70. Sweeping the Field

Sweeping the Field

A vast demon army was moving slowly through the ruins, its formations repeatedly disrupted by craters while its light infantry were forced again and again to detour around rows of slagged cars.

Their numbers were so immense that the streets could not contain them. Stragglers spilled onto sidewalks and into alleys.

Despite their slow pace, despite the terrain, despite resistance at every step, the advance of the undead army was unstoppable.

At the front marched hundreds of sword-guards and executioners in grim black iron plate, armed with serrated swords or two-handed halberds. They cleared every obstacle in the street that could be hacked apart with Mavis enchanted iron.

Behind them came thousands of large, skinless monsters, raw red from head to foot. The necromancers called this class of undead ghouls.

The name came from their craving for human flesh, and from their habit of digging up freshly buried graves when there was no… fresher source of food available.

With every step, those flayed demons leaked a red fluid that only vaguely resembled blood. Wherever it dripped, asphalt hissed and corroded away, metal pitted and rusted in seconds, and plastic or paper caught fire immediately.

The truly terrifying thing about Mavis infantry was not their diet, their revolting appearance, or their casual brutality. It was the fact that a single touch from them could melt living flesh.

Several hundred skeletal archers marched along the flanks of the main force. These petrified skeletons were joined together by molten metal joints, carried steel longbows, and fired arrows made of magical thermite.

Although they were merely archers, they had durability and strength beyond any ordinary human, and every step they took dripped molten metal. Anything flammable it touched ignited at once.

Those ranged units were reinforced by unbound lesser demons.

The lesser demons were tall, almost like mobile artillery pieces, because they could summon self-guided fireballs.

Those fireballs pursued targets like the magical offspring of missiles and drones, then exploded with enough force to destroy buildings.

If that were not bad enough, the lesser demons were nearly impervious to most infantry weapons, and their cursed breath stole the life from any living thing it touched.

Above the army, thousands of small imps wheeled through the sky.

They were chicken-sized humanoids with doglike faces and batlike wings.

They could summon small bursts of fire with the force of shotgun pellets and use weaker illusions to make themselves invisible. Their stony bodies gave them some durability, as well as a small but extremely disruptive magical pyrotechnic effect.

Larger shadows moved among their swarms: iron birds the size of tanks and shaped like chickens.

Like the legendary Stymphalian birds, they could rain down explosive steel feathers. Like miniature dragons, they could breathe fire and destruction.

These iron-beaks were the Mavis equivalent of fighter-bombers. They were slower than jet aircraft, but much tougher, and when striking the enemies of the necromancers, they were not limited by ammunition.

Unlike the forces the enemy had summoned before, this was a true army, built on combined arms, if one could call any of this “arms” without insulting several military academies and possibly reality itself. It was supported by Mavis magic that had finally taken root on Earth.

With the full support of that background flow of magical energy, this was no longer a raiding horde meant for quick plunder or sacrifice, bought just long enough to hold opponents in place until their master’s weather magic could do its work.

By the rules of physics, their weapons were three times as effective as normal, while their armor was three times stronger, three times lighter, flexible, and capable of spiritual repair.

This was what a group of heretical numerologists might call a “+2 magic item,” and it was only part of the army’s deadly upgrade.

The undead and demons themselves were faster, stronger, and tougher than before. They had been fully integrated into their master’s magical hive mind, rather than fighting individually or being controlled in small detachments.

Most importantly, each individual unit cost even less than the first summoned forces and could be completely replaced.

Though they were fewer than the tens of thousands deployed earlier, they would be a lethal threat even against the most fortified modern infantry positions.

Their target?

The fortress with black iron walls, towers filled with firing slits, and no windows or doors, which had appeared almost overnight in the northern part of the ruined city.

A lightly equipped but well-trained reconnaissance squad had managed to evade wandering corpses, undead patrols, and every hunter demon in this horrifying city for more than a day.

They had mostly lost contact with headquarters hundreds of kilometers away, with only occasional connections still getting through.

Their mission was to infiltrate the enemy stronghold, report on enemy troop numbers and capabilities, and make contact with any survivors in this patch of hell on Earth.

The terrible enemy was not the only thing working against them. The mission had suffered a string of misfortunes.

First, their supposedly secure radio had been lost in an imp attack, which was a serious blow.

Inside the enemy’s area of influence, mobile signals remained intermittent and almost useless, while other types of military signals seemed even more vulnerable to disruption.

Then a building collapsed at exactly the wrong time and place. The squad’s evasive movement exposed them, briefly but enough, to the line of sight of a lightning tower.

Fortunately, no one died.

Unfortunately, half their supplies were burned to ash, and the other half had to be abandoned.

They had been living on emergency rations for two days, deep in enemy territory and unable to withdraw immediately.

As it turned out, trying to infiltrate any of the enemy’s major structures near what had once been the city center was a stupid idea.

The undead and demons did not use conventional internal corridors or rooms, because they did not really use the buildings themselves.

There were only a few entrances, leading down to deeper summoning chambers. A narrow, bare corridor connected each chamber to the outside world, and the monsters were continuously summoned there before walking into the light.

The search for survivors had also been a total failure, assuming there had been any survivors after the initial invasion.

The monsters must have dragged them out of their homes long ago, either killing them for amusement or transforming them into more monsters.

In almost every civilian building the reconnaissance squad had checked, at least those not burned down, knocked over by force, or destroyed by strategic weapons, they found countless signs of violent home invasions.

The squad’s unofficial, off-the-books real mission had achieved partial success.

After risking exposure and death more than a dozen times, the team reached the outskirts of the nuclear blast site and took various measurements.

Actually reaching the center of the blast was impossible, and the enemy’s recent movements forced them to retreat again and again, barely staying ahead of the army’s latest advance.