Misfortunes Never Come Alone: A Fight for Survival

The Permanent Sacred Flame Platform was beyond repair, and the bruised crimson sky was pressing down fast.

Shien did not hesitate. "Light every highest-grade Sacred Flame brazier!"

The braziers flared one after another, their blinding platinum light bursting outward. Then everyone's pupils contracted at what they saw.

Within the Great Wall's buffer zone, those flames could have lit an entire camp and driven the chill back hundreds of meters. Here, they were being crushed.

Inside the Great Wall and along its buffer zone, the Sacred Flame Network resonated with the Most Holy Origin Furnace, greatly weakening the Blood Moon's corruption.

Beyond the Great Wall, the laws of the world tilted almost entirely toward darkness. The Blood Mist grew denser, monsters grew stronger, and the Blood Moon's pressure multiplied.

Over Blackpine Fief, the Blood Moon's mist pressed down with a weight that seemed almost solid.

"Hissss—" Amid the piercing sound of burning, the dark-red tide squeezed the flames' radiance smaller and smaller.

At last, only a faint circle of light remained, less than thirty meters in radius.

More than six hundred people, along with warhorses, supplies, and the craftsmen's forges, all needed shelter within it.

But a circle less than sixty meters across could not hold so many.

Packhorses and infantry on the outer edge were forced into the deadly shadows at the light's rim.

People in the rear shoved hard against those in front, desperate to reach the light. Curses mingled with the frightened neighs of warhorses, and the crush nearly became a riot that would have trampled people to pulp.

"Pull it in! Drag the grain crates into the light!"

Several soldiers at the very edge of the defensive line gripped a heavy crate full of old wheat with both hands. Sweat streamed down their faces as they hauled it out of the shadows.

Crack!

The damp, rotten bottom split under the strain. As the grain spilled out...

A black shape erupted from the shadows, springing from beneath the broken planks.

It was a deformed monster as large as an adult hunting dog, covered in festering sores that oozed pus. Blackened bone spurs jutted from its back: a Bloodthirsty Rot Rat.

It made no sound. In the next instant, it was on a man's leg.

Crunch!

Its sharp, venomous teeth pierced the soldier's lower-leg armor. The hardened leather shattered as though struck by an iron chisel, and the fangs sank deep into his calf.

Clang! Steel flashed, and Ivan split the enormous rat from head to tail.

Its stinking black entrails spilled across the ground.

The bitten soldier collapsed, unable even to cry out.

Before everyone's horrified eyes, the flesh around the bite marks blackened and rotted at a visible pace.

Sickly green pus mixed with poison raced up his blood vessels. The monster's saliva was laden with a deadly concentration of Corpse Poison.

"Aaaah!"

Only when the poison had eaten through his flesh did the soldier clutch his rapidly rotting calf and let out a scream of agony.

A priest shoved through the crowd. He pinned the soldier's violently twitching thigh with one hand and bit open a lead-sealed vial at his waist with the other, splashing several viscous drops of Consecrated Unction onto the blackened, ragged wound.

Hiss!

White smoke erupted with a burnt stench. Pure holy power tore into the wound, destroying the poison that had already seeped into his blood.

The soldier's eyes bulged, then he passed out from the searing pain.

The poison's spread had stopped, but the flesh of his lower leg had been burned black.

"It's over..."

An old knight who had served for years on the edge of Long Night went weak at the knees and dropped to the ground.

His lips trembled. "When you see one Bloodthirsty Rot Rat crawl to the surface... it means ten thousand have already hatched in the burrows below!"

A vast maze of abandoned sewers and shelters ran beneath Blackpine Fief. Untouched by sunlight for years, it had become the perfect breeding ground for those deformed creatures.

Once the Blood Moon rose fully tonight, the ravenous, frenzied rats would pour out like a breached black tide.

Misfortune upon misfortune: the Sacred Flame Altar could not be repaired, and six hundred people were crammed into a circle of light barely thirty meters in radius.

Every inch of ground beneath them hid countless flesh-eating teeth waiting to break through.

Despair spread like a contagious plague through the hushed circle of light.

Several terrified recruits scrambled toward the base of a brazier, knocking over a stack of wooden grain crates with their shoulders.

Shien drew his sheathed sword and brought it down hard on the bridge of the fastest deserter's nose.

