The massacre had no end.
Or at least, that's how it seemed.
Ash moved among the abominations like an automaton, like a machine designed exclusively to kill and nothing more. His arms rose and fell mechanically. The Pale Needle pierced. The Sword of Seven cut. One abomination fell. Then another. Then another still.
He had lost count after the hundredth corpse.
Perhaps he had killed two hundred. Perhaps three hundred. Perhaps the number no longer mattered because for every one that fell, two more seemed to emerge from the horizon to take its place. The army of nightmare creatures was endless, a living tide of corrupted flesh and blind hatred that knew neither fear nor retreat.
And Ash was tired.
Not physically. The blood sacrifice of the Sword of Seven kept him standing, healing his wounds, restoring his energy, returning vitality to him each time his strength began to falter. His body was a perfect machine of destruction in that moment, enhanced by the souls he reaped, reinforced by the crown Nephis had given him, fed by the fury burning in his chest.
The exhaustion was mental.
The voice inside him roared without rest. It was something deeper, more primitive. A desire born from the darkest part of his being that screamed for more blood, more violence, more death. Urging him to keep killing even as his arms burned and his chest ached from the immense overexertion he was enduring.
More, whispered the voice. More. More. MORE.
And Ash obeyed.
He moved by inertia now. His thoughts had become blurry, fragmented, like a broken mirror whose pieces no longer quite fit together. He vaguely remembered that he had begun the battle with a strategy, with a plan, with clear objectives. Now only the next movement existed. The next death. The next corpse piling upon the others.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his echo.
The Black Knight fought against the abominations in a different section of the battlefield, its great sword reaping lives with a disconcerting calm. There was no hurry in its movements, no fury, no desperation. Only the cold efficiency of a warrior who had transcended the need for emotions. Around it, a group of sleepers had gathered, taking advantage of the path the knight was opening to advance upon enemy lines.
There were at least twenty, perhaps thirty. Men and women who had seen in that living stone armor an opportunity to survive, and who now fought in its shadow like squires of death.
On the other side, in the sky, the Black Steel Raven continued its dance of destruction.
The flying abominations had diminished in number — the original messengers no longer existed, and the smaller creatures fell by the dozens beneath the raven's metal claws — but enough remained to keep the winged summon occupied.
Beside the raven flew Kai.
Ash recognized the sleeper's silhouette flying through the stormy sky; that silhouette was none other than Kai. Kai moved among the abominations with a grace that Ash vaguely admired, even in his fragmented mental state. His bow hummed each time it loosed an arrow, leaving behind a trail of light and death.
Together, the metal raven and the flying human had cleared much of the aerial space. The few winged monsters that remained kept their distance, too wounded or too frightened to approach again.
At some point, Ash noticed that Nephis had moved.
The bearer of the white flames was no longer where he had seen her before. Her glow had shifted to the left flank of the battle, where the abominations seemed to concentrate with greater intensity. Ash didn't pay it attention. Not because he didn't care — somewhere inside him, he knew he cared very much — but because at that moment he couldn't process it.
He could only kill.
Ash stopped atop a mound of bodies.
Not because he had decided to, but because his feet sank into something particularly unstable and he had to regain his balance. He looked down and saw a twisted mass of limbs and torsos and heads, all belonging to abominations he himself had killed in the last few minutes.
He rose upon that sea of corpses and let out a battle cry.
The word that left his mouth wasn't even recognizable. It was a raw, animal sound, belonging to no human language. A roar of fury and defiance that rose over the battlefield and, for a moment, silenced everything else.
But the screams of the dying abominations drowned it out almost instantly.
No one heard it.
No one except himself.
And that was enough.
---
The storm began without warning.
First came the wind. A sudden gale that emerged from nowhere and shook the nearby trees, lifting dust and ashes and small stones that battered the sleepers' armor like ammunition thrown by invisible hands.
Then the water. Not rain, but something denser, heavier. Drops the size of fists falling from the gray sky as if the ocean itself had gone mad and decided to empty itself upon the earth.
Ash felt the water strike his face, mixing with the dried blood covering his skin. The impact was almost painful, but he didn't stop. He couldn't afford to stop. The abominations kept coming, kept attacking, kept dying.
So he continued.
He killed another abomination. And another. And another still.
Though now, beneath the storm, the battle began to change.
The abominations started becoming far less numerous. Not because Ash had killed them all — that was impossible, even for him — but because the tide seemed to be receding. The monsters that had previously charged blindly against the sleeper lines now hesitated, moved with less conviction, as if something on the horizon was calling them back.
But those that remained were more intense.
Without the support of the masses, the nightmare creatures still fighting did so with a ferocity multiplied by desperation. They were the strongest, the fastest, the largest. Those that had survived because they were better than their fallen brethren.
The battlefield leveled.
It was no longer a one-sided massacre. It was a real, violent struggle, where each death cost blood and sweat and pain.
