The Ragguard infantry and the war-golem batteries strained every nerve and muscle to hurl the demonic tide back from the battlements. This brutal grind—a constant slaughter of man and beast—left the curtain walls choked with a slurry of filth. Ruby blood and sallow emerald vitriol splattered every stone, congealing into deep, rusty stains that no amount of scrubbing could ever clean.
Whenever a Crawler managed to scale the heights, it reaped a terrifying toll, butchering hundreds of the garrison in a frenzied blur of talons before leaping back into the surging mass below.
The Western and Northern ramparts were manned by over eighty thousand soldiers—the lion's share of the fortress's strength. These fronts faced the blighted lands directly, taking the full brunt of the Legion's fury. The other sectors were held by mere skeleton crews, as High Command was forced to put every blade where the pressure was greatest.
Suddenly, the rhythmic clatter of plate armour and the heavy strike of iron-shod boots echoed across the stone, followed by a frantic shout.
"Lord Seraph!" General Leonis bellowed.
The commander charged from the Northern battlements, skidding to a halt before the young magis, gasping for air. His personal guard and the ever-persistent Rosalyn were right behind him, a constant shadow at his side.
"General... what can I do for you?" Seraph asked, his composure as calm as a still pond.
Since the Bloody Hunting party arrived, the fifty Crawlers that had breached the inner sanctum had been systematically wiped out. The demon hunters had done the job with surgical efficiency; though some bore the scars of the fight, not a single soul among them had fallen yet.
While the number of dead predators was only a fraction of what the Arkflame Army had expected, a flicker of cautious optimism had begun to spread among the slayers, far outweighing the grim dread they had felt before.
If you weighed this mandate against the harrowing purgatory of the Raffbloom culling, this second trip felt less like a theatre of war and more like a stroll through a field of lavender. Nearly half the hunters who'd quit early were now gnashing their teeth in bitter regret, cursing their haste to walk away from such a lucrative harvest.
"Look, Seraph," Leonis growled, his voice like grinding stone and his face slick with sweat. "Cut the 'General' talk and just call me Leonis. That kind of politeness from a magis like you makes my damn skin crawl."
The plate armour on the General and his men was coated in the sallow emerald vitriol of the slain. They'd been lucky; the demonic gore lacked the corrosive acid of their primary organs. Like a serpent's venom, the real lethality was sequestered in their fangs and talons, leaving their blood merely foul, not fatal.
"Have you figured out how the Crawlers broke the inner circuit?" Seraph asked, cutting straight to the tactical marrow.
"That's the exact thorn in my side!" Leonis spat, his fingers tightening around the hilt of his broadsword in a rhythmic display of agitation.
He continued, his tone darkening: "We can't rule out a traitor just yet, but I'm betting they hit a structural crack in our subterranean reaches. Ragguard's foundations are honeycombed with tunnels and sewers—a literal spider's web of stone. I've ordered every culvert and crawl-space sealed for good. If the interior stays quiet, we'll have our answer: the bastards moved right under our feet."
"You need to keep a sharper watch," Seraph remarked with a detached gravity, his gaze never wavering from the sea of slaughter churning below the battlements.
The magis found himself in agreement with Leonis's assessment. The likelihood that the Crawlers had seeped through the ancient, subterranean arteries of the fortress was far more plausible than a coordinated breach of the curtain walls.
In the past, the Demon Legion had never bothered with such subversive tactics. Their sheer physical power made the common man a mere footnote in the history of slaughter. By simply throwing an endless, rhythmic tide of demons against a fortress—day and night, without pause—they usually ground human resistance into the dust. Complexity was a luxury they never needed to learn.
Yet, this calculated infiltration by the Crawler packs planted a seed of unease in the magis. Seraph wasn't convinced the danger had been settled just by sealing a few tunnels.
"I need a favour, Seraph. A heavy one." Leonis asked, his voice cracking with a clear hesitation.
"What's the crisis now?" the young man asked, a sidelong glance tracking the General's nerves.
"I know your mandate here—and the rest of the demon hunters—is strictly to kill the Crawlers," Leonis began, his eyes fixed on Seraph with a raw anxiety. "But I'm asking you to help us clear out the undead hives and the lesser swarms surrounding the walls. If you can thin their numbers even a little, it'll give my men the breathing room they need to hold out until the Arkflame reinforcements show up."
"I understand the stakes," Seraph countered, his voice cold and flat. "And my duty is to bolster the Ragguard defence. But my rules are non-negotiable: I want a cut of the spoils from every kill I make. Every strike and every spell I cast will be logged in the mission scrolls as proof. I also need a steady supply of potions and sharpened blades. If you provide the gear without being stingy, I won't hold back on the help."
"That's it? You should've said so from the start!" Leonis exclaimed, his excitement borderlining on frantic. "The Ragguard armouries are packed with that stuff. I'll personally see to it that you're loaded up with healing draughts, strength augments, and anti-venoms. Hell, I'll even put a dedicated choir of healers at your beck and call for the whole fight! You give this city everything your Art has got, and I'll give you every damn asset we have. Once the smoke clears, I'm sending a dispatch to the Royal Court and the Sanctus personally to sing your praises!"
In truth, Ragguard's resources weren't nearly as bottomless as the General's bluster suggested. Under normal circumstances, Leonis would never have signed off on such an extravagant tab for a single fighter, hunter or magis alike.
But after seeing Seraph in action, the General was convinced the kid had already crossed the threshold of a true Warlock—or was standing right on the edge of it. An entity like that was a strategic asset with terrifying potential, especially looking at where he'd be in a few years.
To bag a Warlock of Seraph's calibre through official channels, the Arkflame Crown would usually have to broker a brutal, overpriced contract or issue a high-priority mandate that cost a fortune in gold sovereigns. Compared to a ransom like that, a pile of refillable potions and some steel was a pocket-change investment.
Had it not been for the Bloody Hunting muster, these thousand slayers might never have set foot on the Northwestern frontier. Seraph's deal was, a strategic windfall for the garrison. They were about to reap a massive harvest of security without actually going into the red. Once the culling season hit its denouement, the fortress could just bill the Arkflame coffers to replace everything they'd spent.