By next dawn, Ashen was already on the battlefield.
The front was a narrow spearhead compared to the theater behind it, but even that narrow spearhead still held a million soldiers.
That was all Ashen and Alice commanded here, the vanguard assigned to break into Narkal territory and survive long enough for the rest of the coalition to keep pace.
Beyond them moved the greater machine of war, vast enough to darken the horizon, but their authority did not extend over those divisions. They had one blade to sharpen, one front to hold, and one enemy to tear open.
The land ahead was already ruined.
Broken ridges. Cratered soil. Blackened trees stripped of bark. In the distance, the smoke of earlier battles still hung over the ground like a lingering curse.
Ashen looked over it all once, then lowered his gaze to the battleground in front of him.
The beasts poured in waves.
At first they looked like the same mindless beasts the army had been slaughtering for weeks. They surged forward in dense packs, clawing, biting, screaming, trampling their own fallen bodies to reach the human line.
Then Ashen stepped into the breach, and the shape of the fight changed.
His footwork carried him across the gap in a breath.
Riven Convergence threaded through his body the moment he moved, tightening every muscle into a killing instrument.
The spear in his hand regained that familiar feeling of weightlessness when his body had become too exact for it to matter. He met the first monster head-on and drove the spear through its face before its claws could rise.
A second lunged from the side.
Ashen turned his wrist, let the shaft slip through his grip, and snapped the point upward into the creature's throat.
A third came from behind with too much speed for an ordinary soldier to track. Ashen caught its arm with his elbow, pivoted on his heel, and rammed the butt of the spear into its jaw so hard that its neck bent with a sickening crack.
He kept moving.
That was the most frightening part for the soldiers witnessing his fights.
He did not stop to admire a kill, nor did he freeze at the overwhelming violence. He simply cut through the enemy as if the battlefield were a path built for him and the Narkals were the weeds choking it.
By the end of the first hour, the soldiers near him had already stopped counting his kills with any seriousness.
By the end of the first day, they had stopped trying.
The number kept rising so fast that only the officers in the rear bothered to record it. Ten became a hundred. A hundred became a thousand. A thousand became the kind of tally that made clerks stare at their own ledgers in silence and wonder whether their eyes had betrayed them.
Of course, through it all, Ashen did not tire. On the contrary, with each day that passed, he only looked sharper.
His expression stayed flat, his eyes narrowed, his body loose until the moment it struck. When the spear moved, it did so with the merciless directness of the first thrust of the day.
Of course, the soldiers around him did what they did best when they were not busy killing and dying. They began whispering among themselves, spreading his deeds far and wide.
—Did you see our marshal in the center line today?
—With the commotion he keeps making whenever he fights, who didn't?
—He went through three titans like they were straw. I've got goosebumps just from seeing it…
—I saw him take a bite to the shoulder and keep going like it was a mosquito, haha!
—Is he even human anymore…?
—Human? More like a walking disaster.
—Watch your mouth!
The rumors kept spreading.
At first they were told in low voices at supply tents and around fire pits.
Then they moved through the ranks like a second front.
They said Ashen was the kind of man who could smell a breach before it happened.
They said monsters broke formation the moment he appeared.
They said the enemy had begun calling him by names in their own language, names that translated roughly to predator, executioner, or the thing that comes when there is nowhere left to run.
Some soldiers laughed when they heard that, but those who had seen him with their own eyes… did not.
All they could manage was awe, respect, and raw fear.
By the third day, the whispering had changed shape.
—He doesn't fight like one of us. Is he even of the same species?
—I heard he is still on the fourth step.
—Don't spout bullshit! There's no way…
—We fight to live, but that man… he fights like the very presence of these monsters offends him on an existential level.
That one rumor spread quicker than most.
But as the days passed, despite Ashen's continued dominance, the casualties kept mounting, and the war became uglier.
The Narkals were changing.
At first the army thought it was only a matter of numbers. They were deeper in enemy territory now, making them closer to the places where Narkals gathered in greater density. Naturally the swarms would be heavier and, naturally, the attacks would become more frequent.
Then the enemy started using terrain.
They concealed ambushes beneath rubble and half-buried ruins. They left corpses in the open, human corpses, arranged in deliberate ways to draw soldiers out of formation. Sometimes they pinned human faces to broken gates or tree trunks, not because they felt any sentiment about the dead, but simply because they understood what it did to the living.
How would you feel if you woke up and saw thousands of human bodies hanging under the sun?
For the soldiers, their most prominent emotion was anger. How could these beasts parade their dead in such a manner? How dare they make a mockery of the same people who gave their lives for the noble duty of safeguarding their race?
Mere anger would be a severe understatement of what they felt.
After all… aside from the shared sentiment, many saw their comrades, friends, and even lovers among the people hanged.
Predictably, that same anger was unleashed in the following skirmishes, and unfortunately, rage did not magically make them stronger beyond clouding their judgment and enabling recklessness.
Of course… it was another matter for men and women of the Wrath pathway, but they, too, did not have it easy, and it was arguably worse, since the rate of losing control among their ranks increased exponentially with the Narkals' new tactic.
In the following days, a simple word to describe the war would be a feast. It was a feast of human flesh partaken by the Narkals as they gouged their throats after exploiting the recklessness of their foes.
Day by day, the same spectacle of hanged corpses repeated itself like a broken film. Perhaps, not exactly the same, since the Narkals got more and more creative in their methods of display and humiliation.
Either way, eventually, the anger melted away in favor of a more instinctual feeling.
Fear.
At first it started insidiously small, like a small question echoing in the back of the head.
Someday… that could be me.
How will my friends feel if I were to pass?
How about my family back home?
Will I also be unlucky enough to end up dangling in the same manner?
Bit by bit, the whispers got louder and more assured, until they could practically hear their inner voices screaming at them. IT WILL BE MY TURN NEXT.
Will it be tomorrow?
Will it be today? Or the day after?
Will my corpse be eaten, or will it be displayed to strike fear into others?
I don't want to die…
I don't want to die….
Please save me from this hell…
***
The only one who answered the prayers of the soldiers when they sought salvation was the newly crowned king of the battlefield.
Only he remained undisturbed. And only he kept killing with the same brutal pace. Nay, his swiftness only rose as the days passed.
He became the star shining the path of the common soldiers. He was the hope that they would see another day, as well as the proof that they could eventually win.
And just like that, humanity did what it always did best: adapt.
Soon enough, the feelings of fear gradually diminished under sheer numbness. The harrowing sigh that kept greeting them every dawn became as common as the rising of the sun.
Eventually, it blended with the surrounding serenity until the soldiers could even manage to laugh and joke about it.
When it came to surviving under pressure, one really had to give it to this wretched race.
The Narkals weren't convinced, however, and if one tactic became obsolete, all they had to do was move to the next.