The minutes following Vira’s declaration were the most frantic the city had probably ever seen. Bastion was situated deep in the Daggerfall mountain range, surrounded on all sides by terrain that made attacking the place untenable for most: a lake of ether-dense lava on one side populated by deadly monsters, and a rainforest of living rock on the other.

  Bastion’s geographical location had made it a haven of safety for millennia, but its primary defence came from the hundreds of thousands of magical wards carved deep into the city's foundations, the most important ones preventing any unauthorised teleportation within five hundred odd miles of the city.

  That was the exact ward Rosano’s infiltration had damaged, and it seemed the consequences had already arrived. Arthur’s room descended into pandemonium, people running in and out as threats were assessed and messages were relayed. The good news was that it wasn’t Shylo himself or any of his heavy hitters attacking. The bad news, however, was that an enormous warp gate had appeared right outside the city, almost a half mile across, and a constant flood of corrupted monsters was pouring through it. It was the kind of onslaught that would rapidly drain the reserves of a city stocked with a garrison and active militia.

  Bastion had neither.

  Instead, it had five hundred humans and elves who’d somehow remained uncorrupted despite the world itself succumbing around them. They were a hardy people, and Arthur would bet on them every time if they were stacked against regular odds. This was something else, though. Something no amount of training could ever prepare you for.

  ~~~

  Arthur stood on the city's walls and looked out at the ongoing battle. Thousands of monsters rushed through the warp gate every minute, packed together like sardines in a tin, a sea of flesh, claws and teeth that rushed towards the densest source of ether in the vicinity: Bastion.

  A few skirmishes broke out amongst the corrupted beasts. After all, they were maddened animals that would never normally work together, but a dominating will pushed them towards a common goal. The Avatar of corruption had spoken, and they would obey.

  The only silver lining Arthur could think of was the relatively low levels of their opposition, averaging around 190, which Vira had explained was the cut-off point of Shylo’s authority. Corrupted monsters beyond level 200, or ‘monsters who’d evolved thrice,' as Vira had put it, would listen to no one unless they were specially raised to do so from birth. Arthur wondered how the ancient healer knew such specific details of Shylo’s limitations, but this probably wasn’t the first time she’d gone against the Silverglade palace.

  Only the first time the fight's been brought to her doorstep, though. The morbid thought hung at the back of his mind. Bastion, despite its name, had never truly been attacked. It had never had to live up to its moniker. Until he'd come along.

  Maverick had set up a rotating guard where two hundred would fight for three hours before swapping out. The ninety-seven people with nothing to do were the emergency reserve, who were to remain at peak performance levels should things suddenly take a turn for the worse. At least, that was what they were supposed to do. Maverick, however, was right in the thick of it, every swing of his axe bisecting a monster or three.

  The giant man had been fighting for half a day now in the stifling heat of Haadran. The last four hours of that had been after nightfall, though it didn't do much to lower the temperature this close to the lava lake. Visibility, thankfully, wasn’t an issue. Bastion had the magical equivalent of floodlights, and the battlefield was as well-lit as early evening. The biggest issue they were facing was clearing the corpses fast enough to keep the battlefield clean and uncongested.

  This was the biggest fight Arthur had ever been a part of. He wouldn’t be wrong in calling it a war. It all felt so surreal: the sounds of corrupted monsters screaming, injured humans and elves shouting their defiance, the deafening thrum of artillery shot from the ramparts. Healers rushed to and fro, keeping everything running, the oil that lubricated the machine of warfare.

  The true MVP, however, was Wovan. The ender never tired; she quite literally had infinite stamina, and her presence on the battlefield changed everything. She had over two tons of telekinetic force to work with now, and she used it with frightening accuracy, wielding it like a fine rapier to pierce eyes and crush heads. She also had ten of her bodies constantly acting as mobile meteors, though she didn’t travel more than a thousand meters up this time.

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  While she was more than durable enough to survive terminal velocity now, the monsters she was currently facing didn’t warrant such force. The terrain was difficult enough to manoeuvre in without his soul splinter going and creating massive craters everywhere. Wovan had killed upwards of thirty thousand monsters at this point, but she didn’t have a single level to show for it. She never would, either, even if the fight dragged on for the next decade. Her soul simply could not grow from such weak opposition.

