While the ballistas had felled wyverns in droves, Castle Black’s losses had quickly mounted when the enemy closed in. The wyverns, alongside the Intis air cavalry, struck with ferocity, and half an hour into the battle, the toll was steep.
Asher stood upon a rampart steeped in ash and the stench of burnt flesh. Smoke curled around him like mourning shrouds. The twenty Dragon Head ballistas that once crowned the walls—gone. Reduced to molten husks. Their controllers either charred in their seats or hurled to the ground by silver javelins that had struck like lightning bolts from the sky.
The corpses of hundreds of Dark Skies littered the battlements, their longbows shattered beside them.
Now, only silence lingered in the air, broken only by the keening wails of retreating wyverns—three of them—beating their heavy wings as they fled across the moonlit sky. Their cries, jagged and raw, gnawed at Asher’s bones.
He stared at them with clenched teeth, his jaw so tight it trembled. Rage boiled within him like a black tide. For a hundred years, none had slain this many wyverns in a single night. Seventeen of the scaled beasts lay dead, sprawled across the blood-soaked earth. And yet…
To him, it was not victory.
The price had been too steep.
He would have felt no triumph unless all the enemy fliers—wyverns, Swiftwings, every last feathered or scaled abomination—lay broken and burning beneath his walls.
Smoke spiraled upward, thick and dark, blurring the stars. What remained of the once-mighty wall was scarred, scorched, and shattered. Over a thousand men—soldiers of House Ashbourne and House Nubis—lay lifeless. Limbs buried in rubble. Faces frozen mid-scream.
Yet the ground below fared no better. Two hundred elite Intis air cavalry had died with their swift, furred mounts. Seventeen wyverns had fallen alongside them—pierced, burned, or dashed into ruin. The soil was now no longer soil. It was blood and mud and sorrow.
Asher exhaled slowly, but his breath caught.
A deep, rolling thunder rumbled on the wind.
Not of the sky—of the earth.
The enemy’s ground forces had arrived.
Twenty-eight thousand men.
Their unified war cry rose in a single monstrous roar, ancient and full of fury, like the bellow of long-dead behemoths waking from the deep.
They surged toward the shattered gate.
Then—came the voice.
A single command from below.
Alec.
“Open the gate!”
Chains groaned. The iron maw was drawn wide, and at once, ten thousand Grand Aegis soldiers marched forward with mechanical precision into the gateway, the torches flanking them casting long, flickering shadows across their blackened armor.
Alec reached the gate’s heart, then slammed his tower shield into the stone with a resonant clang. The men beside him followed in unison, their shields forming an impenetrable wall of steel and discipline.
“We hold this line,” Alec’s deep voice echoed like thunder. “Hold even in death.”
Their answering cry split the night.
“Hoo!”
Spears rose and leveled like a forest of iron thorns. The phalanx stood—unyielding, unmoving, unmoved.
Above, what remained of the Dark Skies scrambled across the crumbling ramparts. Their bows—taller than men—arched and sang, loosing volley after volley into the oncoming tide.
True to their name, the skies had turned black. Though unrivaled in might, the United Army eventually reached the gates and collided with the Grand Aegis Heavy Infantry.
Spears struck like serpents—darting forward, piercing through steel and sinew, then recoiling only to lunge again. They jabbed from gaps in the wall, slipping through blind spots where the light infantry least expected.
Bodies piled at the gate. Blood pooled. Yet the battle pressed on, fueled by escalating fury. Roars from both sides tore through the air. In the cold of night, heat pulsed among the living.
Men’s eyes were bloodshot. Their breath steamed with rage.
“Hold!” Alec roared, his voice booming as he drove his spear through the chest of a soldier from the United Army, then yanked it free. He scanned left and right, his vision catching soldiers scrambling over their own dead, using them as footholds to vault the shield wall.
“Sky of Death!” he bellowed.
In perfect unison, the men behind raised their spears high. The United Army’s desperate climbers landed on a wall of iron tips, their own momentum impaling them mid-leap.
“Forward!” Alec cried. His shield line surged a step ahead, boots digging into stone and blood. Muscles trembled, veins bulged, but the line did not break.
At the rear of the battlefield, a rider thundered toward Count Rimmon Wyvern, who stood watching from the outskirts astride his wyvern.
“My Lord!” the horseman called. “The light infantry cannot breach the gate. House Ashbourne’s Grand Aegis holds the passage with immovable strength!”
Count Rimmon’s pale eyes did not waver. “Is that so?” he said coldly. “Pull them back. Send in the Immortals.”
The messenger rode off.
From atop the broken ramparts, Asher saw the shift. A wedge of warriors began marching through the center of the United Army’s host—disciplined, silent, utterly out of place amidst the chaos.
The Immortals.
Asher’s brows lowered into a grim line.
The Grand Aegis had the advantage in height, weight, and armor. But that advantage dissolved the moment the Immortals struck.
With a single sword swing, one of the Grand Aegis was hurled back like a sack of grain. The Immortals moved like shadows, unhesitating, precise. Blades flashed like silver lightning.
Asher watched in shock as one cut down a Grand Aegis soldier with such ease, it made the armored warrior look like a mere trainee. His pupils narrowed.
It was as if the Immortal had seen it all before.
“Paladins!” Asher roared, leaping from the wall like a falling star. Two hundred Paladins and his elite bodyguard followed him, trailing cloaks and fury.
He landed in the heart of the battlefield with a thud, dust and blood rising around him.
Without pause, he closed the distance to the nearest Immortal and swung his sword in a brutal horizontal arc. The Immortal slipped back, swift and sure, and flung a dagger mid-retreat.
Asher lifted his shield, absorbing the dagger’s impact with a grunt, and surged forward into the opening.
But as he lowered his shield—a sword was already there, headed straight for his eye.
He jerked his head aside—but the blade curved with him, as if guided by foresight, like the Immortal knew exactly what Asher would do.
Not prediction.
Experience.
‘This feeling—!’
Asher growled, shoving his shield forward, knocking the blade aside, and with a fierce twist of his hips, brought his leviathan sword down like a falling tower.
Steel met flesh.
The blade cleaved through the Immortal’s cuirass as if it were straw. The armor split, and the blade bit deep.
The Immortal staggered back, cuirass falling away, revealing skin—gray and marred with dozens of scars. Skin that looked… wrong. Skin of the dead.
Before Asher’s very eyes, the gaping wound knit itself shut with eerie speed, leaving only another scar among many.
‘What in the world is this?!’