The plan was simple in design. The first line—led by Effie—would meet the brunt of the charge, holding the front as long as possible before rotating with the second line. Meanwhile, the third was in charge of eviscerating as many creatures as they could.
Because behind the first and second lines, stood the real firepower. Towering war machines, spearheaded by the former general, Kido, stood ready to unleash destruction.
Archers flanked the engines, over a hundred strong. Lyss was supposed to be among them.
Above them stood their shield of light: Nephis, her Dawn Shard blazing as she poured strength into their Memories.
And then there was the man in golden armor. He commanded no line. No unit. His role was singular: to be seen. A symbol. A weapon.
He would break through first and draw as much attention as humanly possible. Inspire the army, survive.
The world held its breath as the creatures charged.
Then came a sound, low and terrible. A hammer struck metal and a second later, six titanic spears screamed through the air, crashing into the horde with impossible force.
Monsters shattered, but those around them kept going.
Another second passed and the arrows followed, whistling through the sky, black rain tearing into the front ranks of the Nightmare tide. Aspect fueled projectiles followed, bursts of light, fire, wind, explosions—some chemical, some magical.
More creatures fell, but they didn't stop.
A second volley.
Still they came.
The golden man rolled his shoulders. He exhaled, letting the nerves drain from his fingertips.
Then he ran.
Solitary, he broke from the front and charged. A metallic blur before an army of Nightmares, all of higher rank than him. He was but a lone figure hurling himself into the oncoming abyss.
The tide of horrors surged to meet him. And though he was just one man, the sea broke first. Because inside that gleaming armor wasn't just a Sleeper.
It was Kallen, the Bright Lord, and he had no intention of dying so soon.
~~~
In the center of a devastating wave of monstrous insects, crab-like creatures, horrific beasts, taloned birds of prey, and many more dangerous creatures, was a man dancing from beast to beast. Ribbons of black water flowed around him, lashing out, piercing, grabbing, and constricting whatever lay in sight.
The man himself held back the pincers of a giant, black plated scorpion. Its tail struck forward to pierce his face, but he dipped his head to the side at the last moment, and a jet of water shot from behind him, ramming through its armored head, killing it on the spot.
Kallen twirled as it died, ducking and forming a golden blade from his shimmering armor. He thrust that blade into the core of a carapace scavenger, then twisted, bisecting an Awakened Monster.
He moved onto another. Then another.
Kallen was a whirlwind of black water and golden armor. Nothing that faced him down ever lasted more than a few seconds. Nothing ever withstood more than a few strikes.
He was both and unmovable force, and an unstoppable object. He crashed through wave after wave of beast, monster, demon, even devils fell before him.
Because why wouldn't they? He had killed a Titan, anything else was simply beneath him.
Kallen stood in a pocket a dozen yards out from the first line. He was surrounded, but it didn't matter. As he fought on the coral bridge, there lay the black sea next to him on both sides, and with such an endless supply, he was untouchable.
For now.
But while there was still steady breath from his lungs, and fresh blood pumping through him, he would decimate as many foes as he could.
He went all out. Held back nothing save for his trident which would did not consider this meager horde worthy of its wrath.
Meager, Kallen thought, grimacing as he spun on his heels, forming a massive, sweeping greatsword from Gilded Warden. As he twisted, he adjusted his grip for better leverage, cleaving through three Awakened Beasts with one strike. Wasting no time, Kallen called upon the golden liquid of his greatsword, and it detached from his hands and shot through the skull of a monstrous ape lunging for him.
He swung his hand in a chopping arc, and the detached stream slashed through a demon lunging for him. It survived the initial slash, but Kallen pushed out with both his hands, and twin torrents of black water assaulted it from different sides, punching a single hole through the sides of its head.
Every ounce of him wanted to look back to see how his army was doing. He wanted to know how Seren was holding up, if Effie was still fighting strong, if Caster and Sunny and Kai were all fine.
But he couldn't. If he took his mind off the task at hand for even a moment, he would lose his rhythm. His water would fail him. His state of flow would fail him. His transcendent echo would receive hits.
It would take those hits without complaint for a while. But it had limits, and once his armor was gone, Kallen was without his greatest defense, and offense. His aspect would leave him as well. So he couldn't let that happen.
Therefore, Kallen continued his bloody dance, weaving between beasts and leaving dozens dead in his wake.
The words spoken to him by the spell had lost all meaning. He couldn't even remember how many new Memories had joined his soul arsenal.
Who cared?
Memories—even those enhanced by the Dawn Shard—were useless to him. His echo was too powerful.
[You have slain a Fallen Beast.]
Kallen thrust a golden spear.
[You have slain an Awakened Demon.]
He slipped a slash of razor sharp talons, then lunged to the side as a pair of fangs snapped at the air.
A clench of his fist, and water shot into that beasts mouth.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast.]
More.
[You have slain…]
[You have slain…]
[You have slain…]
Kallen slaughtered.
~~~
Effie
Effie's arms burned. Not the sharp, panicked ache of fresh injury, but the slow and grinding agony of unrelenting burden. She had pushed past her limits an hour ago, just recently pushing past the new ones. Her legs were stone and her chest fire, but she didn't relent.
Because if she did, people died.
The front line wasn't like Kallen's fluid slaughter. She could see him in the distance, lacing through their ranks with dreadful streams of black liquid lashing out with unbreaking wrath.
But her line was a grind. A clash of flesh and metal and humming Memories and aspects and… it was chaos. The Sleepers here didn't kill in sweeping arcs of transcendent might. They killed together, in packs, in formations, sometimes multiple people clambering on top of a thrashing beast to bring it down.
When one fell, another stepped in. When formation faltered, Effie closed the gap.
