They ascended via the Gargoyle’s Ribcage, a twisted lattice of external flying buttresses that looked like the skeleton of a dragon picked clean by vultures. The stone was slick with Weeping-Moss that translucent, jelly-like fungus that glows faintly when you step on it making the climb feel like crawling up a giant, cold tongue.

  The jump nearly killed him. Wilhelm landed on the slate roof of the Armory Spire with a grunt that tasted like copper and regret. His boots skidded on the wet tiles, sending a few into the abyss below. He barely caught the gargoyle’s chipped ear.

  “Graceful,” Brandan rumbled, landing next to him like a falling boulder. The impact shook the whole structure.

  “I aimed for style points,” Wilhelm wheezed, checking his belt pouch. The potions were safe. The spoon was safe.

  Below them, the courtyard was a grinder.

  Steel flashed in the rain. Magic bloomed like toxic flowers green fire, blue ice, white lightning. Screams were the only music.

  Gutrum landed last, heavy but stable. He looked over the edge. "Baldur’s line is holding," he said, voice tight. "But the archers on the west flank... they are slaughtering our flank."

  Wilhelm peered through the gloom. On the lower terrace, fifty meters away, a squad of Shadowgrove Archers (Tier 2 Tincti) was raining death. Their arrows glowed purple.

  "Target rich environment," Wilhelm muttered. His ring pulsed.

  "We can't reach them," Brandan growled, hefting the Starfall Blade. "Not without flying."

  "Or falling with style," Wilhelm grinned. "Parkour?"

  He pointed to a series of gargoyles and buttresses connecting their roof to the archer’s terrace. It was a suicide run. A slippery, wet, narrow path of stone over a drop that ended in the sewers.

  "You're insane," Gutrum said.

  "I'm Level 16," Wilhelm replied, tapping his chest. "And I need the XP. Last one there buys the drinks."

  He jumped.

  He didn't land on the first gargoyle; he bounced off it. He scrabbled for purchase, stone scraping skin, and pushed off again. He was a blur of blue coat and silver mask.

  Behind him, Brandan roared and followed, smashing stone where he landed, creating his own path.

  The archers saw them. Ten turned, bows rising.

  "Incoming!" Wilhelm screamed.

  He didn't block. He didn't dodge. He activated Sheet Ice (Tier 1).

  He coated the landing zone in slippery frost. The first two archers fired, missed as they slipped, and tumbled off the edge.

  Wilhelm landed in a slide, rapier out. The third archer, a woman with a mask like a skull, drew a shortsword.

  She was fast. Tier 2 Speed.

  She slashed. Wilhelm ducked, feeling the wind of the blade. He countered. Not with steel. With fire.

  Skill: Fireball (Level 2)

  Effect: Increased Radius.

  Cost: 263 ml

  The flame burst from his hand point-blank. It wasn't a ball; it was a shotgun blast of heat. It caught her in the chest. She screamed, armor melting, and fell back. Wilhelm finished her with a thrust to the eye.

  Three dead. Seven to go.

  Brandan crashed into the melee. He didn't need magic. He had a Legendary Sword. The Starfall Blade cut through a stone parapet and the man behind it like they were cheese.

  Gutrum was a wall of earth, shielding them from incoming fire.

  "XP is tasty tonight!" Wilhelm yelled, drunk on adrenaline and blood loss.

  His ring was flashing red.

  [ VITALITY: 2,686 / 5,000 ml ] (Bleeding).

  He ignored it.

  A Shadow Knight (Elite - 50k SP) dropped from the shadows above, aiming for Gutrum's back.

  "Father!" Wilhelm didn't think. He threw himself in the way.

  He raised his left arm. Ice Shield (Tier 1).

  The ice formed just as the shadow blade hit. CRACK.

  The shield shattered instantly. The blade bit into Wilhelm’s arm. Deep.

  Pain white-hot and blinding.

  He fell back, clutching his bleeding arm.

  But Brandan was there. He grabbed the Shadow Knight by the throat and threw him bodily off the tower. "No one touches my brother!"

