The tar-black silence of the underground level was shattered by a trembling hum — a low, rising growl, like the roar of the Underworld's own wrath. The ceiling wept with dampness, the air was stale and fetid, but nothing crushed the soul like the sound of legs. Hundreds. Thousands. Approaching from the darkness.
Before the massive iron grates stood not soldiers, but women. Thousands of them. Formed into ranks along the colossal steel barriers. Not elite knights. But people. Elderly women, sleepless children. They stood in formation — trembling, yet unbroken. In their hands — spears and in their eyes — a fire that would not die, even in despair.
It smelled of sweat, iron, and fear. Not the fear that makes one flee — but the kind that crystallizes in your bones and tempers with your will. Here, on the lowest level of the bastion, where flickering torchlight barely tore through shadow, they stood — the last wall before the abyss.
"Hold the line!" cried one of them — a woman with a scarred cheek who was once a seamstress. Now she was a shield. "They break through, your children die first!"
This was not a mob. This was an army. No uniforms. No noble crests. But real scars.
The first line — spearbearers. The second — rotation teams. The third — carriers of water, bandages, and oil. Children — deeper in the shadows, armed with rocks and bottles filled with sand. They knew when to act. They no longer cried. They had been taught to stay silent. And to strike.
The bugs hit with a roar. Hundreds, thousands. When they slammed into the grates, the steel groaned, but held. Hooked legs clung to the bars. The beasts tried to force their way through, crushing the barrier with their armored bulk. But the women were already ready.
"Front line!" — the command rang out like a thunderclap.
Hundreds of spears thrust through the grates, striking soft joints beneath legs, between eyes, under chitin. The beasts howled, spraying the ground with black-green fluid.
"Switch!" — the second call.
The first line dropped their weapons and stepped back half a pace, allowing the second to strike. With renewed force, like a piston, they drove their weapons deeper — cleaner, more precise. Every movement — drilled. Every step — earned. No one panicked.
The women moved like a single machine. From every direction came the hissing of bugs breaking their jaws on the grates, but even through metal they could sense death. Human resolve. Hatred.
On the right flank, a team formed from former cooks and laundresses stood out. They struck legs in unison, hacking joints, tossing torches the moment acid-carriers were spotted. Their leader, a woman named Raya — once a librarian — commanded the rhythm of battle with mere gestures. A flick of her hand — and three women shifted from defense to counterattack.
Their accuracy was terrifying. One by one, the bugs fell back, slipping on their comrades' bodies, crushed beneath the weight of retreat.
"Left section! Careful — acid-carriers!" someone shouted from the rear.
Flames flared instantly. A ten-year-old boy, one eye bandaged, crawled to the front and hurled a jar of firestarter liquid. A weak explosion — but enough to sear the legs of three creatures. The women finished them with the precision of executioners.
One of the knights observing from an upper platform couldn't help but comment:
"Gods damn… they're holding better than most of our recruits."
But the women didn't hear praise. They struck. They switched. They drove iron into flesh again and again.
It was a meat grinder. Deaf. Cold. Unrelenting. But not chaotic.This was not a fight for honor. Not for glory.It was the day mothers and daughters became the blade of mankind.
While below, in the blood-soaked catacombs, women fought against the waves of chitinous death, another battle raged above — across high platforms stretched between the bastion's towers. Silent. Precise. Without mercy.
It was a war of arrows and steel against swarms of monsters pouring in from all directions. The platforms cried beneath wind and thunder, but those who stood on them — did not tremble.
Men and women, shoulder to shoulder, like mute hunters, worked without pause. They didn't shout or argue. They had long since run out of words. Their language — the pull of a bowstring, the hiss of an arrow, the whistle through air, the dry thunk into flesh.
"Eight at three o'clock! Two acid-types to the left!" barked the sector commander — a tall, dark-skinned archer with a scorched face. His eyes burned — not with fear, but with loyalty that had no path backward.
The archers responded instantly. A volley rained down on the bugs climbing the wall — dozens of arrows pierced the weak spots between armor plates, and the crossbowmen brought down even the most heavily shielded. The survivors slipped on corpses and tumbled back into the gorge.
"Right side incoming!" another tower called.
The wind tore the hood from a middle-aged woman — a murky scar slashed across her cheek. Her hands trembled not from fear, but from strain. She loosed an arrow straight into the mouth of a poison beetle about to spit acid at the wall.
