The air in the room was still choked with the dust of Jeremiah's departure. Mariah and Tessa stood paralyzed for a heartbeat, their eyes locked on the jagged opening in the wall where the behemoth, who seemed to be named Gillian, had driven Jeremiah through the reinforced concrete and into the dark expanse of the forest beyond.
A cold, parasitic dread curled in Mariah's chest, but she ground her teeth until her jaw ached. He's a monster in his own right, she reminded herself, forcing her hands to stop shaking. He's strong. He will survive.
She couldn't afford the luxury of distraction.
The cacophony of the battle outside had fallen into an eerie, heavy silence. The Demon Masked mage noticed it too. He tilted his head with a bird-like curiosity, the painted porcelain of his mask catching the dim light.
"It seems my thralls have finally been silenced," the mage mused, his voice smooth and devoid of regret. "A pity. They were quite difficult to harvest. However, my work here has reached its conclusion."
Before Mariah could retort, a suffocating pressure erupted from behind the mage. It was a physical force that made the oxygen feel thin, as if the room itself were being hollowed out. Tessa's reaction was instinctive—arcs of lightning hissed and crackled around her, her eyes glowing with a desperate electrical charge. Mariah stepped into a combat stance, her own mana flaring in response to the crushing atmosphere.
Then, the static of the comms cut through the tension. Nyx's voice was breathless. "Mariah, what the hell happened in there all the puppets are dead. The perimeter is clear. Do you need backup?"
The masked man let out a soft, melodic chuckle as he heard the transmission. He reached into the folds of his robes and withdrew a small shard of glass. It pulsed with vibrant, shifting runes that seemed to bleed light into the air.
"As much as I would love to spend the evening carving the two of you into my most beautiful pieces of art, my Master is a demanding soul," the mage said, his grip tightening on the shard. "So, I shall leave you with a parting gift. Try not to die too quickly."
He shattered the glass in his palm.
A vacuum of light swallowed him whole. In an instant, the mage was gone, leaving behind nothing but the faint scent of ozone and old parchment. Mariah and Tessa stared at the empty space, stunned. Teleportation via artifact was unheard of—theoretically it's possible but that defied any artifact Alliance artificers could ever come up with.
"Where the hell did he go?" Tessa gasped, her lightning flickering as she looked around the vacant room.
But Mariah wasn't looking for the mage anymore. Her eyes were fixed on the floor beneath the spot where he had stood. The floorboards were curling upward, and the suffocating pressure from before had intensified into a rhythmic, pulsing throb that vibrated in their very bones.
Tessa's face went deathly pale. "Mariah… was there a Gate down there the whole time? How is that possible?"
"It doesn't matter how," Mariah said, her voice tight with urgency as she grabbed Tessa's arm. "I can't contain this one. It's too big. We have to fall back—now!"
She slammed her hand against her comms, screaming over the rising roar of collapsing stone. "Nyx! Get out of range! Call for heavy backup! Everything is going down!"
They turned and sprinted for the exit, their boots skidding over debris as the ceiling began to groan. They cleared the threshold of the abandoned outpost just as the structure gave up. Behind them, the building imploded, pulled into a central point by a terrifying gravitational force.
A massive explosion followed, a shockwave of raw, unrefined energy that threw them forward onto the dirt. When the dust settled, the outpost was gone. In its place stood a fully formed Gate, shimmering with an unstable, violet light that bled into the night sky like an open wound.
Nyx remained exactly where she had been perched, elevated above the outpost grounds, her vantage point giving her full visibility over both the collapsing structure and the open perimeter beyond. Even as Mariah's voice came through the comm—firm, urgent, telling her to fall back and call for backup—Nyx had already acted.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the comm device as she relayed the emergency signal to Alliance Command, her tone steady through sheer discipline rather than calm.
"Outpost breach confirmed. Unidentified gate manifestation. Immediate reinforcement required—unknown threat classification."
She ended the transmission without waiting for acknowledgement.
Because she already understood the reality of the situation.
Reinforcements would come.
But not fast enough.
