Chapter 704: 704

Another came, leaping from the wall’s edge. The commander met it mid-air with a swing of his blade, feeling the shock of the impact travel up his arms. Claws raked his armor, tearing metal and flesh, but his speed and experience carried him through. With a swift strike, he drove the sword through the creature’s chest, feeling its body convulse beneath his blade before dropping.

He was moving constantly, a whirlwind of motion, spinning, striking, retreating, barely catching his breath. The forest and town streets were a blur. Thralls came from every direction, some on rooftops, some from alleys, some seeming to materialize from the darkness itself. The commander’s eyes flicked constantly, measuring distance, calculating angles, predicting movements.

He continued to fight when all of a sudden, he noticed something different.

The screams around him had begun to thin. The frantic, chaotic shouts of soldiers calling for help, arrows loosing, and swords clanging on claws and bones, they were fading.

He looked around.

Horror struck him like a physical blow. Most of his men were gone. The ground was littered with their bodies, their lifeless forms half-covered by shadows, torn, broken, or pinned beneath fallen debris. He could see the archers who had manned the walls, now crushed under their own barricades. The foot soldiers he had rallied, scattered and slain.

A cold sweat ran down his back and he realized with grim clarity, he was alone.

He gritted his teeth, pushing panic aside. There was no time for grief. Only action. He swung his sword at the next attacking thrall, slicing through sinew and bone with practiced precision, dodging its counterattack by inches. Each move was perfection born of desperation, but exhaustion began gnawing at him. Even his enhanced stamina could not last forever against such numbers.

Then, something unnatural caught his eye.

A twitching movement from a fallen soldier.

At first, he thought it was a trick of the firelight, a body shifting in the wind. But the twitching grew more pronounced. The fingers curled unnaturally, joints cracking in ways they should not. The face of the fallen soldier contorted, lips peeling back as though his flesh were rearranging itself.

The commander’s stomach dropped.

Another body moved, then another. The soldiers he had counted as dead, the ones he had mourned only moments before, were rising.

Their forms convulsed violently, bones cracking, elongating. Limbs bent at impossible angles. Skin stretched and withered, veins dark and pulsing. And then, with a sound that made his blood run cold, the first transformed fully: a thrall, four-legged, eyes burning the same blood-red hue as the creatures attacking him.

He staggered back, horror stealing his breath. One by one, his fallen men twisted and reshaped into the grotesque silhouettes of the enemy. Their jaws elongated, claws sharpened, and their eyes now glowed with feral hunger.

It was at this time he realized the full truth, why no body was found in the previous towns. Once these creatures were done, they assimilated, turning their victims into new thralls to swell their ranks.

The commander’s arms shook with exhaustion, each swing of his blade slower than the last. Sweat and blood streaked his face, mingling with grime and tears he refused to shed. Around him, the street was a nightmare of motionless bodies, both thralls and the remnants of his fallen men. Piles of twisted, broken forms littered the cobblestones, their red eyes extinguished as he cleaved through them one by one.

For a moment, it seemed as if he could hold them back. The thralls closest to him fell beneath his relentless assault. His training, his instincts, even the deep well of adrenaline all of it held him upright.

But the numbers never ceased. They came from every direction: emerging from alleyways, falling from rooftops, crawling through broken walls. Each wave seemed more ferocious than the last.

A claw had nicked him, tearing through armor and flesh. He gritted his teeth and ignored it. Another strike hit his shoulder, nearly forcing him to drop his sword.

His legs were heavy now, his lungs burning with every breath.. He spun in a wide arc, cleaving through a thrall, only to see three more in its place, moving with terrifying coordination.

He had fought for what felt like hours, though he knew it could only have been minutes.

Another thrall leaped at him from the shadows. He met it with a swing, cutting through its body, and watched as it hit the ground. But his knees buckled. He had moved through too many bodies, dodged too many attacks, fought too many enemies.

Then it happened.

A claw caught his ankle as he spun to meet another attacker. He fell, hard, chest slamming against the cobblestones. His sword skidded from his grasp. Pain lanced through his side, burning hotter than any he had felt before.

He scrambled to rise, but the thralls were upon him instantly. From every angle, from every shadow, they descended, dragging him to the ground. His vision blurred, red eyes flashing above him from rooftops, from the scattered piles of the fallen.

He fought, striking with fists, kicking, clawing at anything he could reach, but exhaustion claimed him finally. The sword slipped from his grasp, spinning across the stones out of reach. His arms grew heavy, his movements sluggish.

And then he stopped struggling.

The commander collapsed fully, chest heaving, blood mixing with the dirt beneath him. Around him, the once-slaughtered thralls lay in heaps, a grim barricade of death he had built with his own hands.

His thought was short lived as he felt a teeth skin into his throat, drawing out all the blood in his body. The light from the commander eyes dimmed.

The thralls slowly fell back before roaring out loud clearly pleased with their victory. Their eyes turned once again to the commander body waiting for his change, waiting for his new stronger form to join them.

Their wait was not long a sthe body of the camp began to twitch, true to his strength his figure looked a little different from the otehr thrall, he wasn’t as shriveled up and his eyes held some form of intelligence.

Sadly the source and catalyst for his change had no need for his intelligence, he was to join the otehr thralls in their simple goal to feed and multiply so in te blink of an eyes the intelligenec was wiped out.

The thralls all moved out again back to their original goal before this small stop. Bodies left behind for the first time since their birth, it was inevitable as more bodies will pile as they continue to serve their purpose.

After the thralls had vanished from the town, two second-generation godlings appeared atop a shattered rooftop, their eyes sweeping over the remnants of the fight: the bloodied streets, the collapsed buildings, the twisted bodies strewn like rag dolls.

They could have wiped every trace clean in an instant, leaving the empire blind and helpless, uncertain of who or what had struck. But that was not their goal. No, this was about sending a message, a reminder to the empire of how close they truly were to death and children of its lineage. Every body left, every ruin, was meant to whisper fear into the hearts of those who witnessed it, to etch the reality of their vulnerability into the minds of all who saw it.

When the countess and the empire discovered the scene, it finally glimpsed the magnitude of what it faced, but understanding did nothing to change the inevitable. Knowledge offered no protection against horrors that moved faster, struck harder, and vanished without warning.

As towns fell one by one, even the viscount’s response in sending trained soldiers, seasoned mages, and specialized squads did little to halt the spread. Each intervention only highlighted the futility of resistance: fewer returned with stories of survival, and those who did were broken, traumatized, and forever drawn to the safety of the light. Shadows became their enemy and their constant companion.

The problem was simple, and terrifying. The thralls were creatures of the night. They vanished with the sun, retreating to places the light could not touch. As they progress, their method of hiding themselves got better, able to bore a hole through the ground and refill it in moments

During the day, only the watchful godlings, tailing them from hidden vantage points, could track their movements and with their occasional disruption, made the thralls almost impossible to locate. And when night fell, they awoke.

The professionals and soldiers were forced to fight under the cover of night, stripped of their usual advantage. Darkness robbed them of sight, limited their strength, and twisted every movement into a perilous gamble. Even the mages, with their glowing orbs of light, could only offer fleeting safety. The thralls would retreat at the edges of illumination, always staying just beyond reach, biding their time. They knew that sooner or later, the mage’s mana would wane, and when it did, the hunters would become the hunted.