Bone cracked with a sickening crunch. Blood spraying from his nose, the man pitched headfirst into the mud.

Ivan followed at once, driving his sword into a gap between the paving stones with the violent Battle Aura of the Third Tier Resonance Realm.

Stone chips flew. The surging aura battered everyone's eardrums, choking off the screams about to burst from their throats.

With one boot planted on a broken stone pillar, Shien looked coldly down at the terrified crowd.

"More people die of fear at the Great Wall than of Corpse Poison! Now shut your mouths, open your ears, and listen to me!"

The authority and goodwill he had built over the past few days now gave his command absolute force.

The crowd, on the verge of collapse, froze like ducks seized by the neck. No one dared make a sound.

"Throw every piece of fancy silk and all those delicate, useless goods out of the light! Keep only necessities: old wheat, Pig Iron, alchemical materials! Dismantle every iron-plated supply wagon and build a defensive ring!"

The order left no room for argument. To survive, they had to cut away everything they could spare.

The Convicts gritted their teeth and pushed dozens of emptied heavy wagons to the very edge of the light.

The craftsmen swung their forging hammers, smashed every wheel, and lowered the heavy wagon bodies to the ground, locking them end to end.

They chopped spare planks apart and packed them with stone blocks dug from the ruins, filling every gap between the wagons.

In less than half an hour, a ring-shaped barricade of scrap iron, logs, and stone rose in the cold wind of the wasteland.

But any veteran who had survived two Blood Moon Seasons in the wild knew that Bloodthirsty Rot Rats did not excel at charging across open ground. They dug.

The stone paving beneath their feet could become a deadly trap at any moment.

Shien was not foolish enough to have his men dig defensive trenches. He called over the low-ranking Convicts. "Set up the pots. Draw water from that contaminated deep well and boil every drop!"

Several great iron pots, each half as tall as a person, were set over the secondary braziers. The murky well water soon boiled.

The Convicts wrapped their hands in thick layers of coarse burlap and poured sacks of Quicklime and baskets of the wasteland's highly corrosive mineral powder into the water. Gritting their teeth, the priests shook in a small bag of ruinously expensive Holy Silver Powder.

A short while later, they carried the scalding poisonous mixture to the cracks in the plaza's paving and the dark entrances to several abandoned cellars, then poured it straight down.

"Skreeee!"

Thousands of shrill screams erupted deep underground, setting everyone's scalp tingling.

The boiling, corrosive mixture, infused with the power of Holy Silver, flooded the rats' breeding grounds through the cracks in the earth.

A thick stench of scorched flesh and cooked rot billowed from the fissures.

Hundreds of blinded rats, their flesh scalded and their bodies smoking, shrieked as they burst through the surface. They howled in agony beneath the Sacred Flame, and the knights standing nearby pinned them to the paving stones with their swords.

With cheap lime and a few pots of boiling water, Shien had turned the shallow ground beneath the plaza into a lethal, scalding mire.

The ruthless tactic sealed off the Rat Tide's route from below, forcing the creatures to attack across the surface.

If thousands of frenzied, deformed rats burst from the ground on all sides beneath the Blood Moon, they would not last ten breaths.

Shien's next arrangement sent a chill down even the veterans' spines.

He did not seal the wagon ring completely. Instead, he deliberately left four deadly gaps, each about two meters wide, at the cardinal points.

Shien explained, "A classic tactical funnel. When low-intelligence monsters meet an obstacle they can't cross, instinct drives them toward an open path.

"Put every heavily armored infantryman and greatshield at those four narrow entrances. Without their numbers, they'll be a joke in a space two meters wide."

Every order fell into place like the teeth of hard iron gears.

The recruits who had been trembling uncontrollably now held their positions like rivets driven into place.

Shien's precise control and meticulous tactics steadied the troops about to face the Rat Tide. More than that, they inspired an almost fanatical faith in him.

The moment the last sharpened caltrop was dragged behind a gap, the bruised crimson veil overhead abruptly peeled away.

The true Blood Moon hung high above Long Night.

Beyond the faint circle of light, squeaks and the sounds of claws scraping in the boundless dark swelled into a terrifying roar.

Thousands of pairs of bright scarlet eyes lit up together in the thick Blood Mist, fixed greedily on the living flesh within the light.

The first bloody battle of Long Night had begun.