The battle ground on with intensity that showed no signs of slowing. Every Eternal we destroyed seemed to be replaced by two more pushing through the breaches in our defenses. The merchant hall had become a killing floor, bodies of both Boros soldiers and destroyed Eternals littering the ground in pools of blood and preservative fluids.
A young human planeswalker woman who specialised in illusion magic made a critical error. She'd been using her abilities to create false targets, drawing the Eternals' attacks away from more vulnerable positions. When one of the champions, a massive bull-headed creature covered in ceremonial lazotep armor, charged through one of her illusions and caught her unprepared when it passed harmlessly through the false image.
"Hey watch out!" someone shouted, but the warning came too late.
The champion's fist connected with her chest, the impact driving her backward into a wall hard enough to crack stone. She slumped to the ground, stunned, as three regular Eternals closed in on her position.
Teferi tried to reach her with temporal magic, slowing time around the advancing zombies to buy her seconds to recover and escape. The Eternals pushed through his spell as if it barely existed, their lazotep armour resisting the temporal manipulation that should have frozen them in place.
He was also busy keeping a major part of the Eternal Horde busy.
The first Eternal reached her and grabbed her arm with fingers that looked like it was preserved through centuries of mummification. Where its hand touched her skin, something began to glow with sickly purple-white light. The woman screamed, a sound of pure agony that cut through the din of battle like a knife through flesh.
I was moving before my conscious mind finished processing what I was seeing, divine speed carrying me across the room in two enormous strides. My hammer caught the Eternal across its head, the impact powerful enough to shatter its skull and the lazotep helmet that protected it. The zombie collapsed into dust and broken armor.
But I was too late to prevent what had already begun.
The woman's body was convulsing now, magical energy crackling across her skin in patterns. The light was draining from her eyes, her skin going pale beyond what shock or blood loss could explain. Something fundamental was being torn from her essence, extracted against her will through whatever magic the Eternal's touch had activated.
The second Eternal grabbed her other arm, and the extraction accelerated with horrifying speed. I destroyed it with another hammer strike, then the third one that had been reaching for her. But the damage was already done.
The woman's eyes went glassy and unfocused. Her body slumped against the wall, still breathing but clearly no longer present in any meaningful sense. The spark that had allowed her to walk between worlds, the divine gift that made her a planeswalker, was gone from her essence.
I picked up her spark from the ground where the dust of the eternal had previously been. I tried to shove it back into her, but she had already lost her breath of life by then. It might also be partially because she was a younger walker, which might have contributed to how quickly she succumbed.
"No," Nissa breathed from across the room, horror and recognition in her voice. "They're harvesting sparks. The Eternals are designed to extract planeswalker sparks on contact."
That revelation sent a wave of fear through the assembled defenders. Planeswalkers were used to being the most dangerous beings in any given conflict, used to having powers that made them functionally immortal across multiple realities. The idea that a simple touch from these zombies could strip away what made them special, what made them survive, was terrifying in ways that simple death wasn't.
"Don't let them touch you!" Ajani roared, his previous confidence replaced by fury. "Physical contact activates the extraction! Keep them at range!"
Easier said than done when we were fighting in close quarters against an enemy that kept pushing forward regardless of casualties. The Eternals didn't care about self-preservation, didn't flinch from injury, and didn't slow down when their companions fell. They advanced, hands outstretched, seeking contact with any planeswalker they could reach.
Another planeswalker went down near the northern breach, an elven man who'd been holding the line against a squad of crocodile Eternals. He'd been managing fine until one of the champions, this one wielding twin spears, feinted high and struck low. The spear caught him in the leg, not a fatal wound but enough to make him stumble.
The regular Eternals immediately swarmed his position. He managed to destroy two with blasts of force magic before hands grabbed his shoulders from behind. The same sickly purple-white light began to glow where they touched him. His scream joined the first woman's in a horrible chorus of planeswalkers being unmade.
Gideon reached him in time to destroy the Eternals, his massive sword cutting through lazotep and mummified flesh with brutality. But like before, the extraction had already begun. The elven planeswalker collapsed, his spark torn away.
