Misfortunes Never Come Alone, a Fight for Survival

The permanent holy brazier was beyond repair, and the dark red smear overhead, like clotted blood, was pressing rapidly downward.

Shien did not hesitate. "Light every highest-grade holy fire basin!"

The basins flared to life one after another, dazzling platinum light bursting forth. But what happened next made everyone's pupils contract.

Within the Great Wall's buffer zone, the holy fire could have lit an entire camp and driven back the chill for hundreds of meters. Here, it was being ruthlessly suppressed.

Inside the Great Wall and throughout the buffer zone, the holy fire network answered the Most Holy Origin Furnace, greatly weakening the Blood Moon's corruption.

Beyond the Great Wall, however, the world's laws tilted almost entirely toward darkness. The density of the blood mist, the strength of the monsters, and the Blood Moon's oppressive force all multiplied.

Above Blackpine Fief, the blood mist bore down from the sky with pressure so heavy it seemed almost solid.

Hiss— Amid a piercing sizzle, the holy fire's glow was squeezed smaller and smaller by the dark red tide.

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 beneath that cramped glow.

But a circle less than sixty meters across could never hold so many.

Large numbers of packhorses and infantry on the perimeter were forced into the deadly shadow at its edge.

Desperate to squeeze into that feeble ring of light, those in front were pinned by the people behind them. Curses mingled with the terrified neighing of horses, nearly sparking a stampede that would have trampled people into pulp.

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

Several soldiers at the outermost edge of the defense were drenched in sweat. They gripped a heavy wooden chest full of old wheat and strained to drag it out of the shadows.

Crack!

Its damp, rotting bottom suddenly gave way under the strain. The wheat had barely begun to spill when...

A dark shape exploded from the shadows, springing out from beneath the broken planks.

It was a misshapen monster as large as an adult hunting dog, covered in festering sores and with several blackened bone spikes jutting from its back: a Bloodthirsty Rot Rat.

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

Crunch!

Sharp, venomous fangs punched through the soldier's lower-leg armor. The stiff leather shattered as though struck by an iron chisel, and the fangs sank deep into his calf.

Clang! Cold steel flashed, and Ivan split the huge rat from head to tail.

Its foul, blackened entrails spilled across the ground.

The bitten soldier collapsed to a sitting position, without even time 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 venom raced upward through his blood vessels. The creature'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 heart-rending scream.

A priest shoved through the crowd and rushed forward. One hand pinned the soldier's violently twitching thigh while the other yanked a lead-sealed vial from his belt and tore it open with his teeth. He splashed a few thick drops of Consecrated Unction directly onto the blackened, curling flesh.

Sss!

A piercing hiss sounded. Thick white smoke burst from the wound with a charred stench as pure holy power hunted down the toxins already seeping into his blood.

The soldier's eyes bulged, and the searing pain knocked him unconscious.

The poison had stopped spreading, but the flesh on that section of his calf had been burned into a blackened mass.

"We're finished..."

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

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

Beneath Blackpine Fief lay a vast maze of abandoned sewers and shelters. The sun never reached them, and they had long since become perfect breeding grounds for these deformed mutants.

Once the Blood Moon rose fully tonight, the maddened, ravenous swarms would pour out of their nests like a black tide bursting through a dam.

Misfortunes never came alone. The holy brazier could not be repaired, and six hundred people were crammed into a circle of light just thirty meters in radius.

Every inch of ground beneath their feet held countless flesh-eating teeth, ready to break through.

Despair spread like a virulent plague, erupting inside the deathly quiet ring of light.

Several terrified recruits scrambled toward the base of a holy fire basin, their shoulders knocking over the wooden grain chests stacked beside it.

Shien saw them, drew his sheathed sword, and brought it down with crushing force on the nose of the deserter in front.

Bone cracked with a teeth-grating sound. Blood spraying from his nose, the man pitched headfirst into the mud.

Ivan moved with him in perfect accord. His longsword, surging with the violent battle aura of the third-tier Resonance Realm, slammed into a crack between the stone slabs.

