Lazy Salvation

The army had underestimated the Narkals.

This wasn't the first time they had done so, and despite doing their best not to fall into the same trap, they still did.

After all, some things remain unimaginable, no matter how much you try to exaggerate them in your own mind.

Some things... such as the number of Narkals.

The culling they'd performed before the march should have left the surrounding territories sparse for at least a couple of days. Instead, from the third day of resumed movement, the scouts returned with reports that didn't add up: the hordes had thickened again, faster than any natural recovery could account for.

It didn't take long to identify the contributing factor.

For the last stretch of the campaign, Lola had maintained a near-constant presence among the soldiers. She walked the supply lines, attended command meetings, sat with the injured, shared meals with unit commanders… and the soldiers loved her for all of it.

The problem was the same equation: every hour she spent among them was an hour she wasn't killing Narkals. The surplus had to go somewhere.

It went into the next wave.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know the consequences of her actions, but the cultists that had appeared with increasing frequency since the Maria incident made staying necessary.

These ones were different from the usual infiltrators. They could call on their patron's strength without ritual preparation, and they used it to reshape flesh mid-combat in ways that made killing them costly. Lola had taken personal responsibility for hunting them before they could bury themselves deeper in the army's structure.

So the army fought heavier, and a substitute stepped forward.

***

The soldiers of the combined army knew Seraphine before she ever set foot on a battlefield.

They knew her from the clinic tents, where she was one of the few who moved through rows of injured men with a brightness that had no business existing in those places.

Of course, they also knew her from the stories: the Saintess who could knit a soldier back together after a Narkal had opened him from sternum to gut, the woman who had healed thousands each day, and now, her latest accomplishment:

The youngest Transcendent in Seravelle's recorded history.

What they didn't know was what she looked like working at scale.

They learned as soon as she joined the front line.

Just like now... when a Narkal horde poured out of a ravine in numbers that swallowed the vanguard's formation before the warning horns could finish sounding.

Seraphine was already moving.

She didn't go to the front directly; instead, she moved laterally through the ranks, mana threads spreading outward as she walked, one hand raised and lips moving without pause.

Her Soulweaver's Benediction touched soldier after soldier, mending the wounds they'd already taken while doing something else beneath the surface: casting a certain spell that would soon become her most iconic one.

"God takes the souls at the time of their death, and those that do not die during their sleep." The chant did not cease even as injuries mended.

"...He takes your souls by night and knows what you have done by day."

"Then He keeps those for whom death has been decreed, and returns the others until their appointed time, raising them again so that their term may be fulfilled.

...In this are signs for those who reflect.

In Your name, O Lord—I die, and I live."

The soldiers it touched stopped hesitating. This wasn't the first time they had come under the spell, and they knew what to do.

Then she cast it...

"Undeath."

Soldiers started glowing with a mysterious white aura. Yet they showed no sign of confusion; instead, they simply threw themselves back into the fray.

But this time, fear was absent. More than that... they fought with growing excitement, as though they couldn't wait to tear the monsters apart, even at the cost of tearing apart their own bodies.

A sergeant took a Narkal blade through the stomach and kept moving. A younger soldier beside him lost most of his left arm at the elbow and swung his remaining sword without breaking stride.

Neither of them fell. Seraphine was there within thirty seconds, healing and closing both wounds before either man had fully processed what had happened.

She did not worry about the possibility of their deaths as she leisurely healed them, and neither did they.

...all thanks to Undeath.

It was a spell she had developed under the Kingmaker's tutelage when he was teaching her magic—one she had spent years honing and upgrading during her time as the vampire consort.

Now, it was no longer solely about healing, but was instead intertwined with soul magic.

The principle was stasis.

The body continued to function at a baseline level regardless of the structural damage it received. Fatal injuries could be ignored. Basically... the body refused to acknowledge the final consequence until the spell's duration ended—or until the brain was destroyed.

Her mana whispers moved through the vanguard faster than the Narkals did.

The morale didn't just hold; it flipped. Men who had been fighting on the back foot began pressing forward because dying had stopped feeling like the most likely outcome.

This story originates from NovelFire. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Banner Of One Heart."

Seraphine rode that shift with her newest Path skill.

An illusory banner rose into the sky, visible only to her and those under its effects.

–Ahhh!

–Kill!!!

–Destroy them!!

The soldiers beneath it found the conviction they'd been running on fumes to maintain suddenly replenished by some source they couldn't identify.

CRUNCH—

Far from collapsing, the vanguard broke through the Narkal line in under an hour.

When the dust settled, the soldiers looked back to find Seraphine still moving among them on her horse. She healed those with fatal wounds before finally releasing the stasis of her spell.

Undying Saintess.

That was what they were calling her by nightfall.

"How ironic... The word I refused to choose as a Thema came back and latched onto me anyway." Seraphine laughed helplessly as the distant cheers of the soldiers continued to reach her.

***

Alice's contribution was quieter… and considerably more fatal.

She held a tool that had no business being on this continent in her hands: a sniper rifle.

It had taken a month to build, and she had opinions about everything that had gone wrong with the first four prototypes. The fifth satisfied her completely.

She held it with a touch of pride. It was a month's work that had paid off exactly as planned, after all. The mithril barrel alone had required three separate reformulations before it could achieve the accuracy she intended.

The reason for building this unorthodox weapon was twofold.

One, she was looking for another way to take advantage of her lover's absurd perception without having to climb on top of him just to hurl spells.

With this, she could use his senses to locate monsters and snipe them from kilometers away.

There had been countless times when Ashen could sense an ambush long before it happened but was physically too far away to intervene.

