Lazy Salvation

It started like most disasters did: without warning, and all at once.

One moment the perimeter scouts were filing their standard reports, one illustrating the manageable density, another announcing how the eastern flank was clear.

To make it short, there were no unusual convergence patterns. But the next second, the horns were sounding across every section of the camp simultaneously, which was a thing that had never happened before, and the soldiers who heard it understood instinctively that it had no good explanation.

The first wave hit the eastern wall before the stragglers had finished reaching their posts.

It was enormous. While not unprecedented since they'd seen comparable numbers during the campaign, the timing was wrong.

The Narkals were supposed to be thinning after the culling of the past weeks. Instead, what poured out of the dark beyond the perimeter was a number that made their one hundred million strong look small.

They fought it back.

Then the second wave came.

Then the third.

By the morning of the second day, nobody was talking about whether this was unusual. They were too busy.

*

"HOLD THE LEFT FLANK—!"

The shout was Braun's, and it cut through the noise with authority. His shield was already up, braced against two Narkals who had gotten through the line simultaneously, and his feet were planted in the earth like something that had grown there.

SLAM—

The impact sent hairline fractures up his forearm, and he absorbed it without flinching, just shoved back with his whole body until both creatures stumbled, and the soldiers on his right closed the gap.

Three seconds later, the gap had opened somewhere else.

It went on like that.

The Narkals didn't fight with strategy anymore. They just threw themselves at the line in numbers dense enough that attrition alone could break a formation if the soldiers holding it weren't careful.

Careful, in this context, meant not dying when your neighbor went down, not letting the gap stay open for more than two breaths, not looking at the ones still coming over the far ridge and letting the number register.

Most of them had gotten good at that last part.

"Seraphine—!" A soldier on Braun's left took a blade through the thigh at an angle that found the artery. He hit the ground fast, and the blood that followed was the wrong color and moving too quickly.

She was already there.

*

Seraphine hadn't stopped moving in thirty-six hours.

She had learned, in the months of campaign that preceded this, how to move through a battle without becoming part of it in the wrong way; how to read the flow of a fight from the middle of it, and how to know, moments before it happened, where the next body would fall.

She moved perpendicular to the line, always laterally, her horse replaced by her own legs now that the formations were too compact for mounted movement.

The soldier with the arterial cut only felt a blanket of mana wrap around him, and right after, he heard a whisper, as though the Saintess were right beside him.

"...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..."

The mana that spread from her lips was different from ordinary green healing light. It was a soft luminescence that reached the soldiers like the first light of morning.

One by one, they shone like beacons in the darkness, then fought with the ferocity of immortal men.

Because, in a sense, they were. As long as their granter of immortality watched over them from the rear, and as long as they guarded her in return...

Then they were truly an immortal legion.

Vow Imprint activated next, threading into the soldiers' souls. She could feel their convictions through Inner Conviction.

One had a daughter. He had been thinking about her face before the blood loss started pulling him under.

Another wanted to survive above all.

One simply wanted to keep his lover safe.

And so on and so on…

Everyone was latching onto something to anchor themselves. And by feeling each of their convictions, her own kept rousing in turn, because she could not abandon any of them after feeling them shine so brightly within her own heart.

The wounds sealed. The mana carried their convictions back to the surface with it, and the men's breathing steadied.

"T-thank you!"

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One man cried out after she pulled him from the jaws of death.

"Get up." Seraphine didn't glance at him as she kept moving. "She's still waiting."

But being reminded of why he fought was an infinitely greater motivator than any glance from her could have been.

He got up.

And Seraphine was already marching on.

*

The Banner of One Heart had been raised since the first hour and hadn't come down since.

Invisible to anyone who didn't carry a soul it had touched, it hung above the battlefield like a second sky.

The banner looked different depending on who gazed upon it. One could see their domain's flag, another their country's, and some even saw the faces of those dear to them.

It simply reflected what each of them valued most.

The effect was difficult to describe but simple to observe from the outside.

Soldiers who had fought for twenty consecutive hours without sleep were still standing. The exhaustion was there... and it was enormous, but the Banner had given them enough willpower to push it down and keep going no matter what.

It reminded each person beneath it why they were still holding on and unified their spirits under a single collective front.

But Seraphine wasn't merely there to rouse morale and heal anymore. With her new fused Thema, she had become someone who gave strength.

Just like the scene currently unfolding:

She noticed an entire unit pinned against a collapsed barricade. She raised her right hand and cast Concordant Infusion on the unit commander without breaking stride.

The aspect she chose was clarity.

He shone in a pale blue light, and the effect followed immediately. The commander's mana, which had been running hot and scattered after twelve hours of panicked output, started flowing smoothly in an almost absurd fashion.

His next command came out clean and fast through the formation, and the unit responded with equally smooth maneuvers.

Because they too were shining in the same pale light.

They pushed back.

