Chapter 70: The Calm Before the Storm
The underground forge was suffocatingly hot, slling heavily of sulfur, lted iron, and highly unstable mana powder.
Draven Mordis stood near the entrance, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. He watched silently as Cole Rust and Lyra Voltaire operated in a state of frantic synchronization.
CLANG! CLANG!
Cole brought his heavy hamr down on a thick sheet of A-Rank steel, shaping it into a perfectly spherical, aerodynamic shell.
He tossed it into a cooling vat of blue liquid.
HISS!
The mont the shell cooled, Lyra snatched it with a pair of iron tongs.
Her fingers were stained pitch-black with alchemical ink.
She rapidly packed the hollow steel with a volatile, glowing crimson powder, before slapping a dense matrix of sealing runes over the top to keep the internal pressure perfectly balanced.
"That is the last one," Lyra panted, wiping a streak of soot from her forehead.
She looked completely exhausted, her usual energetic bounce replaced by grim fatigue.
She gestured to a reinforced iron crate resting on the workbench. Inside sat six massive, heavy black spheres.
They did not look like standard explosive tags or fragntation grenades. They pulsed with a terrifying, contained density.
"The Void-Core Charges," Cole grunted, leaning heavily against his anvil. He looked at Draven.
"Just like you asked, boss. The steel casing is lined with a micro-vacuum array. When these detonate, they won’t just explode outward. They will violently suck all the oxygen and mana in a fifty-yard radius into a localized vacuum before triggering a secondary, concussive outward blast. It will shatter solid obsidian."
Lyra crossed her arms, eyeing Draven suspiciously.
"I still don’t understand," Lyra frowned.
"A Beast Wave is mostly composed of unarmored, feral monsters. Standard shrapnel bombs would be infinitely more efficient for crowd control. Why did you make us waste three days building bunker-busting implosion charges? What are you planning to hit with these?"
Draven walked up to the iron crate. He did not answer her question directly.
"Sothing Extra-ordinary!," Draven said flatly. He placed his hand on the crate.
VWOOM!
The heavy iron box vanished instantly into his spatial ring.
"But you don’t use a boot when you know there is a sledgehamr waiting in the dark," Draven added.
He knew exactly what Elder Martha’s "hidden card" was. The original novel had described the horror in vivid detail.
The Cult wasn’t just relying on the feral horde. They had a siegebreaker.
A monstrosity designed specifically to bypass the Great Wall’s automated turrets.
These six Void-Core Charges were Draven’s surgical scalpel. He wasn’t going to let that hidden card take a single step near Bastion Seven.
"Rest," Draven ordered the two exhausted crafters.
"When the sirens go off, stay in the underground shelter. Your job is done."
---
High above the slums, in the residential districts of Bastion Seven, the atmosphere was completely devoid of hope.
The sky remained a sickly, bruised gray. The evacuation protocols had been initiated hours ago. Thousands of civilians were being herded toward the subterranean ergency bunkers beneath the inner city.
Managing the panicked crowds were the first-year Academy students.
Kael stood at a crossroad, directing a crying family toward a glowing blue bunker entrance.
He looked up at the towering, silent Great Wall in the distance.
The defensive prodigy gripped his wand tightly, his knuckles white.
"Keep moving! Do not leave your luggage behind, just carry the essentials!" another student yelled nearby, his voice cracking with anxiety.
The student jogged over to Kael. He looked terrified.
"Kael... do you really think we’re going to survive this?" the boy whispered, his eyes darting toward the dark sky.
"The Vanguard Knights look completely on edge. I saw a captain puking behind a transport vehicle."
Kael swallowed hard.
He looked around at the ruined storefronts down the street, the collateral damage left behind by Patriarch Hennessey’s reckless, destructive raids against the Cult.
"I don’t trust the noble Houses," Kael admitted bitterly.
"Hennessey tore the slums apart just to save his own ego. They don’t care about the citizens. They only care about their own estates."
