Chapter 726: The Face of War

Three hundred million.

It was a number vast enough that simply counting it aloud, one digit at a time, would have consumed days without pause, and that was only the number.

Now try to picture the city that number actually belonged to, three hundred million souls, young and old, strong and frail, filling a landscape too vast to take in from any single vantage point, each life its own small variation on the same shared fear.

Now picture that same city under siege. An army numbering in the tens of millions pressing against its gates, close enough to see, close enough to hear. It was a soul-crushing image even for the steadiest hearts to hold.

It grew considerably worse once one understood that the army in question wasn’t made up of soldiers in any conventional sense at all, but of abominable horrors that had once been something else entirely.

For the people of the capital city, Nova, none of this required imagination.

They had lived it. Many times over, each occasion worse than the one before it, lasting longer, costing more, leaving behind a weight that never fully lifted before the next assault arrived to add to it.

Once again, a battle for their continued existence was bearing down on them. The enemy was preparing to unleash everything it had against their walls, determined to grind their defenses down until nothing remained.

In answer, the people of Nova prepared to defend their city and their lives with everything they still had left to give.

Endless streams of people moved through the vast city like the working parts of some enormous machine, each one following its assigned motion without needing to be told twice.

Millions of defenders marched toward their posts along walls that stretched for tens of kilometers in either direction, toward siege towers that each housed hundreds of pulse cannons, the grinding of shifting metal filling the air as thousands of those weapons rotated into position.

Above it all, the sky itself slowly filled with warships, hanging silent and still, gathered together like an unnatural bank of clouds waiting for a storm that hadn’t broken yet.

The sectors positioned directly behind the weakest points in the city’s defenses, or those expecting the most direct assault, were already being evacuated.

Streets and buildings throughout those districts had been filled with traps and barricades, prepared to greet the enemy properly should the outer defenses fail for the first time in the city’s short, brutal history.

Today’s preparations were different from every siege that had come before them, and both soldiers and civilians alike could feel it in the air, in the particular tension threading through every command.

Everyone understood, whether they said it aloud or not, that the Aegis, the great, seemingly impenetrable barrier standing between them and their enemy, was expected to fall today.

For some, it wasn’t merely expected, but already known, and that certainty sent waves of crippling fear rippling through every district of the city.

The city had seen war before.

Its soldiers had seen death in numbers most people could never properly process. Entire sectors, home to millions, had already been lost to the merciless flames of previous assaults, but never once, in all of the past year, had the enemy been able to enter the city freely, in the millions, unopposed.

The panic threading through the streets now was its own kind of battle, one that threatened to spiral into something as dangerous as anything waiting beyond the walls in some time, even as the city’s greatest voices delivered speeches meant to steady the crowds, the kind of words that could make even a thoroughly broken soul feel, for a moment, like it still had something worth fighting and dying for.

But that battle, the one being fought street by street against fear itself, had to be won first. A rattled population only handed their enemies more openings, more ways to make an already nightmarish siege into something considerably worse.

Alex stood before a floor-to-ceiling glass window, watching the city prepare for the war bearing down on it.

A war that would claim tens of thousands of lives on a good day. Millions, if they failed to hold their line and push the enemy back. Tens of millions, if the city itself fell to something unseen.

In an ordinary war, armies fought over territory, over resources, over influence measured in the usual currencies of power. And when territory changed hands, its population was usually spared in some form, soldiers executed, or spared, or enslaved, but civilians left largely intact to serve whatever purpose their new rulers found for them.

This war followed none of those rules.

The Empire took the resources. It took the territory. It expanded its influence with every city it consumed.

But underneath all of that, it fought simply for the sake of the war itself, because there was no such thing as surrender here, not for anyone who might have wanted to offer it.

Every defeated force became fuel for the Devourer horde, the true bulk of the Empire’s endless numbers.

But even the Empire, cruel and soulless as it was, didn’t simply unleash its horde directly onto every defeated population without pause.

Or at least that’s what the Empire did to give its people a reason not to revolt for the cruelty they were inflicting, to make it seem it was all a war for a just reason, that the Alliance was preparing to end them.

But even the mercy they showed was for a reason, because it served their plan.

Once a battle concluded in the Empire’s favor, survivors were permitted to leave, allowed to walk away carrying whatever food they could manage, free to travel wherever they chose to go.

Those who managed to reach another city were allowed inside, granted shelter in isolated processing zones set aside specifically for refugees.

Nova’s own zone was the largest of its kind anywhere in the Alliance. But for those who couldn’t reach a safe city in time, the Devourer beasts scouring the countryside beyond the walls made short work of whatever remained of them.

At least, that was the fate awaiting any city Alex couldn’t personally reach in time.

Not because his own strength determined the outcome, though it certainly helped where it could. But because he remained the only person alive who possessed Continental Teleportation, a skill that worked under any space restriction and was capable of moving tens of millions of people across hundreds of kilometers in the span of a few minutes.

However, even with eleven avatars, each one capable, on its own, of holding an entire city together, it still wasn’t enough.

Alex was needed across five continents simultaneously, doing things that, each in their own way, drew the line between winning this war and losing it entirely. Eleven versions of himself, spread that thin, still left gaps too wide to fully close.

Unlike most wars, this one carried another distinction that set it apart from anything the old histories described. In an ordinary conflict, two sides clashed and did whatever damage they could manage against each other, and in a war ugly enough, erasing entire cities became almost routine, an accepted cost of the fighting.

Not this one.

As already understood by everyone at that table, the Empire fought for the sake of continuing the war itself, but its true objective was never dominance. Not territory, not resources, not even the slow, grinding annihilation of everything opposing it.

The war existed, at its core, because Empress Siles wanted bloodshed. Specifically. Deliberately.

She was not a madwoman in any conventional sense, not someone killing simply for the pleasure of killing. Her reasons ran deeper than that, being far more personal than anyone outside her innermost circle fully understood.

The Soul Cube.

An artifact Siles had acquired nearly a century ago from within the Ancestral Realm itself. What it actually did remained, even now, a matter of theory rather than fact.

Some claimed it granted the legacy of a great sorcerer who had once terrorized the cosmos in an age long past.

Others believed it served as a key to the Soul Plane, capable of granting its wielder the power to bring the dead back to life.

No one knew for certain. Not even the Ancestral Realm Ruler herself claimed to know its true nature. Its history had been written entirely in blood and war, its secrets never once fully surfacing, no matter how many had died trying to uncover them.

Empress Siles waged this war for one purpose above all others, to collect soul fragments. To meet whatever requirement the Soul Cube demanded of her, and finally learn what it truly offered in return.

This was why the Alliance had focused its own strategy so narrowly. Not on razing the Empire’s cities in retaliation, but on dismantling its strategic assets instead, elite forces, key personnel, supply lines, military outposts, logistical hubs, the vital infrastructure holding the whole machine together.

Every blow aimed with precision rather than spread wide for maximum devastation.

Because as much as weakening the Empire mattered, as much as every supply line cut and every outpost destroyed bought the Alliance more time, it all served a single, singular goal underneath it.

Kill Empress Siles, because only her death would end the war at all.