Location: The Obsidian Enclave, Main Ramparts.
Time: 23:00.
The warning bell of the Enclave was a deep, resonant sound, carved from the same volcanic glass as the city itself. It didn't just ring; it vibrated in the teeth of every citizen, a frequency of pure alarm.
Dante stood on the high battlements, his coat whipping in the freezing wind. He looked South.
The horizon was glowing green.
It wasn't the aurora borealis. It was the bioluminescence of ten thousand dead men marching through the snow. A sea of viridian fire washing over the white wasteland.
"Report," Dante ordered, not turning around.
Aurum stood beside him, clutching a datapad with white-knuckled intensity. The Gold Sovereign looked pale. For the first time in his life, his calculations weren't adding up to a profit.
"I have inventoried our ammunition," Aurum said, his voice tight and clipped. "At a standard rate of fire, assuming 80% accuracy from the Onyx Guard—which is optimistic under stress—we have enough bullets to kill twelve thousand hostiles. But looking at that..."
He pointed a shaking finger at the green horizon.
"...I estimate the hostile force at twenty thousand. Minimum. And they don't bleed, Dante. They don't rout. We are mathematically dead."
"Bullets are for the flesh," Dante said calmly. "For the bones, we use gravity. And physics."
He tapped his comms ear-piece.
"Silas, is the mining grid rerouted?"
"Grid is hot, Boss!" Silas yelled over the radio, the sound of turbines whining in the background. "I've rigged the industrial extraction lasers to the perimeter fence. It's going to drain the geothermal core dry in about six hours, but anything that touches the wall is going to get vaporized."
"Six hours is all we need," Dante lied. "Or it's all we have."
He looked at Valerius.
The Sword-Saint stood at the head of the Onyx Guard. Five hundred pale warrior-women stood in phalanx formation along the wall, their obsidian spears eager for blood. They were silent, disciplined, and absolutely terrified. They had heard the stories of the Lost Ones. Now they were seeing the army.
"They do not fear death," Valerius told his troops, walking the line, his voice carrying over the howling wind. "Neither do we. We are the daughters of the Mountain. Let them break against the stone!"
A cheer went up—sharp, fierce, and desperate.
Then, the drums started.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Drums made of human skin stretched over ribcages. The rhythm of a dying heart.
The horde stopped at the base of the canyon. The silence that followed was heavier than the noise.
A single figure rode forward on a skeletal horse wreathed in green flame. It was a Death Knight, clad in rusted iron armor that leaked black smoke.
It raised a rusted sword.
"FEED."
The horde charged.
The Physical Wave
They hit the laser grid first.
ZZZZZT.
The first rank of skeletons simply evaporated as they ran into the invisible beams of the mining lasers. Dust and ash filled the air, smelling of ozone and burnt calcium.
But the ones behind them didn't stop. They didn't care. They climbed over the piles of ash. They threw themselves onto the lasers, their bodies burning out the emitters with sheer mass. They were smothering the light with darkness.
"They're smothering the grid!" Silas screamed. "Heat sinks are overloading! They're using bodies as insulation!"
"Havoc!" Dante roared. "Light them up!"
Havoc, perched in a watchtower with his heavy machine gun, opened fire.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
Explosive rounds tore into the mass. Bones shattered. Flesh-Hulks—massive constructs of stitched muscle—stumbled as their legs were blown off. But for every one that fell, three more crawled over the twitching corpse.
They reached the obsidian walls. They began to climb, digging rusted fingers into the cracks, forming a ladder of bodies.
"Push them back!" Commander Lyra shouted.
The Onyx Guard surged forward. Obsidian spears flashed in the moonlight. They stabbed downward, knocking the climbers back into the pit.
It was medieval. It was brutal. It was working.
"We're holding!" Valerius shouted, stabbing a ghoul through the eye and kicking it off the ladder. "The choke point is too narrow for their numbers! They can't flank us!"
Dante watched from the high tower. He frowned.
"It's too easy," Dante muttered. "The Necromancer is an Aspirant. He knows we have a fortress. He knows we have guns. Why send foot soldiers against a wall they can't breach?"
"Mana spike detected," Prime warned, his voice urgent. "High frequency. Incorporeal. Twelve o'clock high."
Dante looked up.
Above the green tide of the horde, the air shimmered.