She led by example.
She led by excellence.
A screech rang out as a scythe limbed bird descended from above, talons outstretched and eyes burning with cardinal hate.
Effie threw her shield into the strike and jammed her spear into its abdomen, ripping it out in a downward tear that sprayed black blood across the coral.
She didn't wait to see if it died.
"Line swap!" She roared, voice raw and frayed.
The first line began to peel back with disciplined speed, making way for the second wave of humans. Sleepers stumbled as they went, bloodied and breathless, but alive. Effie remained in the space between, keeping the enemy at bay just long enough for fresh sleepers to move in.
Close by, someone screamed. Effie spun and saw a boy—no older than herself—pinned beneath the crushing limb of a bulbous, beetle-like brute. She lunged, hurling her spear through the monster's eye.
It shrieked, reared back, and she was already on it, jamming a summoned dagger into a joint near its head until something cracked.
The boy scrambled away.
In the distance, past the swarming masses and soldiers changing, a golden figure shimmered like a vengeful god. Kallen. Alone and untouched, leaving bloody death in his wake.
Effie didn't resent him. She couldn't, he'd helped so much; become something of a fulcrum for the humans of the Forgotten Shore.
But she did envy him.
She fought in blood and dirt, in the trenches of the front line, while he waltzed through the Nightmare Creatures as though they were nothing to him.
Even through that envy though… even more than that envy perhaps, she felt inspired. Invigorated. With people like him, Nephis, and Doofus on her side, how could they lose?
She would make it to the outside world, and she would challenge the second nightmare, and she would become a master.
Effie would free herself of the prison of her own body.
And so she only allowed herself half a moment to breathe before she rose her chin and leaped, crashing shield first into a Fallen Beast that was galloping toward the second line.
She landed hard, smashed into the creature, then rolled, barely avoiding the hammer-fist blow from something that looked like a giant bear crossed with both a mammoth and a saber toothed tiger.
She clenched her jaw, dodged a swipe, and lashed out. Blood soaked her arms. Her shoulders screamed, but she had help from her flank.
And no more than a minute later, the Fallen Beast fell before her and the two Sleepers who had joined her.
She looked into the distance for a moment before retreating alongside her first line, raising her eyes once more toward Kallen.
"Show off," she muttered.
Then she turned back and retreated for her moment of reprieve.
~~~
Seren
It took total concentration to maintain the starlight threads on Nephis. But that didn't mean Seren couldn't observe the slaughter with her own two eyes.
She watched Effie stand tall like a bastion of strength at the forefront of her line. As though she was made for that very thing.
She saw Kai zip through the sky, unleashing arrow after arrow toward the clouds, fighting against some unseen threat. Down in the midst of the most ferocious fighting, Caster hacked down enemy after enemy, a ghostly blur in the midst of the carnage.
Gemma the hunter Seren was mostly unfamiliar with, stood out as a champion just as well as Effie and Caster had.
The same was true for Seishan who led the second line.
But through it all, Kallen was ahead of them, fighting like their lives depended on it.
It was odd, seeing someone she'd grown up with do such a thing. Cut down dozens of beasts without stopping or even slowing.
She found herself remembering the small moments. The times where he would sleep in and their mom would yell at him to wake up. She remembered when he had set a roll of paper towels on fire when he was cooking for just the two of them.
The way he had scrambled for a cup of water, panicked and wide-eyed.
She thought of the times she'd found him sitting at his desk, complicated math equations strawn about him. She'd barged in on him while he was taking a quiz and he'd thrown a water bottle at her.
She remembered the time he'd slammed his desk after being unable to solve some stupid physics problem. That had happened two years ago. She'd laughed at him for getting so worked up, and he'd told her off.
Seren missed those days.
She missed them more than she thought she would. Missed the version of him that wasn't encased in golden mercury and soaked in blood. The brother that stumbled through excuses when he'd forgotten her birthday, then tried to make up for it with half-hearted apologies.
Not the him that marched nearly a thousand people just because she would die if he didn't.
The version of him—the boy who played video games with his friends up late at night was gone. She didn't know if he was gone forever, but right now, here on the battlefield of coral and blood, he was something else.
Seren tightened her grip on the threads shooting out of her, trying to steady their transient form. Her battle was different from those out in the front lines. Hers wasn't swinging a sword or throwing a spear.
Her battlefield was waged against the wild beating of her own heart, managing a thread through the will of her soul.
Her eyes flicked back to the front. Effie took a blow to the side and fell, but the crazed smile on her face didn't waver. Gemma leaped in her place, swinging some large blade meant for slashing.
Caster was still a blur.
Kai raged against the sky.
Seren watched with bated breath, eyes darting between the people she knew—her friends—anxiously dreading the moment that one of them fell and didn't get back up.
Sleepers were dying with every passing moment. They held the clear advantage over the horde of monsters, but the death was still not something she could fathom.
Behind, Kido shouted something at the siege engineers as the contraptions continued firing their volleys. More creatures fell. More rose in their place.
She didn't like that she couldn't find Sunny. What was he doing? She'd spent the last year with the boy and considered him something of a sibling-like figure.
He had a rough exterior, but he was a good person at heart—no matter how much he tried to convince her otherwise.
But he'd disappeared recently, and she couldn't figure out why.
Then Nephis's eyes shot open. There was white flame burning behind her eyes and she ceased her meditation, walking up to the edge of the coral mound.
She looked back at Seren and Cassie. "Kai should able to get you guys to safety when the time comes. Take care… and I hope to see you both on the other side."
With that, she jumped down, leaving Seren and Cassie alone.
A/N: Daily uploads will begin next saturday and will continue through to chapter 56, which ends book 1 of this series!