Alarm bells began to sound throughout the city. Red flares shooting into the night air casting eerie shadows that shimmered and shuttered, glinting off the metal buckles and drawn weapons around Theo.

  The guard responded instantly. Likely having at least considered some sort of response to a sudden breach in the walls. While the people who hadn’t been properly trained milled about for a few moments. A commander snapped out orders and Theo felt a skill bolster her strength.

  “Move out! Assigned stations!” The booming voice echoed out from where she knew the commander of the guard was stationed.

  “Let’s go!” Vara urged her squad to move.

  Most of the guard left the walls, while some stayed at their posts. Other people began giving their own orders, small groups of adventurers who were used to working together split off into the city, while lone operators either took up vacant positions on walls or followed the guard into the city.

  It was chaotic but it seemed the people of this city had some experience. If this had happened back on Earth, Theo could only imagine how people would have reacted.

  There was less panic and now more focused determination. The painful waiting was gone and now they at least had a goal to focus on.

  Theo followed Vara’s squad from the rooftops alongside Barns and Mels, both of them being scouts and more mobile, and helped direct the squad as they began to come across packs of large rats.

  These packs threw themselves at everyone they encountered with rabid intensity, but for the moment the groups were small enough that Grett and Vara cut through them with relative ease as Barns and Mels provided firesupport from above.

  The rooftops weren’t completely safe either, and Theo made it her focus to keep the smaller groups of rats that had scrambled their way up from drawing close enough to impede either of the Scouts movements. Her ability to run through the air with [wind step] let her cover more ground than the two scouts and her body enhancement skill combined with [geists] made it trivial to intercept anything long before it truly became a problem.

  There was constant screaming and shouts of battle as the density of the rats increased the further they went into the city. Theo’s heart was pumping with the thrill of the fight as Vara and her squad made it to a square that was already being rapidly reinforced with barricades and the like. Either magical or mundane, walls had sprung up as civilians and other noncombatants evacuated into prebuilt shelters that Theo had only learned about recently.

  The city was no stranger to monster attacks and people seemed to have practiced the evacuation in an orderly manner.

  Still, the rats were everywhere. Theo was moving to regroup with Vara’s squad to see what she could do to help, but a man screaming for help caught her attention.

  He was sprinting full tilt down an alleyway as a swarm of smaller rats surged behind him.

  Urging her body to move, she charged through the air. Using a well timed wind step to prevent herself from hitting the ground hard, she sent a slash of air at the swarm disrupting them as she scooped the man up and fled to the rooftops before she carried him down to the secured square.

  Vara gave her a nod and Theo took off again. She was a lot more mobile than most people she had seen fighting and decided to use that to save whoever she could.

  More than once over the next half hour, Theo came across occupants of the city held up in their homes fending off rats trying to break through their doors. She helped where she could, but oftentimes she had arrived too late and had to shove dark feelings down as she moved on from the ruined homes and cold bodies she found.

  ‘Where are they all coming from?’ She thought to herself as another pack of tier two rats climbed up onto the building she was currently standing on.

  The guard had secured several squares and were effectively holding off the hordes but it was clear they were hard pressed. On one occasion her Theo’s timely intervention helped push back a pack of rats that had climbed over the bodies of their fallen brethren in order to climb over the barricades of one of the squares.

  Even as time dragged on, more rats appeared and Theo had to stop for a short breather at the square where Vara’s squad was.

  “What do we do?” Theo asked Vara who seemed to be the commanding officer for her square.

  “I’ve received a report that the vermin lord is pushing on the walls with another host of rats. It doesn’t look good. The commander has mobilized everyone for a strike on it, but they are giving up the walls in order to do so.” Vara’s rifle snapped up as a rat flung itself from a nearby rooftop at one of the defenders.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Theo took a breath before looking in the direction of the wall. She wouldn’t be much help here, she had found less and less people on the last of her excursions and the secured squares seemed to be holding for now.

  “Go. You’ll do more out there than here.” Vara said, seeming to hear Theo’s thoughts.

  “O-Ok. Stay safe.” Theo said, only hesitating for a moment. Scared to leave her friends on their own. But she knew they were capable and Vara was right.

  Without having to escort anyone, or kill rats. Theo moved like a ghost across the rooftops as she avoided fighting to save her energy for what was to come.

