Chapter 7: The First Night's Toll
The sanctuary was breached. From a jagged fissure that had split the courtyard's ancient stones, a new wave of Corrupted emerged. These were different from the beasts on the plains—smaller, more insectoid, their bodies seeming to be woven from the very rust that stained the city. They moved in a skittering, relentless swarm, bypassing armored fighters to latch onto the slow, the weak, the terrified.
Ryley watched from the doorway, his earlier calculation with Kaelen now a live-fire exercise. Borin and his nascent group were at the epicenter, forming a shaky defensive ring. The Guardian's shield was a bulwark, but for every creature he blocked, two more scrambled past the flanks. The Healer, Elara, was a frantic beacon of light, her face pale with strain as she tried to stem the bleeding of multiple wounded at once. Her value was skyrocketing, but so was the risk of her being overrun.
Kaelen's words echoed in his mind: "Fear is a beacon." The main group's panic was indeed drawing the swarm, concentrating the threat. To join them was to become part of the pyre.
His eyes scanned the periphery of the attack. The swarm wasn't infinite. It poured from a single point. The solution wasn't to fight the endless stream, but to dam the source.
He saw a path—a route along the shadowed, crumbling walls that would keep him out of the main fray and bring him to the flank of the fissure. He wouldn't be saving people; he'd be solving a problem.
Drawing his sword, Ryley moved. He wasn't stealthy, but he was efficient. He didn't charge. He stalked, using the chaos as his cover. A lone, skittering creature detached from the swarm and lunged at him. He didn't try a fancy parry. He sidestepped its clumsy charge and brought his sword down in a sharp, brutal chop, severing its rust-weakened spine. It collapsed into a twitching heap. The impact vibrated unpleasantly up his arm. It was grisly, visceral work.
He reached the fissure. The ground here was unstable, trembling with the effort of disgorging its corrupt offspring. He could see down into the darkness, a glimpse of a pulsating, organic-looking network of rusted veins that glowed with the same sickly light as the walls. This was the "poison well" Kaelen had mentioned.
A plan formed, cold and simple. He wasn't strong enough to seal it, but he could block it.
He sheathed his sword and, straining his muscles, grabbed a large, loose slab of rubble from the collapsing wall beside him. He heaved it, grunting with the effort, and shoved it over the widest part of the fissure. It wasn't a perfect seal, but it forced the emerging creatures to squeeze through a much narrower gap, slowing the tide to a trickle.
Immediately, the pressure on Borin's group lessened. The Guardian noticed the change, his eyes darting around until they landed on Ryley standing by the now-partially-blocked fissure. There was no gratitude in Borin's look, only a sharp, assessing acknowledgment. He saw a resource, not a savior. Ryley preferred it that way.
With the source choked, mopping up the remaining swarm inside the courtyard was a matter of brutal, collective effort. It took another hour, but finally, the last creature was put down. The courtyard fell into an exhausted, traumatized silence, punctuated by the moans of the wounded.
The cost was clear. Dozens more were dead. The survivors huddled together, their initial numbers dwindled even further.
As the adrenaline faded, a new problem presented itself. The Healer, Elara, stumbled and nearly collapsed, caught by Borin. Her mana—or whatever passed for it in this real world—was clearly depleted. She couldn't heal anymore. The wounded who hadn't received aid were beginning to succumb to their injuries, their cries growing weaker.
Ryley watched as Borin took charge, his voice a low, commanding rumble. "We need to secure a defensible position. This courtyard is too open. We need water. We need to tend to our wounded." He was a natural leader, his pragmatism forged in a different fire than Ryley's, but just as effective.
Ryley didn't join the huddle. He had done his part. He had protected his long-term investment by solving an immediate tactical problem. He had also confirmed Kaelen's intel was good, which made the Forsaken an even more valuable contact.
As the survivors began to organize, led by Borin into the deeper, hopefully more defensible ruins of the Sanctum, Ryley hung back. He looked up at the sky through the broken ceiling of the city. The bruised purple was deepening into the impenetrable black of night. The Rust on the walls glowed faintly, as if breathing.
Kaelen had been right. The first day was the easy part. The Rust got louder in the dark. And somewhere, far above them, the Spire stood as a silent, mocking promise of a freedom that felt more distant than ever. But that was a problem for another day. Tonight's problem was simply surviving until dawn.
The deeper ruins of the Sanctum were a labyrinth of despair. Borin's group, now numbering around fifty of the most capable-looking survivors, had taken refuge in a large hall with only two entrances. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, blood, and a creeping dampness that made the rust on the walls glisten. Ryley followed at a distance, a shadow on the edge of their fragile community.
He watched as Borin posted lookouts and organized a watch schedule with the grim efficiency of a man who had done this before. Elara sat against a wall, her head in her hands, utterly spent. The few players with minor healing skills were doing their best with bandages torn from cloaks, but it was a pitiful effort. The deeper truth of their situation was settling in: there were no potion vendors here, no convenient healing fountains. Resources were finite.
And the most finite resource of all was water.
Ryley's own throat was a dry, cracked desert. He saw the same desperate thirst in the eyes of everyone around him. A man was frantically shaking an empty canteen. A woman was licking condensation off a moss-covered stone.
"We need to find water," Borin announced, his voice hoarse. "A small group. Volunteers."
The silence that followed was heavier than any monster's roar. Venturing back out into the dark, rust-infested halls was a death sentence everyone could feel in their bones.
Ryley saw an opportunity. Not for heroism, but for leverage. While others had panicked, he had been observing. He'd noted the flow of the land, the way the rust-streaks on the walls converged towards areas of dampness, and the faint, almost imperceptible sound of dripping water echoing from a specific, dark corridor leading away from the main hall. It was a gamble, a hypothesis built on scraps of sensory information, but it was a calculated one.