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The bell's echo hadn't even died before Russell felt his stomach clench into a fist. Luke's face had gone the color of spoiled milk. They locked eyes for a second, and Russell saw his own thought reflected there: This is it. This is the real shit.
Every fight before this had been controlled, manageable. A duel here, a group of demons there. This was different. This was war.
"When we get to the battlefield," Nolan said, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper, "you follow me. No heroics, no wandering off, no trying to be a fucking hero. You stick to me like glue, understood?"
Russell and Luke just nodded. There was nothing to say. They weren't idiots—they knew that in a battle like this, the lone wolves died first.
The army moved as one massive organism, thousands of cardmakers maintaining formation despite riding everything from summoned horses to floating platforms to their own two feet. Russell's picked up the cocktail of emotions around him—fear-sweat, aggressive magical energy discharge from nervous cardmakers, someone nearby muttering prayers in at least three different languages.
They crested a ridge, and the battlefield spread out before them.
Russell had expected chaos. Screaming, explosions, the constant clash of combat. Instead, there was silence. And corpses.
Mountains of them.
The demon bodies were piled so high they formed actual topography—hills and valleys of rotting flesh that stretched to the horizon. The stench hit him like a physical blow, even through Arrogance's filtering. Sulfur, decay, and something else—something sweet and wrong that made his senses want to shut down entirely.
"Holy fuck," someone behind them breathed.
"Move!" Nolan barked. "We need to get to our assigned section."
They jogged along the defensive line, Russell trying not to look too closely at the corpse mountains. Some of the bodies were still twitching. Others seemed to be slowly melting into pools of acidic sludge that ate into the ground. A few were definitely looking at him with eyes that shouldn't still be capable of sight.
Their section was on the right flank, a hundred-meter stretch of hastily erected barriers and magical wards. Nolan ran ahead to check in with their gold-tier commander, leaving Russell and Luke standing there, trying not to throw up from the smell.
"It's a lull," Nolan said when he came back, his face grim. "The quiet between waves. The next attack can't be far—"
The alarms shrieked to life, so loud Russell's hearing made him wince.
"ATTENTION ALL COMBAT UNITS! ATTENTION ALL COMBAT UNITS!" "DEMONS INCOMING! DEMONS INCOMING!"
The ground started to shake. Not a tremor, but a rhythmic pounding like the world's largest drum. Russell felt it in his bones, in his teeth, in the fluid of his eyes.
"Damn it!" Nolan spat, his professional composure cracking. "They're really not going to give us any fucking time at all!"
Russell's expanded perception caught them first—dots on the horizon that quickly became a wave. "They saw the guard change. Knew we'd be disorganized for a few minutes."
"Smart bastards," Nolan muttered. "Follow me."
They took position in a gap in the line, Russell's eyes widening as the demon wave came into full view. It wasn't an army. It was a flood. A tsunami of flesh and claws and teeth, stretching from one end of his vision to the other. Bronze-tier mostly, their magical signatures weak individually but overwhelming in aggregate. Silver-tiers scattered throughout like sharks in a school of fish.
It's like a fucking zombie movie, Russell thought, if the zombies could use magic and were three times normal size.
"Cards out, NOW!" Nolan roared.
Luke's knight materialized first, its massive tower shield slamming into the ground with a THOOM that Russell felt in his chest. The golden barrier expanded outward, creating a wall of light. His Taoist priest immediately began drawing symbols in the air, lips moving in a constant stream of incantations.
Russell summoned his team. Unohana appeared with her usual serene smile that never quite reached her eyes. Fubuki materialized with a disgusted look at the carnage around them. Artoria came last, her golden presence actually pushing back some of the oppressive atmosphere.
"No need to hold back today," Russell told them. "Use everything except the light cannon."
He also summoned Yoriichi, feeling the [First Gotei 13] bond activate, the [Seireitei] field effect layering on top. Unohana's magical pressure suddenly spiked so hard that several nearby cardmakers stumbled.
"Hadō #88," she began, her voice carrying despite its soft tone, "Hiryū Gekizoku Shinten Raihō!"
The pale blue beam that erupted from her hands wasn't just an attack—it was erasure. The ground didn't just break where it passed; it turned to glass, then to vapor. The first line of demons didn't have time to scream. They just... ceased. The beam punched through dozens of bodies before finally dissipating, leaving a canyon of melted flesh and screaming survivors.
For a heartbeat, there was silence.
Then the wave crashed over the gap like water filling a void.
Unohana fired again. And again. Each beam carved another temporary canyon in the demon tide, and each time the tide filled it within seconds.
Artoria had charged straight into the melee, her blade leaving golden afterimages as she moved. Every swing bisected multiple demons. She wasn't fighting—she was conducting a symphony of violence, each movement flowing into the next with deadly grace. A circle of clear ground followed her wherever she went, demon bodies falling away in pieces.
Above them, Luke's weather manipulation had finally taken hold. The dark clouds Fubuki had helped gather suddenly erupted with golden lightning. Not single bolts, but a continuous rain of electrical death that turned the ground in front of their position into a killing field. Demons ran into it and simply fell, cooked from the inside out.
"It seems we can hold on," Russell said, allowing himself a moment of hope.
"The battle's just started," Nolan shot back, his cards invisible but devastating as they carved through any demons that got too close. "Don't get cocky."
The demon corpses piled higher and higher, creating a literal wall of death. Russell was starting to think they might actually survive this when—
"Hmph!"
The sound came from above, dismissive and cold. The mountain of corpses in front of them exploded outward in a shower of gore that painted the sky red. Blood and viscera hung in the air for an impossible moment, then began to coalesce.
Russell watched in horror as the flesh twisted together, forming something that shouldn't exist. A dragon made entirely of corpses, its wings dripping blood, its eyes burning with golden fire.
"Gold-tier!?" Nolan's voice cracked.
"You're looking for death!" A furious roar from above—their own gold-tier commander, supposedly handling the enemy leadership. "How dare you be distracted while fighting me!?"
But the flesh dragon was already diving, its maw opening to reveal teeth made from the bones of a hundred different demons. Luke's face was sheet-white, sweat pouring down his face as he poured everything into his shield.
"It's not enough," Luke gasped. "I can't—"
"Fubuki," Russell said, his voice deadly calm. "It's up to you. Don't hold back."
The dragon hit them with the force of a meteorite. The ground shattered. The air itself seemed to scream. Russell felt his bones creak from the pressure wave alone. The impact threw up a cloud of dust and debris that blotted out the scarlet sky.
Other cardmakers nearby froze, staring at the crater where Russell's team had been.
"Are they... dead?" someone whispered.
The dust began to clear. Where there should have been nothing , a single pillar of earth stood in the center of a massive crater. Russell, Luke, and Nolan stood on top, completely unharmed. A swirling vortex of telekinetic force surrounded them, so dense it was visible as distorted air and floating debris.
Russell's face was paper-white, his whole body shaking from the magical drain. Blocking a gold-tier attack with a silver-tier card had cost him almost everything.
"Well done," he managed to say to Fubuki, his voice barely a whisper. "When we get back, I'll reward you with a special... 'battle'."
Fubuki's cheeks flushed pink before concern took over. "Are you okay?"
Russell squeezed her hand—when had he grabbed it?—and forced a laugh that sounded more like a cough. Then he looked up at the sky, his eyes going cold as winter ice. "I'm fine. But someone is about to be in trouble."
"Lily!"
(End of this chapter)
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