’How did we even reach this day?’ Hastan closed his eyes. No tears ca, but the weight in his chest was almost unbearable.
He already knew the answer to his own question.
This was the day when the White Fla Empire, the empire that had stood tall for more than a century, that had unified the human continent and ushered in an age of peace, was facing extinction.
An empire that was counted among the Seven Pillars of the Unified Alliance was brought to its knees.
And now, its own Emperor was telling the people that the best they could do was resist long enough, so others could survive to see another day.
They couldn’t even spare the energy for mass teleportation. Every ounce of mana, every scrap of stored crystal and mana stone, was being poured into the city’s defense.
The last resources of the empire, including its people’s lives, were all that stood between the demon forces and those who were trying to escape the clutches of death.
It had taken only a year and two weeks for the peace that had lasted for a century to be taken away.
Hastan could still rember the day it began. It had been a bright, cloudless, utterly ordinary day. Children had played in the streets, rchants had called out their prices, and he had been on patrol near the southern wall.
Then the sky had split open.
Many figures of impossible power had appeared above the capital while, beneath their feet, six monstrous beasts erupted from the city ground. In a matter of minutes, the city was engulfed in confusion and chaos.
He hadn’t seen everything, only the beginning. Screams echoed through the smoke, the half-destroyed streets, and the flashes of light from the individuals trying to contain the devastation.
Before he knew it, he and everyone within the city had been teleported to safety. He had later heard that it was the work of demons, an invasion led by one called the Sin Duke of Envy.
The gateway to the Demon Continent had been opened. The demon armies were ready to march and drown their continent in death and in corruption.
They would have succeeded, too, had it not been for the saviors of the Malefis Domain.
Those powerful individuals, each one beyond comprehension, had co as their saviors. They closed the gateway and repelled the invasion, saving countless millions of lives.
But the victory was complete, the Duke of Envy escaped their clutches, and from that day forth, nothing was the sa, not for the humans, nor for the world.
The first few months were relatively calm, but then things just got worse and worse by each passing day.
Giants and the Winged Races sealed their continents, retreating behind their ancient defences. The Dwarves turned their forges inward, their civil war consuming their masses.
The Dragons also shut their doors, only offering little help to the human continent in need. The world that once stood united now stood fractured, and humanity stood almost alone.
Those four continents, the realms of Giants, Winged Races, Dwarves, and Dragons, were not helpful, but at the very least, they were not a threat. In these dark tis, even indifference was a rcy.
The Beastn were far better. Out of their eleven great tribes, seven had chosen to stand beside the humans, lending warriors, hunters, and supplies, though only in moderate numbers.
So fighting for honor, so for coin, but all shared the sa enemy, the nightmares plaguing the human continent.
And then, there were the wretched Elves.
Once proud and one of the strongest allies to the humans, the Elves had turned their backs on the world. They had betrayed the alliance, bending the knee to the Eldravian Empire, a power that had erged from the far side of the seas. Now they stood as its vassals, waging war against those they once called allies.
The newly discovered Terbis Continent had proven no better. It too was but a puppet of Eldravia, a front to extend the empire’s reach across the fractured world.
The enemies that haunted the human lands were too many to count.
Foremost were the Sin Duke and his demonic legions, the core of the darkness. Alongside them marched the war engines of the Eldravian Empire, the armies of Terbis, and a host of smaller factions bound in servitude to that sa distant power.
Then there were the Demon Cultists, insidious, deranged, and utterly devoted. They existed everywhere: in noble courts, rchant guilds, and even among soldiers and scholars. Their thods were madness itself, their reach near impossible to purge completely.
But the greatest horror of all, the one that truly plagued the continent, was the reason for 70% of deaths, which were the mutated beasts known as Devourer Beasts.
Born of the Demon King, the Great Devourer, these creatures numbered in the hundreds of millions. Their numbers multiplied faster than any army could cut them down, as the infectious curse that made them only needed beasts to grow their numbers.
Where the demonic legions stayed hidden in the Rust Peaks of the far south, confined within their fortress of twisted, multi-world artifacts and striking only in planned raids, the Devourer beasts were everywhere.
They road the plains, the forests, the mountains. They devoured towns, travelers, even entire cities, if given the chance.
They were not an invading army. They were a plague, a living hunger that would not stop until there was nothing left to consu but their own acursed existence.
Those nightmare-born creatures had begun to form hordes, vast, writhing masses that grew with every passing week. Their threat no longer spread rely by numbers but by coordination.
Each encounter with them had beco a war, one that demanded imnse resources and claid countless lives.
