There was a time of the night, exactly after midnight, when the human great coalition appeared the most relaxed.
The narkals, no matter how frequently they attacked, never did so in this brief stretch of time, so it could be said that this lull was not a coincidence but a state engineered by design.
Bit by bit, the soldiers unconsciously got accustomed to this routine. And despite choosing to remain alert regardless, when the body was pushed until a certain level, it started looking for windows of respite on its own, disregarding the mind's orders.
Such mistakes would never be forgiven in his war.
Ashen watched it happen once through the eyes of a parasite he had seeded into a forward scout.
A group of soldiers found a slain comrade impaled at the center of a ruined courtyard. One of them shouted. Another cursed. The captain ordered restraint, but the line had already bent inward.
The Narkals waiting in the rubble surged out from three directions at once, cutting the isolated squad apart before it could recover.
Ashen's face went still when he received the memory.
He sent Alice the report immediately.
She read it once, then twice, then folded her hands on the map table and stared at the marked positions.
"Whoever is commanding them is disgustingly cunning…" she said.
"It's probably a type of Demon-tier Narkal," Ashen replied. "We saw a glimpse of them during the history fragment."
The next day, they found more evidence.
The Narkals were not simply swarming anymore.
Now, silent killers that could strike at any given moment of the day were added to the fold.
What was worse was that their coordination was visibly improving to take advantage of the gaps that these assassins left.
Small packs would strike first, then vanish before the army could respond, forcing the vanguard to advance into terrain the enemy had already prepared.
Larger bodies waited in reserve behind broken terrain or underground openings.
Some groups attacked just long enough to drain stamina and mana, then retreated, letting a fresh wave come in while the soldiers were still recovering.
They denied rest.
They attacked in bursts through the night.
They used corpses to provoke mistakes.
They sent smaller units to bait the human advance, then used hidden heavy beasts to crush the response.
It was ugly in the way only true cunning could be.
No one expected elegance or honor from the Narkals, but this efficient, patient, and dirty way of warring was enough to make even hardened veterans grit their teeth.
—Cowardly little parasites.
—Filthy bastards don't even have the decency to fight like animals
—Ever watch one stop mid-fight to tear a chunk out of a corpse? While you're still swinging at it?
—Tell me about it… they're unlike any other creature imaginable… like stomachs with claws attached…
—You can wound 'em. You can cripple 'em. You can watch their guts spill out… they'll still drag themselves toward you, grinning, because they just want one more bite.
—One day, we'll all be dead! And they'll be picking our teeth out of their own gums, not even remembering our faces. Because we were never people to them. Just... crunchy.
***
The Narkals were not acting like beasts anymore. They were acting like an army.
And armies needed commanders.
That answer was confirmed with each passing day, as the Narkal became more organized.
The farther they had advanced, the more their tactics grew even more cunning and intelligent.
Patrols disappeared in places that should have been safe. Flanking strikes began hitting at the precise moments when fatigue was highest. The enemy started collapsing retreat routes with frightening speed, forcing human units to either hold position or die where they stood.
Then the scouts found the first traces of the third Steps Demon class.
When the confirmation finally came, it rapidly spread through the command chain.
They finally found their thinking enemy.
One of the officers who brought the report in was pale by the time he reached Alice's tent.
Ashen read the field notes once, then set them down.
"Finally found them." Alice's eyes sharpened.
"I guess, it's my job now to go after them…" Ashen heaved a sigh.
"I will leave it to you." Alice nodded.
*
The war did not become easier after that, predictably.
The Demon tier commander was actually no stronger than a Gorefiend. They only got their third-tier placement on the echelon of Narkal power because of their uncanny intelligence and ability to seamlessly command their lesser species.
Of course, they used those tools to protect themselves above all else, but it did not matter in front of Ashen. The moment he knew their general direction, his skillset allowed him to pinpoint their mana signature, rapidly close the distance, and go for the killing strike.
When he saw their ugly, diminutive shapes, like thin goblins, he idly wondered how such weak little creatures could cause so much cruelty and chaos.
The humans thought that the Narkals would return to their brainless behavior after the first dozen assassinations of their commanders, but they got to understand that even though Demons were rarer, there was always plenty to go around when Narkals concentrated with this much quantity…
And so, the soldiers were never spared from the torment.
The probing of the vanguard's weak points never stopped, neither did testing responses, then hitting again where the line was thinnest, nor the coordinated strikes between burrowing units and surface packs
The latter tactic was one of the nastiest as it would drive one group of the front line into a bad position while the other cut off retreat. Then, with noise, smoke, and false retreats, they pulled human units out of formation.
And when the humans tried to rest, they attacked at night. When they rested as the sun rose, they also attacked.
It got to the point where one had to simply sleep through the Narkal attacks as units rotated to allow rest.
Amid all of this carnage, another star rose to the limelight aside from Ashen.
It was Alice. And the reason for her rise was simply her instantaneous responses and counters to the Narkal tactics.
Like a machine without emotion, no matter how cruel the reports got, and no matter how high the death toll rose, she just adjusted tactics and responded most logically, like she was moving chess pieces on a board.
