**The Indomitable Spirit Warrior: Lucas Grey**
**Chapter 4: The Beast Tide Assault**
The sirens began at 3:17 a.m.
Not the usual single wail for a small breach or wandering pack.
This was the triple-tone cascade — deep, guttural, repeating every seven seconds.
**Beast Tide Imminent. All citizens to inner shelters. All registered Spirit Warriors to assigned sectors. Code Crimson.**
Lucas was already awake.
He had felt it before the alarms — a prickling at the base of his skull, like static crawling up his spine. His Spirit Sense, now far more sensitive after weeks of nightly core-refining, picked up the distant surge: thousands of life-forces converging from the western wastelands, moving fast, moving together.
He dressed in seconds — black trainee fatigues, lightweight combat boots, the simple alloy bracers Vanguard issued to probationers. No fancy gear yet. No need. His real weapon wasn't strapped to his body.
It was inside his head.
He sprinted down the dorm corridor, joining the flood of trainees pouring toward the armory level. The elevators were locked to priority personnel; everyone else took the emergency stairwells. Boots thundered on metal grates. Voices overlapped in clipped urgency.
"Western quadrant — main breach expected in forty minutes."
"Thunder Serpent confirmed leading the front. Class-5 at minimum."
"Casualty projections already at thirty percent for outer wall defenders…"
Lucas reached the armory, scanned his wrist-chip, and grabbed what was available: a set of lightweight kinetic dampeners for his wrists (useless for him, but protocol), three high-density energy cells (for powering borrowed weapons he wouldn't use), and a standard-issue comms earpiece.
Master Thorne's voice cut through the chatter on the open channel.
"All probationers and juniors report to Wall Sector 7-C. You are not front-line. You are support. Hold secondary positions, plug breaches, retrieve wounded. Anyone who charges ahead without orders will answer to me personally — after the beasts finish with you."
Lucas met Elara and Kai at the rally point.
Elara Voss — flame-affinity, short-cropped red hair, perpetual half-smirk. She could turn the air around her fist into plasma with a snap.
Kai Ren — defense-specialist, broad-shouldered, skin that could harden to something denser than titanium when he focused. Quiet, steady, the kind of person you wanted beside you when everything went to hell.
They had been grouped together for the last two weeks in rotation drills. Not friends yet. But they trusted each other's backs.
"First real tide for you, slum-boy?" Elara asked, cracking her knuckles. Tiny sparks danced between her fingers.
"First one I'm allowed to fight in," Lucas replied.
Kai grunted. "Don't die. I hate breaking in new partners."
The mag-lev ride to the wall took nine minutes.
Outside the reinforced carriage windows, New Haven looked like a city holding its breath. Lights dimmed to tactical levels. Streets empty except for armored response teams. Distant thunder rolled — not weather.
When they disembarked at Sector 7-C, the scale hit Lucas like a physical blow.
The wall rose two hundred meters above them, a sheer cliff of ceramite and gravitic plating. Railgun batteries tracked back and forth. Spotlights swept the dark beyond. And beyond that…
A black tide.
Thousands of shapes surging across the cracked plain.
Glowing eyes.
Glowing veins.
A living tsunami of claws, fangs, scales, and fury.
At the center of the front line, towering above everything else, coiled the Thunder Serpent.
Fifty meters long if it was a centimeter.
Body armored in overlapping obsidian plates that drank light.
Maw crackling with chained lightning.
Every time it exhaled, blue-white arcs leaped between its fangs and scorched the ground black.
Lucas's Spirit Sense flared.
He could feel it — the core inside that monster. A pulsing reactor of Nova Essence so dense it warped the air around it.
"Positions!" barked the sector commander, a woman with lieutenant bars and half her face replaced by matte-black cybernetics. "Juniors on the inner barricades. Support fire only. Do NOT engage the Class-5 unless ordered!"
The first wave hit the outer ablative layer like a meteor shower.
Beasts climbed.
Explosive charges detonated in sequence, shearing off hundreds at a time.
Railguns roared, punching fist-sized holes through anything that reached the top.
But there were too many.
A section of wall thirty meters to their left buckled.
A pack of ironhide rhinos — each the size of a tank — rammed the same weakened panel again and again until it gave.
" Breach! Breach in 7-B!"
"Redirecting reserves—"
Lucas didn't wait for orders.
