“Their souls are almost burned empty too. There’s nothing useful left to read.”

Muen raised a hand and extinguished the wisp of black flame in his palm, his expression growing even graver.

He had originally wanted to use this early-arriving freak to learn the details of what had happened at Notasia Fortress, but clearly, after running hundreds of miles in one burst, this thing—which had been burning itself for who knew how long—was little different now from a walking pile of ash.

Not even the Black Book could read information out of ash.

As for the hundreds of thousands behind it, drenched in blood and obviously fresh from some grand feast of slaughter... Muen did not think those ordinary soldiers would know the truth of what had happened either.

Most likely, they too had been turned into these monsters in a haze of confusion, without ever understanding what was being done to them.

Because no matter the era, ordinary people were always the most pitiful. They could only be swept forward by the great current of events. Even if what lay ahead was a bottomless cliff, they still had no way to turn back.

“I take it back. The Salvation Society... really is the Salvation Society.”

Muen drew in a deep breath. Feeling the thickening smell of blood in the air, along with the steadily approaching tremors and thunder, his hands unconsciously tightened around the hilt of his blade.

The Salvation Society—that infamous terrorist organization—was even more savage than he had imagined. And this was obviously only the appetizer.

Because Muen still remembered that the place Holy Lord of Salvation Gaius had invited him to was not the Empire’s northern plain, but the Kingdom’s interior... that ancient royal city.

And yet now, while he was still a full thousand miles away from that city, he was already feeling the other side’s opening show of force.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

The bright tails of the magic cannon fire made the whole sky seem dim by comparison, yet the gaunt, savage faces of those monsters only became clearer and clearer.

“Young Master Muen, shouldn’t we retreat?”

The Royal Knight assigned to protect Muen forcibly calmed the restless horse beneath him, but when he raised his head, he still could not hide the panic on his face.

“There are too many of them. We can’t hold.”

“We have to.”

Muen’s answer was immediate and decisive.

“They’re too fast. We can’t outrun them. The moment we start fleeing, the formation will collapse, and everyone behind me will become prey—blood and meat for those things!”

“But... with this few people, how are we supposed to hold?”

The Royal Knight’s voice trembled slightly.

Even though he was one of the elite Royal Knights, well-trained and battle-tested, he still had no idea how anyone was supposed to withstand the charge of a frenzied army tens of thousands strong—no, hundreds of thousands strong.

On their side, they seemed to have a hundred thousand troops as well. In terms of area alone, their formation looked only three or four times smaller than the black tide swallowing the horizon, far from some lonely island adrift in the sea.

But both he and Muen knew the truth.

Out of those hundred thousand, only eight or nine thousand were actual people, and most of those had only come to fill numbers. Some were Lower District thugs. Some were civil personnel drafted in at the last minute. There were even students, workers, and vagrants who had signed up on nothing but a burst of hot blood.

In terms of combat strength and organization, they were nowhere near even eight or nine thousand real soldiers.

If even a true force of eight or nine thousand soldiers might not hold, how were this mixed bag of people supposed to stop a tide of hundreds of thousands?

And right now, their biggest problem was not manpower at all. It was the terrain.

“On an open plain, trying to face a force this large head-on is nearly impossible. We’re no different from a lone boat in a storm. If only we had a city... if only we had walls to anchor ourselves on...”

The Royal Knight muttered under his breath, desperately running through every possibility that might allow them to survive this tsunami.

But no matter how much he thought, those possibilities existed only in theory.

After all, in this empty wilderness, how could they possibly—

“Who said we don’t?”

“What?” The knight froze.

“Walls. Who said we don’t have them?”

Muen glanced at him and said:

“Don’t forget how we got over a hundred thousand sets of steel armor out to a place like this in the first place.”

“...”

The knight’s eyes widened slightly. Amid the sharp stink of blood, he suddenly caught another scent—cold, metallic.

At some point, while everyone had been panicking at the tidal wave about to crash over them, countless empty suits of armor had already begun moving forward on their own, gathering at the very front of the line.

They were made of ordinary steel, roughly forged, with nothing remarkable about them. They had no real combat power to speak of. A child could probably kick one over and send it clattering apart in ridiculous fashion.

They were useless for anything except serving as props in a show.

And yet now, at this very moment, those moving suits of armor gave the knight an extraordinary sense of reassurance.

Because he remembered a rumor.

The reason those suits of armor could move on their own was not because, as officially claimed, they had been driven by some kind of magic.

It was because in the carriage at the very center of the army, one of Young Master Muen’s lovers was hidden away.

A young woman of poised and graceful bearing, with beauty said to rival even Her Majesty the Empress. Once, someone had caught a distant glimpse of her face through a crack in the carriage curtain at night and had been left stunned by how breathtakingly beautiful she was.

And according to rumor, the girl’s power was...

“An.”

Muen spoke softly.

The call was so faint that even the knight at his side did not hear it clearly.

And yet across the long ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) expanse of the formation, the maid seated inside the carriage suddenly opened her eyes.

“I’m here, Young Master.”

The quiet murmur reached no one’s ears, and yet it had still been conveyed perfectly between them.

Inside the carriage, An had no idea what the exact situation outside looked like. She did not know how close that army, already lost to madness, had gotten. In fact, from the moment the formation stopped advancing, she had already closed her eyes to rest.

But she did not need to know any of that.

She only needed to answer the Young Master’s call.

“Gather the mind.”

Crimson began spreading outward from the center of An’s pupils. In the space of only a few breaths, her whole bearing changed abruptly, and an ancient, profound presence began to emanate from her lovely and delicate body.

She silently activated an ancient secret art that could temporarily strengthen mental force, giving her enough power to wield such a formidable Divine Favor.

From the surrounding carriages came one cracking sound after another as the expensive magic stones embedded within them were drained dry at a visible rate, crumbling into useless sand.

The enhancement array painstakingly crafted by the Royal Mage Corps let out a strained, overloaded whine, but An showed not the slightest bit of pity. She placed her palm directly at the very center of the formation.

Boom!

The earth shook again.

But this time it was not because the tidal wave of hundreds of thousands of monsters was almost upon them—indeed, not because it had already begun crashing into the foremost units.

It was because...

Enormous, razor-sharp thorns of steel burst violently through the earth, splitting stone and soil apart. They twisted together as they surged skyward, transforming in an instant into a dense forest of iron.

At the same time, the hundred thousand suits of steel armor visibly warped and deformed, merging into the thorn forest as one, becoming its thick trunks and its hard, bladed branches and leaves.

The monsters roared as they rushed closer, never expecting danger to come from beneath them. Then, amid sweeping flashes of cold steel, countless Kingdom soldiers were skewered clean through by the iron thorns, lifted bodily into the air—

and still did not die.

Like chunks of meat on skewers, they writhed and struggled from the tips of the branches.

Limbs flew. Blood sprayed.

And just like that, before the two armies had even fully collided, the battlefield had already turned into a slaughterhouse.