"With this... he will just have to see them. I will do the rest." She caressed the long white barrel...

The second reason she built it was that she'd been waiting for the flying threats.

They started appearing not long after the army resumed its march: winged Narkals ranging in size from a large dog to a draft horse, having apparently concluded that attacking from above bypassed most of the army's defensive formations. They were right. The casualties during the first two hours of contact were ugly.

Soldiers couldn't afford to watch the sky and the ground at the same time, and the aerial units were fast enough that most conventional countermeasures arrived several seconds too late.

Alice set up two hundred meters behind the main line, lying prone atop an elevated slab of ruined stone.

She was sharing Ashen's perception from a distance. Through his extended senses, she tracked aerial units at ranges her own eyes couldn't resolve.

BANG—

The first bullet detonated a frost edict on impact. The winged Narkal had been forty meters above the army's center column and moving at full speed. After the shot, it wasn't moving at all.

The ones who witnessed it searched for the shooter. The sound gave them a general direction. They dove toward it.

BANG— BANG—

Neither of them arrived.

By the end of that engagement, the surviving aerial units had learned not to dive toward that particular patch of ground. What they hadn't learned yet was that Alice repositioned after each volley and started over.

She kept harvesting them.

And each time, they died a little bit differently.

If they were in a horde, the bullet expanded and detonated into an area of effect spell.

If they were armored, the bullet had a penetrating quality.

If they were slippery, the bullet honed on them.

As to how such effects could manifest in a seemingly ordinary weapon? This was a creation of hers after all, so how could it be mundane?

The rifle allowed her to increase the velocity of her bullets depending on how much mana she fed it due to a preprogrammed spell installed in it.

But the kicker was in the bullets themselves, or more precisely, in the mechanism that allowed her to imbue her spells into them.

So, in short, Alice was combining her spells with the lethality and range of a bullet.

Below, soldiers began pointing skyward when a Narkal suddenly burst or dropped without visible cause, searching for something they couldn't locate.

It didn’t stop them from putting a name on it, though. And just like that, Alice gained yet another title. This one was luckily much more respectable than the “Bedchamber general.”

The Pale Reaper.

Alice herself had no opinion about this. She was busy reloading.

***

Another woman aside from those two was making waves; this one had no special title, and she didn't need one.

Her methods weren't theatrical. She had no trump card that redefined what surviving meant, nor did she harvest lives from distances that made her seem like an act of the divine.

She had a katana, a cavalry unit that moved with her like a single organism, and the combined experience of her riders shaped into a formation she had designed herself.

What she had was consistency.

Every push, every rally, every counter-charge... Lapis was somewhere in the thick of it, and the Narkals that thought they'd found the edge of the human line typically found her instead.

She didn't overextend or grandstand. She went wherever the gap was and closed it, doing so with such regularity that the soldiers around her began to treat it as inevitable.

The moment they saw a breach, their first thought wasn't how to handle it—it was that she would handle it any second now.

And despite not matching the fame of her big sister and her friend, death remained the same. A rifle shot from two hundred meters and a katana cut from arm's length arrived at the same destination. Lapis simply made sure she was always the one making the delivery.

The soldiers in her unit didn't call her anything dramatic. They called her Boss, yet they looked ready to lay down their lives for her despite the somewhat informal appellation.

...Because they had already owed them to her long ago.

***

Alice made the call on the ninth day after Seraphine's deployment to the front lines.

Seraphine and Lapis operating as separate units was a resource allocation problem, and she had been treating it as one ever since she'd started modeling their respective outputs.

The math was clean. Seraphine's Undeath and Banner of One Heart had a comfortable ceiling of around a thousand soldiers before mana became the constraint. Lapis's cavalry unit sat just under that number. The overlap was total.

She sent the order through the command chain in two sentences.

Neither Seraphine nor Lapis objected, which was efficient.

What happened when Lapis's steadiness met Seraphine's light was something Alice had predicted numerically and underestimated in practice. She watched it unfold from her elevated position during their first joint engagement, then revised her notes afterward.

The soldiers behind them entered a collective fever.

Lapis moved at the front, her katana cutting with the same clean economy it always had. Seraphine kept pace just behind, Banner overhead and healing threads always exactly where they were needed.

Something passed between the two women like a current and spread through the soldiers between them. Lapis's certainty was transmitted through muscle and movement. Seraphine's conviction came through the soul.

Together, they produced the feeling that victory was simply the next thing that would happen, and the soldiers fought accordingly.

Less than a thousand of them. Regularly clearing ground that should have required ten times their number.

By the time the second metropolis came into sight, their reputation had already traveled ahead of them through the army's rumor network.

The soldiers who hadn't fought alongside them had already heard.

Now, no one still thought of them as women who had merely ended up at the front of a war for various reasons.

A Saintess who only knew how to heal? The way she pulverized monsters with her uncanny strength and long whip had wiped that thought away. After all, she could borrow Ashen's physical strength whenever she wanted.

A woman riding on the coattails of her brother? Lapis Hart didn't ride on anyone's coattails. She simply rode, and the Narkals learned to dread the sound of hooves.

A bedwarmer who slept her way to authority? Alice's aerial kill count sat at sixty-three thousand after just four days. The army had stopped losing soldiers to the sky.

These were not mere women anyone could casually dismiss anymore; they were calamities.

…Three calamities, orbiting the largest one, which had by then developed the habit of clearing the path ahead with a casual thoroughness almost akin to someone removing obstacles he found mildly irritating, leaving them free to descend upon whatever remained without ever looking over their shoulders.

But despite all of this... by the time the second metropolis fell, the human army had gathered a new set of problems.

The Sin Lords were thinking of pulling back.