On the outskirts of the Crimson Spire, there was nowhere to hide. No tunnels to cower in, no secret passages to traverse. The world had become a solid, jagged mass of unbroken red coral – a petrified, parasitic entity that had devoured this shore thousands of years prior.
Asteria stood upon that calcified surface, overlooking the miserable wretches of her makeshift army. Several hundred people stood with her, their eyes wide and fixed on the oncoming horizon of abominations. Fear lined their irises; their teeth chattered in a rhythmic, terrified staccato.
They all knew a simple, brutal truth: a lot of them were going to die. But the question that haunted the silence was who? Would it be their friends, their comrades, or themselves?
Would any of them truly reach the Spire and go home? Nobody knew. Not even Asteria, and not even their acting goddess, Changing Star.
'I should be able to leave no matter what happens,' Asteria mused, feeling a slight tug in her heart toward a power she couldn't quite name. 'The same way I got here, eh? Entering and exiting the dream realm at will... I'll have to see.
Snapping out of her thoughts, she gazed at the sleepers drowning in their own terror. Asteria stood at the center of the vanguard, supposedly in command of an army – if one could even call this desperate rabble an army.
She wasn't the tallest nor the bulkiest, and to a stranger, it might have been frightening to see someone of such slight stature commanding hundreds of lives. However, every sleeper followed her of their own accord.
In the Forgotten Shore, might makes right. And Asteria was the strongest thing breathing.
Her golden armour flowed over her figure like molten sunlight, capturing the gaze of every onlooker. In her hand was the living longsword of starlight; on her head, a crown fit for a Queen.
Despite the tension and hopelessness, Asteria felt an emotion she hadn't expected.
Worry.
She was worried. Even as an ascended warrior who was virtually untouchable in this forsaken corner of the dream realm, she feared the weight of a wrong decision.
One mistake could extinguish the lives of those she had come to call comrades. That pressure sat on her chest – the cold, heavy fear of failure.
But she had to march. And so, she did.
Nearby, she heard Effie – the huntress – snarl and bellow to the ranks behind them. "Stand your ground, wretches! If anyone runs, I'll kill you myself!"
'Pfft, not like they have anywhere to run... Damnation, this is horrible.' Asteria thought.
If they were going to die, they might as well die like warriors, fighting for a freedom they could almost taste.
Gripping her longsword, Asteria cast a glance at her immediate cohort: Effie, Caster, and Gemma – one of Gunlaug's old lieutenants who had traded his gold for survival.
She wondered where Sunny was. That crazy, feral cat was likely hiding in a corner or entrusted with a task far too insane for the rest of them.
She wanted to wish him luck, but a part of her – something bone-deep and irrational – vaguely hoped for his demise. It wasn't a thought she recognized as her own; it was a lingering, ancient anger that flared whenever he was near.
Either he lived and she found out why, or he died and the irritation vanished.
'Shit, I sound crazy thinking like that,' she mentally chided herself.
Looking at the approaching tide of monsters, Effie waited until the ground began to tremble. Then, she screamed: "First mark!"
The shout was taken up by Seishan in the second line and echoed by Kai somewhere in the third. The plan was simple: the first line would hold the breach, cycling with the second as they tired, while the third rained destruction from afar. But first, they had to survive the momentum of the initial charge.
Behind her, the enchanting voice of their resident idol gave the command to fire the siege engines. These monstrous machines, built by the artisans of the Bright Castle, were designed to pierce the thickest chitin – so long as the target wasn't a fallen.
That specific problem was left to Asteria.
'It feels like I have to slaughter my own kind. This is unfair, isn't it?'
A melodic, mechanical twang reached her ears. A fraction of a second later, six heavy metal spears, each two meters long, hissed above their heads.
They streaked through the air and slammed into the front of the horde, spraying blood and shattered shell across the coral. One beheaded a giant crab-like creature; another skewered a blood-red mantis and the three monsters behind it.
The wave didn't slow. There were simply too many of them.
Stepping forward with the unfair confidence of an ascended, Asteria flooded her limbs with essence. She launched herself into the oncoming hoard like a golden bolt of lightning. [Sentinel's Heart] sliced through the mass of abominations like heated wire through wax.
[You have slain: Awakened Monster, Carapace Scavenger.]
To the monsters, she was no longer a human; she was the apex predator they hadn't evolved to fear yet.
All around her, abominations fell, butchered by her starlight blade. After minutes of frantic slaughter, the momentum of the horde diminished – if only by a fraction.
It was the peace before the storm. It was unforgiving.
"BRACE!"
Effie's scream was the last thing Asteria heard before the unseen secondary wave crashed into the human wall. It could hardly be called a collision... it was an inundation of terror.
Madness, havoc, and death consumed the front lines instantly.
Asteria's gaze froze. Her feet locked into the red coral as she watched a sleeper she recognized disappear under a swarm of skittering legs. Her jaw clenched in a sudden, sharp fury.
'Shit... I can't kill fast enough. I'm a master, and I'm still just one person.'
