The roar of Leonis's voice rolled across No Man's Land like a physical weight, drawing a weary sigh from the young magis. In the heat of the unfolding cataclysm, Seraph realised he'd screwed up—he hadn't given the General a tactical heads-up, nor had he expected his spell to look quite so much like the end of the world.
In truth, the liturgy he'd loosed wasn't a genuine mid-tier spell. It was a sophisticated, high-order fusion—a rhythmic, composite technique of his own making, designed to mimic the devastating yield of a mid-tier catastrophe while dodging the ruinous mana drain those spells usually demanded.
While Seraph's internal reserves had swelled to the very edge of the Warlock's domain, he knew his limits. Trying to force that gap without a damn good reason was a sucker's bet. Stretching those spiritual boundaries could suck a practitioner dry, withering their lifespan or, worse, triggering a mageia backlash that would leave them a hollowed-out husk—or a corpse.
This Flame Arrowrain was a masterwork of mimicry. He'd engineered this specific trick for maximum area of effect, saturating the Western front from end to end. While the flaming shafts were powerful enough to wipe out a massive chunk of the undead legion, Seraph wasn't kidding himself about the tougher breeds; the Crawlers, the Bigfoot batteries, and the high-ranking demon scions would likely ride out this initial storm.
The real target of this opening gambit was the sea of several hundred thousand undead.
The sheer density of these lesser demons provided a living shield for the Crawler packs, letting the apex predators lurk in the shadows of the swarm, hidden from the human defenders. As long as the battlefield was choked with this mindless biomass, the Crawlers could move with impunity, dodging the garrison's counter-strikes.
To kill the wolves, Seraph first had to burn down the forest where they were hiding.
Young magis had no intention of letting loose the full, devastation of a real mid-tier spell. His goal was more surgical: saturate the entire theatre of war with a massive area-of-effect that reached every dark corner of the Western approaches.
The Ragguard garrison, however, didn't know the tactical nuances behind the magis's play. They just followed the General's orders, pivoting with precision and locking their shields into the Celestial-Earthen Phalanx—a massive tortoise-shell formation built to weather the most hellish firestorms.
The soldiers weren't the only ones who felt the storm coming.
The moment the Crawler packs saw the first streaks of the Flame Arrowrain—shimmering like a thousand fireflies of death—their predatory instincts overrode every demonic order. They didn't understand human spell or the complex mechanics of fire mageia, but they knew the scent of their own extinction when they smelled it.
In a blurred, retreat, hundreds of inky shadows bolted back toward the rearguard, weaving through the mindless crowd of the host with frantic, unhesitating speed. They abandoned the vanguard entirely.
It was a sharp contrast to the undead hordes, who just kept shuffling toward the Ragguard walls with a stagnant, mechanical idiocy.
Suddenly, the aerial assault on Seraph stopped. No more shadows jumped to meet him; only the low-tier trash kept pressing their advance against the masonry. Even the Bigfoot batteries stayed fixed in place, hurling massive stones and timbers into the fray with the dull, tireless persistence of machines.
The rhythmic clang of iron shields meeting in perfect unison echoed across the battlements. The Ragguard sentries moved as a single, cohesive engine of war—a testament to the brutal, drilling they'd endured under Leonis's command.
Within heartbeats, the garrison had vanished beneath the stone towers and the canopy of their interlocking shields. They stood entombed in their own defence, as if they'd collectively decided to leave the battlements to the coming fire.
The vacuum on the battlements allowed the undead tide to crest the masonry unopposed. But once they hit the summit, the hordes just stood there in a stupor, their withered fingers scratching at their scalps as they scanned the circuit. The living had vanished; the ramparts were as desolate as a necropolis.
Thousands of these mindless husks saw nothing but the inscrutable domes of interlocking steel—the Celestial-Earthen Phalanx—shielding the garrison like the impenetrable shells of primeval tortoises. Without a target, the Legion's vanguard just faltered, lost in a brain-dead daze.
"RAZE THEM ALL!" Seraph commanded, unleashing a torrential rain of fire-aspected arrows upon the legion of a million demons.
[KRA-ZA-ZA-ZA-ZAAAAAM—!]
The sky let out a rhythmic, aggressive roar as the Flame Arrowrain came down with predatory intent. The Western theatre was instantly saturated by a cascading veil of igneous shafts, shimmering like a frantic meteor shower. The air hummed with a low-frequency vibration that gnawed at the very soul, while stray embers drifted like vengeful spirits toward the Northern bastions and the inner sanctum of Ragguard.
This was no northern light; it was an impartial blizzard of death.
The air shrieked as the flaming arrows tore through the skulls and carcasses of the demonic horde with visceral ferocity. Across the field, the enemy was turned into a collection of macabre, ignited pincushions. The ranks were mostly lower-tier trash—undead hordes, goblins, and stone-imps—creatures whose bodies offered zero resistance to the bite of mageia.
The undead, in particular, had hides so brittle they mocked the very concept of mageia defence. The flaming shafts ripped through their desiccated frames with effortless speed.
[THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!]
Skulls popped like soft jelly—a cacophony of rupturing bone and cooked sinew. A discordant chorus of shrieks rose from the walls, only to be cut short as the climbers were systematically wiped out. Beyond the masonry, the million-strong horde began to collapse in a sequence of agonising thuds, until the entire Western approach was carpeted in a fresh, smouldering shroud of the damned.
[AAAAAAAGH-WHEEE!]
Plumes of onyx smoke and sweltering haze rose to shroud the blood moon. Igneous shafts arced through the sky with predatory grace, pinning the undead through their very marrow and dragging their broken forms off the Western battlements. A gale, thick with the screams of the damned, tore across the heights; in a heartbeat, those still standing were turned into silent, smouldering heaps. Even the parched grass of the field ignited, the fire surging to swallow the entire theatre of war in one hungry embrace.
[RRRR-GHA!]
The demonic horde turned their jagged muzzles to the heavens, letting out defiant roars against the cinder-clouds and the ashen rain. They shook their crude maces at the sky as if to curse the stars themselves. But the heavens answered only with fire—flaming arrows punched through open maws and throats, burying themselves deep in the scorched earth.
The slaughter went on with the relentless pulse of Hell's own breath. A host of nearly a million began to wither like autumn leaves in a storm. The body count didn't just climb from the kills; it was fed by the frantic, messy retreat of tens of thousands of goblins, hit by a sudden, paralysing terror.
But a legion isn't a single organism; it's a machine that needs clear orders and discipline to move with any real speed. Those kinds of tactical nuances were missing from the dark records of the Demon Legion; the very concept of a 'retreat' had never been written in their war-books.