Three hours had passed since General Berbaris’s charge tore into the Cloaker line. Seven hours since the battle began. And now, the weight of time was showing.

  While the number of mana beast certainly ground them, it was the exhaustion that nail the coffins.

  Formations that once snapped into place now lagged a beat behind. Mana took longer to gather, and longer still to shape. Swords hung lower in tired hands. Shields chipped, cracked, then stopped being raised altogether.

  What had once been precise—spell-chained, drilled to rhythm—was now held together by instinct and muscle memory. Barely.

  The neat divisions blurred. The valiant senior mages, the one that formed what supposed to be an unbreakable wall of bodies now splintered, fighting in pairs while being cut off from the others supported only by the bent spears of Aschezug division, hoping to proof their worth as more than just canon fodder.

  Blood flowed like a river—mana beasts and mages alike bleeding into the same ground. Yet they held the line. Because if they didn’t, their home would be overrun, and their loved ones would become feed for the mana beasts, reduced to nothing more than shredded meat with human faces.

  “Damn it all to hell—!”

  An Oberkreis mage staggered back, robes slashed open, blood blooming across his ribs. His staff cracked uselessly in his hands as the oncoming mana beast lunged—jaws wide, fangs slick with ruin.

  This was the end. He knew it.

  But the strike never landed.

  A pike rammed through the charging beast’s throat, dropping it inches before the fallen Oberkreis mage. Gasping, he turned—expecting death. Instead, he saw three small figures in formation, cloaks singed, eyes hard with fear they hadn’t let win. Aschezug.

  One of the kids wrenched their pike free and gave him a quick glance.

  “Senior mage, please—run. We’ll hold it here.”

  He coughed, chest heaving, and managed a grin through the blood in his teeth.

  “You little monsters… soon as this is over, I’m getting you pie. Real pie. With plums. None of that ration-starch sh—”

  The sky ignited.

  A fireball slammed down like judgment. Heat, light, and silence followed.

  The trench disappeared in flame.

  Elsewhere, chaos. Another line was folding—mana beasts swarming, too many, too fast. A soldier, pinned against a collapsed wall, tore open a pouch at his belt. Inside: a mana grenade, barely stabilized, humming with unstable runes.

  He looked to the others still holding nearby—one clutching a broken spear, another dragging a friend by the collar, both too young to die, too tired to live.

  Then toward the beasts bearing down.

  No time. No choice.

  “LONG LIVE HOUSE EINHART,” he shouted.

  “LONG LIVE THE REICH!”

  He locked eyes with the boy dragging his comrade—just long enough to nod.

  And then he pulled the pin.

  The explosion swallowed him—and half the street.

  Better ash than entrails. Better martyrdom than being devoured alive.

  Berbaris stood on blood-soaked ground, his boots sinking half a step into the slurry of flesh and ash. The air reeked of burned fur and ruptured entrails. Around him, the melee dragged on—tighter now, uglier.

  Cloaker carcasses littered the field, their shrouding veil dissolving into the blood-soaked wind. It should’ve meant reprieve. It didn’t. The beasts staggered for a moment—some broke ranks, turning on their own fallen to feed—but it wasn’t enough. The pressure never truly stopped. The herd still surged, the weight of it pressing harder with each second. The Saturation Array still pulsed in the distance—its light distant but magnetic, like a wound that begged to be bled dry. The Cloakers saw it as a promise of evolution.

  Worse still—too many Cloakers remained. Far too many. Just enough to keep the horde sharpened, just enough to keep instinct honed to a deadly edge. The battle wasn’t tipping. It was stalling.

  He narrowed his eyes.

  His body dropped low—one hand resting on the scabbard’s throat, the other gripping the hilt midway. Knees bent. Head bowed. Mana gathered around him like breath before the storm.

  “Halbmond: Aufschlag”

  The world blinked.

  Berbaris vanished—then reappeared a breath later, directly in front of the approaching herd. His boots cracked the earth as he landed, sabre already drawn and brimming with light.

  He slammed it down.

  The ground answered—not with tremor, but revelation.

  A circle of force expanded from the impact point, and from it, a forest of spectral blades burst upward—phantom swords, thousands of them, howling with force. They surged in a cone shaped direction in front of him, tearing through mana beasts like wheat under scythe. Dozens fell, then hundreds. Some were cleaved cleanly, others pinned mid-roar, reduced to twitching silhouettes in a storm of radiant steel.

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  When the last of the spectral blades dissolved into fading light, silence clung to the battlefield for a breath too long.

  And then he saw them.

  More daemons. More variants

  One of them moved with a sway that made his stomach turn—not from speed, but from how each step bent reality. Its spine jutted like broken branches, ribs hollowed around something still pulsing inside. Behind it, the corpse-littered ground twitched—as if answering its presence.

  Another lumbered into view. Massive. Hunched. Shoulders knotted with muscle, chest glowing faintly. No flame—just a presence, aware and watching. Steam hissed from slits in its neck as it exhaled, warping the air with each breath. It walked on all fours, not like an animal—more like a butcher choosing his next slab.

  Farther still, a tall, thin figure emerged—wrapped in membrane that shimmered like oil. Its face was a smooth, silver mask.

  Berbaris didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

  He didn’t need to know their official names. Didn’t care what variant they are, a cursed war constructs, or just another nightmare spat from the black gut of Fluxzeit.

  Berbaris shifted. His sabre rose—then swept outward in a clean arc.

  “Halbmond: Kaskade”

  Berbaris swung his sabre wildly through the air, as if cutting at something invisible. The air bent in response, obeying his will, forming crescent-shaped slashes that surged forward and tore through the mana beasts, cleaving them in half. Blood and entrails flooded the battlefield, falling like a cursed vermilion rain.

