{Chapter: 147: The Unending Tide}
There would be no diplomacy.
There never was.
Unlike the internal skirmishes of the mortal realms, where kings and warlords often left room for negotiations, demons had no such customs. There were no peace treaties. No ceasefires. No surrender.
Only consumption.
Only death.
And now, once again, the sky was burning.
Looking at waves of millions of demons. Henry gripped the hilt of his sword tightly.
Wave after wave—they never stopped coming.
The stench of blood mixed with scorched earth hung heavy in the air. Screams of dying men echoed from the battlefield below as Henry stood atop the ancient stone wall, gripping the edge until his knuckles turned white.
"We killed one wave after another… but the more we killed, the more came," he muttered, his voice hollow, his gaze distant. "Could it be that they're growing out of the ground?"
It wasn't a joke. It was desperation wrapped in curiosity, like a man trying to understand the madness devouring his world.
This wasn't just his fight. All across the continents, from the icy north to the burning deserts of the south, the skies rained with black fire, and the ground cracked open to spew forth more of the damned. Entire nations were falling. Cities that had stood for thousands of years were now ash. The world had become a battlefield, and the enemy seemed endless.
The demons didn't fight with tactics or strategies, not in the way humans or elves or even orcs understood war. No—what they had was chaos, and within that chaos, a dark kind of unity. After tasting blood, they became like rabid dogs, frothing with violence, losing even the barest thread of reason.
And yet, in all that madness, there was something terrifyingly effective.
Henry knew this firsthand. He had been a soldier his whole life. He'd studied battlefields, dissected campaigns, written manuals on siege defense and counter-assaults. And yet, none of that knowledge truly prepared him for this.
"If these creatures had even a fraction of sanity," he thought grimly, "we would have lost this war long ago."
What saved humanity time and time again was not strength. It wasn't unity. It was the enemy's own madness. The demons would brawl amongst themselves in the middle of battle, clawing at their own kin, sometimes fighting harder against their allies than against their enemies. Their lust for destruction was indiscriminate.
But that chaos was no comfort. Looking out now at the oncoming demonic horde, Henry felt a chill crawl down his spine. It wasn't just their numbers. It was how they moved—like a living tide, like the land itself had vomited them out to swallow the last remnants of order.
He exhaled slowly, his breath visible in the frigid morning air.
"How do they multiply like this…?"
He couldn't shake the thought: What if they really do grow out of the earth itself?
It was nonsense, wasn't it?
Or was it?
The demons were a mystery to even the most learned scholars. They appeared in places they shouldn't have been able to reach. They burrowed, tunneled, reappeared from craters, corrupted the land with each step. Some scouts even claimed they watched a corpse split open and give birth to three new ones. The idea that they spawned like mold—alive and infectious—was no longer dismissed.
Turning away from the wall, he barked orders to the officers flanking him. "Activate all outer defense magic! Immediately. And pay special attention to the underground. They almost dug us out last time."
"Understood!" the officer saluted sharply, his voice firm.
Henry watched as the man sprinted down the stone stairs, disappearing into the chaos of the inner walls. All around him, soldiers stood at the ready—some trembling, some praying, some clutching talismans carved by desperate hands. Faces pale, armor scratched and dented, eyes heavy with the weight of too many sleepless nights.
This was humanity's last stand.
He closed his eyes for a moment and whispered a prayer.
"May the gods… all of you… grant us one more day."
---
Far from the wall, beyond the defensive line where the land was already corrupted and diseased by demonic presence, a different figure marched forward.
Dex, strode confidently in the midst of the oncoming horde. Towering monsters trailed behind him like war dogs. The sickly land groaned beneath their weight.
Dex felt that the effect of [Contaminated Land] was rapidly declining and the world's suppression force was slowly increasing.
It allowed their numbers to surge. Allowed even lesser demons to shrug off the effects suppression of the will of the world. But now, as they neared the fortress, that advantage began to unravel.
The resistance of the world—the "suppression force," as demons called it—began pressing down like a great weight. The air thickened. Magic faltered.
The tide of monsters slowed.
Several weaker demons buckled, screeching in agony as the pressure increased. Their flesh peeled. Their limbs dragged. Some looked pleadingly toward the rear, but there would be no mercy.
The whips of their demon overlords cracked through the sky.
"Advance," Dex muttered, watching it all with disinterest. "If you die, you were weak."
Just then, the fortress answered.
A crystal embedded at the top of the central bastion began to glow, pulsing with radiant power. Then—without warning—it exploded into a beam of divine light several meters wide and blindingly bright, a holy lance cutting across the corrupted sky.
It wasn't a mere spell.
It was a divine execution.
The beam roared forward like the sword of a vengeful god, tens of kilometers long, its momentum shaking the battlefield.
And yet, from among the demonic tide, a monster of nightmares stepped forward.
Massive. Grotesque. Covered in eyes and bearing a hundred sinewy arms, the beast snarled in defiance. Its name was unknown, its origin abyss, but its hunger was eternal.
Rather than dodge, the creature reached to its side—grabbing the spine of a nearby snake demon and yanking it free with a sickening rip. The demon shrieked once before collapsing into twitching pieces.
With a roar, the hundred-armed monster twirled the blood-soaked spine like a whip and met the beam head-on.
The collision was thunderous.
The ground quaked. A shockwave blasted across the land, lifting dirt and debris into the air like a volcanic eruption. For a moment, all sound vanished, smothered by the overwhelming force of the blast.
Then—dust settled.
The light dimmed.
The monster stood, its body battered, black smoke rising from where its flesh had been charred. Over a dozen arms had been severed. Its chest bore a hole large enough to see through.
But it laughed.
It laughed like a mad god tasting victory.
And even as Henry watched from afar with horror, the monster's wounds began to close. Arms regrew—first as twitching stubs, then as fully formed limbs. As the magic power surged in his body, the broken arm extended out one section at a time like bamboo shoots after spring rain.
Within minutes, it stood whole again, drunk on violence, feeding on the magic in the air.
Dex observed from a hill nearby, calm and calculating. The energy signature of the beam had been immense—powerful enough to erase most commanders.
And yet this creature survived.
He grinned.
"Yes," Dex whispered to himself. "That attack… I can survive it too."
His eyes gleamed with anticipation. The fortress was no longer a wall. It was a challenge. A prize.
And soon, it would fall.
*****
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