  Commander Sartha grunted as he kicked away one of the new variants of rats the vermin lord had shown up with, it was the size of a small horse and had long claws that easily punched through the leather most of his guards were wearing. Even at tier five the tier three rats were a threat to him if he was careless, and even more so to the lower tier people around him.

  The city only had so many people strong enough to deal with them directly and his boosting skills only went so far to mitigate the damage they could do if left unchecked.

  Thankfully, the larger rats weren’t very common, and the intelligence that was guiding them used them more as wrecking balls when they would have been more effectively used in other ways.

  With the guilds help, the guards were scything their way through the hordes between them and the vermin lord, but it was still a tough fight. People were tiring and that led to mistakes, mistakes that were tiring out the strongest of them as they rushed to prevent failings in their lines.

  The Seekers were a more independent organization and so their members focused on tasks similar to what Sartha was doing right now, but the Hounds and the Slayers were covering their own without much aid given to the guard.

  He was spitting mad at how they were using this situation as another political maneuver, but couldn’t do anything about it at the moment. They might not be helping as effectively as they could, but everybody thrown at this problem was another to draw the rats' attention away from them.

  He was rushing to another part of the line as they trudged forwards when a solid bar of wind magic tore apart the rat that had been dragging one of the guard forwards and away from his fellows.

  Even as other rats swarmed to attack the prone guard, a barely visible shimmer of wind flew to hover over the man. A sword of wind splitting hair and hide just long enough for the man to be dragged back to a safer position.

  Then a woman he recognized from a report he had received from one of his captains landed at one of the weaker points in the line. Her sword flashing out with blades of wind that brought the guard there a brief moment of reprieve.

  His eyes tracked her even as she moved along the line. Helping at opportune moments or even sprinting further away from the lines to deal with the largest of the rats before they became a problem.

  The report had only barely mentioned that she was a combat focused tier two, but it seemed she had tiered up since then and was making good use of her strength.

  It was hard to say one person made a difference, she couldn’t be everywhere. But that didn’t stop her from trying. Any moment it looked like someone would be dragged down under the living tide of rats, and that there was no hope to save them, she was there. Leaving dead rats in her wake.

  There was no way a tier three was so strong, but all of Sartha’s senses told him otherwise. Maybe she was a noble from the inner kingdom? Or a well trained guild member? She was wearing the guards armor, but he knew for a fact she wasn’t a new member. He had to review and approve of all of those.

  Sartha killed another group of rats. His long sword barely slowing as his tier five strength tore through the lesser beasts with ease. Answers would come later, for now he had work to do.

  His voice boomed out as he used his skill [encourage] the skill would grow less effective on the same people with each use, but there was an emotional aspect to the skill that would be bolstered by the strength and relief the woman had brought with her intervention.

  More avatars of air moved through the back of the battle lines. Killing anything that spilled over the shields of the guards. Yet again providing further relief to the tiring guard.

  Whoever she was, he’d have to thank her when this was all over.

  He glanced at the vermin lord, sitting behind the waves of rats it produced from the swarm supporting it at its feet. He hadn’t heard of a monster like this before and was even surprised that the system had given it a name.

  [Rift Devouring Vermin Lord]

  The damn thing was tier five, the diviners had said it was still tier four when they originally planned to push out and eliminate it. But it had grown in the last few days, and now that was going to be a problem.

  It stood three times the size of any man, and was bipedal. It wielded a staff adorned with rat skulls and seemed almost gleeful in actions as it watched the guards moving closer to it.

  Mana cannons had targeted it but the shots were wasted as it simply relocated through its own magic to a different portion of its swarm. Sartha knew the only reason it wasn’t inside the city right now was because of the extensive wards the walls had placed on them.

  If the thing had been smarter, it would have overwhelmed them with the increased size of its swarm before breaching the city, but it hadn’t and that gave them a chance.

  They were drawing close when he saw the woman rush out ahead of the lines. Moving directly towards the giant rat.

  She arrived in front of it, sprinting through the air as she sent out several pointed blasts of air that the vermin lord blocked with the bodies of smaller rats. Tides of the swarm climbing up like ants tried to reach her, but she moved faster than the towers could form.

  She moved to directly attack the monster, but it relocated itself like it had done with the mana cannons, and with her drawing its attention the pressure on the guard loosened and they cleared the distance more rapidly than before as the woman used the creatures targeting of her to lead groups of the animals into the lines of the Slayers or the Hounds.

  Sartha would have laughed if he wasn’t so busy right now.