Chapter 196: THE LEGION’S LAST STAND
Ash fell like snow over the battlefield—soft, silent, and wholly out of place.
Shia stood at the edge of the Rift-blasted wasteland, where the fortress gates had once stood. Now there was only ruin, and beyond it, war. The sky above bled light in the wrong direction, and reality twitched like a sick animal trying to wake from a nightmare. The goblin phalanx waited behind her, shields braced, eyes fixed not on the horizon, but on her.
They were warriors reborn from a war that should have ended. Veterans of a dozen deaths. Goblins, humans, fragments of old spirits sealed into shells of flesh and metal. Whatever they had been, now they were one legion.
And this was their last stand.
A ripple passed through the ranks as the first shape emerged from the breach—an entity too large for physical space, limbs phasing in and out of dimensions like broken reflections. Eyes—dozens of them—blinked in patterns that hurt to look at. A dark-touched brute, bent by the void and dripping with the raw stench of cosmic decay.
Shia gripped her glaive tighter. Beneath the metal, her fingers trembled.
Not from fear. From pressure.
The Network pulsed inside her mind, the emerald strands that connected her to every soldier shimmering with unbearable tension. So many lives braided together. So much will resting on one heartbeat.
She raised her weapon.
The phalanx moved.
The first clash came like thunder. Spears drove into shifting flesh, only to be absorbed into probability. The creature turned inside out and screamed in backwards time. A shield-bearer vanished mid-chant, his entire concept of defense unmade by a burst of inverted logic.