The Long Night Meat Grinder

Shien stood at the edge of the Sacred Flame's raised platform, wrapped in a heavy dark cloak.

Thanks to days of intensive battle formation drills, Shien had honed the Basic Battlefield Awareness and Battle Formation Command Logic skills in his mind to perfection. Basic Battlefield Awareness had even risen to Lv. 2.

He pushed the two skills together to their limit, even driving them beyond it. But the cost was plain: his mental strength was being drained bit by bit.

Exhaustion scraped at his nerves like a dull knife. Tiny black spots had begun to flicker at the edges of his vision.

To focus his senses, Shien closed his eyes.

The roars and sounds of hacking below slowly receded from his awareness. The entire position assembled itself anew in his mind.

He sensed it all with perfect clarity, as though looking down from above: which gap's spearmen were slowing, which side's broken wagon was nearing the limit of what it could withstand.

On this meat-grinder battlefield, his mind was the command center. Ivan, standing half a step beside him, was his signal tower.

"The fighters at gap two are at their limit," Shien murmured. "Send in the second line."

Ivan snapped the signal flag through the air.

At gap two, Kyle and the others caught sight of the flag signals from the platform. Their taut nerves eased at once.

In perfect accord, they drew their heavy iron shields half a step back at an angle.

Almost simultaneously, the fresh troops who had been waiting behind them surged forward.

Spears shot through the openings left by the shields, vicious as striking vipers, driving the rats trying to pour in back into the heap of corpses.

The defensive line completed the rotation like interlocking gears.

But no matter how perfect the tactics, accidents could still happen amid the chaos of battle.

Crack—boom!

West of the platform, the thunderous sound of massive timbers breaking erupted.

Hundreds of frenzied Corrupt Rats piled atop one another, crushing together into a huge ball of flesh that brought a heavy supply wagon crashing down.

A gap four or five meters wide was torn open in an instant.

A foul black Rat Tide, laced with sickly green Corpse Poison, poured through the gap into the inner circle of light!

"Personal guards, hold the west side! Convicts, bring materials and fill that gap!"

The signal flag in Ivan's hand whipped wildly.

Dozens of elite knights who had been resting in the inner circle roared as they drew their greatswords and hurled their Battle Aura-clad bodies straight into the gap.

They became shields of flesh, holding the black mudslide of the Rat Tide beyond the shattered remains of the wooden boards.

Behind these powerful fighters, crowds of Convicts desperate to erase their brands through military merit charged in without a thought for their lives, carrying heavy pig-iron ingots and coarse sacks filled with gravel.

Sharp rat claws scrabbled through the gaps in the knights' leg armor and tore the arms of several Convicts in the front ranks into bloody tatters.

"Aaaaaah!"

To screams of flesh being stripped from bone, a new makeshift wooden wall was nailed fast into the mud, the work bought with human lives.

The gap was sealed by force, and the position once again held its tottering balance.

And so Shien stood atop the platform, using precise orders and the bodies of his soldiers to keep the battered position standing.

The night deepened. Overhead, the Blood Moon shone ever more fiercely.

At the highest point, Shien did not dare draw even half a deep breath.

Without warning, an uncontrollable chill shot up his spine and pressed against the back of his skull.

Shien spun around, his gaze sweeping toward Ivan.

The Resonance Realm knight was staring into the bottomless darkness beyond the western edge of the light.

He was not alone. The few dozen high-level fighters in the camp who had crossed the threshold into the Resonance Realm all fixed their eyes on the same direction at once.

Far behind the waves of lesser rats throwing themselves to their deaths, several presences of savage malice prowled deep within the Blood Mist.

They watched the faint circle of light coldly, using tens of thousands of lesser Corrupt Rats to drain the humans' strength and force out every last card they held, yet never made a move themselves.

With that malice watching them all night, the people of Blackpine Fief endured the screams rising from the battlefield and somehow made it through.

By the time the sticky black blood in the trenches and gaps had risen past their calves, the despairing dark red overhead finally began to peel away, sliver by sliver.

The lifeless light of day struggled to spread across the Blood Moon's Blood Mist.

With shrieks of protest, the black tide swiftly withdrew, scrambling back into the shadows of the dead forest beyond the light.

The entire camp fell silent for several breaths.

Clang—

No one knew who collapsed first, dropping a nicked sword into the muddy water strewn with scraps of flesh.

Then the sound of weapons hitting the ground spread throughout the camp.

Everyone slumped into the bloody water as if their spines had been pulled out, gasping for air. They had been drained of even the strength to move a little finger.

Shien watched the rats retreat like a receding tide. He knew this was no victory.

This long, bloody first night had been nothing more than a probe by the Dark Races.

By the second night, the entire force would be spent, and much of the makeshift wagon wall would be ruined.

When the suffocating malice deep in the Blood Mist finally tore through the light and entered the fray, what would this battered Blackpine Fief have left to stop it?

At that moment, Shien's vision wavered.

The Battlefield Perception he had maintained all night suddenly faltered in his mind, like a string stretched to its limit snapping apart.

Agony burst through his nerves, making him sway despite himself.

Ivan noticed at once and instinctively reached to steady him. "My lord!"

Shien raised a hand to stop him. He drew a deep breath, forced the exhaustion down into the depths of his mind, then slowly shook his head. "I'm fine."

Ivan frowned at him but said nothing more.

After taking a moment to steady himself, Shien slowly descended from the platform.

A whole night of sustaining Battlefield Perception while issuing commands with unrelenting precision had left his head aching as though countless steel needles were stabbing into it. But he could not stop to rest.

He did not look at the soldiers sprawled in the bloody water, gasping for breath. Instead, he went straight to the base of the Permanent Sacred Flame Platform.

Victor was there with a dozen or so master craftsmen, sweating under the faint firelight as they scraped oxidized bloodstains from the base's main bearing, bit by bit, with thin blades.

The shriveled, one-armed old man looked as though he had just been dragged from a mire. Dark red Bloodrust and unidentifiable filth covered him, and his remaining left hand gripped a Refined Steel scraper tightly.

"How are the repairs going?" Shien stopped, his voice hoarse with fatigue. "How much longer?"

Victor's clouded eye avoided Shien's gaze. "My lord... the surface cleaning... is about half done."

"I led the others in scraping away the thickest Bloodrust around the main shaft overnight. Give me one more day and we can finish it all. But..."

Victor's voice dwindled, and he shrank back without realizing it. "But... there's a fatal problem..."