Below her, Mariah and Tessa burst through the outpost's primary exit. They moved with the frantic, high-octane energy of soldiers who knew they were seconds away from being buried. Relief hit Nyx first—a sharp, instinctive spike that made her chest tighten.
They're clear. They're alive.
But the relief was incinerated as the building imploded inwards and the gate fully formed.
A violent geyser of pulverized concrete and raw, unrefined mana tore into the night sky. The shockwave rolled outward in a visible ripple, slamming into Nyx's position and snapping her hair like a whip. She dug her boots into the ledge, her grip tightening on her weapon until her knuckles went white.
Her breath caught in her throat.
For a moment—just a moment—her focus slipped.
Jeremiah.
The image forced its way into her mind without permission, replaying with brutal clarity. The way he had been driven through the structure and out into the forest beyond. The questions came faster than she could answer them, piling on top of each other, tightening around her chest until it became difficult to breathe.
An almost overwhelming urge surged through her—to move, to abandon her position, to find him and confirm with her own eyes that he was still standing.
That he was still—
Nyx's jaw clenched with enough force to make her teeth ache.
She slammed a mental door on the panic, forcing the emotion down into the cold, dark cellar of her mind. Clarity returned, cold and bitter.
"Please be ok, Jeremiah," she whispered to the empty air.
Nyx's breathing steadied as her grip on
Moonpiercer stabilized, the fleeting hesitation dying in her throat. She lifted her gaze fully back to the battlefield, her focus sharpening as the ambient mana continued to thicken. It pressed against her senses like a physical weight—a storm on the very verge of breaking.
Seconds later, the Void Gate finished its violent birth. Its structure stabilized just enough to hold a shape, though "stable" was merely the closest word their language offered for an anomaly that clearly did not belong in this reality. It loomed where the outpost had once stood, a vast, unnatural wound carved directly into the world. Layers of dark, shifting energy folded inward on themselves, spiraling without pattern or logic.
Then, the first of the Void creatures burst from the gate in a frenzy of motion.
Their bodies were low and elongated, resembling wolves only in the most distant, unsettling sense. They poured out in a black tide, each one colliding with the ground and scrambling forward with feral, unrestrained aggression. Their eyes burned with a singular madness—a violent, instinct-driven need to tear and consume anything within reach.
The moment the first wave cleared the threshold, the creatures' chaotic movement snapped into a terrifying unison. Dozens of heads turned at once. The erratic scrambling vanished, replaced by a unified focus that made the air feel heavier just by witnessing it.
They had found their targets.
The wave surged forward all at once.
Grotesque, twisted bodies closed the distance with overwhelming speed, their movements snapping violently between fluid and jagged.
From her perch, Nyx saw the scale of the horror. Below, Mariah and Tessa stood their ground, their silhouettes small against the encroaching dark. But they didn't retreat.
Because at that speed, running was no longer an option.
Mariah gritted her teeth as the Void creatures surged forward, a distorted wave of snapping limbs and feral intent tearing across the scorched earth. The sound alone—a cacophony of scraping claws and warped, layered growls—pressed against her senses, threatening to splinter her composure.
"Fine…" she exhaled under her breath, her expression hardening as resolve settled in. "Let's do this."
She raised her hand, fingers tapping lightly against the frame of her glasses. As the lenses flickered with a faint, rhythmic pulse, instantly flooding her vision with streams of tactical data. Mana signatures and core outputs overlaid the chaos, breaking each creature down into a readable pattern as they closed the distance.
Her eyes darted behind the glass, processing the shifting geometry of the swarm at a superhuman pace. The conclusion hit her that these creatures were classified as VoidSpawns.
Within the Alliance's classification system, void creatures weren't ranked by simple strength, but by the structure of their cores and the density of void mana they carried.
At the lowest level were Voidspawn—newly formed entities with a single core. Creatures like the ones charging now were unstable, aggressive, and dangerous in numbers, but lacked intelligence, coordination, or higher-level of mana output.
Above them were Fiends, followed by Dreadspawn, then Sentinels, each stage marking a complete evolutionary shift rather than a gradual increase. Beyond that came Tyrants and Titans, beings capable of dominating entire battlefields or regions through sheer presence alone.