Even Ashen was not spared for her pragmatism. Whenever she told him to support, he moved, and wherever she told him to appear, he went.
He knew that she had a better overall picture of the battlefield, and he trusted her judgment to leave himself in her hands.
And that trust had saved countless lives.
*
Another day passed with Alice wielding the full authority of the million-strong army's command.
And as always, she turned the theater into a machine.
Ashen had long since forsaken the role of keeping one part of his mind chained to the rear while another bled at the front.
And with that came the sigh of a million soldiers moving as one body.
Orders moved through the army in layers. Horns carried signals across the front. Runners relayed adjustments where sound could not reach. Floating devices hovered over command posts and repeated Alice's instructions to unit leaders.
The captains heard her. The mages heard her. The artillery crews heard her. Even the reserve lines, far behind the vanguard, moved in accordance with her timing.
The scale of the army was obviously too large to be commanded at once, so she gave each layer a purpose and made every purpose support the next.
The front ranks absorbed the first impact.
The artillery broke the enemy's momentum.
The mages shaped the battlefield.
The reserves sealed every gap.
The logistics columns kept the whole thing alive.
At the center of all that movement stood Ashen, the point where the war broke apart.
The first enemy wave hit the vanguard with a force that made the ground shudder.
Narkals slammed into the shield line, snapping jaws and clawing at the front with mindless violence. Their bodies pressed forward in a thick, writhing mass. The first row of infantry bent under the strain, boots grinding into mud and shattered stone.
Then Alice's voice cut through the line.
"Second rank, hold. Artillery, staggered volley. Mage squads, left flank and air denial. Ashen, the breach on your left."
The cannons answered first.
A line of them roared in sequence, each blast timed to open a larger wound in the enemy mass than the one before it. Shells tore through the front ranks of the Narkals, exploding in overlapping bursts that shredded bodies and hurled blackened chunks of flesh into the air. The smell of burnt blood and soil rolled over the field.
The survivors kept coming, just as they always did.
That was the Narkals' greatest strength and greatest flaw. They could lose entire ranks without slowing. They could watch their own kind die and still hurl themselves into the next assault without hesitation. They knew only how to advance, kill, and consume.
'—Which makes them easy to lead to their deaths.'
Alice thought absently as she wove an elegant dance of death between humans and monsters with every order she relayed.
Ashen stepped into the opening Alice created.
BlindStep folded the distance in an instant; the next moment, he was in the middle of the breach, spear already in motion.
Riven Convergence resumed its familiar reinforcement, turning him into a more monstrous entity than the beasts he was slaying.
Spear after spear, he harvested their blighted souls like a hardworking farmer, and through it all, his expression remained tight and flat, his eyes narrowed to a hard, focused line.
The calm in him was sharper than any intensity he could have shown.
That was the part that unsettled the men around him.
No matter how much they held him as such, he did not look like a hero. He looked like a predator.
The spear flashed again and again, its blade gradually shining white as concentrated mana gathered around it.
A thrust to the throat.
A sweep across the knees.
A reverse strike that caved in a skull.
A quick parry that knocked an enemy claw aside and left its owner open for the return blow.
He slid beneath one attack, rose into another, and split a creature from forehead to groin before the body had even finished collapsing.
The kill count started its swift climb once more.
Ten.
Twenty.
Thirty.
And as he advanced, the white residue left behind by his strikes began to accumulate in his wake until the battlefield started resembling a beautiful canvas painted by a deranged genius.
Alice followed the movement of the battle from the rear command line and adjusted around him immediately.
"Infantry curtain, move with the Marshal," she ordered. "Keep a three-hundred-meter lane in front of him. Mages, support his left and right. Do not let the front outrun his advance."
The effect was immediate.
The battle stopped behaving like a wall and became a funnel.
Ashen pushed forward, and the army moved with him. Infantry units sealed the space behind his spear. Mages on the flanks cleared anything that tried to slip through his blind spots. Artillery crews kept the enemy packed into kill zones. Alice turned his advance into the backbone of the entire theater's front line.
That was how the war began to change.
A million soldiers fought at the front, but the real scale of the campaign lay behind them. More than a hundred million men, spread across the theater in layers and formations, were all part of the same machine.
One force softened the enemy. Another held the line. Another rotated forward to replace losses. Another secured supply roads, treated the wounded, and ferried ammunition, food, and water to where they were needed most.
The other commanders of the theater exploited the opportunities created by the duo commander and beast butcher.
A war that large could not be fought by brute strength alone.
It had to be managed and shaped.
Alice understood that instinctively.
So she treated the theater like a living body with her army as the foremost arm, and expected the rest of the limbs to follow.
And they did not disappoint.
And Ashen, at the very tip of the blade, removed anything the rest could not handle quickly enough.
A larger Narkal brute broke from the swarm and charged him head-on, its body broad as a carriage, its forelimbs raised to crush him flat.
He charged a generous amount of his mana into his spear, layered it with his deadly intent, and finally allowed it to leave his hands in a magnificent throw.