These platforms were narrow, treacherous, the distance to targets unstable — but these people had trained for months. There were no soldiers here. Only death hunters.
Some were former bounty hunters. Others — circus marksmen. One had been a violinist. Another — a darts player. But in their hands, war had become the maestro of death.
They didn't just target the bugs swarming the castle, but covered the wall defenders who couldn't look to the skies during close combat. One of the archers, a girl with white braids, spotted the winged carrier approaching. She loosed her arrow into the soft tissue between its wings — the beast screeched, tumbled midair, and shattered on the stones below.
Fire. Arrows. Powder. And silence. No celebration. No euphoria.They just kept firing.
And when one young man loosed his final arrow, he didn't ask for a replacement. He snatched a crossbow from a fallen comrade's back, took position, and shot down a bug about to bite a man on the wall.
Because from above — they saw everything:The women soaked in blood behind the grates.The children hurling flaming death.The swordsmen falling on the battlements.
"If we don't shoot — they die," said an old archer."So either we kill… or we wait for the end in silence."
No one said another word.
Darkness slowly closed in, like a deep bowl filled with shadows where light had already died. Against the backdrop of dull rumbling and distant screams of terror, Kan Jun and his team gathered at the designated spot.
Kan Jun stood still — a statue among the ruins of the world. His gaze was cold — like a blade that had tasted blood. His face showed nothing — no anxiety, no anger — only the weary focus of a predator used to living in the shadow of death. His body radiated calm, but a calm that made others uneasy — especially Lars.
Lars stood nearby, the smell of beer still clinging to his clothes. But this wasn't drunken chaos — it was hunger, irritation, poisoned envy gnawing at his insides. Kan Jun's calmness felt like mockery from the heavens, tightening his suppressed rage.
"That bastard... He looks at me like he knows something I don't. And it pisses me off..." Lars thought, clenching his fists.
The silence didn't last long.
"Sixth wave, you're up again!" came the command, ripping through the gloom like thunder above a grave.
And then thousands of people, like a living river of pain and despair, began moving toward the stairs. Their faces — gray, worn. Their eyes — no longer held hope. Only duty.
As Trent Barlow's team ascended, they crossed paths with those they were meant to relieve. Wolves in human form. No words. No emotion. Their eyes carried the cold resolve of those who had long since died inside. They only nodded to Trent — respect for a fellow warrior. The rest — ignored.
Lars scoffed, but in their presence, his sarcasm sounded like the whimpering of a pup beside predators. They moved on, leaving a crushing weight in their wake.
Trent issued short orders. Kan Jun silently drew his sword. Its blade, still wet with enemy blood, gleamed — like a mirror reflecting hell.
"He who neglects his weapon is unworthy of life," he recalled his old master's words.
And then the air trembled. A deep, ragged scream rose from the underground — like a veil of curses torn from the depths. The bugs had come. Like a swarm of demonic ants, they covered everything. Their bodies devoured light, their motion spread panic.
The walls became arenas of hell. People in colored armor, like islands of life, stood firm amid the darkness that hungered to devour them.
But this time the enemy acted with cunning — subtle and demonic. Among the swarm were those who could control minds. Their mental tendrils searched for the weak. Some broke — turned their blades on comrades. Flesh torn by friendly steel. Minds lost.
But not in Trent's team.Not where Kan Jun stood — a lone blade in the storm.
And once more, danger came for Kan Jun.
When one such wave of psychic force touched his mind, something ancient and predator-cold within him… devoured it. The force meant to control — vanished like ash in flame.
In that instant, a rotten-cold energy — like a vile whisper in the dark — invaded his mind. It slithered in slowly, like a venomous snake crawling through veins toward the heart. The moment it touched his brain, something deeper — his soul — reacted.
An explosion of light — inner, almost sacred — tore through him.
And for a moment, the entire world vanished.
Kan Jun felt the power unravel. It wasn't destroyed — it was consumed. As if his very being had licked it clean from the surface of his soul. His body shuddered — not from pain, but from awakening.
The bug that tried to dominate him froze. Then tried again. More pressure, more force. The psychic thread drove into his mind with hateful intensity — and tore apart even faster, like a snapped tendon under too much tension.
At first, he thought it was a protective mantra he had studied.But no...
Kan Jun felt it.And smiled.