Chapter 95: Feral Beings

“Hold the line!” Gorak roared to the Troglodytes.

The Warlord charged into the swarm. He could not use a weapon without accidentally chopping Iron-Scale to pieces, so he relied entirely on his System-granted biology. Gorak drove his heavy bone-plated gauntlets directly into the mass of parasites. He grabbed the Rust-Ticks by their carapaces and physically crushed them into gray paste, ripping them off the Inquisitor’s body one by one.

Iron-Scale collapsed to one knee, panting heavily as acid smoke hissed from his breached scales. He gripped his polished scythe, slashing the remaining bugs away from the sleds.

“I had them under control,” Iron-Scale lied, his voice vibrating with static.

“Sure you did,” Gorak grunted, kicking a crushed tick out of the way.

Before they could catch their breath, a horrific, echoing howl rolled across the ash plains.

Gorak looked up. Over the eastern ridge, a massive, starving horde of humanoids poured down the slopes. There were thousands of them. They were the feral pilgrims of a dead minor god, left to wander the wastes after their deity was consumed. They were bone-thin, their mouths foaming, and their eyes glowing with a sickly, corrupted static. They saw the heavy supply convoy and charged with mindless, terrifying speed.

“Form a wall!” Gorak bellowed.

The Shell-Kin slammed their massive bodies together, creating a barricade of organic shields. Gorak and Iron-Scale stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the front, bracing for the impact.

The wave of corrupted pilgrims crashed into them. The fighting was absolute brutality. Iron-Scale swung his polished scythe in wide, lethal arcs, reaping the starving attackers, while Gorak shattered ribcages with his bone-plated fists. But there were too many of them, and the pilgrims felt no pain.

Then, the sky turned pitch black.

The ambient temperature plummeted. A deafening screech tore through the atmosphere. A storm was rolling directly over the battlefield. The wind whipped up billions of microscopic, razor-sharp glass shards.

“Take cover!” Iron-Scale hissed, trying to shield his damaged plating.

The Troglodytes tried to duck behind the Shell-Kin, but the feral horde kept pulling them out into the open. The glass storm began to shred the gray skin of the workers. They were going to be flayed alive.

“What’s going on?!”

“Why so many disasters at the same time?!”

“Is the Lord punishing us?!”

Suddenly, the ground shook with a massive, loud thumping.

“What now?!”

“Another danger?!”

Huge silhouettes emerged from the blinding black storm. The Crag-Goliaths had arrived. Oros’s followers had seen the storm from the excavation site and marched out to intercept the convoy. Towering over twenty feet tall, the Goliaths possessed skin made of literal bedrock. The high-speed glass shards simply bounced off their stony bodies harmlessly.

The Goliaths charged directly into the fray. They formed a massive, impenetrable circle around Red’s expeditionary force, taking the brunt of the glass storm and physically crushing the feral pilgrims under their massive stone boots. The allied forces had arrived just in time.

Up in the Void, Red was not watching the rescue as it wasn’t a life threatening issue for them. Instead, he was entirely focused on a secondary screen.

He had paused a frame of the battle and zoomed in on the corpses of the feral pilgrims lying in the ash. Red opened the System diagnostic tool and scanned their biology.

[WARNING: ANOMALOUS CODE DETECTED]

Red leaned forward, his eyes narrowing at the glowing red text. The pilgrims were not just starving humans driven mad by the loss of their god. Their internal code was corrupted, rewritten by an external force. Black, static-filled veins pumped a digital virus through their physical bodies.

“The Void-Eater,” Red whispered in the dark.

He finally understood the true threat of his enemy. The Void-Eater did not just consume gods and leave their territories empty. It infected the surviving followers. It turned them into a mindless, spreading plague.

It was a biological virus designed to consume the remaining factions from the ground up. And it was spreading.

The northern border of the continent was not just facing an invading army. It was facing an actively spreading glitch in reality.

Red closed the diagnostic window. He needed to accelerate the continental highway, and he needed to do it immediately.

The howling wind died. The black glass-ash storm broke apart as quickly as it had formed, leaving the eastern plains in dead silence.

The feral humans were entirely wiped out. The razor-sharp winds had shredded the corrupted pilgrims down to the bone, leaving nothing but scattered, static-laced ash across the wasteland floor.

The massive Crag-Goliaths stepped forward, breaking their impenetrable defensive circle. They were literal walking mountains of bedrock. Their leader, a towering giant with deep cracks glowing with amber energy, slammed a massive stone fist against his chest in a heavy, booming salute.

Gorak mirrored the gesture, his star-iron gauntlet cracking against his chest plate.

The Goliaths immediately escorted the exhausted supply convoy through the eastern ridges.

They led Red’s forces down into their sprawling, terraced quarry-city. The Goliath Chief officially welcomed the Warlord and the Inquisitor, offering them a massive cavern to house the Shell-Kin and secure their equipment.

The Chief looked down at the battered Troglodytes and the acid-scarred, smoking armor of the metallic Kobolds.

He offered them shelter and a full day to sleep. They had been dragging heavy iron for days and had just survived a brutal gauntlet.

Gorak ignored the offer to rest. He pointed a thick thumb back toward the plains.

“What were those things?” the Warlord asked.

The Goliath Chief let out a deep, grinding sigh that sounded like shifting boulders. “They used to be men. Their god was eaten by the Void. Without a tether, their minds broke and their bodies rotted. They became a plague.”

The Chief pointed up at the clearing sky. “But the world hates them. Whenever those corrupted hordes gather in large numbers, the sky turns black. The wasteland always summons a glass storm to sweep them away.”

Goliath Chief gestured toward the comfortable, hollowed-out stone barracks.

Gorak shook his head. The Warlord adjusted the heavy straps of his bone armor and gripped the hauling chains of his transport sled. Beside him, Iron-Scale ignored his acid burns and silently polished the blade of his scythe.

“We decline,” Gorak rumbled, his voice echoing off the quarry walls. “We bleed for the Lord. We do not have time to sleep in comfortable caves. Point us toward the Leviathan fossil. We start the extraction right now.”

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