn’t try to block it. She waited until the pillar was coming down, then beat her wings once and shot up into the air. The pillar hit the ground where she had been standing.

She landed on top of it.

Then she ran up the pillar, onto the Golem’s arm, across its shoulder, and drove the burning halberd straight down into its glowing red eye.

The Golem locked up. Red light leaked out of the cracks in its iron body.

Evelyn put her boot against its head and pushed off, pulling the halberd free as she flew backward.

The Golem tipped forward, still holding its pillar, and fell straight onto the second Golem standing beside it. Both of them went down in a pile of iron. A second later, the first one exploded, and the blast tore the second one apart with it.

Two down.

Back on the wall, Sylvia sank into her own shadow.

She didn’t go down to fight hand to hand. That wasn’t how she worked. She used [Shadow Sovereign] and slid down the face of the wall as a flat patch of darkness, passed out through the barrier, and disappeared into the shadows of the battlefield.

The third Golem was still hammering. It raised its pillar for another swing at the cracked spot.

Sylvia came up out of the shadow under its feet. She touched the pillar right as it reached the top of the swing.

And she put it in her inventory.

The pillar was gone. The Golem’s arm came down holding nothing, and with all that weight suddenly missing, the swing pulled the Golem off balance. It stumbled forward and crashed face-first into the shield.

The Aegis Wards didn’t care about that. It was just a body hitting it.

Sylvia was already gone.

Farther back, a squad of Abyssal mages was standing in a circle, chanting. A cloud of green acid was building up above them, getting bigger, aimed at the wall.

Sylvia came up out of the shadow of a dead Orc right behind them.

She didn’t stab them. She opened her inventory above their heads.

Out dropped one of the ten-ton pallets of raw void-steel she had taken from the Demon King’s vault.

It landed on the whole squad at once. The acid cloud fell apart with nobody left to hold it.

Sylvia laughed and sank back into the ground before the demons nearby even turned around. Then she started working her way through the backlines, coming up under one group after another and dropping the Demon King’s own treasury on their heads.

The third Golem got back to its feet. It had no weapon now, so it started punching the shield with its bare iron fists.

Sylvia came up on its shoulder and dropped the pillar back out of her inventory, from forty feet up, straight onto its head.

Three down.

Donald stood on the wall and watched it all happen.

Then his [Valuation Eye] flared.

Half a mile out, a dozen high-level Abyssal Warlocks had gathered in a tight group. They raised their staves and chanted together. In the sky above the city wall, a spinning vortex of red hellfire started to form.

[WARNING: Catastrophic Energy Spike Detected.]

[Enemy Skill: Meteor Swarm (A-Rank Mass Artillery)]

[Note: Spell originates outside the Aegis Wards. Impact point is inside.]

The spell wasn’t shooting through the shield. It was being made on top of it.

"Incoming!" an Awakened captain screamed, pointing up.

Ten meteors dropped out of the vortex, falling straight at the packed defenders on the wall.

Donald raised his right hand to the sky.

"[Hostile Takeover]."

[Target Spell: Meteor Swarm (A-Rank)]

[Appraised Value: 900,000 System Credits]

[Current Balance: 350,000 System Credits]

[Insufficient Funds.]

"Sylvia. I need you on the wall. Now."

The shadow at his feet opened, and Sylvia came up out of it. She saw the meteors and didn’t ask anything. She held the shadow open.

Donald pushed his left hand down into it until his fingers touched the wooden edge of a crate.

"[Asset Liquidation]. Five crates of cores."

[Liquidating: Condensed Abyssal Cores x5 crates — 900,000 Credits.]

"Buy it," Donald said.

[900,000 Credits Deducted.]

[Ownership Transferred.]

[Current Balance: 350,000 System Credits]

The ten meteors stopped in the air, fifty feet above the Awakeners’ heads. The red fire around them turned gold.

Sylvia sank back into the shadow and was gone.

Donald lowered his hand and pointed at the backlines.

"Return to sender."

The meteors turned around. They flew back the way they had come at twice the speed, and all ten of them landed on the group of Warlocks. When the smoke cleared, there was a crater where the enemy’s spellcasters had been.

The Awakeners on the wall went wild. They were shouting and pounding on the railings. Their Guild Master could not be touched.

Donald didn’t smile.

Because out in the field, the demons had gone quiet.

The army split down the middle, making a path. The roaring stopped. So did the sound of weapons on the shield.

A figure stepped down from a floating chariot and started walking toward the dome.

Demon King Azgalor was twelve feet tall. His jagged black armor didn’t reflect any light at all. His greatsword was longer than he was. He didn’t run. He walked slowly, in no hurry, the way someone walks when nothing in front of them has ever stopped them.

Evelyn landed in his path and planted her burning halberd in the ground.

"Move," Azgalor said. His voice was so deep that the people on the wall felt it in their chests.

Evelyn flared her wings.

Azgalor didn’t swing at her. He didn’t even raise his sword.

He just let out his aura.

Level 100+ killing intent hit Evelyn all at once. Her boots dug two long lines in the dirt as she was pushed backward. She leaned into the halberd to stay standing, and the halberd’s shaft bent under her weight. She couldn’t get a full breath. It felt like the air had become too heavy to pull in.

"Evie, get back behind the shield!" Donald said over the comms. His voice was sharp now. "Now!"

Evelyn let go of the halberd. She beat her wings hard, shot backward through the open gap, and Donald closed the section of the dome right behind her.

The halberd fell over in the dirt. The holy fire on it went out.

Azgalor stood alone in front of the Aegis Wards. He looked up at Donald on the wall.

"You steal my gold," the Demon King said. "You break my gate. You burn my army."

He raised his greatsword. Hellfire came up along the blade until the whole thing was burning.

"Let’s see how much your money can protect you, Investor."

He swung the sword into the dome.

No spell. No skill. Just his arm and the weight of the sword.

CRACK.

The sound was so loud that half the Awakeners on the wall dropped to their knees with their hands over their ears.

Behind his gold mask, Donald’s eyes widened.

At the point where the sword hit, the blue hard-light had split. Glowing cracks spread out from it in every direction, across the barrier, wider than the wall itself.

[CRITICAL WARNING: Aegis Wards Structural Integrity at 80%.]

The shield that protected Genesis City was breaking.