Stone chips flew. The shock of his battle aura throbbed against the eardrums of everyone nearby, choking off their screams before they could escape.

With one boot planted on a broken stone pillar, Shien looked down coldly on the crowd, as skittish as birds startled by a bowstring.

"More people have died of fear at the Great Wall than of Corpse Poison! Now shut your mouths and listen carefully to me!"

The authority and goodwill he had built up over the past few days became an absolute force of command.

The crowd, teetering on the brink of collapse, froze like ducks seized by the neck. No one dared breathe loudly.

"Throw all the fancy silk and those delicate pieces of junk out of the light! Keep only essentials like old wheat, pig iron, and alchemical materials! Strip down every iron-plated supply wagon and build them into a defensive ring!"

It was an iron order to cut off a limb to save the body, with no room for argument.

Gritting their teeth, the convicts pushed dozens of emptied heavy iron-plated supply wagons to the very edge of the light.

The craftsmen swung heavy forging hammers and smashed every wheel. The massive wagon bodies dropped to the ground, locked tightly end to end.

Spare planks were split on the spot and packed with stone blocks dug from the ruins, filling every gap between the wagons.

In less than half an hour, a circular barricade cobbled together from 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 wilderness knew that Bloodthirsty Rot Rats were best at tunneling, not charging across open ground.

The stone slabs beneath their feet could turn into a man-eating trap at any moment.

Shien was not foolish enough to make his people dig defensive trenches. He summoned the convicts. "Set up the pots. Draw water from that contaminated deep well and boil all of it!"

Several enormous iron pots, each half as tall as a person, were set over the auxiliary fire basins. The murky well water quickly came to a boil.

The convicts wrapped their hands in thick layers of ragged burlap and tipped sackfuls of quicklime and baskets of the wasteland's highly corrosive mineral powder into the boiling water. Gritting their teeth, the clerics shook in a small bag of extraordinarily costly Holy Silver powder.

Moments later, they carried the scalding, poisonous brew to the cracks in the plaza's stone slabs and the pitch-black entrances of several abandoned cellars, then poured it straight down.

"Screeech!"

Thousands upon thousands of shrill, skin-crawling screams erupted from deep underground.

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

A thick charred stench mingled with the reek of boiling rotten flesh and gushed from the fissures.

Hundreds of blind rats, their flesh scalded and their bodies smoking, burst screaming onto the surface. They wailed in agony beneath the holy fire, and the knights waiting beside the cracks pinned them to the stone with their swords.

With nothing more than a heap of cheap lime and a few pots of boiling water, Shien had turned the shallow ground beneath the plaza into a deadly, scalding poison pit.

The ruthless tactic sealed off the rats' route of attack from below, forcing the beasts to charge across the surface.

If thousands of frenzied, deformed rats had erupted from the ground on every side beneath the Blood Moon, they would not have lasted ten breaths.

Shien's next arrangement sent a chill down the backs of even the battle-hardened veterans.

He had not sealed the ring of wagons completely. He had deliberately left four deadly gaps, each about two meters wide, to the north, south, east, and west.

Shien explained, "A classic tactical funnel. When low-intelligence Demonic Beasts encounter a barrier they can't cross, instinct drives them toward an open path.

"Put all the heavy infantry and great shields at those four two-meter death gates. Without their advantage in numbers, they'll be a joke in a passage that narrow."

Every order meshed and turned like cold, hard gears.

The recruits who had been shaking like sieves now stood fast as rivets at their assigned positions.

Shien's precise control and meticulous tactical reasoning did more than steady the battered force facing the rat swarm. They kindled something close to fanatical faith in him!

Just as the last sharpened barricade was dragged behind a gap, the dark red layer overhead, like clotted blood, abruptly peeled away.

The true Blood Moon hung high above the Long Night.

Beyond the faint circle of light, the scraping and chittering of bones in the boundless dark swelled into a terrifying tide.

Thousands of pairs of bright crimson eyes lit up together in the thick blood mist, fixed greedily on the fresh meat within the light.

The Long Night's first bloody battle had begun.