She cast Undeath on the unit's front row before they surged forward, and the white aura coated the pale one surrounding each soldier like armor made of light. Those men knew what it meant. They'd fought under it before. And so, they threw themselves at the Narkal line with reckless abandon.

Behind them, Seraphine kept weaving.

Her Soulweaver's Benediction flowed through the mana threads she'd placed on every soldier she'd healed over the last two days, carrying two things simultaneously: physical mending and a subtle, persistent calm that didn't remove fear but kept it from becoming despair.

She could feel the threads pulling at her mana reserves like roots drawing water through dry soil, hundreds of them at once, each one a person.

‘How long can I hold on…’

Her worries were hers alone. There was no time for dread in the face of these valiant soldiers, after all.

*

Two hundred meters back, Alice was lying prone on the same elevated slab she'd occupied for sixteen hours.

She had not been there continuously for all sixteen; she'd moved a dozen times as the positions below deviated enough to change her angles, but she had been prone for most of them, and her count was somewhere past three thousand. Though she had stopped keeping track because the number wasn't the point.

The point was the sky.

The flying Narkals had returned in force on the second night, apparently having received enough reinforcements from somewhere deeper in the territory to make another attempt. They came in tight formations this time, which was new and suggested a change in the way they were being directed.

Alice adapted without needing to think about it.

BANG—

The bullet expanded mid-flight into a cluster of five before detonating, catching the edge of a tight V-formation. Three Narkals dropped. The other two scattered.

BANG—

One of the two scattered toward her position. She tracked it through Ashen's perception, adjusted by two degrees, and fired once.

Another down.

She reloaded without looking at her hands.

Through their shared perception, she could feel the shape of the battlefield in a way that would have been impossible from her elevation alone.

Ashen was at the center of it all, which was where he always was, and the information that reached her through his senses was vast and detailed: where the next breach would open, which flanks were thinning, which aerial units were clustering for another dive.

She called the breach before it happened. The rifle redirected toward it seconds before the nearest unit commander would have spotted it himself.

She did not consider this remarkable as it was the only sensible use of the situation.

Her mana was beginning to show the strain of two days, but like most things happening all at once, it was just another variable.

She had perhaps another six hours at this output before she needed to reduce the lethality of the spells she was embedding into the bullets, or be forced to use her nine tails.

She fired again, and at the edge of her perception, she saw a pink-haired woman weaving through the battlefield like a spider.

*

Lucia was not supposed to be here.

This was not a complaint. She had made her peace with the fact that the battlefield had a way of deciding where you were regardless of where you'd planned to be, and she had learned to adapt to it.

What she had not planned for was this cultist breakthrough.

There were three of them, which was enough. Twisted Communion's Blessed carried enough regenerative capacity that normal soldiers couldn't hold them, and Lola was occupied on the eastern wall where the main pressure was concentrated.

So Lucia and the soldiers assigned to this wing had to handle it somehow.

Wires came out of her coat one after the other and latched onto the globes of flesh. They were thin enough to disappear in one's peripheral vision and light enough to move before the enemy registered them as a threat.

She didn't fight the way most people did. The fact that she didn't possess the overwhelming power required wasn't lost on her.

What she had was patience, and the willingness to use it to slowly but surely snare her adversaries in her web.

More thin streaks of light shot out, wrapping around another cultist who had yet to lose his human form. The wires coiled around him before he finished his lunge, going taut at the joints and then tighter still, pulling steadily but not lethally enough for his regeneration to trigger.

Soldiers followed her call, throwing ropes and restraints, doing their best not to accidentally damage their flesh and unleash something worse.

The second tried to tackle her before she could free the wires.

The stalemate continued, and she didn't know who would arrive first: their Sin Lord, or the eventual rolling wave of Narkals freeing their trapped prey.

*

CRACK—

The spear shaft broke another skull, and Ashen heaved a sigh after clearing the breach on the northern blockade.

Four days and three nights had passed in the same manner.

During those days and nights, he knew only one word.

Kill.

Kill, kill, kill, kill... and keep killing.

No matter what happened, no matter who screamed or who died. His only duty was to kill.

By the fifth morning, the word rest had lost its meaning entirely. There were rotations among the soldiers; there had to be, or the army would have collapsed from exhaustion before any Narkal could finish the job.

But the rotations were shorter than they used to be, and the soldiers coming off them weren't actually recovering. They sat wherever there was space and waited for their turn to go back.

The healers were running low on consumables. The mages' mana had dried up long ago. The supply lines that had once been at the rear had long since moved to the center of the army because there was no rear to speak of anymore.

The monsters had forced them into a circle, compressing them and tightening around them like a noose.

What held them together was two things.

Lola, whose Togetherness kept cycling through every injury every hour, whose presence alone was the only reason the casualty rate wasn't ten times higher.

And Cornelia, whose every punch caused a small calamity.