The realization hit her like a physical blow. Blood sprayed across her golden greaves – human blood this time. The screams of the dying rose in a sickening chorus, a sound that the siege engines couldn't drown out. She saw Gemma's line buckle as a towering, multi-limbed monstrosity tore through the ranks, tossing armored men aside like discarded husks.
"Get back in formation!" Asteria roared, her voice amplified by her essence until it vibrated in the bones of every living person on the field.
She dove deeper into the fray, her movements becoming a blur of gold and starlight. She wasn't just fighting for her life anymore; she was fighting against the tally of the dead. Each scream she heard felt like a personal failure, a notch of negligence carved into her soul.
The red coral beneath her was no longer red from its own nature – it was slick with the fresh, steaming gore of her army. Through the spray of blood, she caught sight of Nephis further down the line, her white flames erupting in a desperate attempt to hold the center.
Asteria realized then that this wasn't a battle. It was a harvest. And if she didn't become the reaper, there would be no one left to go home.
With a snarl of defiance, she unleashed her essence, the golden aura of her armour exploding outward in a blinding shockwave that sent a dozen monsters flying into the air.
"Is that all you've got?!" she challenged the Spire, her voice cracking with a manic, desperate edge. "Come on then! Die for me!"
The unseen wave broke their line; it sought to drown them in a literal tide of serrated limbs and gnashing maws.
Asteria was a whirlwind of gold, her blade a blur of starlight that left trails of after-images in the stagnant air. Every swing of [Sentinel's Heart] took a life, or ten, yet for every monster she cleaved, another three seemed to spring from the red coral.
"Close the gap!" Asteria's voice tore through the cacophony, reinforced by the sheer pressure of her ascended soul.
She saw a giant, centipede-like horror lunge for a young sleeper whose shield had shattered. Before the creature could snap its mandibles, Asteria was there. She cut it – driving her shoulder into its armoured thorax, the [Might of Gold] pulverizing the chitin on impact.
With a fluid twist, she ran the starlight longsword through the creature's head, pinning it to the coral before kicking the carcass into the approaching swarm to create a momentary barricade.
She was fighting with a frantic, cold efficiency. Her movements were no longer those of a girl practicing in a courtyard – she had learnt, practiced and bled. Her strikes were fluid; fitting her status.
She pivoted on a heel, the golden greaves of her armour sparking against the coral, and unleashed a horizontal sweep that decapitated a row of scavengers in one fluid motion.
But even as she slaughtered, the sheer scale of the swarm mocked her. She killed a dozen, and twenty more climbed over the twitching remains.
She lunged into a cluster of spiked abominations, her blade humming a high-pitched, mournful tune as it vibrated through their carapaces, yet she could still hear the sickening sound of human screams from the flanks.
'Faster. I have to be faster!' She flooded her veins with essence, her vision sharpening until she could see the twitch of every mandible and the pulse of every insectoid heart
She became a golden blur, a streak of light that moved between the gaps in the human line, intercepting the horrors that were inches away from claiming another life.
She was everywhere and nowhere, a singular goddess of the battlefield attempting to hold back the tide with nothing but her own will.
Yet, as the minutes bled into a blur of gore, the weight of being only one person began to settle. No matter how many heads she lopped off, she couldn't stop the spray of red that occasionally erupted from the shield wall behind her.
She was a master, yes, but she was master protecting five hundred fragile, terrified mortals.
Slowly, the frantic slaughter began to stabilize. The momentum of the monsters, once an unstoppable wall of meat and malice, began to falter against the sheer lethality of the golden sentinel at the front.
With Effie's relentless drilling and Asteria's explosive interventions, the human line finally held. The unseen wave broke, leaving behind a silence so sudden it was more deafening than the screaming.
Asteria stood amidst the carnage, her chest heaving, the golden plates of her armour stained with a sickening cocktail of black blood from the carapaces and crimson human blood. She dismissed her blade, her fingers trembling slightly – not from fatigue, but from the raw adrenaline of a warrior forced to fight like a desperate animal.
"Report!" she barked, her voice cracking the silence.
The aftermath was a grim tableau. The red coral was carpeted in bodies, a mosaic of chitin and steel. Effie was leaning on her spear, her white cloak shredded and soaked through. Seishan was already moving among the ranks, her grey skin smeared with gore as she hauled survivors to their feet.
The tally began, whispered from mouth to mouth until it reached the front.
"Forty-two dead," Effie muttered, her voice uncharacteristically raspy as she looked at Asteria. "Sixty-eight too wounded to stand. Another thirty missing limbs."
Asteria looked at the rows of the fallen. In a single, twenty-minute engagement, over a hundred people – nearly a fifth of their entire force – had been neutralized.
The victory tasted like ash. She looked at her golden gauntlets, reflective and beautiful, and saw the faces of the forty-two looking back at her from the polished surface.
She had been the strongest. She had been their commander. And yet, she was only one girl standing against an ocean.
'How many have to die?'
This... was a horrible turn of events.