  Vira suddenly appeared beside him, and Arthur startled in place.

  “I get why David's always getting angry at you now,” he grumbled.

  Learning that Vira was the displacement mage who had kept Bastion functioning all these years had certainly been a surprise. It had been a well-kept secret for the last millennium, with only a few trusted soldiers aware of the fact out of fear that the information would ever reach Shylo.

  She’d been the only mage keyed into the city's teleportation wards, the cornerstone of a survival strategy that had kept humanity in the game for so long. Now, however, none of that mattered, and the ancient healer had taken to teleporting around everywhere, almost like she’d made it her new life's mission to never take a single step again.

  Vira chuckled. “You need to get better at sensing teleportation fast. Now that the wards are failing, you’ll be a prime target for assassination, and next time, they won't have a soft spot for you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Arthur grumbled. “What's going on with those two anyway?”

  Vira’s mirth instantly disappeared, and her expression darkened. “Nothing good. Their bodies were horribly mutated, so much so that I honestly have to applaud the madman behind it. The psychopathic genius required to pull off so many augmentations without having your patients die in horribly gruesome ways is ludicrous. I wouldn’t be able to pull off a tenth of what they did, and I’ve been working with human bodies longer than most ever live.”

  “So have you…” Arthur was at a loss for what the right word would be. Vira thankfully understood what he was trying to say.

  “Fixed them. No. At this point, it's not really possible, except for the most proficient of soul mages. What's more, I don’t think it would be fair to them either. They’ve clearly suffered greatly from these mutations—judging by their skeletal growth, from the time they were teenagers. For the most part, those changes are beneficial. The mechanical parts of them, not so much, but they were thankfully very easy to remove once I got past all the fail safes. Right now, they’re in a magically induced coma three miles underground, a prison accessible only by a displacement mage with their exact coordinates."

  "Are you sure about that?" Arthur asked with a raised eyebrow. "Not sure how much I trust your magic comas after last time."

  Vira sighed and shook her head sadly. "The youth these days. No respect for their elders. Maverick's an outlier. You can't judge me on that."

  "Every failure's an outlier as a healer, unless you're doing something seriously wrong."

  Vira turned and stared at the battle, focusing on Wovan. "Your pet monstrosity is something else. I guess she'd have to be to get an entire realm to turn on you. I have a greater eye for things than most, yet I sense almost nothing when I look at her. It's like looking at an object the size of the sun from a few metres away. You can't tell the vastness of it."

  "I honestly considered whether the enemy we should be focusing on is you and not Shylo. The corrupted Avatar would destroy the world. You would..." Vira let her words trail on into silence, but it wasn't a sentence that needed finishing.

  "I can change everything," Arthur said quietly.

  Vira nodded. "True. Whatever you may be now, it was your humanity that stayed my hands. The part of you that let those two live when killing them would have been so much easier." Vira chuckled mirthlessly. "That and I don't think we've got what it takes to kill you anyway. Wovan's terrifying, but you're no slouch either."

  Arthur summoned his soul spear and started to idly launch it at the monsters below, intermittently using his left hand and telekinesis to do so. It cost a negligible amount of ether and let him get some much-needed practice in. His spear would hit a monster, rarely kill it, and most often miss altogether—an admirable feat, considering they were so packed together—before returning to his side a few seconds later.

  "How long do you think we can keep this up for?" He asked.

  "Five days, maybe ten if we get lucky and nothing changes, but fatigue will get to us eventually. Without Wovan, I doubt we'd even get to three."

  "So what's the plan. Surely you've got something."

  "The plan's simple. One that was set in stone as soon as that warp gate appeared. Shylo's sending a message. Either we stay here and die a slow death, or come to him and die quickly. There's enough fodder around that he can keep this rate of attack going on for months."

  "So... can we take him?"

  Vira laughed. "You crack some funny jokes, Arthur Ward. Come, you said you wanted to learn bone carving, didn't you? I'll give you a one-day crash course on the ancient art and get you a little bit more powered up. Maybe we can figure out how to get your hand reattached next, and then you can use them both to pray Shylo has a heart attack."

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