"Then who is going to protect us?" the boy asked, his voice trembling. "If the walls fall, we’re the last line of defense for these civilians."
Kael tightened his grip on his wand. He thought about the day in the cafeteria.
He rembered Aegon Logcheville violently kicking the blast doors open, choosing to face the burning city alone while the rest of them cowered.
"The nobles might be corrupt," Kael said, his voice steadying with a frail but genuine spark of resolve.
"But the Lord Commander is up there on the walls. And Aegon is with him. We just have to believe in the Commander. We hold the residential lines, no matter what."
At the absolute pinnacle of the Great Wall, the wind was freezing.
The Lord Commander stood at the edge of the parapet, his heavy military coat violently snapping in the wind.
He stared out into the ten-kiloter expanse of the Wildlands.
The unnatural fog obscured the horizon, turning the landscape into a sea of churning gray soup.
Guildmaster Seraphina Vance stepped up beside him. She was fully ard, wearing her pristine silver combat armor.
"The inner city is locked down," Seraphina reported quietly.
"The students are managing the civilian bunkers. Sirius Statanham’s syndicates are surprisingly cooperative, keeping the underground crowds perfectly orderly."
"The calm before the storm," the Lord Commander murmured.
His silver eyes were narrowed, trying to pierce the thick mist.
The weight of millions of lives rested squarely on his broad shoulders. He could feel the heavy, sickening ambient mana pooling in the distance.
The spatial fabric was groaning.
"It’s too quiet, Seraphina," the Commander whispered, his jaw clenching.
"They are holding the tension on purpose. They are waiting for our Vanguard Knights to exhaust themselves just by standing at attention."
"We will hold," Seraphina said, placing a reassuring hand on her old friend’s armored shoulder.
"We always do."
---
At the furthest Northwestern edge of the Great Wall’s periter, Guard Tower Delta-Four sat in absolute silence.
Two seasoned Vanguard sentries stood on the balcony, their hands resting on the grips of heavy, automated mana-turrets.
They were peering through high-grade telescopic visors, scanning the dense fog.
"Anything?" the first sentry asked, his breath misting in the freezing air.
"Nothing," the second sentry replied, rubbing his tired eyes.
"Just gray soup. The magical sensors are going crazy with background radiation, but there are no physical movent pin..."
RUMBLE.
The sentry stopped speaking. He lowered his visor.
He looked down at his boots. The solid steel grating of the watchtower was vibrating.
It was a low, rhythmic thrumming deep within the earth.
"Did you feel that?"
RUMBLE.
The vibration grew stronger. A tiny pebble resting on the railing vibrated, then fell off the edge.
The first sentry quickly raised his telescopic visor and aid it dead Northwest, staring into the thickest part of the fog, exactly ten kiloters out.
The fog was moving.
It wasn’t blowing with the wind. The gray mist was physically being pushed upward, displaced by a massive, moving wave of dark brown dust.
The sentry’s eyes widened in sheer horror as the dust cloud breached the top of the fog line.
It stretched horizontally across the entire horizon. I
t wasn’t a pack of monsters. It wasn’t a horde.
It was an ocean of flesh, bone, and corrupted magic, charging toward Bastion Seven with the force of a tectonic shift.
"Light preserve us," the sentry choked out. He lunged toward the wall panel.
He slamd his armored fist directly into the massive red ergency button.
BZZZT! WEE-OOO! WEE-OOO! WEE-OOO!
The deafening, chanical shriek of the Class-A Siege Siren exploded from the watchtower.
A fraction of a second later, hundreds of sirens across the Great Wall linked together, blanketing the entire city of Bastion Seven in a terrifying, apocalyptic wail.
Down in the Apex Villa, Draven Mordis stood up from the balcony ledge.
A bright crimson screen materialized in his vision.
[System Alert: Planetary Threat Level Event Initiated.]
[The Beast Wave has arrived.]
Draven drew his tactical knife.
The war had begun.
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