The first crash came like an avalanche.

  They rushed through the mouth of the gate in a tide of muscle and brawn, our tanks only waiting a few feet inside to greet them, shields dug deep and ready. The impact of the collision exploded into an echo that reverberated through the metal walls and abode, a quick explosion immediately drown out by a symphony of fighting.

  Every impact a dull, concussive boom that rattled the slits and towers. The demons didn’t slow to think. They didn’t slow to breathe. They hit the shield wall and kept trying to move as if pure momentum was enough.

  “Hold!” Richard barked, voice cutting through the chaos. “Let them push!”

  Alan and Marcus braced shoulder to shoulder at the throat of the entrance, shields overlapping. Nicole mirrored the angle on the other side, stance compact and stubborn as a boulder. The first demons that reached us hit the shields and simply… stopped. Not because they wanted to, but because there wasn’t anywhere to go.

  That was the plan, and our shield wall didn’t budge. Not a push or pull, they were anchored like stone pilings embedded deep in the earth. Their only job to endure the fiercest part of the coming storm.

  As attacks started to rain down, the stink was immediate—burnt fat, bile, the bite of blood spraying like mist through the air. Demons bled differently than we did. They bled thick and dark and all wrong. The blood was like oil or honey on your skin.

  “Now,” Lucas said softly beside Alan, and then he was gone—slipping into the gap between bodies like a knife between ribs. Bruce went with him, lower to the ground, daggers flashing in short, economical bursts. Neither of them tried to fight the front of the wave. They fought the weak points—hamstrings, joints, throats exposed when a demon leaned too far forward to bite at the shield.

  Above us, the towers came alive.

  Anna’s frost hit first—not the razor-like shards she used when she panicked, but a controlled, layered cold from blizzard. A glaze crept across demon limbs, turning their jerking movements into slow, brittle spasms. The ones in the first rank began to move like they were underwater, then like they were trapped in tar.

  Maria’s arrows followed, each shaft cutting a clean arc through the air before blooming into flame on impact. She wasn’t aiming for heads, or anything in particular—She aimed for mass. Clumps, for torsos, for anywhere the fire would spread across bodies pressed too tightly together to escape. Every hit made the pile-up worse, and that was exactly what we needed.

  Evee’s gunfire stitched through it all—sharp, percussive cracks that carried even over the screaming. She didn’t waste shots on the thickest demons. She hunted eyes, mouths, exposed gaps in armored plates. Anything that looked like it might explode on impact. Sometimes she just held the trigger and let it rip, too.

  Jessica did much of the same, carefully conserving her MP. She excelled mostly in single target, so picking off the wounded efficiently was her forte. Anything left mangled or dismembered by Maria or Anna was prime for target. She expertly supported the tanks too, an arrow here or there piercing an important joint or stopping the wind up of a clawed attack.

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  Even with just one and a half days of diligent training, the line our tanks had formed was holding strong. No one behind was in danger, which was mostly support and the few DPS that couldn’t fit in the towers.

  Thomas and Rebekah stood a dozen feet behind the tanks, hands already glowing, weaving a rhythm of support spells. Thomas used Shields expertly to avoid damage and weaved

  HoTs to keep people relatively healthy.

  Rebekah on the other hand, spot healed. She excelled in large heals, so tanks that were hit particularly hard were shielded by Thomas and then capped off with a heal from Rebekah. It was a solid combo they had discussed to maximize MP efficiency. Things were progressing smoothly.

  The damage was still low now, so Rebekah didn’t have to cast much. Not yet. She watched the fight unfold carefully. Her eyes tracked demons, teammates, looking for any sign of fatigue or give. She was saving her MP for when it mattered the most. She also had her large instant cast heal ready, just in case she needed to snatch someone from the jaws of death.

  Thomas was less carefree. One hand gripped an MP potion as he chugged it down as the other sent out a new spell. The fresh MP disappeared almost as fast as it came in, a slurry of HoTs landing on every tank, and a big shield for Alan as Rebekah prepped a Greater Heal.

  Everyone was giving it their all while I let the shadows pool at my feet.

  Vast Shadows slid outward from my feet like spilled ink, my shadow creeping along the threshold of the gate and into the churned earth where demons died and slid underfoot, only to be replaced by another.

  The shadow was an extension of myself. A place to hide my influence. A place for my minions to rise from without telegraphing where they were coming from. My influence had been growing steadily.

  I willed them forth and a familiar tug hit my chest. For a heartbeat I felt hunger—the part of me that reacted to death like a starving man reacts to food. I forced it down, tried not to remember what I was becoming.

  Boney figures began rising from my shadow in rapid succession. Spikey #1 first, his Zweihander dragging across the stone ground like scraping metal as he rushed towards the shield wall with a small entourage of melee minions.

  Spikey #2 came quickly after, his cleaver angled low, already leaning forward like it wanted to sprint into the mess and get dirty. His personality had always been twisted, and now he moved oddly as if half-man and half-animal. Sometimes running on two legs or simply sprinting on all fours like a Ghoul.

  A wall of skeletal mages formed behind them, hands glowing with colored bolts that pulsed in synchronized timing like a choir breathing together. King Spikey appeared last, and didn’t rush into battle but came and protected me instead.

  “Mike!” Richard suddenly shouted, and I snapped back in time to see a demon crest the shield line—climbing over its own dead like a dog scrambling over a fence.

  It was thin and too long, its arms reaching like ropes. A mouth split its face vertically, and the tongue inside flicked like a whip, savoring every taste of air.

  It wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, at least not the demons we had seen.

  Nicole caught it with her shield in a half-uppercut, the impact jarring her backward half a step, and another demon surged into the gap it created. Alan slammed his shoulder into Richard, re-sealed the overlap, and Marcus shoved forward hard enough that his shield edge cut a groove into a demon’s chest.

  “Push!” Marcus roared. “Don’t let them climb!”

  My mages fired as one, a symphony of bolts impacting the climber mid-leap. Paired with a quick rot, the demon’s ribcage detonated outward, pieces of it spinning into the air before falling like black hail. It crashed back into the pile and vanished under the press.

  The death of a singular demon caused no ripples. The pile shifted without slowing, like it hadn’t noticed.

  It probably just didn’t care.