The wind on the hillside was bitterly cold.
Thomas knelt on one knee among the rubble and raised a hand. Behind the ridgeline, the White Night Squad spread out and took cover.
Several searchlight beams pierced Greyrock Castle from the hillside, like shadowless lamps over an operating table, stripping away the darkness inside the gateway layer by layer.
As the beams swept past, dust and lingering blood mist churned together, turning the distant air a murky dark red.
Then Thomas heard a sound. Chewing.
"Smack... smack..."
The sound of sharp teeth crushing bones and tearing flesh was amplified across the empty castle square, then reflected back by the walls in overlapping waves. It sounded as though countless mouths were feeding at once.
"Fuck," someone in the White Night Squad muttered.
The voice was quiet, but it could not suppress the nausea rising in the speaker's throat.
Even these Transcendent Knights, long accustomed to fighting among heaps of corpses, could not remain unmoved by that sound.
The searchlights continued sweeping, illuminating the mountain of bodies in the center of the square.
Shattered armor, bloodstained silk, and trampled corpses lay mixed together like a burial mound that had been stomped over again and again.
And atop it crouched things.
Hundreds of them.
Thomas narrowed his eyes. Battle Aura rippled faintly along the edges of his retinas, letting him see more clearly than an ordinary person.
Those figures could scarcely be called "human" anymore.
Their limbs were grotesquely proportioned, their joints bent backward, and their bodies covered in gray-black scales, as though they had been forcibly twisted into shapes that made no sense.
Most of the monsters stood over two meters tall. Their skeletons were abnormally thick, yet their movements were remarkably steady.
Their vertical pupils betrayed no emotion beneath the harsh lights.