"Pathless' blessed light," one of the mages gasped. He would have fallen to his knees were it not for Lars' strong grip.
"On your feet. We got movin' to do," the archer muttered.
Mervin couldn't help but sympathize. They had escaped the calamity below the earthwith less than ten of them, all toldonly to find new, ungodly threats ready to kill them all. New monsters ran amok in Haarwatch. Just a few at first, but the numbers steadily grew as the Guilders flitted from house to house in an attempt to reach the Wall again. Surely the defenders would have answers.
What they found was a massacre.
The Wall had been overrun, and parts of it were on fire. Blazing, violet flares of clearly magical fire lit large swathes of the structure, and according to Piotr, the red-gold glow of it had dimmed for the first time ever.
"Here! Survivors!" Someone on the Wall was shouting down at them. Mervin let loose his Perception and pinpointed them immediately, four stories up and leaning out of one of the Wall's many hidden windows. "More monsters on the way! Run! Get up here!"
His team didn't have to be told twice. Mervin and his crew sped for the access stairs, taking two or three at a time. The higher up they got, however, the more Mervin grew concerned. He could hear screaming from the other side of the Wall, monstrous ones as well as what sounded like Guilders. The interior shone with the same weak, red-gold light as the outside.
"What is going on? How'd this happen?" Piotr asked, his voice rasping. The man had been in rough shape ever since something had killed all the Revenants. They'd encountered quite a few of the desiccated corpses on their blind flight from the sewers, and he looked much the same. He'd lost muscle mass and fat, but he stubbornly refused to rest.
"Blind gods, man! What happened to you?" a Tin Rank exclaimed, but her Iron Rank superior stepped in.
"Wall failed at least partially. Monsters are surging from the Foglands faster than we can put them down, and without the Wall's protections"
"They're bleedin' climbin'!"
The Tin Rank was pointing out of the other side of the ancient, orichalcum artifact, were several one way windows let them view the approach. What looked like thousands of low leveled white-furred monkeys had swarmed out, each roughly the size of a Human. And behind them came skittering creatures with iridescent green-blue carapace.
"Those're Wretches," Garin exclaimed, his eyes nearly bugging from his head. "They're back!"
"How? We never see two monster groups intermingle like this," Piotr rasped, speaking over the Iron Rank. Slowly their group had gathered the other Guilders closer to them, as if desperate for new information. All of them quivered with fear and uncertainty.
"Where's Elder Teine?" the Iron Rank asked.
"Gone," a Tin Rank mage responded. She was white as a sheet.
Gasps ran through the Guilders, but Mervin paid them no attention. Instead, he focused on the warning that was screaming through his head. Sentinel's Regard squealed, a hot sensation between his brows.
"Something bad is coming," Mervin said. "The earth...it's shaking."
Sentinel's Regard is level 34!
The Wall shuddered. Then the sound of an immense impact struck the side of the Wall, and Guilders screamed. Violet fire surged down the narrow hallways, but an Iron Rank mage raised a shield of hardened air, diverting the flames. The red-gold shine within the Wall flickered and died, plunging them all into semi-darkness.
"What happened!?"
"The sigils are inert! The Wall is down!"
A blue box appeared before their eyes as that high pitch noise continued through Mervin's ears.
Warning!
All Defenses Are Being Deactivated And Rerouted!
"No," Mervin gasped.
Beyond the treeline, the insectoid Wretches let out piercing, distorted screeches. The monkeys and insects charged, as one.
All Defenses Deactivated And Rerouted.
Heuthorn was curled on the ground, immobile but conscious, and he gasped like a dying fish. "What...what have you...done..?"
"What I must," Eliza said with a grin. She held it, despite the fact that her Authority somehow let her hear what was happening at the Wall. Desperate screams echoed impossibly across the distance of Haarwatch for her ears alone, but she pushed them aside. She focused on what she had to do.
No one could Challenge her Authority if they were too busy fighting another monster horde. She stripped the Wall of its damaged protections and rerouted the Mana to her, the Authority providing a basic understanding of the vast, hidden systems beneath the city. It was astounding.
The mansion began to rumble.
Mana Reserves Have Been Rerouted Completely.
Sing the Song of Siege. She had been flicking through her options while the Inquisitor had writhed along the floor. She had growing grasp of it now.
Song of Siege, Activating.
All around the Sunrise Quarter, the lines that traced out its well-tended walls began to tremble. She could sense that the few Acolytes nearby ran in alarm as something massive lifted from beneath the earth. Masonry and wrought iron crumbled and fell, the walls raised up higher than ever before falling into clouds of dusty debris. In their place, new shimmering walls of smooth, red-gold metal formed a single, solid barrier. No doors or windows or even defensive parapets existed along its length. It was smooth, steep, and charged with all the deadly defenses DuFont could access.
The Sunset Quarter was cut off entirely from the rest of the city, from mountain to mountain. Eliza laughed so hard she cried.
"Lady Inquisitor?" Klark asked, carefully.
Eliza dabbed at her eyes, but the mirth kept spilling out. "I'm fine, Klark. Truly, for the first time." She stepped forward, maintaining eye contact with a feebly struggling Heuthorn and all his precious lackeys.
"You cannot...kill me...you cannot...imprison me," the old Inquisitor gasped, barely holding onto consciousness. "The Order would...fall upon you...The hammer...of justice."
"The wolf need not fear the rabbit," DuFont said to him, and relished the fear in the old man's eyes as her sword cut off his head.
"I've found my destiny," she whispered. She turned to Klark, who had turned a bit pale. "Dispose of them. All of them."
"They do our work for us, brothers!" cried the venomous green Arcid, her skeletal neck turned to the skies. Violet fires had erupted along the western edge, and the sounds of battle rode the breeze. She was hunched over in pain, atop the stepped hills of city center. Her metallic flesh was battered and charred, but she was whole.
The rounded one, also charred, laughed. It's voice rattled as if something had come loose in its chest. "Our Father's Marked beasts have come, finally. The Bloodmoon is nigh! Number 55118! Let loose the signal!"
The umber-hued Arcid grunted and lifted unmarred his arms. His eye-fires were bright and merry as a bolt of yellow-red, inverted Mana shot into the sky above them.
A thunderclap shook the air as the power pushed at the ever-present cloud cover, making spacing for a single and gargantuan sigil. Yellow-red power sparked and scalded the air, tracing out the convoluted and eye-searing form that anyone within leagues would be able to see clearly.
Distantly, a noise began. It faded, then began again. And again. A dark cloud roiled to the west, low and racing for the mortal city. The skeletal Arcid laughed and threw it's arms wide.
"Let it begin!"