Chapter 205: You Call For Light

Yuta had been a soldier for ninety-seven years and served as an enforcer at Stormfall for forty-five years.

He had fought beasts in the desert, pirates on the coast, and twice, he had stood in the shield wall when the Rune Beasts came down from the mountains in the spring floods. He had seen men die, and had seen them die badly, but he had never seen anything like this.

The tide rose from the hole like something the earth was vomiting up.

Bodies pressed against bodies, limbs tangled, claws scrabbling at stone and flesh alike. They came in a wave that filled the alley from wall to wall, and they did not stop.

It was almost impossible for a normal mind to describe what was happening, and only instinct pushed Yuta on what he should do next, or he would have a grievous slaughter on his hands.

“Fall back!” Yuta’s voice cut through the chaos, a command honed by decades. “Fall back to the warehouse! Form a line!”

His Enforcers were good. They were better than good. They had trained for this, trained for the day when something crawled out of the dark and tried to take their city.

Yuta wanted to join them, but he knew that this instinct was wrong, and he would better serve his men if he was overlooking this entire battle, and he nodded in appreciation as they fell back in good order, their weapons rising and falling, killing the spawns that reached them, stepping over the ash that was all that remained.

But the ash was everywhere now. It rose in clouds, choking the air, coating their armor, their faces, their eyes. Every spawn they killed turned to ash, and that ash was filling the alley, filling their lungs, filling the space between them until they could barely see the man beside them.

What made it worse was that this ash seemed to be a bit acidic and poisonous, they had not noticed it at first, but after killing hundreds, the volume of ash in the air was beginning to rise, and it was a good thing that a Fury Forge could hold their breathe for up to forty minutes, but this number dropped drastically when they were exerting themselves.

Thanks to the fact that the alleyway was not deep, the enforcers were quick to return, the first reaching him was Korin.

“How many?” he shouted. The youth had lightning talent that made his sword sing, and he should be a child from the upper district that was sent for experience, something that Yuta found to be laughable, but now, all of that seemed to be such a useless thing to think about.

“Doesn’t matter!” Yuta grabbed Korin’s shoulder and shoved him toward the warehouse. “Move! Bring up a shield and ready for a shieldwall.”

Yuta has two pools of Lumina, granting him double the amount of energy than most average Siphons. Not worrying about pacing himself, Yuta connected to his Flame Aura Talent.

As a Fury Forge, this Talent was very lackluster because the flames he emitted could not leave his skin, but reaching the Mist Phantom level gave him the ability to propel this flame, and over the years, he had learnt how to control fire in a more in-depth manner.

As more of the enforcers began to run past him, Yuta sent a burst of flames overhead, restricting the explosive effect, and the flames poured over the entire warehouse.

With the last of the enforcer running past him, he released the floodgates, and the entirety of the warehouse groaned and began to collapse.

Yuta’s flame had caught the old timber, and the fire was spreading, eating the walls and the ceiling. The heat was immense, a wall of orange and yellow that should have driven back anything that lived.

For a moment, the flame held back the spawn, and Yuta hurried back to the enforcers. He stood at the front; there was not enough shield and not enough men, but this would have to do. One of the first things he had done was to send word back to the Guild with the emergency amulet he had on his wrist.

Yuta wanted to give a short speech to bolster his men as he drew out his blade and coated it with flames when the spawns came through the burning wreckage of the warehouse.

They came through the fire with their skin blistering and their eyes boiling in their sockets, and they did not stop. Yuta would have expected something that was burning to scream, but these abominations never did this, not even when they were being slaughtered.

“Light!” Yuta roared. “Give me light!”

It was believed that fire came from the sun, which was the source of all light, and so, there was a popular slang among Siphons with the talent for fire or whose Lumina Vein Art gave them the ability to control flames, that they controlled light, and even in this tense situation, Yuta still used this same terminology.

This was done deliberately to push his men out of their heads, and it may have worked from the way he saw some of them smile.

The Enforcers with fire talents and arts stepped forward. There were thirty-seven of them, good men and women, their hands raised. They had worked together before and had good compatibility.

There were so many Siphons here with flame speciality due to the fact that their commanding officer had a flaming talent, and this was present in most units across the entire world, as younger Siphons would learn better from those with similar talents.

Flames bloomed between them, like a sun. Yuta pointed his hands over the massive fireball more than six feet across, and he poured his essence inside the flame, and shoved it forward.

“FWOOSH…. BOOM!”

The fireball tore through hundreds of the spawns, and even those that were not touched by the fireball turned to ash, sending a ripple of force that shattered windows across several buildings near this alley.

For a moment, Yuta could see the pit as the powerful fireball had tore its way through hundreds of those abominations and he saw that the pit no longer resembled a hole in the ground, now to him it was like a bloody mouth, and for a moment, there was nothing emerging from this mouth, and Yuta wanted to believe that this nightmare had ended, but he was so wrong.

There was a rumble, and the pit expanded, and to Yuta, it was as if he was looking at a mouth growing wider. The buildings on both sides of the alley collapsed into the growing pit, but they did not even fall for long before they were shattered by tides of bodies in their thousands.

Yuta’s eyes widened in shock as the distance between these creatures and the shield wall was eliminated in the blink of an eye, and he pushed out his talent in a wide arc that covered the blades and the shields of the enforcer with flames.

One of his pools was empty, and his second pool was halfway empty, but Yuta sacrificed all of that power just to keep his people alive long enough for reinforcement to arrive.

“Hold the line!” Yuta’s voice was a whip. “Hold!”

The first wave hit them like a breaking wave. Their warped bodies slammed into shields, claws scrabbled for purchase, and teeth found gaps in armor. The Enforcers held, their blades rising and falling, their formation unbroken.

Spawns died by the dozens, by the score, turning to ash that choked the air and blinded the eyes.

But there was always another. And another. And another.

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