  If this had been a normal encounter, if it weren’t during Fluxzeit, when the mana beasts’ numbers swelled toward infinity, the attack would have at least halved their ranks.

  But it didn’t. Not this time.

  For every beast cut down, two more took its place. It was as if they had not been sliced apart at all, but had instead split themselves into two.

  And yet he didn’t care. He kept burning through his mana, turning it into strike after strike. Some of the mana beasts forced their way through the storm of blades and reached him, tearing into his flesh with crooked claws. The wounds were deep, bloody, and accumulating.

  It wasn’t a lapse in skill. It wasn’t weakness.

  The numbers were simply absurd—far beyond what any single fighter could endure alone.

  “FUCKING BASTARD!” Berbaris shouted as he crushed a mana beast’s head with the pommel of his sabre. The impact sent out a shockwave, staggering the nearby enemies. He kept going, hurling wave after wave of crescent-shaped air without regard for his own wounds.

  The sight burned itself into everyone who witnessed it.

  The reserves of Aschezug. The stragglers of Splittermarsch. Those who were still marching forward. Those who were supposed to retreat, they froze. They saw the sabre rise, fall, and rise again—cutting not just through flesh, but through the lie that command meant distance.

  Most generals would’ve just barked orders from behind. Watching them become nothing but meat—shredded to buy time. Told them to rotate in, hold the line, stall while the senior mages slipped out the back. That was the rhythm of war—feed the young to buy time for the skilled.

  Aschezug soldiers gritted their teeth.They had always known what they were.

  Spare parts in a war they weren’t meant to survive. Hands meant to bleed, not be held. Backs meant to break first. That was Aschezug.

  But Berbaris was not supposed to be here, not like this. He was Silberschade’s Commander. A legend, a pillar, one of the few officers whose loss would matter. His death would echo in strategy rooms and history books. He wasn’t suppose to bleed in front of them, but bark order from behind.

  And yet, he didn’t care. All the effort to keep him alive, all the time he could have bought by sending others to die—he cast it aside. As if the role he’d been given didn’t matter.

  That choice rippled through the field. Every young mage, every tired woman, every half-trained soldier still gripping a weapon they barely knew how to use—they felt something sharpen inside them. Not pride. Not fear.

  Resolve.

  If a man like that was willing to be spent for this line, then what excuse did they have to stand still?

  They were expendable. They knew that. And for the first time, they chose to be.

  Fire rained from above. Quills tore through the air like locusts. Somewhere behind them, a cannon misfired and split open a trench wall—but none of that mattered.

  Aschezug was marching.

  One by one, the scattered remnants began to reform—cloaks scorched, weapons half-shattered, boots dragging through the mud. No commands were given. Einhartturm’s banner had risen like a beacon in the dark: Ouroboros, the snake that endlessly ate itself.

  And now, that was who they were—feed for a town to stay alive, to remain eternal.

  They didn’t look to the sky for cover. When fire fell, they took it. When stone struck, they flinched—but they kept marching. Children. Teenagers. Drilled bodies with trembling hands. They marched into the mouth of the chaos as if the world owed them a reason to live—and hadn't paid.

  From the other side came twisted silhouettes that defied names—half human, half experiment—moving with a single purpose. Erratic, yet not without intent: to reach the breach and hold it.

  They had been taken because they were different. Made into weapons. Discarded when they cracked. Forgotten when they failed. A mirror of Aschezug, in both form and fate.

  Fate no longer mattered. Only action did. Only merit defined who you were. That was the truth of the town: it did not care who you were, only that you did your part—either as feed, or as another cog in the machine.

  And in that moment, there are no longer monsters, expandable, elite, or even general, there is only one entity now: Soldiers of Einhartturm

  High above, the walls thundered with crossbow volleys and mana bursts—firing at winged mana beasts circling like vultures, testing for gaps. The sky itself was hostile.

  And as the line reshaped itself from ruin, within the depot—where orders were barked and runes blared red—Vierna stood still.

  Orders were being barked. Crates dragged. Ink splattered as Halwen knelt over the relay slab, sweat dripping down his temple. Warning runes blared overhead—urgent, shrill, insistent.

  And yet… all she felt was silence.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on the scrying screen.

  She watched as broken soldiers, the limping, the burned, the barely-armed, chose to stay. Chose to bleed for a wall that once saw them as expendable. For a cause that once only measured their mana, not their hearts.

  And now, as she looked again—she saw it clearly.

  They didn’t bleed because they were loved. They bled because this place let them matter, even if only as fuel.

  Different uniforms. Different ages. Different voices and bodies and burdens.

  Moving as one.

  She remembers what she saw on the street. A girl in rags fumbling with a crate far too heavy for her arms, helped without hesitation by a boy in a velvet vest. A crippled man with a wooden leg, scribing runes while a child fetched him ink. A Splittermarsch brute—stitched and snarling, jaw uneven from grafted bone—talking easily with a levy boy who didn’t flinch at the sight of him.

  It hadn’t made sense then. She had watched in confusion, certain the moment would break apart, that fear or disgust would surface and crack through.

  But the truth of the town came crashing down on her. Even with the circumstances of her birth, maybe this place could see past it.

  Here, where the lines between elites and common folk blurred, perhaps the line between Faintborn and non-Faintborn was nothing more than a relic of the past.

  She had always believed that finding a home meant being adopted. That someone would ignore those lines, accept her, love her, train her as she was.

  And if that was the case, then hadn’t this place done the same?

  In the most brutal and honest way possible. A way that did not hide its intentions behind pitying gazes or sharpened stares.

  Didn’t that make this place—

  a home?