Chapter 41: The Invasion Begins
The forest didn't move like a forest should.
From up on the wall, the Edelmere treeline was a jagged black-green smear against the horizon, but every now and then, the shadows inside rippled, too fast, too deliberate, like something was shifting beneath the foliage. The air was still, the kind of stillness that makes you think the whole world's holding its breath.
Freya was on the far side of the section, leaning over the wall with a spyglass. She didn't say a word, but the way her knuckles whitened around the brass tube told me everything.
The sun climbed toward its apex, and the stone beneath my boots baked in the heat. Sweat gathered under my armor, slow at first, then relentless. I tried distracting myself by counting the guards in our section again, thirty-one now, since another adventurer showed up late with a quiver of arrows slung across his back and an expression that screamed instant regret.
I kept glancing at the countdown.
64:27:12… 11… 10.
It felt like the damn thing was mocking me.
Around early midday, the captains made their rounds, double-checking supply counts. The heavy crossbows had been lined up along the wall, each with a crate of bolts beside it. Barrels of pitch and oil were stacked two rows deep along the second barricade. Everyone moved in short, efficient bursts, hauling, cranking, tying, testing, like ants fortifying their hill before the boot came down.
I tried not to think about the size of that boot.
By the time the sun started sliding west, the shadows in the treeline weren't subtle anymore. You could see them shifting even without a spyglass, waves of movement just under the canopy, branches swaying in unnatural rhythms.
The younger guards had stopped joking. Hell, most of them had stopped talking. That uneasy silence crawled across the wall like frost.
62:14:03… 02… 01…
Then, at exactly 62:00:00, they stepped out of the forest.
I don't know what I expected, maybe a trickle of scouts, some advance pack to test our defenses but this wasn't that. This was the fucking floodgate opening.
The first line broke through the treeline at a loping sprint: big, hulking beasts with shaggy fur and too many teeth, some on all fours, some upright with crude bone weapons in their hands. Behind them, I caught flashes of scaled hides, horned silhouettes, insect-like shapes that skittered between the others. And the sound… gods, the sound was a low, rolling growl that seemed to vibrate in my chest even from this distance.
A familiar translucent box snapped into place in my vision.
**---**
[SYSTEM WARNING]
Special Mission Continuation Alert
Hostile Force Identified: Magic Beast Horde – Estimated Strength: 1,000+
Commencement: Now approaching city limits.
Duration of Engagement: 30 hours (minimum).
Primary Objective Reminder: Protect Freya Mikaelson – 62:00:00 remaining.
Failure Condition: If target dies, user dies instantly.
Secondary Advisory: This engagement will be continuous. No safe rest periods guaranteed.
**---**
Thirty hours. Thirty straight hours of this?
"Fuck me sideways," I muttered under my breath.
The horn blasts came again, louder this time, and the entire wall seemed to tense. Archers took their positions, ballista crews started loading, and the smell of oil and pitch drifted on the wind as fire crews prepared their torches.
The horde wasn't rushing headlong, yet. They were fanning out, testing the edges, their movements oddly… coordinated.
"Hold your fire!" someone shouted down the wall. "Wait for my mark!"
I rested my hands on the wall, watching the black-green tide advance. The forest behind them was already closing, swallowing the gaps they'd left in the undergrowth, like it was spitting them out one wave at a time.
And the clock kept ticking down.
The horn blast came again—long, drawn-out, and deep enough to rattle my teeth.
That was it.
The first ballista bolts fired with a sound like the city itself snapping its spine. Thick wooden shafts cut through the air, whistling loud enough to be heard over the rising roar of the beasts. The impacts were brutal—one bolt punching straight through a wolf-thing the size of a carriage, another skewering two leaner, horned creatures before slamming into the dirt behind them.
Then the arrows started. A wall of black shafts raining down in tight formation, the hiss of their descent almost musical, if the music was written by a psychopath with a crossbow fetish.
And the magic… gods, the magic.
From sections of the wall I couldn't see directly, shapes of different elemental colors flared into being, red-orange circles the size of wagon wheels spinning in the air before erupting in fireballs, blue runes flashing just before jagged bolts of lightning tore through the front lines, chunks of stone and hardened earth whipping upward from brown-gold sigils and launching like catapult shots.
Every impact lit the field in flashes, each explosion throwing beast bodies into the air like ragdolls.
Freya stood two paces to my right, shield braced, sword drawn but not yet ready to strike. Her eyes never left the advancing horde. I kept just behind her, not because I needed to be shielded, but because if the system's warning was right, my life was literally tied to hers.
The first wave hit the killing field hard. I saw a horned beast stagger under three arrows before a fireball took its head clean off. Another creature, a boar-like brute with a mane of quills, charged through the wreckage until a lightning bolt reduced it to a smoking heap.
The noise was insane. Screeches, roars, the crack of magic, the crash of impacts, it was a solid wall of sound. The stench of burning fur and ozone rolled up over the battlements, making my eyes water.
Freya barked orders to the nearest guards, telling one to reload faster, another to aim lower. She was calm, focused in a way that made me think she'd done this before. I just mirrored her movements, tracking her like a shadow.
The beasts weren't breaking yet. Even as the front lines fell, more poured out of the forest. For every one that went down to a bolt or a spell, two more emerged from the trees, their eyes glowing in the half-light.
"Kaizen," Freya called over the din without looking at me. "If they breach, we fight. Stay close."
"No shit," I muttered, tightening my grip on my sword.
Another volley went out, the impacts briefly lighting the battlefield in a hellish strobe. For a second, all I could see were bodies, some twitching, some still, littering the grass between the wall and the forest. Then the darkness of the horde closed over it again.
The countdown in my vision ticked lower.
61:55:47… 46… 45.
If this was just the first wave, thirty hours was going to feel like thirty years.