The central theater of the Light Empire had become a landscape of absolute, grinding horror. While the skirmishes on the periphery were brutal, they at least followed the traditional logic of war.
But at the heart of the battlefield, the legions of the Dark Empire, the necromancers, dark alchemists, and elite knights who formed the backbone of the empire's power, were staring into a mathematical abyss.
For a full day and night, they had poured their mana into the earth, raising a sea of undead and alchemy puppets that usually guaranteed them a victory through sheer exhaustion. But as the sun climbed higher on this second day, a cold, suffocating realization swept through the dark ranks.
The enemy wasn't thinning. They weren't tiring. In fact, the horizon was more crowded with hostile steel than it had been at the very start of the engagement.
"It's not possible." A veteran Dark Empire commander muttered, his face pale beneath his iron visor. His eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep and mana over-extension, tracked the shifting front lines.
"We have pulverized their vanguards. We have seen their dragons fall and their knights torn asunder. Yet for every ten we kill, fifteen more emerge from the rear. This is not a battle; it is a tide that only rises."
In any other war, the Dark Empire held the ultimate advantage. Their necromancers could harvest the enemy's dead, turning a loss for the opponent into a gain for their own skeletal legions.
But here, the logic was violently inverted. The Dark Empire's numbers were dwindling as their mana pools ran dry and their puppets were smashed to scrap. Conversely, the Great Aetherium and the Castle Faction were expanding their forces.
The news spread through their ranks like a plague. The Daily Recruitment. The Castle Lords were not merely bringing reserves; they were manifesting entirely new armies from thin air every day.
While the Dark Empire struggled to refine a few thousand alchemy puppets from the blood-soaked mud, the Castle Lords were summoning trillions of fresh troops. This 'emergency' wasn't a tactical fluke, it was a fundamental law of the Castle Faction that rendered the Dark Empire's famous attrition tactics meaningless.
…
As the psychological weight of the 'infinite tide' became too much to bear, the morale of the human supernaturals, the true living core of the Dark Empire, finally snapped.
Unlike the mindless undead slaves and the unfeeling alchemy puppets on the front lines, these necromancers and mages were creatures of self-interest. They were the 'Seeds of Divinity', the elite few destined to ascend to Godhood in their empire.
They looked to the sky, where the sealed battlefield flickered with the dying light of their God Legion. They knew the Gods were being slaughtered by Haru's forces.
"If the Gods fall, why should we stay to be buried in this dirt?" Whispered a high-ranking alchemist, "We are the future of our empire. Dying here is not a sacrifice, it is a waste of divine potential."
A silent, desperate coordination began to ripple through the rear lines. The Saints and Demigods, who were supposed to be directing the slaughter, began to "drag" their combat ranges toward the edges of the battlefield.
They maintained a facade of aggression, but their eyes were fixed on the gaps in the Great Aetherium's tightening net. They were no longer soldiers of an empire, they were refugees in waiting, looking for the first opportunity to vanish into the wilderness.
…
By late afternoon, the tactical collapse was total. Without the constant mana support and iron-willed direction of their professional masters, the alchemy puppets and undead servants on the front lines became sluggish. Their movements grew hollow and erratic, transforming them from a deadly legion into nothing more than target practice for the fresh recruits of the Castle Faction.
Seeing the structural failure, the Great Aetherium and the major Castle Alliances drove into the heart of the Dark formation like a silver blade. They didn't just push the line; they pierced it, fragmenting the six-trillion-strong host into thousands of isolated, chaotic pockets. The unified front was gone, replaced by a 'Harvest Phase'.
Mighty Castle Faction troops poured into the gaps, surrounding the directionless undead and pulverizing them for exp. The battlefield had ceased to be a contest of strength; it had become a training ground where the troops became Saints and Demigods in real-time.
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