Clouds of green mist drifted upward, ignoring the walls, ignoring the spears, ignoring gravity.
From the mist, faces formed. Screaming, distorted faces of women with hollow eyes and long, trailing hair made of smoke.
Banshees.
"Ghosts!" Dante yelled. "Incoming! Sky-watch!"
The Metaphysical Wave
The Banshees didn't attack the soldiers' bodies. They attacked their minds.
They flew over the ramparts, swooping down like vultures. They opened their mouths.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE.
The sound wasn't just noise; it was a psychic drill. It was the sound of every regret, every nightmare, every loss the soldiers had ever felt, amplified to a lethal frequency.
Soldiers of the Onyx Guard dropped their spears, clutching their ears. Blood ran from their noses. Some curled into balls, screaming as hallucinations of the Necromancer's making flooded their minds.
"My ears!" Lyra screamed, falling to her knees, clawing at her helmet. "Make it stop! I can hear them dying!"
Physical weapons passed right through the ghosts. Havoc fired a burst at a Banshee; the bullets went through her chest and hit the stone wall behind her. She just laughed—a sound like tearing metal—and flew through him.
Havoc froze, his eyes rolling back in his head. "No... no, stay away... I didn't mean to..." he whimpered, lost in a memory of a war crime.
"The defenses are breaking!" Aurum shrieked, ducking behind a crate as a Banshee swooped over him. "Dante! Do something! I can't bribe a ghost! My assets are tangible!"
Dante looked at the chaos. The physical wall held, but the mental wall was crumbling. If the Guards stopped fighting, the skeletons would climb the walls in minutes.
"Prime!" Dante shouted. "Solution!"
"Target is non-material," Prime analyzed. "Physical entropy is ineffective. You must disrupt the mana-binding holding their spirit forms together. You need a Soul-Shock."
"I don't have a soul-cannon!"
"You have the War Engine," Prime countered. "The Engine emits a radiation of Conquest. It imposes Authority. Ghosts are echoes of the past. War is the urgency of the present. Overwhelm them. Assert dominance."
Dante grabbed the railing of the tower. His knuckles turned white.
"Valerius! Get everyone down!"
Valerius looked up through the pain, saw Dante's eyes glowing red, and tackled Lyra to the ground. "Cover your ears!"
Dante closed his eyes. He reached into the Tesseract in his soul. He grabbed the brass gear of the Second Axiom.
He didn't channel mana. He channeled Intent.
He channeled the feeling of a thousand armies marching. The roar of cannons. The absolute, crushing weight of a General's command.
He opened his mouth.
"SILENCE!"
It wasn't a shout. It was a command issued by the God of War.
A shockwave of red mana blasted outward from Dante. It hit the Banshees like a physical wall.
The ghosts shrieked as their green forms were shredded by the red pressure. They didn't die; they were dismissed. Their binding to the mortal plane was severed by the sheer weight of Dante's presence.
POP. POP. POP.
The Banshees popped like soap bubbles.
The psychic screaming stopped instantly.
Silence returned to the ramparts, save for the heavy breathing of the terrified soldiers and the distant drumming of the horde.
Dante slumped against the railing, blood streaming from his nose. Using the Authority without the Engine's physical core to stabilize him was tearing his body apart.
"They're gone," Aurum whispered, peeking out from behind a crate. "You... you shouted them to death?"
"I evicted them," Dante wheezed, spitting blood. "Squatters' rights don't apply here."
He looked down at the wall. The skeletons were still climbing, unbothered by the psychic blast.
"Valerius!" Dante croaked. "The ghosts are gone! Get them back on the line!"
Valerius stood up, pulling Lyra with him. He shook her shoulders.
"Up!" Valerius roared at the dazed Guards. "The nightmare is over! The enemy is flesh again! Kill them!"
The Onyx Guard, fueled by shame and rage at their momentary weakness, grabbed their spears. They returned to the wall with a vengeance, hacking the climbing skeletons to pieces, venting their fear in violence.
The First Wave was broken.
But on the horizon, the green glow was getting brighter.
"That was just the vanguard," Dante wiped the blood from his lip. "The Necromancer is testing us. He wanted to see what kind of cards we held."
He turned to Aurum.
"Get the coffee ready, CFO. It's going to be a long night. And find me a way to kill something that's already dead."