Poooooooorrrr!!
The first horn blast echoed through the Greshan skyline like a warning from the gods.
It wasn't the start of the battle—that had already begun.
The outer scouts had vanished without a word. Essence tracking spells stopped reporting. Magic circle along the northern ridge lit up in warning, then died.
Everyone on the northern front knew what that ant.
The horde had arrived.
Damien stood on a rooftop above the city's outermost path, watching the distant treeline ripple unnaturally in the dusk. Shadows shifted. Trees shook with no wind. Birds had stopped flying hours ago.
The demons were close now.
And they brought silence with them.
Below him, the rcenaries of Greshan were forming up—archers on raised scaffolding, runebearers laying down suppression circles, barrier-casters channeling layered shields.
Lyone was with a squad near the back line, his blade drawn, hands shaking but eyes focused.
Then it hit Damien—not through sight or sound, but a ripple across his extraordinary senses shared with his summoned beasts.
A subtle pulse.
One he knew well.
Aquila.
She was fighting.
Far from here. North. Her essence flared like a beacon—calculated, powerful, precise—but stressed. She was under pressure. Not close to death… but not exactly surrounded by allies either.
Damien's brow furrowed.
He glanced toward the trees. He couldn't see her. But he could feel her.
She was supposed to be with Arielle. With Arielle's people.
So why was she fighting like she was protecting a flank?
Why did it feel like she was alone?
He didn't have ti to think it through.
Because that's when the System pulsed.
A blue panel flared in the corner of his vision.
Ding!
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[MISSION: DEMON SLAUGHTER]
[Objective: Kill 5,000 demons]
[Reward: Unlock Summon Slot 6 and the next Sub-Skill]
[Ti Limit: Until the Greshan Event Ends]
Damien's heart didn't race.
It settled.
Everything in him aligned.
It was ti.
The first demons erged from the treeline—a wave of shifting silhouettes, black as night, bodies misshapen and limbs twisted. So ran on all fours, others walked upright, clawed hands dragging along the dirt. Horns. Fangs. Screams that clawed the sky.
Most Grade Six.
So Grade Five.
Good.
Damien didn't wait.
He leapt from the rooftop before the first spell was cast, cloak trailing behind him as he dropped into the open field between the city and the trees. The rcenaries gasped as he passed their lines.
"What's he doing?"
"Wait—he's alone?"
"That's suicide!"
No.
That was Damien.
He landed silently, one knee to the ground, and rose just as the front line of demons spotted him.
The first charged—a wolf-shaped creature with a snake's jaw and six legs. It didn't even make it halfway.
Damien raised his hand.
"Wind Magic: Spiral Piercer."
A burst of compressed wind essence spiraled from his palm, punching through the demon's skull with a sickening crack. Its body twitched once, then fell—lifeless.
[Demon killed: Grade Six]
[Kill Count: 1 / 5,000]
He didn't blink.
More ca. Five. Then twelve. Then twenty.
Damien stepped forward.
His staff unraveled from his coat like a drawn blade—its edge now glowing with arcane fury.
The next beast leapt, aiming for his throat.
He ducked low and spun, cleaving its legs mid-air and jamming the reinforced butt of the staff through its ribs on the rebound. It burst into ash.
[Kill Count: 2 / 5,000]
The world blurred.
He moved fast—sliding through enemy lines like a shadow underwater. He weaved between claws and spears and snapping jaws, countering with impossible precision. Every strike he landed was lethal. Efficient. Unemotional.
He wasn't fighting.
He was harvesting.
[Kill Count: 11 / 5,000]
[Kill Count: 22 / 5,000]
[Kill Count: 39 / 5,000]
Demons started to pull back instinctively—unintelligent, but not suicidal. The front lines recoiled.
Damien surged forward.
He called on his inner energy and activated his movent skill.
"Flash Step."
The air cracked.
He vanished and reappeared mid-pivot behind a pack leader, driving his staff clean through its core, twisting hard as it howled.
[Kill Count: 48 / 5,000]
On the Greshan wall, Lyone stared, slack-jawed.
"Is he—he's not even waiting for them to attack?"
"No," one of the rcenaries whispered beside him. "He's hunting them like a Dunter does."
In the distance, one of the other rcenary captains cursed. "He's broken the line—now they'll scatter!"
But they didn't.
Because Damien was drawing them.
The more he killed, the more attention he drew—demons screeched in fury, eyes blood-red, and sprinted toward him. But every new arrival only added to his tally.
It was working.
Until the second wave arrived.
The treeline exploded outward as a larger beast erged—easily four ters tall, covered in shifting black armor, eyes vertical and glowing.
A Grade Four.
Damien turned as it roared, the very sound splintering stones nearby.
It charged.