A sonic Boom echoed, and the next thing the soldiers saw was a fist-sized hole in the creature's brain and a spear tracing back its path like a living object.
Around him, the infantry surged into the openings he left behind.
That pattern repeated across the field.
He made space… They filled it. The farther the battle went, the more obvious his effect became.
Units that would have been pinned by enemy pressure regained momentum once Ashen passed through their sector. Soldiers who had nearly broken found breathing room again when the Narkals in front of them suddenly vanished in sprays of blood and shattered bone.
Medics worked with less panic because the front line was not collapsing in their faces. Shield bearers lasted longer. Spear squads advanced farther. Cannon crews had more time to reload.
Every moment he spent on the frontline was reducing the cost of the war in an exponential manner.
A young man in a broken helm stared at the space Ashen had just cleared and whispered, "He's making it look easy."
An older sergeant snorted, though his own voice came out rough. "No. He's making us look slow."
Across the line, a nearby Marshal with a bodyguard ring around him lowered his binoculars and remained quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
"No matter how much I hear... the rumors always seem too small."
Another Marshal beside him did not answer at once. He kept watching the front, watching Ashen carve through the Narkals with a spear that seemed to strike from every angle at once. "No," he said at last. "The rumors were wrong in scale."
The enemy responded by changing tactics.
Narkal packs broke toward the flanks.
Flying creatures rose above the smoke line and tried to dive toward the artillery units.
Burrowers tore up the ground under the rear infantry.
Farther back, black-misted shaman creatures gathered a corrosive cloud meant to blind the command network and choke the mages.
Alice answered each threat without hesitation.
"Third artillery line, stop firing at the front and hit the air. Mage squads nine through twelve, break the cloud. Reserve wing two, move right. Seal the burrowers' tunnels and let them starve underground."
Her voice never rose. It did not need to.
The soldiers moved because she made each order simple enough to obey and sharp enough to trust.
A wall of arrows rose from the rear and caught the flying Narkals in the air. Cannon fire shattered the cloud before it could spread. Mages on the left flank released earth spells into the ground, caving in the burrower tunnels before the creatures could surface where they wanted. Reserve units rotated in to block the gaps the enemy had created and held them shut with disciplined, grinding force.
The theater moved as one.
War was never smooth. But this... this was probably as smooth as it could get.
And the credit for keeping this engine running belonged largely to Alice Sinclair.
...if her lover was taken out of the equation.
Said lover happened to be the sharpest point of that engine. Ashen Hart kept killing as naturally as he breathed.
The Narkals began to cluster around him in a way that would have been suicidal against any ordinary fighter.
They tried to overwhelm him through numbers, to bury him under bodies. Their mistake was simple. They had chosen the one man on the battlefield who wanted exactly that.
Ashen's mouth curved faintly as the next wave hit.
It was the look of someone who had finally been allowed to do what he was built to do.
He lunged into the mass, spear striking in short bursts.
thrust.
parry.
slash.
pivot.
A backhand stab through the ribs.
A sudden step to the side, followed by a spear tip driven clean through the temple of a charging beast.
His spear eventually blurred, leaving nothing for the naked eye to follow.
He used the shaft to lever one corpse into another, then BlindStepped behind a third and opened its spine with a downward strike. His body shifted in tight motions, each one refined by years of spear training and the physical compression of Riven Convergence.
Nothing about him wasted energy. Hesitation? It was a foreign concept.
He was all-purpose.
On the command ridge, one of the Marshals who had doubted Alice earlier in the campaign watched the battle develop and let out a long breath.
"That woman is terrifying," he said quietly.
The Marshal beside him kept his eyes on the field. "Which one?"
The first Marshal glanced toward the map table, where Alice continued issuing orders with perfect precision. Then he looked back at the front, where Ashen was turning the enemy into meat.
"…Both of them," he said.
The battle pressed on through the afternoon.
The sky darkened under smoke and distant spellfire. The field became a churn of blood, broken earth, shattered armor, and burnt mana residue.
And for yet another day, Alice kept the formation alive, proving she was far more than just a pretty woman whose only purpose was warming the Marshal's bed.
No. She was the other half of the equation, and together, they turned battlefields wide enough to swallow cities into effortless victories.
*
When the field finally quieted enough for voices to carry, Ashen stood at the front line with blood running down the grooves of his spear and across his hands.
His breathing remained steady. His shoulders were loose. His expression was cold, but there was no exhaustion in it that anyone could see.
A wolf loosed into a pen would have been dangerous enough. A wolf that knew exactly where every sheep stood, where every fence broke, and how to tear the field apart without wasting a motion was something else entirely.
Ashen looked across the smoke-veiled horizon, felt the next enemy movement before the scouts even reported it, and rolled his shoulder once.
Far behind him, Alice's voice came through the command network again, calm and exact.
"Frontline units, reform. Ashen, the next corridor is yours."
His grip tightened on the spear.
The faintest curve touched his mouth.
Then he stepped forward, and the theater moved with him.