[The Inner Wall]
The Inner Wall stood as the final physical barrier of stone and iron. It was manned by a brittle shield of terrified humanity.
The wait was a crushing physical weight. It felt heavier than the steel plate armor the defenders wore. The air was thick with the suffocating stench of ozone, sulfur, and the roasting ruins of the lower districts. Down there, the outer rings of the holy city were already reduced to ash.
Sir Kaelthas, a Vanguard Paladin of the rising sun, slammed the iron rim of his massive tower shield against the flagstones.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The relentless rhythm matched his racing heartbeat. He refused to look out at the swirling, viridian abyss swallowing the city below. Instead, his eyes remained locked on the trembling militiamen stationed to his left and right.
These were not seasoned veterans. They were bakers, weavers, and farmers handed spears and told to hold back the end of the world.
"Eyes forward!" Kaelthas barked. His gravelly voice tore through the hot wind.
"Shields locked! If you fall, I will pick you up! If I fall, you step over my corpse and hold the line. We are the anvil of the Gods!"
A young spearman beside him stammered. His knuckles were white around his weapon's wooden shaft.
"Sir. Are the rumors true? The tunnels... are they really leaving us behind?"
Kaelthas did not flinch. He offered no empty comfort.
"They are securing the chosen people," Kaelthas replied grimly.
"The future of the Theocracy is walking into the dark right now. Every minute we stand here breathing is another mile they put between themselves and the slaughter. Do not ask for rescue, boy. Ask for a heavy toll."
Kaelthas hated the quiet. Silence was the fertile soil where panic took root. He sought to drown it in the rhythmic percussion of steel striking stone. He knew they were already dead. His only prayer was to die on his feet.
Nearby, the Seraphic Knight Elena floated mere inches off the bloodstained masonry. Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, exposing stark white sclera. She was communing with the ceiling of living light cast by the summoned angels above. Her mind bridged the terrifying gap between mortal flesh and divine mandate.
It was an agonizing connection. Blood dripped steadily from her nose and splashed against her silver breastplate.
"They are restless," she whispered. Her gauntleted hands blindly traced glowing sigils in the air.
"The light burns them to look down upon this. The streets below are thick with rotting sin. The angels want to purge it. They want to dive."
Beneath the heavy shadow of an ironwood ballista, Ritewarden Oryn knelt in the muck. His hands were coated in gray chalk dust. He rapidly drew a complex circle of warding around the siege engine, muttering the Sixty-Sixth Canticle of Earth in a breathless loop.
"Salt for the spirit. Iron for the flesh," Oryn mumbled.
His fingertips were scraped raw on the granite. They bled freely into the chalk, but he did not stop drawing.
"Don't let the green whisper take them," he pleaded to the stone.
Closing his eyes, Oryn could physically feel the oppressive geometry of the enemy's spellwork pressing against his fragile wards. It felt like cold fingers probing a cracked windowpane. The sheer scale of the approaching magic defied mortal understanding. It was a apocalypse. His wards were nothing more than paper walls facing a hurricane.
A few paces down the line stood Valerius, a bastard cousin of the Flame-Brand. He rested his heavy claymore on his pauldron. Wisps of acrid smoke curled from the joints of his armor.
He was recklessly channeling [Inner Fire]. It was a highly dangerous martial art that boiled the user's blood to brutally enhance muscular speed.
"Come on," Valerius hissed through tightly clenched teeth.
He sweated heavily from his own self-inflicted heat. The faint, sickening smell of cooking flesh drifted from his collar.
"I'm burning up out here. Let me hit something before I turn to ash."
The adrenaline was eating him alive. If he did not swing his sword soon, his own rampaging martial arts would simply stop his heart.
Anchoring the center of the infantry block was a colossal, heavily armored man. He carried a rectangular bulwark of enchanted steel. He did not shout prayers. He did not shake. Instead, he hummed a low, vibrating dirge from the deep mining villages of the western peaks.
It was a dark, soothing lullaby meant for the buried. The sound resonated in the chests of the men around him. The terrified spearmen unconsciously leaned toward the noise. They grounded their fraying sanity in his monolithic bulk. He was a mountain of calm in a sea of rising panic.
Drifting through the rigid ranks like a phantom was Sister Milla, the Quiet Chaplain. She offered no grand speeches of guaranteed victory. Everyone on the wall knew there would be no victory today.
Instead, she reached out with gentle hands to tighten a loose helmet strap on a hyperventilating boy. She tied a clean linen bandage around a veteran's blistered palm.
"The Six are with you," Milla murmured. She pressed her thumb against a weeping archer's sweat-slicked forehead. "And I am with you."
Her hands smelled faintly of dried lavender and old grave dirt. It was a scent that promised peace after the pain.
High above this tapestry of desperate mortals, the Principality Peace angels shifted. Their massive wings flared in perfect unison. It was a breathtaking expansion of blinding white feathers that briefly blotted out the night stars. The celestial light illuminated the viridian fog below. The holy glow turned the enemy's shroud into a churning sea of bruised, sickly colors.
Then, the silence finally broke.
It did not start with a battle cry. It started with a tremor. The thick stone of the Inner Wall shuddered violently beneath their boots. The viridian fog swirling at the base of the wall began to part. The stench of ozone was instantly overwhelmed by the suffocating reek of ancient, rotting earth.
Sir Kaelthas stopped hammering his shield. He stepped up to the crenellations and looked down into the ruins of his city.
The lower districts were gone. In their place was a moving ocean of bone and rusted steel. Thousands upon thousands of Death Knights marched in perfect, terrifying lockstep. Above them, skeletal dragons wreathed in spectral flames glided through the smoke.
The vanguard of the Sorcerer Kingdom had arrived.
The boy beside Kaelthas dropped his spear. It clattered loudly against the stone. He fell to his knees, his mind shattering at the sheer, impossible scale of the nightmare approaching their gates.
Kaelthas did not scold him. He did not offer any more words of false hope. He simply drew his longsword. The holy steel hissed as it caught the light of the angels.
He raised the blade high.
"Brace!" Kaelthas roared. His voice cracked the unnatural quiet, echoing down the length of the doomed wall. "For humanity! Brace!"