He sprinted toward the gap, Elara and Kai right behind him.
The rhinos poured through — five of them, bellowing, lowered horns dripping with coolant fluid from the wall's damaged coolant lines.
Lucas skidded to a halt on the shattered rampart.
He spread both arms wide.
The air screamed.
Every loose piece of debris within fifty meters — chunks of ceramite, twisted rebar, dead beasts, even spent railgun slugs — rose in a swirling storm.
Then he clenched his fists.
The storm collapsed inward.
A thousand kilograms of jagged metal and stone slammed into the lead rhino from every direction at once.
The beast's skull imploded.
Its body flipped backward, crushing two more behind it.
Elara laughed — wild, exhilarated — and hurled a spear of white-hot plasma that burned straight through the fourth rhino's eye and out the other side.
Kai stepped forward, skin turning the color and texture of blackened steel.
He caught the last rhino's horn charge square in the chest, boots gouging trenches in the deck plating as he skidded back five meters — but he held.
Then he roared, twisted, and threw the beast sideways into the wall remnants, where it broke its neck on impact.
The breach was plugged.
For now.
But the real threat was coming.
The Thunder Serpent had noticed the resistance at Sector 7.
It reared, coils tightening, mouth opening wide.
A sphere of ball lightning gathered between its jaws — growing, crackling, brighter than the spotlights.
"Artillery! Focus fire on the Class-5!" the commander screamed over comms.
Railguns swiveled.
High-caliber rounds hammered the serpent's scales — most ricocheted, a few cracked plates.
It didn't even flinch.
The lightning sphere detonated forward in a cone.
White-blue death swept across the wall top.
Defenders vaporized.
Metal melted.
The shockwave knocked Lucas off his feet.
He hit the deck hard, ears ringing.
When he looked up, half the sector command post was gone.
The lieutenant's cybernetic half-face sparked and smoked where she lay.
And the serpent was already lunging again, mouth aimed straight at their position.
Elara dragged Lucas behind a toppled gun mount.
"Get up! We're not dying here!"
Lucas tasted blood.
His head pounded — not from impact, but from rage.
He could feel it now, clearer than ever.
The serpent's life-force.
A blinding white core wrapped in black chains of corrupted Nova Essence.
He pushed himself to his feet.
"I'm ending this."
Before Elara could argue, he stepped out into the open.
The serpent's head descended, jaws wide enough to swallow a house.
Lucas raised one hand.
Nothing happened at first.
Then the air around him warped.
Every metal object on the wall top — guns, armor plates, railings, even the lieutenant's fallen cybernetic arm — tore free and streamed toward his outstretched palm.
They didn't stop.
They compressed.
Layer after layer folding in on itself with terrible speed, forming a spear thirty meters long, tip sharper than any forge could make, shaft denser than osmium.
Lucas screamed — not in fear, but in pure, focused will.
He hurled.
The compressed-metal spear lanced forward faster than sound.
It struck the Thunder Serpent directly through the left eye.
The impact rang like a cathedral bell struck by a meteor.
The serpent recoiled, thrashing, lightning exploding wildly from the wound.
The spear kept going — punching through the skull, out the other side, trailing arcs of stolen electricity.
The beast's core flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then went dark.
The colossal body crashed sideways, flattening hundreds of lesser beasts beneath it, carving a kilometer-long trench in the wasteland before it finally stilled.
Silence — broken only by the crackle of dying fires and the groans of wounded.
Then the sector survivors erupted in ragged cheers.
Lucas dropped to one knee, nose bleeding from the strain, vision swimming.
Elara caught him before he fell completely.
"Holy hell, Grey," she whispered, half-laughing, half-shocked. "You just killed a Class-5 solo."
Kai appeared at his other side, offering a steadying hand.
"Not solo," Lucas rasped. "We held the line. Together."
Overhead speakers crackled back to life.
"All sectors report — Tide broken. Class-5 neutralized. New Haven stands."
Lucas looked up at the wall, at the stars visible through the smoke.
He felt different.
Not just stronger.
Seen.
And in the shadows far beyond the breach, a figure in a dark coat lowered his macro-binoculars.
The crescent-moon sigil on his sleeve caught the moonlight for just a second.
"Lucas Grey," the man murmured.
"Eclipse will remember your name."
To be continued...