The horde didn't think. That was the only mercy in any of it — no strategy, no flanking, no restraint. They simply came, wave after wave, drawn by the same noise that had drawn the last group and the group before that, and Killian had long since stopped counting how many had dropped because the number stopped mattering somewhere around thirty.
What mattered was the numbers still standing.
"Left's thinning!" Erik called, lightning forking from his fingers into the skull of the nearest infected before he'd even finished the sentence, the frost trailing behind him in a thin sheet that made the next three stumble on their own momentum. His voice carried no strain in it, no urgency beyond the tactical — just information, delivered the way a man delivers a status update, because that was what the moment required and nothing more.
