Flames flowed across the land, forests burned relentlessly in the blazing war, and an appalling breach had been torn open in the ancient Great Wall. What poured through that breach was the enemy of civilization—and caught unprepared, the defenders of the Civilized World collapsed into disarray. Under wave after wave of Aberrant assaults, they retreated again and again, from the foot of the Great Wall to the forest barrier, from the forest barrier to the kingdom's border. Beyond that lay nearly undefended towns and villages.
The ranger forces of the Highland Kingdom and the allied troops sent by the Silver Empire held desperately along these fronts. The original military lines had been torn completely apart, battlefield communications were in chaos, and the remaining mortal armies had been cut off across the vast war zone. They fought alone without support, knowing neither where their allies were nor whether the defensive line still existed. They did not even know whether they had become the last living people in this nightmare.
In many regions, the garrison troops had long since lost any semblance of morale. The soldiers fought numbly in a state of near madness, for one reason alone: the enemy they faced permitted neither retreat nor surrender.
Yet under such circumstances, some of them noticed a sight they would never forget—the scene unfolded high over the northern reaches of the Highland Kingdom. As the Stellar Sanctuary, wrapped in flames and thick smoke, slowly fell toward the edge of the horizon, the surviving legions across nearly half the border could clearly see that mass of light plunging toward the earth.
The Stellar Sanctuary abandoned all its subsystems and no longer considered returning or undergoing repairs. The aged, decaying Power Hub wrung out its final thread of magic, allowing weapon systems that had long