He rolled aside just in ti to avoid being trampled, then pivoted mid-air and lashed his staff into the beast's knee joint. It staggered, screeched, and backhanded him into a nearby boulder, shattering it.
Dust exploded around him.
Lyone cried out. "Damien!"
But from the dust, Damien stepped forward again—coat torn, blood on his lip, but eyes calm.
And then he smiled.
"I was hoping one of you would show up."
He activated another one of the magic spells granted by his system.
"Enchanter Magic: Blood Echo."
His staff pulsed red.
And the Grade Four demon paused—just for a second.
Enough.
Damien blurred again and struck at its neck three tis in one breath. The final hit cracked the armor and sent essence leaking from the wound.
Kreeeeeeei!!
The demon howled and lunged again, but Damien was already past it.
Bang!
His final strike drove through the open joint behind its shoulder—essence surged into the staff's core—and he detonated it from the inside.
Booom!
The explosion rocked the ridge.
The demon dropped, body twitching, then lay still.
[Kill Count: 93 / 5,000]
Damien stood above its body, blood running down his chin.
Still more ca.
His hand tightened on the staff.
And then he whispered to himself.
"Aquila… hold your side. Don't you dare die on ."
Brrrrrrrrr…
The battlefield roared like a breathing monster.
Dust clouded the open field beyond Greshan's north line. Shrieks of dying demons collided with the war chants of mages, rcenaries, Dunters, and travelers who had co to this checkpoint city to rest—and found war instead.
At its center, Damien moved like a blade through ink.
Each step he took ended a life. Each breath he drew tightened the noose on the horde's montum. His silver hair was streaked with blood and ash, but his eyes remained clear, cutting through chaos like moonlight on steel.
"He's still going!" soone cried from the city walls.
More had gathered now—spellcasters, barrier warders, beast tars—all watching the single man fighting like a battalion.
"Is he human?"
"He's alone out there!"
"No, he's not," muttered one of the older rcs, eyes wide. "That's not a man. That's a Battle God."
Behind Damien, a dozen demons broke away, managing to avoid his sweep by veering hard left.
They charged toward Greshan's line, screeching.
But the city was ready.
Wards erupted beneath their feet—glyphs drawn into the earth by Dunters and old-world engineers.
Boooom!
Boooooooom!!
Explosive formations detonated in synchronized bursts, scattering the creatures in chunks. One that got past the flas was instantly impaled by three pikes of summoned bone from a necromancer rcenary hidden behind the ridge.
"Traps are holding," a mage confird. "Don't let them flank."
But their eyes kept shifting back to Damien.
His kill count was still rising.
[Kill Count: 161 / 5,000]
[Kill Count: 198 / 5,000]
[Kill Count: 226 / 5,000]
The air warped around him. Demons began avoiding his direction—an instinctual fear radiating off his presence. But that only made him chase harder.
Every type of demon spilled through the field:
Long-limbed brutes that moved like wolves on stilts.
Thick-skinned tanks with jagged teeth for faces.
Swarrs—those twisted rat-like crawlers that moved in twitching clusters.
A floating parasite with a glowing third eye that screeched in multiple voices.
He cut them all down.
Effortlessly.
But as the pressure mounted, the system pulsed again—offering no rcy, no pause.
[Kill Count: 279 / 5,000]
Still too slow.
Too inefficient.
Damien flicked blood from his wrist and muttered, "I guess it's ti."
He exhaled, then drew his hand to his chest.
The air around him thickened. Magic essence spiraled upward in a wide vortex, turning the ground beneath his feet into a glowing circle etched in blue light.
rcenaries and fighters along the ridge gasped.
"What's he—"
"Wait, is he summoning?!"
He didn't speak loudly—but the command echoed across the battlefield like a divine sentence.
"Summon: Cerbe."
A tear in the air opened behind him, wide and violet. From it erged Cerbe—one of his oldest summons, the black-furred hound seed to have grown seven bigger, now three tis the size of a warhorse, its back covered in hellish flas and glowing with infernal energy. It's three heads snarled in unison, and when it landed, the entire ground shook.
"Summon: Skylar."
Blue essence curled into a spiral above him.
From the heart of that spiral, Skylar, the Shadowfang Wyvern, dove into the sky—wings like torn galaxies, eyes burning like suns behind smoke. It shrieked once, and the sky bent around it.
"Summon: Fenrir."
From a vertical portal of blue ca Fenrir, Damien's frost-fanged direwolf, paws pounding the ground like thunder as it raced from the portal.
"Summon: Luton."
A ripple.
A plop.
Then a red blur landed at his feet. Luton, the Stellar Sli, chirped cheerfully before doubling in size—then again—and again, its form pulsing with essence as it prepared for absorption and disruption.
The battlefield froze.
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