"We're losing people!" Chandra shouted, flames erupting around her in a defensive sphere that incinerated any Eternal that got too close. "We need to fall back to a more defensible position! This hall is too compromised!"
Razia was bleeding from a cut across his forehead where flying debris had caught him, his face pale with exhaustion. His Boros soldiers were faring even worse, their mortal endurance nearing its limits. I'd watched three of them collapse from sheer physical exhaustion in the last few minutes, their bodies unable to sustain the kind of continuous combat that planeswalkers could maintain through supernatural resilience.
"We can't hold this position much longer!" Razia called out between sword strikes at an approaching Eternal. "My soldiers are mortal! They don't have your stamina or your ability to recover! They need rest, or they're going to start dying from exhaustion before the Eternals even reach them!"
A lion Eternal crashed through what remained of the eastern wall, its lazotep-armoured form moving with predatory speed, animated by necromantic magic. It leapt toward Samut with jaws wide enough to bite her in half. She dodged with temporal acceleration, her body blurring sideways through accelerated time, but the lion adjusted its trajectory mid-leap.
Karn suddenly appeared, his metallic form interposing itself between Samut and the lion's attack. The Eternal's jaws closed on Karn's arm with crushing force, lazotep teeth grinding against the arm. Karn showed no pain, grabbed the lion's upper jaw with his free hand and pulled in opposite directions with immense strength.
The lion's skull cracked, then shattered, as lazotep armour fragmented under the immense force. The Eternal collapsed into a heap of broken metal and dust.
"They're testing us!" Karn called out, his keen mind still working even mid-combat. "Each wave is probing our defenses, identifying weaknesses! The champions are learning our capabilities and adjusting their tactics accordingly! This is coordinated warfare, not random assault!"
More breaches were opening in the merchant hall's walls as Eternals physically tore through stone and wood that had been weakened by previous combat. The defensive perimeter was collapsing inward, forcing all the planeswalkers into an increasingly small area where there was less room to maneuver and more risk of accidentally getting caught by an Eternal's grasp.
A third planeswalker fell near the center of the hall, this one a young man who'd been providing support magic for the front-line fighters. An Eternal that had been playing dead suddenly lunged upward from the floor, grabbing his ankle. The purple-white light flared immediately. The young man's scream was cut short as his spark was torn away, leaving him a hollow shell that slumped to the ground.
"The sparks!" Teferi shouted with horrified realization. "Look at what happens to them after extraction!"
I followed his pointing finger and saw what he meant. The sickly light that appeared when an Eternal touched a planeswalker didn't just disappear after the extraction. It flowed through the Eternal's body, traveling through lazotep armor and preserved flesh in visible streams of energy. The light moved down the Eternal's arm, across its torso, down its legs, and into the ground beneath its feet.
The energy was being transmitted somewhere else, siphoned away through channels underground I couldn't perceive clearly.
"They're not just killing us!" I called out, making sure everyone could hear. "They're harvesting planeswalker sparks for someone! This entire operation is designed to strip our power and deliver it elsewhere! Don't let them touch you under any circumstances!"
That realisation galvanises the defenders into even more desperate action. Chandra's flames burned hotter, creating barriers of fire between the advancing Eternals and us. Nissa called forth more massive roots to physically block breaches in the walls. Ajani's strikes became more precise, targeting Eternal joints and weak points with surgical accuracy.
But we were still losing ground. More Eternals kept coming through portals that opened and closed too quickly to target. More champions arrived to lead coordinated assaults. And every minute that passed, Razia's soldiers grew more exhausted, their movements slowing, their strikes losing force.
"We can't stay here!" Gideon shouted, his invulnerability protecting him from harm but not preventing him from being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. "We need to break out and find better defensive terrain! Somewhere with fewer entry points and more room to maneuver!"
"Where can we even go!?" Samut demanded while destroying another Eternal with temporal magic. "The entire city is crawling with these things! Everywhere we go will have the same problem unless we can get behind the beacon's barrier itself!"