[The Middle Wall — Above the North Gate]
The air atop the Middle Wall tasted of rusted iron and burning flesh.
Captain Gerrick leaned against the hot stone of the battlements, his knuckles turning white, his breath pluming in the sudden, unnatural heat. Below him, the plaza was a silent, sprawling graveyard. Tens of thousands of people lie dead. There were no severed limbs, no pools of blood. Just a carpet of huddled shapes drowned in the lingering, sickly green mist.
"Gods have mercy..." Lieutenant Varkas whispered to his left, his hand trembling so violently his scabbard rattled.
"If we had left the wicket gate open," Gerrick said, his voice a hollow rasp that barely cut through the wind, "that poison gas would be in the Middle District right now. We... we did the right thing."
A coward's choice, his own mind immediately hissed back. Thousands are dead to save millions. but, You watched a family suffocate with their daughter, rather than let them inside to safety, and you call yourself a defender of humanity.
No… this is not the time for self-doubt. I have done what duty demanded of me, to trade the lives of the few for the survival of the many.
"Captain," a young watchman stammered, pointing down into the green smog with a shaking halberd. "The mist. It's... It's moving."
Gerrick snapped his head up.
It wasn't the fog. It was a sound. A dry, clicking whisper that magnified by the second, rising into a deafening cascade like thousands of rats trapped in a dry granary.
Scratch. Scrape. Slurp.
Through the dissipating green haze, a nightmare tide surged over the fresh corpses. They didn't come in formations; they crawled, climbed, and scrambled over each other in a mindless, rotting frenzy.
Bloated zombies with sloughing gray skin dragged themselves forward, slow and relentless. Yellowed skeletons skittered like massive insects, their bones clattering against the cobblestones. Feral ghouls with elongated, multi-jointed limbs leaped from the rooftops, landing on the piled dead to use them as stepping stones toward the wall.
They reached the base of the 70-foot barricade and simply began stacking.
"Archers!" Gerrick roared, drawing his broadsword. The scrape of steel pulled his men from their paralysis. "Volley fire! Mages to the parapets! Don't let them scale the wall!"
Bowstrings snapped in a frantic chorus. A rain of iron-tipped shafts plunged into the dark.
"Burn them!" Gerrick commanded, though his stomach turned to ice. Too many. There are simply too many.
Behind the front line, the arcane casters stepped up. A barrage of Fireballs exploded downward, washing the stone in cascades of blinding heat. The reek of searing rot hit Gerrick's throat, forcing him to gag. Beside the flames, jagged forks of blue lightning arced through the climbing horde, chaining from skull to skull. It left clusters of skeletons smoking and shattered, their blackened bones raining down on the zombies below.
But the tide did not care.
"They're halfway up!" Varkas screamed, leaning over with a heavy pike.
A ghoul crested the battlement, its jaw distended. A panicked watchman thrust blindly, his iron tip lodging deep in the creature's throat. The ghoul didn't die; it simply dragged its own ruined neck up the wooden shaft, its dead eyes locked on the young soldier, and snapped its bloody jaws around his wrists.
The soldier. shrieked, letting go of the spear as the ghoul dragged him over the edge. They vanished into the dark together.
"Hold the line!" Gerrick bellowed, stepping forward and severing a skeletal arm that hooked over the stone. "Brace your feet! Push them down!"
The parapet devolved into a claustrophobic hell. A spearshaft splintered with a sickening crack under the weight of a descending skull. Arrows jammed in trembling hands. Gerrick swung until his shoulders burned, kicking a zombie backward, only to watch three more claws their way over the gap it left.
To his right, a veteran soldier slipped on a slick of black blood. Before the man could rise, a mound of crawling corpses surged over the wall, crushing his leg beneath a pile of rotting, thrashing weight. His screams were mercifully short.
"Captain!" a mage gasped, dropping to his knees. His hands were sparking pitifully, the mana completely drained from his veins. "I can't, I can't pull the weave! There are too many of them."
Spells misfired. A fireball sputtered into a harmless cloud of soot. Men were crying now, weeping openly as they stabbed and slashed.
We're losing the wall, Gerrick realized, parrying a rusted blade held by a skeletal warrior. Have the Six abandoned us? No! Thinking that is heresy, keep faith, help is coming! We have to hold the wall, no matter what!.
CRASH.
The stone beneath Gerrick's boots shuddered violently. A massive, jagged hook attached to a blackened, obsidian chain flew over the parapet, biting so deeply into the masonry that the wall cracked.
"A siege hook?!" Varkas yelled, his face smeared with ash and someone else's blood.
"No," Gerrick breathed. The air around the chain was freezing, dropping the temperature so fast that frost bloomed over the blood-soaked stone. "A boarding party."