"Spend us all."
Commander Vane's broadsword met the creeping dark. The kinetic impact of rusted iron striking holy steel vibrated violently up his forearms. He locked his jaw, his face a mask of soot-stained, desperate exhaustion. He parried a feral ghoul's lunging claws, drove his heavy boot into its rotting sternum, and buried his blade in its throat.
All around him, the tactical reality of the Inner Wall was disintegrating.
Vane threw a frantic glance toward the eastern flanks. The masonry was swarming. A tidal wave of feral zombies climbed over the high merlons. Battered priests fought shoulder-to-shoulder with weeping militiamen. Holy men swung heavy brass censers like maces, crushing brittle skulls. Soldiers thrust shattered spear shafts into rotting chests. It was a chaotic, intimate slaughter of mud and blood. The defenders were dying, but they were clogging the ramparts with their own bodies.
Down in the plaza, the heavy evacuation carts rumbled desperately behind Vane's vanguard line. The deafening clatter of wooden wheels hammered against the cobblestones. Draft horses foamed at the mouth, whipped into a blind frenzy toward the subterranean tunnels.
The vanguard had to hold the throat.
Sir Kaelthas slammed the iron-banded rim of his massive, splintered tower shield into the pavement. He anchored his steel-plated boots deep into a thick, foul slurry of mud, pulverized bone, and black ichor.
The Death Knight towering directly over him was not merely an undead soldier. It was a localized monolith of pure hate. It stood over eight feet tall. It emanated an aura of profound frost that flash-froze the blood splattered across Kaelthas's white armor. The giant slowly raised its flamberge. The massive, undulating blade completely blocked out the sickly green light of the sky.
"Get behind me!" the Vanguard Commander shouted over his shoulder.
A straggling family scrambled through the mud behind him. A limping father clutched a screaming toddler. A weeping mother dragged a battered wooden handcart. They desperately tried to slip past Kaelthas's flank toward the safety of the tunnel.
Kaelthas did not look at them. He could not afford to. His eyes locked dead onto the suffocating black slit in the giant's horned helm.
The flamberge descended. It fell with the speed and kinetic inevitability of a guillotine.
CRACK.
The impact was cataclysmic. Kaelthas's enchanted oak tower shield did not just break. It violently exploded. Shards of blessed steel and splintered hardwood became lethal shrapnel. They tore upward, burying themselves deep into the Death Knight's visor. The debris blinded whatever dark magic saw through the slits.
The giant did not fall. It did not stagger.
The sheer concussive force of the blow drove Kaelthas directly to his knees. Both of his kneecaps shattered instantly against the cobblestones. The pain was a blinding, white-hot supernova, but his mind refused to register it. He dropped the useless, shattered leather handle of his shield. He lunged upward.
He grabbed the Death Knight's descending right wrist with both of his gauntleted hands. He locked his elbows, creating an agonizing display of pure, desperate leverage.
"Run!" Kaelthas roared to the terrified family behind him. A thick torrent of bright arterial blood bubbled past his cracked lips.
The blind giant tried to casually shake him off. It pulled its massive arm back. But the human was no longer flesh and bone. He was a monument of defiance.
Kaelthas felt his own ribs violently give way under the crushing pressure of the Knight's freezing aura. He felt his heavily overtaxed heart physically stuttering in his chest, the muscle tearing from the impossible strain.
My King. My Gods. My Little Bird, Kaelthas prayed. His vision swam with encroaching black spots.
He reached blindly to his right pauldron with a shattered, trembling finger. He snagged a small, frayed blue ribbon, the one he had kept safe through the end of the world.
The terrified toddler scrambled frantically past his armored legs. Kaelthas pressed the blood-soaked ribbon into the boy's tiny hand.
"Shield the children," Kaelthas gasped. His voice was a bare whisper against the roar of the undead horde.
The holy magic inside his veins flared one final, glorious time. It turned his ruined legs to immovable, petrified stone.
"Do not let them see the end."
The Death Knight, unable to free its sword arm, raised its left fist. The heavy gauntlet of spiked obsidian came down directly on top of Kaelthas's helmet.
The steel collapsed inward with a sickening crunch.
Sir Kaelthas, Vanguard of the Theocracy, died instantly.
But his body did not fall. The divine magic, fueled by his final mandate, locked his corpse in a rigid, kneeling stance. His shattered hands never loosened their iron grip on the giant's wrist. He remained there, an immovable human bollard. He was a monument of faith that forced the entire vanguard of the undead legion to slow down and awkwardly step around him.
High above the carnage, the sky was screaming.
It was a high, mechanical wail of tearing magic and dying angels. Seraphic Knight Elena hung suspended in the freezing air. Her celestial wings were heavy, frayed, and dripping with gray soot and sheer magical exhaustion.
Below her, the macroscopic tactical situation was unraveling. Swarms of elite Death Warriors effortlessly flanked the exhausted infantry. Their dual blades spun like macabre threshers through the ranks of the city watch.
There are too many, Elena realized. A cold, clinical certainty washed over her mind. We are trying to empty the ocean with a cracked cup.
Her profound connection to the celestial choir violently frayed. The beautiful, harmonious song of the heavens that had guided her entire life dissolved. It became a harsh, buzzing static of necrotic interference. The angels were dying.
Through the stinging smoke, Elena spotted the critical threat.
A cluster of three massive Death Knights had brutally shoved their way through the center gap left by Kaelthas's corpse. They strode with terrifying, unstoppable momentum directly toward the mouth of the sanctum tunnel. They were going to catch the very last refugee wagon before it crossed the threshold.
"Break them," Elena commanded.
Her voice rang out like a crystalline bell. The pure acoustic tone physically cracked the glass of the corrupted air.
She did not raise her sword to cast a spell. She did not have the mana to summon a gentle breeze, let alone a miracle. Instead, with a serene, terrifying calmness, she tightly folded her silver wings against her back.
Above her, the three remaining Level-4 Principality Peace angels flawlessly followed her lead. They were heavily damaged and flickering in the dark. They aligned their bodies with hers. They became falling stars.
Elena did not pray for survival. She prayed for velocity.
She hit the exact center of the Death Knight cluster at terminal velocity.
The resulting impact was not an explosion of fire. It was a blinding, silent flash of blue-white radiance. The kinetic strike instantly vaporized a thirty-foot crater into the solid stone pavement.
The three Death Knights, beings of immense, unyielding mass, were blown violently backward. Their dark, heavily enchanted armor literally fused by the sheer, unadulterated heat of the divine suicide.
When the light faded, Elena did not rise from the crater. Her physical body was entirely gone. She was consumed down to the atomic level by the violent release of her own soul-fire.
But her light lingered.
Suspended over the smoking crater was a shimmering, auroral barrier of brilliant gold dust. It hung in the air like a localized nebula. It was a testament of pure faith. The radiant dust burned the hollow eyes and seared the rotting flesh of any undead creature that tried to push through her final resting place.
The throat was sealed.