Assembly-Line Combat

Kyle gripped the hilt of his Refined Steel sword and stood at the gap, barely two meters wide, waiting for the Blood Moon to rise.

Cold night wind poured down his collar, but it could not dry the sweat soaking his back.

As a veteran who had spent two full years fighting along the Long Night Defense Line, Kyle should not have been on the front line. But he had followed the wrong lord.

That fool Roland had fancied himself clever and pulled a golden cicada shedding its shell, leaving all his soldiers branded as criminals.

He would never forget the stench of his own flesh charring beneath the branding iron.

Nor could he forget how, when he had been left to die in a mud pit, the silver-haired lord on the dais had shattered his shackles and given him hope of freedom.

From that moment on, Kyle had sworn a terrible oath: his life belonged to Lord Shien. Even if he was chewed to pieces tonight, he would not retreat half a step.

He had pledged his life, but that did not mean he was unafraid.

He had survived two years at the foot of the Long Night Defense Line's walls. He knew what a Rat Tide spawned by the Blood Moon looked like.

Kyle glanced to either side. The wagon walls had been cobbled together from heavy wagons with their wheels removed, broken planks, and rubble.

How could such flimsy defenses stop tens of thousands of monsters?

As far as he could see, the outcome was certain. They would all be gnawed down to bones.

Then, high overhead, the dark red beneath the gray clouds tore open.

An enormous Blood Moon hung directly above the ruins of Blackpine Fief, so vast it stole his breath. Terrifying red light spilled down, and the wasteland plunged into darkness.

"Screee—!!!"

A skin-crawling chorus of shrieks erupted from every direction. In the boundless dark, tens of thousands of crimson eyes suddenly lit up.

The Bloodthirsty Rot Rats surged toward the defensive line like a black tsunami bursting through a dam, carrying a sickening stench of corpses.

At the sight of that black wave, powerful enough to grind all flesh to pulp, Kyle's pupils contracted.

They're here!! They're here!!!

We're finished!!!

Kyle clenched his teeth until they cracked, instinctively bracing his legs to meet his death.

He had expected the fragile flagstones beneath him to collapse at once, with countless sore-ridden rats bursting from the earth to bite through his boots.

But nothing happened. The stones beneath his feet held firm.

The boiling water and poison poured underground during the day had proved brutally effective. The acrid smell of quicklime and burning Holy Silver kept rising through the cracks.

With their instinctive sense for danger, the monsters would rather be crushed together on the surface than burrow up through the boiling ground to attack.

"Bang—!!!"

The black Rat Tide slammed into the outermost defense like a tsunami.

But the collapse Kyle had imagined never came.

The instant the first hundred or so Bloodthirsty Rot Rats set their forepaws on the line of Holy Silver powder the priests had scattered beyond the defensive perimeter that day—

Great clouds of white smoke billowed up. Flesh melted from the front ranks, and their agonized screams rose as pain slowed them for a split second.

That split second of hesitation shattered the wave's momentum.

The Bloodthirsty Rot Rats behind them could not stop and crashed into those in front, throwing the swarm into chaos.

Stripped of most of its force, the Rat Tide slammed with its remaining momentum into the ramshackle wagon wall Kyle had thought would fall apart at a touch.

"Thud!!" Dull impacts rolled together into a continuous roar.

The steel wagon frames packed with stone and the thick oak planks shook violently under the impact, creaking enough to set teeth on edge.

But they held!

Unable to break through the makeshift barrier, the rats lost all reason to the Blood Moon's bloodthirsty pull.

They writhed along the edges of the wagon wall, instinctively searching for an opening. Almost all of them surged toward the gaps Shien had deliberately left.

"Kill them!!!"

Facing the black monsters flooding into the gap, Kyle was too terrified to think. He instinctively poured all his fighting spirit into his body and swung his steel sword in frantic slashes.

But after only a few minutes of fighting, something began to feel wrong.

The tens of thousands of rats in the Rat Tide were trapped outside by this vicious tactic. They could only line up and squeeze through the narrow, two-meter-wide gap directly ahead.

Heavy wagons and high-ranking shieldbearers guarded his sides and front, while spearmen stood behind him with their weapons ready to finish off anything that got through.

He did not have to worry about the left or the right. No rats would come up from beneath his feet, either.

All he had to do was hold his sword in both hands, level it, thrust forward, then plant a foot on a rat's corpse and pull the blade free.

Thrust again. Pull back again. Over and over, countless rats turned to rotten meat beneath his sword.

This Long Night meat-grinder battle, which should have been a bloody slaughter, had somehow begun to feel tedious to a veteran like Kyle.

Was this even a battle? It was more like harvesting grain on a farm.

Kyle glanced at the young soldier beside him, who had wet his pants in fear only minutes ago. Now excitement lit his face as he jabbed his spear wildly into the gap, each thrust charged with Battle Aura.

Every time he pulled out the spearhead, it dragged a spray of foul black blood with it and sent several Bloodthirsty Rot Rats sprawling.

And he was not alone. All along the defensive line, the heavy infantry's backs, once rigid with tension, gradually relaxed with each repeated swing.

The chill they had felt when first facing the Demonic Beasts faded without their noticing.

The Ironbound Oak Shields in the front rank were battered by the rats, while spears darted through the gaps between them like venomous snakes.

"Squelch—squelch—"

The muffled sound of blades cutting through rotten flesh and bone came again and again.

The soldiers' ragged breathing gradually fell into rhythm. Everyone repeated the same motions, over and over.

From a distance, the terrifying defensive line looked almost like an assembly line at work.

"Huff... huff..." Kyle panted, kicked aside a rot rat hacked to pieces at his feet, and wrenched his sword free of the mangled flesh.

He looked up. The bloodthirsty monsters beyond the gap, which had once terrified him at the mere thought of them, were now trapped outside the funnel.

They piled up layer upon layer, able only to writhe and snap at one another, until they formed a mountain of corpses that slowly streamed black blood.

With a moment to catch his breath, Kyle wiped the foul blood from his face and glanced back without thinking.

High on the sacred dais, the silver-haired boy of just fourteen stood quietly, his cloak stirring in the cold wind.

It was as though he held the entire battlefield in the palm of his hand.

Kyle's feelings, once born solely of gratitude for having his life saved, had changed somewhere along the way. Suddenly, he felt that this was a man worth risking his life for.

By the gap, the soldiers, the heavy infantry holding their shields, the spearmen thrusting from the rear... many of them looked up at the dais, whether they meant to or not. Without realizing it, their eyes had taken on the same look as Kyle's.

What they did not know was that the Grace Value above their heads was rising rapidly.