  Wilhelm lay there, panting. He dragged himself to the dead Elite Archer he'd killed earlier. He ripped the pouch from her belt.

  "Nice," Wilhelm wheezed, blood dripping from his arm. "Profit."

  The terrace was clear.

  He looked at the carnage. His stats were blinking.

  "Wilhelm!" Gutrum was kneeling beside him. "Your arm."

  "Tis but a scratch," Wilhelm quoted, grinning behind his mask, his teeth red. He pulled a Crimson Vial from his belt. Pop. Glug.

  The metallic taste of alchemy washed down his throat.

  [ POTION CONSUMED: +500 ml ]

  Vitality rose to 2.600. Safe zone.

  "Let's go," Wilhelm said, struggling up. "The night is young, and there are at least a million XP left on this battlefield."

  Brandan laughed, a deep rumble. "You’re a madman, Wil."

  "I'm a businessman," Wilhelm corrected, wiping his blade. "And business is booming."

  The main doors of Kynoboros were carved from Spirit-Ivory, massive slabs taken from the tusks of the Leviathans the Pontifex Invana Celestborne hunted to extinction in the Void-Sea. Crossing the threshold felt like walking into a migraine; the air inside hummed with Static-Sanctity, a high-pitched buzz that tasted like ozone and burnt sugar.

  It was the white that did it.

  After years lifetimes, felt like of rotting under that black concrete sky, breathing gray fog and basalt dust, the inside of Kynoboros wasn’t just bright. It was an assault. A polished, white marble throat that went on for kilometers, vanishing into a singularity of sterile, holy light.

  We marched in. Five hundred Knights. The Angels.

  Boots on stone. Clack. Clack.

  Wilhelm hated it. The silence was wrong. Sticky. It clung to the back of his neck like a wet cobweb. Earlier, this place had been a riot. Priests running, monks looting their own altars. Now? Empty pews. The smell of ozone and old wax, thick enough to chew on.

  "Baldur," Wilhelm hissed, grabbing at his own collar because it felt too tight suddenly. "Baldur, stop. The silence... it’s heavy. We’re walking down a gullet."

  "The gullet is where the enemy is," Baldur said. He didn't even look left or right. Eyes front. Grey Perfection. "If they retreated to the catacombs, we secure the altar. That is the procedure."

  Procedure. Always the damn procedure.

  They hit the center. The crossing. The sun of this wretched place.

  And then CRASH.

  No magic. Just physics. A portcullis, iron thick as a man's leg, dropping like a guillotine behind them. Chains cut. Gravity doing the rest.

  The exit wasn't just closed; it was erased.

  "Ambush!" Brandan roared. He swung his hammer at a marble pew, shattering it, looking for something to hit that would bleed. "Cowards! Face me!"

  Nothing came out. No archers. No swords.

  Instead, high up in the vaulted gloom... a shifting sound. Glass on metal.

  Mirrors.

  Hundreds of them. Huge crystal lenses meant to bounce holy light during Mass. Alexander hadn't built a fortress; he’d just angled the furniture.

  Click. Click.

  Angling down.

  "Shields up!" Baldur barked.

  The order was instinct. It was also useless.

  The Enmagic array hummed a mosquito buzz that drilled into your teeth. Then the light hit.

  It wasn’t fire. It was just brightness. Unfiltered, concentrated luminance focusing into a single kill-zone. The nave became a convection oven.

  Wilhelm felt it instantly. He wasn’t wearing plate, just leather and coat. It felt like opening an industrial furnace with your face. The air shimmered. He scrambled, practically clawing the floor, diving behind a thick marble pillar. He curled into a ball, hands over his head, whining. A pitiful sound. He didn't care.

  The knights? They were canned food.

  Five hundred men in conductive steel.

  Polished. Steel.

  It took maybe three seconds. First, the oil on their joints popped and sizzled. Then the paint bubbled.

  Then they started screaming.

  It wasn’t a war cry. It was a kitchen sound. The sound of lobster hitting the water. High, thin, frantic. They were braising.

