Chapter 729: Under Siege

The horde was vast beyond any number that could still mean something once spoken aloud. A seething sea of bodies that had swollen to a few million in a matter of minutes and showed no sign of slowing, spreading across the barren ground from the base of the walls to the far edge of the horizon, churning against itself, folding over itself, and growing ever greater.

The sound of it alone was its own kind of siege. A low, grinding roar made of a million throats, none of them individually distinguishable anymore, all of them fused into a single continuous hunger.

And just when the mind had finished stretching itself around that scale, when it had accepted the horror of what it was seeing and settled into it, the sky began to fill as well.

Winged entities poured upward from the many tears in reality, similarly horrid abominations that roared with rage and hunger in equal measure, climbing in their thousands until the clouds behind them were gone.

Soon, many millions of eyes shone in the expanse of the night. Amber and green and bruised violet, sickly gold, colors of every shade and some that had no honest name, and behind every last one of them the same two things.

Malice and Hunger.

The sky itself drowned beneath their weight, and their sheer numbers reached a scale that was no longer merely dreadful but suffocating, the kind of scale that pressed against the chest and made the act of breathing feel like something one had to remember to do.

The city was so vast that it would require days to cross on foot. With its walls, its towering spires, its destructive weaponry, and defenders beyond any reasonable counting, it should have appeared impossible to fall against any foe.

Yet before the endless horrors that grew by the minute, the city felt small.

A million abominations threw themselves at the city in a single surging motion and stopped a dozen meters short, halted by an invisible wall.

Tens of thousands died from the sheer impact, more dying beneath the feet of their own kind, painting the barrier red with blood, the creatures caring nothing for their own well-being and less than nothing for their own kind.

They climbed atop one another, crushing and mangling and grinding their own beneath them without pause or hesitation, and having found their target, they rained down a barrage of everything they possessed, elemental and physical both, from the pounding of fists and the driving of skulls used as battering rams to crackling torrents of light and incinerating flame.

Their forms spread across the barrier from below and from above, like a parasite bent on drowning the whole of it beneath its own weight, and at the speed they were spreading, an hour would have been enough to finish the work.

The barrier held.

Beneath the weight and the assault of millions, not a single ripple moved through its invisible form.

Yet how long it could hold was the question sitting behind every pair of eyes within its bounds, from the defenders standing shoulder to shoulder on the wall to the families pressed together in their homes below, and no one had an answer they were willing to speak aloud.

The defenders had lived through such attacks many times. Each time the experience had been soul-crushing in its own particular way, and each time they had survived it.

Only this time the weight of it all was worse. The rumor that the barrier would fall had begun somewhere no one could point to, the way such things always began, and it had grown louder with every passing minute.

Now, standing beneath a Devourer horde vaster than any they had ever witnessed, the credibility of that rumor was becoming harder and harder to dismiss.

But even if the barrier held strong as it had held for the past fourteen months, the casualties today would still be great in number.

One would be right to ask why, if the barrier held, there should be any casualties at all. To answer that, one had to first understand how the barrier worked.

Unlike a normal barrier, the Thousandfold Bastion, a barrier Alex acquired from the Ruler’s shop, was not a single, continuous wall of energy. Its entire structure was divided into thousands upon thousands of independent sections, each one functioning like a small door or block set into a colossal structure.

Damage inflicted upon one section therefore remained localized. Even if an attack carried enough force to shatter a single section outright, the surrounding portions of the Bastion would remain completely unaffected.

The destroyed section would simply collapse, isolating the breach, while the array immediately redirected energy toward the wound and began reconstructing what had been lost.

The repair of a single cell took less than three seconds. But under a siege of this magnitude, dozens of cells could fall at once, and the time required to mend them all could stretch into minutes.

Minutes, which were more than enough for the horde to pour through and wreak havoc, and it was in those narrow windows, not in any grand collapse, that they would suffer casualties.

The Bastion was special in another way as well. Where other barriers depended solely upon the energy fed to them, this one possessed a second and far crueler source of sustenance.

The life force of every entity that fell around it could be absorbed and converted into raw energy, allowing the barrier to continue functioning even when the array itself could no longer provide sufficient power, since the greater the slaughter at its feet, the stronger it became, and the faster it healed itself.

The other reason for casualties was traitors and renegades hidden among their own ranks, cultists and fanatics whose sole purpose was to sabotage the city’s defenses, to sow chaos, to do anything at all that might open a door for the enemy.

And unlike the horde, they did not need to break the barrier in order to kill.

Alex, Saahira, Odin, Loki, Wenrys, Zephar, and every other individual of power stood ready to do their duty, and minutes into the siege, orders began to ring through the ranks of the defenders.

The grinding of metal filled the air as massive pulse cannons shifted in their cradles, as grav cannons swung outward and locked, as incinerator lances rose along the length of the wall and ballistae the size of watchtowers drew back their arms.

Rune batteries lit one after another in long chains of pale fire, and siege arrays woke beneath the stone with a hum that could be felt through the soles of the boots.

Then the never-ending roars of rage and hunger were drowned beneath an avalanche.

Fire and plasma, cold steel and searing light, elemental rage of every kind imaginable poured down from the walls in a single unbroken sheet, and the plains below ceased to be ground and became a furnace.

In less than a minute, nearly the entirety of the Devourer mass that had threatened to drown the barrier was gone, wiped away like dust beneath rain, leaving the Bastion pristine once more.

But as if it had been waiting for that precise moment, waiting for the defenders to lift their heads and let themselves feel the first thin edge of relief, a massive boom tore through the city.

Before anyone could react, an entire sector spanning nearly a kilometer was in flames, a plume of fire climbing hundreds of meters into the night as though a volcano had opened beneath the streets. The shockwave rolled outward through the districts, and the screaming that followed it came from inside the walls.

Alex was already there.

Darkness rushed in from every direction at his command, folding over the burning sector, smothering the spread of the flames and pinning them where they stood, while his ancient eyes swept across the ruin with a speed that no ordinary sight could match.

The confusion in them lasted perhaps two heartbeats before it faded beneath the weight of understanding.

’Cassian has betrayed us.’

The realization cut him deeply, because it was not only an ally who was gone. Beneath the black smoke and the collapsing stone were thousands of lives that had been counting on them to protect them.

Every individual of power within any city, let alone Nova, had been vetted and examined for loyalty until there was nothing left to examine.

They had cleared tests designed to expose even the thralls of Empress Siles, those who were genuinely loyal in every waking moment of their lives and would nonetheless turn the instant she chose to reach into them and take hold.

So Cassian’s betrayal was something that demanded clarity, because an Elemental Ruler had just detonated his own body.

That was not a thing done lightly, nor cheaply, nor by accident. And Alex could not yet say whether the destruction had been the purpose of it, or whether Cassian had spent himself to prevent something far worse from happening, because from what Alex could see, the blow dealt to the city was bad.

Yet, it could also have been so much worse.

But whatever the motive had been, Alex did not have the luxury of dwelling on it, because one of the array nodes had been erased in the blast, and with it a section of the Bastion had collapsed.

A gaping hole now stood open in the wall of the world, and it would take minutes to mend itself. Minutes, with a few million waiting outside for exactly that.