Ash felt his arms burn. Each movement of the Pale Needle was agony. Each cut of the Sword of Seven made his shoulders crack. His chest ached with every breath, a dull, deep pain that reminded him that no matter how much the blood sacrifice healed his wounds, it couldn't erase accumulated fatigue.
He knew the battle was coming to an end. Only a few more minutes. Perhaps less.
He only had to hold on.
He only had to keep killing.
---
The earthquake stopped him.
It wasn't a normal tremor. It was something deeper, more primordial. A jolt that didn't come from the earth but from something much larger, as if the very world had turned over on its axis.
Ash planted his feet on the ground and struggled to maintain his balance on all fours. Around him, sleepers and abominations alike staggered, some falling, others grabbing onto whatever they could to keep from rolling across the blood-soaked ground.
The earthquake lasted several seconds. Perhaps more. Time lost all meaning in that moment of absolute chaos.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm disappeared.
The wind ceased. The water stopped falling. The gray clouds covering the sky tore apart like a veil ripped by invisible hands, revealing something Ash hadn't seen in a long time.
The sea was receding.
Not a sea of water, but the dark sea. That endless mass of corruption that had surrounded the crimson spire throughout the entire siege, that liquid barrier that had kept the sleepers trapped in their struggle, began to withdraw. Slowly at first, then faster, as if something were sucking it toward the horizon.
Within minutes, the dark sea ceased to exist.
The ground left exposed was dead, gray, covered in a dry crust that cracked under the weight of the combatants. But there was no more water. No more barrier.
And above, the white reaper sun shone with a force Ash had never witnessed.
The light was blinding. It wasn't warm like the sun he knew from the waking world, but cold, implacable, like the gaze of something above the gods that judged without mercy.
Ash blinked, his eyes burning from the sudden change from twilight to that searing light.
The battle continued.
The abominations, blinded by the sun as much as the humans, kept attacking. Perhaps with even more fury, as if they knew something was about to change. Ash couldn't stop. No one could.
He summoned the mist once more.
The hazy cloak emerged from his body, enveloping him in its cold, protective embrace. But something was different. The sensation was strange, uncomfortable. The mist no longer whispered promises of power and speed to him. Instead, he felt heat spreading across his skin, a burning that didn't come from his fatigued muscles but from something deeper.
The sun. The white reaper sun was affecting him somehow. Both him and his ability.
He dodged an abomination's strike — one of the last, a twisted creature with three arms and a face that seemed to be melting like wax — and as he moved away, he looked up at the bright sun.
He shuddered.
The nameless sun was launching an attack of souls.
He couldn't explain how he knew. There was no notification from the spell, no voice telling him. It was simply a certainty rising from the depths of his being, an instinctive knowledge that chilled his blood even beneath that searing heat.
The souls of the dead — his? those of the fallen sleepers? those of the abominations themselves? — were being dragged toward the sun like moths to a flame. Ash felt his own soul tense, as if an invisible hand were pulling at it, trying to tear it from his body.
And then he heard the bell.
The sound was clear, sharp, unmistakable. A bell tolling from the crimson spire, from the highest point of that imposing structure that rose over the battlefield like a monument to death.
He didn't hesitate.
Ash dismissed the Steel Raven and the Black Knight in the same instant. He felt his summons fade into nothingness, returned to the ether from which they had emerged. He had no time to mourn their loss. No time for anything.
The sleeping army began to run.
Everyone ran toward the crimson spire. Men and women who moments before had been fighting with desperate ferocity now abandoned their positions and ran as if death itself were nipping at their heels.
Because perhaps it was.
Ash ran.
His legs burned. His lungs seemed about to burst. The mist enveloping him thinned with each step, unable to maintain its form under the white sun's light. But he couldn't stop. He couldn't afford to stop.
The path to the tower was long. Too long.
It took him nearly a minute to reach the interior. An eternal minute, during which he felt the sun licking at his soul, pulling at it with increasing force. A minute during which he saw other sleepers fall, their bodies collapsing to the ground like puppets whose strings had been cut.
He didn't look back. He couldn't.
He entered.
The interior of the crimson spire was dark after that blinding light. Ash stumbled, fell, slid across the stone floor until he stopped on all fours, his arms trembling from the effort of keeping himself upright.
The mist enveloping him dissipated completely.
He let out a long, deep sigh. The vapor of his breath rose in the tower's cold air, and Ash simply stayed there, on the ground, trembling from head to toe.
Now that he was no longer in combat, his mind began to clear.
Slowly, painfully, the fragments of his consciousness came back together. He remembered who he was. He remembered why he was there. He remembered Nephis, Kai, Effie, all those who had fought alongside him.
And with clarity came exhaustion.
All the exhaustion.
It hit Ash like a wave, like an earthquake, like that same dark sea that had receded but now seemed to have moved into his very bones. His arms weighed a ton. His legs were two columns of lead. Every muscle in his body screamed in agony, demanding rest, demanding peace.
He stayed on the ground, breathing heavily, listening as the other sleepers began to enter the tower.
Soon, all who had survived were inside the crimson spire.