And as if that weren’t enough, ca the final nail in the coffin, the Immortal Adventurers.
They were humanity’s greatest asset, paragons of strength who grew with every kill and welcod death with open arms.
But now, even among them, divisions had taken root. While many still fought for the Empire and its allies, others had turned against it, seduced by darker powers or personal ambition.
And more than both sides combined had chosen neutrality, vanishing into the newly opened continents ruled by the Eldravian Empire.
In the span of a single year, the tapestry of the world had been torn apart, thread by thread, and now, this day’s dawn would mark its blackest hour.
The capital, Nova, would fall. Their Emperor, the fla that had guided them, would die. And the White Fla Empire, which had once united the human continent, would be left as a husk of itself, if that.
No one truly knew what disaster was taking birth, what crisis could have been dire enough to make even their saviors abandon the Empire completely, not even spare a few of their mighty warriors to aid them as they always did.
A single year had rewritten reality as they knew it, and after today, the descent would only deepen. For every soul caught on the losing end of these mad powers, there would be no reprieve.
Emperor lvin’s words still rang in Hastan’s mind: Help is coming, but not soon enough.
He had already co to terms with what that ant. They were all going to die, but if their deaths could buy ti for others to live, then it would not be in vain.
’I always dread of serving the Emperor, serving the Empire,’ Hastan thought. ’And what greater service can there be than to give my life for it?’
Yet beneath that bravery, a quieter dread lingered, a thought he refused to face, buried deep under duty and resolve.
He took a slow breath, closing his eyes for just a mont. When he opened them again, they burned with the steady light of resolve.
Without another word, Hastan turned, his steps quick and silent. In a blur of motion, he vanished into the depths of the nearest watchtower.
--------
The four hours passed like a blink. Where monts before the city had been a mass of panicked movent and wailing, Nova now sat like a living fortress, tense, ordered, ready to die.
The evacuating bands had long since lted into the dark beyond the north roads.
Above, the sky had shifted from midnight black to that bruised, pre-dawn color, an indigo washed with bruised lavender and a thin, cold gold at the horizon.
The air felt leaden and heavy, a thin mbrane of quiet stretched over the city like a held breath.
On the hundred-ter-high city walls, thousands clustered shoulder to shoulder. Most were citizens in mismatched cuirs and patched mail, ard with long and close-range weapons.
Interspersed among them were the Empire’s regulars, trained n and won in gleaming white breastplates bearing the sigil of the white fla.
Together, they ford a human wall, with ranks of spears, rows of archers, and lines of pikes and shields locked into place.
Nova itself had been remade for war. The concentric rings of the city, once neighborhoods and market districts, had been turned into belts of defense.
Streets had been transford into chokepoints, with entire streets dismantled to form barricades, rchant wagons lashed together into mobile bulwarks, and cobbles torn up and piled as low ramparts.
Alleyways were gated with spikes and burning braziers; butcher stalls and stalls of linen had beco armory stockpiles.
Where gardens and courtyards once were, trenchworks and firing steps had been carved out, creating overlapping kill zones that funneled an attacker into a path of blade or fire.
Each ring fed into the next, a layered lattice of traps and troops designed to bleed an invader dry.
Towering masts and pylons had been raised in plazas and market-squares. Mana-focusing arrays humd faintly, rune-stones glowed with a dull inner light.
On the highest terraces, the great mana guns were prid, iron Ballistas shining coldly, their barrels burned, and their cores pulsed like caged lightning.
Above all this, nearly two dozen heavy airships hovered in disciplined orbits. Their hulls were dark and massive, with sails taut, though there was no wind; pale blue and goldfield shields shimred across their undersides, pulsing slowly and steadily.
From their gun ports and ballista racks ca the low thrum of gravity engines and the tallic click of weapons warming. Crewn moved along catwalks like ants. The ships hung there like predators watching a gorge.
Every posture in the city told the sa story: they were not preparing for a graceful victory. The formations were not intended for safety, or the preservation of life, or even the slim hope of triumph.
They were set to make the enemy pay for every inch in spilled blood.
Carriage-borne ballistae, archer galleries, mage-pylons, and spike-lined streets, and countless weapons and traps were all part of a single, brutal calculus.
If the enemy wished to destroy Nova and kill their Emperor, it would have to do so at an imnse, unbearable cost.
In the dim light before dawn, n and won adjusted straps, checked fletchings, and whispered brief prayers.
The city waited. The silence pressed harder, and every heartbeat seed magnified, the last small music before the flas of war engulfed them one final ti.
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