The young magis began to ascend, his form once more enveloped in a soft, emerald aura as he prepared to resume the harvest.
"Wait! I'm coming with you!" Rosalyn cried out.
The girl's shout fractured the air, drawing every eye toward the young huntress in a singular, focused beat of surprise.
Prior to their descent, the demon hunters aboard the Arkdreadnought had scrutinised the Ragguard garrison's struggle through the observation crystals. They had noted that these frontier conscripts were not without merit; however, were one to weigh the finest soldiers of Arkflame against the muster of the Bloody Hunting, even the most seasoned veteran could not hope to rival the weakest among the ten thousand.
They beheld the huntress and saw how green she remained. She appeared no older than fourteen summers, yet her affinity was undeniable—a raw, burgeoning potential that might one day see her ascend to the elite ranks of the slayers.
Yet, for all her promise, the martial prowess of her unit was hampered by a lack of experience against high-rank demonic threats. They were a sufficient vanguard for culling low-tier demons, but they would be butchered in a heartbeat should they stumble into the path of a Crawler pack.
"My apologies... you cannot match my velocity. Your safety lies in the exodus; depart with the refugees," Seraph stated, his words a cold blade of pragmatism that spared no room for sentiment.
"But I—"
Before her sentence could find its end, the magis surged toward the city's heart—a blur of motion that outpaced the human eye. The displacement of air from his flight was so violent the soldiers were forced to shield their eyes. The girl was left in his wake, her words discarded.
Rosalyn could do naught but clench her fists, her jaw set in a rictus of thwarted youthful defiance.
Robin and the gathered hunters regarded her with a flicker of pity. Among the initial ten thousand, there had been countless women of breathtaking beauty and peerless affinity who had sought to ensnare the young man's interest. Yet Seraph had remained a fortress—unmoved, cold, and utterly sequestered. He granted no quarter for intimacy, nor the slightest opening for any soul to draw near.
Had it not been for the whispers reaching Robin and his peers—rumours of the young man's intimate associations with several maidens back in Arkflame—they might have been tempted to believe the magis harboured a cold revulsion for the fairer sex entirely.
✧ . ✶ . ❂ . ✶ . ✧
Seraph stood atop the belfry, the absolute zenith of the Northwest frontier. A suite of defensive wards orbited his form in a rhythmic, protective gyre, shielding him from the freezing gales.
Behind him loomed the massive war-bell of the Ragguard Fortress. It tolled incessantly, haemorrhaging a jagged crimson light that signalled the bastion's transition into a state of total demonic warfare.
Throughout the preceding forty-eight hours, the Ragguard garrison had loosed scores of mageia avians to the surrounding townships, screaming for immediate reinforcements. Should the fortress withstand the crushing weight of the million-strong undead host for but a single week, the provincial hosts and neighbouring tower-garrisons would arrive in force to break the siege and enact a bloody counter-strike.
Thus, the coming seven days stood as the most perilous threshold of the campaign. If the Crawler pack were not purged—if the undead tide were permitted to breach the curtain walls—the primary hosts of the Demon Legion and their demonic generals would pour into Arkflame, saturating the human realms in a flood of slaughter.
In this heartbeat, Ragguard was the final, gigantic barrier holding back hundreds of millions of demon minions. There was no margin for error. The stones of this frontier would be the genesis of either salvation or extinction.
Seraph activated his mageia sight, his vision sweeping across the urban sprawl to assess the theatre of war.
"Fifty Crawlers within the inner circuit," he murmured, his eyes cold and analytical. "They breached the interior through means that elude the garrison's wit... and the greatest concentration of their signatures lies there."
He fixed his gaze upon the very heart of the city.
His tertiary eye ignited with a piercing, ethereal radiance. Through this mageia lens, Seraph's sight locked upon the city's heart, where thirty Crawlers had laid siege to a beleaguered detachment of the Ragguard sentries. The remaining twenty predators were scattered throughout the districts, sowing a rhythmic, calculated chaos.
The General's personal guard had sought sanctuary behind a ten-thousand-strong phalanx of pavise shields. It was a bristling cage of iron—a tortoise formation designed to both weather the storm and thrust out with polearms in a desperate bid to fell the beasts. High above in the surrounding spires, thousands of archers maintained a suppressing volley to bolster the line.
Yet the sight of those thirty Crawlers, virtually unmarked and prowling the perimeter with predatory ease, signalled that the General's clock was bleeding out.
"They won't hold another candle's breath," Seraph murmured, his gaze boring into the town square.
The young man cast himself from the belfry's height with the cold intent of a hunting eagle. He plummeted toward the epicentre where the General's resistance was fraying into futility. In a singular, blurred heartbeat, he hovered above the square—a massive shadow sweeping across the flagstones like a dragon's wing.
The Crawlers paid the heavens no heed; their focus was a singular, visceral hunger for the marrow within the iron shells of the soldiers. The Ragguard conscripts gaped, their eyes wide as they beheld the enigma descending from the firmament.
"Ventus Galebreeze!" The incantation resonated through the square like a clapped thunderbolt.
[VNNNNN—!]
Upon the spell's release, a preternatural whirlwind ignited at the city's core. The sky, once a stagnant canvas of drifting white, buckled. The atmosphere warped, spiralling into a localised tempest that gorged itself on the surrounding clouds, dragging the very heavens into its gullet.
Outcries of pure terror erupted from the Ragguard ranks. Men were forced to their knees, clawing at the cobbles to prevent the gale from hoisting them into the churning void. The stalemate that had defined the town square for hours was atomised in an instant, replaced by a theatre of howling, elemental disorder.
Strangely, the Crawler pack did not seize the interval to strike at their confused prey. Instead, they tilted their muzzles toward the firmament, venting a guttural, rhythmic howl to threaten the intruder they had never anticipated. Their primal instincts shrieked the moment they beheld this man.
Specifically, they caught the scent of demonic vitriol clinging to his aura. In a singular, chilling realisation, they grasped that the human hovering above was no longer a quarry—he was an adversary.
"Ventus Eruptus!" Seraph intoned, unleashing the gale with clinical celerity.
Upon the final syllable, a massive sphere of emerald wind plummeted into the heart of the pack. There was no trace of its former lethargy; the globe of mageia churned with a manic, violent rotation, as if it could no longer brook the indignity of containment.
As the sphere neared the cobbles, the thirty Crawlers scrambled to leap clear, sensing the lethality of a mageia they had never before encountered. Yet, only their thoughts moved with such velocity.