  "Help me!" one screamed, clawing at his helmet. His gauntlets had fused to the gorget. He tore at his own face, blistering his fingers, dancing a jerky, horrific jig before he fell.

  Smoke rose from the vents in his visor.

  Pink smoke.

  It smelled sweet. Like roast pork.

  Wilhelm gagged, dry-heaving into the stone floor. It was sickeningly rich. It smelled like Sunday dinner.

  Panic broke the line. Men ran. They ran blindly, crashing into pews, cooking in their own shells. Brandan was bellowing in rage, swinging wildly, backing away from the light, useless against an enemy he couldn't smash.

  "HALT."

  The voice wasn't loud. It was hard. Like granite grinding.

  Baldur.

  He stood in the center of the beam.

  His gray armor had lost its shine; it was dull, dark gray now. Steam hissed off his pauldrons. His face... gods. The skin was tomato red, tight, shiny. Sweat boiled the second it touched his brow.

  He must have been in agony. His nerves had to be screaming.

  But he wasn't screaming. He wasn't even grimacing. He was... calculating.

  He turned his head. The movement was jerky, rusted. He looked at the scattering light beams. He looked at the corpses piling up. He looked at the shadows cast by the piles of dead men.

  "The heat acts as a fluid," Baldur rasped. His lips cracked, bleeding. "Refraction angles. Forty-five degrees."

  He looked at his panicking men.

  "Angels! Second and Third Cohort! Pile the dead!"

  Nobody moved. They were too busy dying.

  Baldur walked over to a twitching knight Ser Hollard, maybe? who was thrashing on the floor. Baldur didn't help him up. He grabbed the man by the breastplate and heaved him upright.

  "Hold position," Baldur ordered the dying man.

  He shoved him into the path of the beam. The man screamed as the light focused on his back, but the shadow he cast... it was long. It was cool.

  Baldur stepped into that shadow.

  "Formation!" Baldur roared, and this time, the authority cut through the pain. "Use the casualties! Form a tortoise wall! Lift them up!"

  Wilhelm peeked around his pillar, horrified. "Baldur... you can't..."

  "If they are dead, they are equipment," Baldur said flatly. He didn't look at Wilhelm. He grabbed another body this one limp and slammed it vertically against a pew, creating a barrier.

  The remaining knights, seeing their Lord burning but working, snapped out of the panic. Drill took over. Muscle memory.

  They grabbed the fallen. Friends. Brothers.

  They lifted the smoking corpses.

  Walls of meat and steel.

  "Advance," Baldur commanded.

  They marched. A phalanx of grotesque shields. The light battered against the dead, sizzling the flesh of the fallen, but the living behind them... they moved.

  Baldur walked at the front. He didn't have a corpse-shield. He used his own shoulder to shove the heavy formation forward. The light cooked the left side of his face. His eyebrow was gone. His ear was a ruin.

  He didn't blink.

  He stared at the Altar like he was reading a ledger and finding a discrepancy he intended to correct personally.

  "Discipline," Baldur croaked, marching over a melted gauntlet. "Discipline beats geometry."

  Wilhelm stayed behind his pillar, trembling. He looked at Brandan. The giant was staring at Baldur with something close to fear.

  This wasn't bravery. Bravery was overcoming fear.

  This was a complete lack of regard for the concept of suffering. Baldur had looked at the situation, realized that human bodies blocked the heat, and applied the solution.

  Baldur didn't scream. He didn't rally them with speeches of glory. He just marched, sizzling, smelling of burnt iron and law, forcing the universe to bend to his stubbornness.

  "They're monstrous," Wilhelm whispered to the dust. "We're all monstrous."

  At the far end, near the altar, a figure in polished silver armor stood up. Ser Alexander. He held an apple. He dropped it.

  Alexander’s smile faltered. He looked at the smoking, relentless block of steel marching through his death-trap. He looked at the man leading it a half-cooked thing that walked with mechanical precision.

  For the first time all night, the Violet Eye looked afraid.

  Because you can't intimidate an avalanche. And you can't hurt a man who has decided that pain is just an inconvenient logistics issue.