And at the very top—
Primordials.
Existences so far removed from conventional threats that they were treated less like enemies and more like catastrophes given form.
Each rank wasn't just stronger than the last—it was separated by an overwhelming gap in power and intelligence.
That hierarchy was determined by two things:
The color of the core, which defined the quality and dominance of their power—
And the number of cores, which represented their evolutionary stage.
Most creatures within a given tier carried the corresponding number of cores, reinforcing the gap.
Mariah stepped forward, moving directly into the path of the oncoming tide. Tessa's brow furrowed, lightning spitting from her skin in anxious arcs as she turned toward her.
"Mariah, what are you doing?" she demanded, the tension in her voice rising with the creatures' approach.
Mariah didn't slow her pace. A faint, knowing smirk touched her lips. "Conserve your mana, Tessa," she said, her voice a calm anchor against the rushing chaos. "We're going to need you soon."
She tapped her comm. "Nyx," she said, eyes still locked forward, "I'm going to hold them in place. The moment I do—kill as many as you can."
She didn't wait for a reply; there wasn't a second to spare. Taking one final, deliberate step, Mariah planted her feet.
As a Green Core mage, her mana manipulation was more refined than most, but her true potential lay in a lineage she shared with Magus Selene, an Overseer of the Alliance. What Selene could do with that power was classified as apocalyptic. Today, Mariah would show why.
Her eyes shifted, the warm golden-brown bleeding into a cold, burning blue.
The atmosphere fractured. The temperature plummeted so violently the air itself seemed to scream. Frost surged outward from her boots in a white-hot wave, racing across the jagged debris and freezing dust particles mid-air, as if time had been dragged to a halt.
Her voice was a low, chilling command: "Absolute Zero."
The world stopped.
The Voidspawn froze mid-motion, their grotesque bodies encased in jagged layers of ice in a heartbeat. Limbs were halted mid-stride and jaws remained locked open in silent snarls, their frantic, chaotic momentum reduced to a brittle, crystalline stillness. Even the oxygen felt solid, heavy with the weight of the frost.
Before the first second of silence could pass, three explosions detonated across the battlefield.
From her perch, Nyx had released in perfect synchronization. Three arrows struck with calculated devastation, the frozen horde shattering like glass under the impact. Shards of ice and Void flesh erupted outward as the blasts tore through the formation.
The few creatures on the periphery that weren't vaporized barely had time to register the slaughter. As they scrambled to break free, their claws skidding violently on the frozen earth, ice spikes erupted from the ground beneath them. The jagged lances pierced upward with lethal precision, impaling the remaining Voidspawn before they could even find their footing.
Silence followed after the slaughter.
Mariah exhaled slowly, her breath a plume of white in the flash-frozen air as she steadied her racing pulse. Beside her, Tessa let out a low, impressed whistle, the tension in her shoulders finally beginning to ebb.
Mariah shot her a sharp look.
"You've dealt with this before," she said, her tone firm, cutting through the moment. "This is only the first wave."
She turned her gaze back toward the Gate, where the violet energy was already beginning to churn with renewed hunger. The atmosphere grew heavy again, pregnant with a malice that hadn't been satisfied.
"It only gets worse from here," Mariah muttered. Her voice hardened, leaving no room for doubt. "Our objective isn't to win. It's to hold this line until reinforcements arrive. Nothing more, nothing less."
She paused, a shadow of something more serious settling behind her eyes as she looked at Tessa. "For now, we keep this rhythm. But soon—very soon—I'm going to need everything you've got. So focus."
Tessa shrugged, rolling her shoulders as fresh sparks of lightning crackled faintly against her skin. "I am focused," she replied with a dry smirk. "Trust me. This is just how I handle the craziness."
For a fleeting moment, the corner of Mariah's mouth twitched into the faintest hint of a smile.
Then the Gate pulsed.
The vibration was harder this time, a subsonic thrum that rattled their teeth and cracked the fresh ice on the ground. The air twisted violently as the second wave began to force its way through.