Chapter 728: The Devourer’s Horde

Alex placed the young girl into the dark, cold expanse of a space ring, laying her to rest as gently as the motion allowed, securing what remained of her to be buried later in a nameless grave, one among the countless others already resting within the largest graveyard the Malefis Domain had ever needed to build.

Leaving her behind on the Human Continent, or on any continent still standing, would have amounted to nothing more than leaving fresh food out for the Devourer horde.

The graveyard itself also served the purpose of reminding Alex of every death this war had claimed so far, and it reminded him, in the same breath, of exactly why the war needed to end.

It also reminded him, more quietly and more insistently than he liked, that he might already be holding the key to stopping it entirely.

Empress Siles hadn’t been lying about The End.

The blade took the souls of the lives it claimed, dragging them down into the abyssal prison hidden somewhere within it.

No...Not quite.

The End only claimed the souls it judged unworthy, passing some manner of verdict on them, deciding they didn’t deserve to rejoin the natural cycle of life and death, and condemning them instead to its abyssal prison, a place where even a soul was denied the great mercy of oblivion.

The blade itself was eons old, and so the souls imprisoned within it numbered beyond counting, entities the cosmos itself had once feared, beings capable of erasing the likes of Ancient World without so much as pausing to consider the cost of doing it.

So when Empress Siles claimed the blade could give her everything she needed to complete her plan, she hadn’t been exaggerating. Not remotely.

But even though Alex carried the blade, even though he could never lose it- not figuratively, but genuinely could not, because it had chosen to remain with him of its own accord.

The End possessed a consciousness of its own. It decided what he was permitted to draw from it, and for the time being, all it had granted him was permission to wield it.

Alex knew, with absolute certainty, that the blade held an arsenal of souls whose combined strength exceeded anything he could properly imagine.

He understood that gaining even partial control over a fraction of them would transform every battle he fought from that point forward.

So, he had tried, in every way he knew how, to prove himself worthy of that power. He had used the blade to kill not merely powerful individuals, but three Hegemons, each one more monstrous than the last, one of whom he had brought down entirely through his own strength and strategy.

Yet, the blade had granted him nothing in return. No boon. No deeper trust.

But this wasn’t the moment to dwell on the impossible.

A siege was already unfolding, and he still needed to understand exactly how Empress Siles intended to threaten the cities under his protection, because dismissing her threats as empty would have been the mistake of a fool.

This wasn’t the first time she had tried to motivate him this way, and it wasn’t the first time she had issued a challenge this openly, but the scale of it had never been this large before.

In the last few minutes alone, three more cities had already come under siege, and now it was Nova’s turn.

A moment passed in heavy silence.

Then a screeching sound tore through the chaotic murmur rising from the city, one cry, followed swiftly by another, inhuman and raw, cutting through the tension like something physical.

An oppressive heaviness gripped the world in their wake, washing over everything around in one complete, suffocating wave.

Alex looked up.

Tens of portals stretched open across the distant land, jagged wounds torn into the fabric of reality itself, spaced apart at even intervals, chaotic energy spilling out from each one in thick, greyish darkness that curled and pooled against their walls, like something alive.

A silence engulfed the world for a long moment.

Even the low rumble of the storm clouds overhead faded into stillness, the entire sky holding its breath in the particular way it did before something irreversible. A calm before the storm, complete and absolute, and then, a heartbeat later, it broke.

Guttural, predatory roars, overlapping by the tens of thousands, layering into a single unbroken wall of sound, rippled outward as tides of unsightly creatures gushed forth from the torn gates.

It was a sight built from pure nightmare. The countless portals, too many now to count individually, might as well have been gateways to hell itself, spewing forth creatures that were disgorging repulsive, horrid shapes that clawed their way into the world, screaming in what sounded, in equal measure, like rage and agony.

Their forms varied as wildly as their swelling numbers.

Human and animal remained useful only as loose descriptions of resemblance, a starting point, nothing more.

Whatever these things had once been, they no longer belonged cleanly to either category. Humans with faces contorted past recognition, features twisted into fangs and animal parts, some collapsing entirely into massive maws ringed with writhing tentacles where a mouth should have been.

The beasts fared no better. Skinless horrors bristling with too many limbs, leathery wings stretched at wrong angles, bodies distorted into shapes that defied any clean description at all.

These formless horrors were the bulk of what spilled through the tears.

But scattered among that horde were other things, creatures that looked, at first glance, considerably less horrifying. Less nauseating to look at, and yet, somehow, they proved more terrifying than anything around them.

They carried the same horrid mutations as the mindless raging swarm, but refined, no longer something forced violently onto their bodies, but woven seamlessly into what they now were. Entirely new creatures, built rather than broken.

Their eyes were clear.

Free of the mindless rage consuming the horde around them, carrying instead something far worse: inhuman intelligence and a malice sharp enough to chill anyone unfortunate enough to meet their gaze directly.

And then there were the others.

Fewer still. Different again from both the rage-consumed swarm and the coldly intelligent predators moving among them.

Even within a horde spreading across the land like an unstoppable tide of flesh and rage, these few stood apart, each one distinct, sharing no single unifying theme.

One appeared as close to human as anything walking among the ever-growing horde. Another was beautiful, appearing genuinely and disturbingly pleasing to look at. A third was some manner of chimera, its mere presence enough to chill even the steadiest heart standing atop Nova’s walls.

They stood out because, like the horde surrounding them, they radiated a wrongness so total that the fabric of reality itself seemed to ripple and recoil at their presence, refusing to fully accept that they belonged in it at all.

But beneath even that wrongness, beneath the cunning in their eyes, the malice rolling off them in waves, they were, at their core, hunger given form.

That was the true nature of every abomination pouring through those tears. Not rage, or cruelty, though both were present in abundance, but their true nature was hunger.

The overwhelming, insatiable desire to consume everything in reach, to feast on the world they now walked, and devour reality itself down to nothing.

The horde gushed forth like the tides of some ravenous ocean, their bestial roars and growls drowning out every other sound across the battlefield.

Within minutes, they closed the distance to the city entirely, their sheer mass forcing them into a crescent formation almost by accident, covering the front, the left, and the right flanks in a single unbroken wall of teeth and claws.

Alex had already vanished from his position, reappearing above the wall in a single breath.

He had entertained, briefly, the idea of dropping into the horde himself and cutting through them for hours, letting the violence bleed the boiling anger out of his chest.

However, he knew better than to indulge it. He could stay down there and unleash death for hours on end, cull their numbers by a full tenth, and it would still count as a victory for the enemy, a victory won simply by dragging his attention toward something that meant nothing to them at all.

"BOOOMMMMMM."

The horde of horrors crashed headlong into a nearly transparent barrier, the impact producing a sound so violent, so absolute, that it felt for one disorienting moment as though the sky itself had fallen out of place.

Bodies were crushed instantly against the unmoving wall, the creatures behind pressing forward without the faintest regard for the casualties piling up in front of them, climbing over the dead and dying alike, scaling tens of meters within seconds, crushing tens of thousands of their own kind to death in the process without ever slowing down.

The shockwave from that first collision genuinely did make the sky fall.

The thick gray storm clouds that had been building for hours finally gave way, rupturing with a low, rolling roar of their own as rain began to fall in heavy, relentless sheets, washing down over the horde, over the barrier, over the blood-soaked land, as though the storm itself had simply been waiting for the first blow to land before it let go.