Aiming was a bit difficult. If only I’d had the chance to practice something like this beforehand. As it was, the first few chunks of debris and monstrous bodies I sent flying missed their target wildly.

  Although, they still had the effect of making my actual, living targets pause. The monsters chasing after the retreating defenders slowed their rush, trying to find the source of the impacts that had fallen around them. I was pretty sure I even saw the defenders turn to look at what was going on.

  I didn’t give anyone time to figure anything out. My next shots went true. I was able to release the next set of my artillery fire from their orbits at the exact point of their circular flight paths to shoot straight at the bug monsters.

  This time, the creatures from the Swarm screeched out as they were the ones bombarded from far above. One of the dead ants I shot at them ripped apart mid-flight under the stress but that was fine. That just meant the missile spread apart into several and struck more of the bugs. Several monsters were crushed, their whole squadron falling into disarray.

  A cheer from the defenders buoyed my spirit. They were now reversing themselves, pouncing on the disorganized monsters that had been chasing them moments ago.

  I couldn’t bask in the sensation of triumph for long. There was more work to be done.

  My next target was Hamsik. Or rather, the bladed mantises attacking him relentlessly. He had killed a few on his own, but they were clearly powerful enough to slowly but surely wear him down. I was tempted to wonder what exactly was supposed to be the limit for an immortal vampire, but now wasn’t the time.

  Instead, now was the time for me to fire more of my makeshift bombardment.

  It was incredibly satisfying to see a mantis get blown away mid-flight by a torn, dead ant crashing into it at the speed of an onrushing truck.

  Just like with the previously-retreating defenders, the whole momentum of the battle changed. Before the oversized mantises could even understand what was going on, more of my Gravity-fuelled lobs struck in. Sure, a few missed, but I killed, wounded, or confused enough for Hamsik to show why he was so terrifying.

  I didn’t know if he understood what was going on or who was helping. But the way he rushed into the monsters in a comet of flaming red, I was assured that he would be taking full advantage.

  Ignoring the familiar drag of mana exhaustion calling to me once again—especially since the cracks of Threaded Reinforcement pulsed within me to reinvigorate my falling mana channelling capacity—I continued assisting everyone from up on high until I was starting to run out of shots.

  And also until the Blight Swarm started registering me as the threat to their operations they had to prioritize.

  I dropped back to the ground as I spotted several winged monstrosities buzzing in my direction. Time to get moving. I needed to regroup and rendezvous with the others. I had made a ton of progress, shifted the equation of battles all across Ring Four as far as I had seen.

  The monster bugs swarmed my earlier location, but they found nothing. I was already gone. As I moved, I kept channelling Flare, this time focusing on my Manifestation Augmentation instead of any Affixes. The little bursts of heat kept the smaller insects off me pretty well.

  Sadly, I couldn’t say the same for the bigger ones. But Flare did help there as well. I just needed to add Concentration and Capacity alongside Manifestation to store the energy temporarily before letting loose explosive blasts when the time was right. The mantises trying to attack me suffered terrible burns alongside being staggered and shocked.

  And subsequently got killed by my well-placed mace strikes. Their bladed hands, at least for the few that I faced, never grew to be a problem.

  Of course, I simply avoided the ones that would actually need me to pay effort and attention. There was one far larger monster that crashed through an abandoned house not too far from me, but fuck if I was going to pay attention to that thing, not when there was no one being fatally threatened by it just yet. I’d deal with it if it became an actual problem.

  I found Hamsik had utterly destroyed the rest of the mantises, even the couple of house-sized ones, by the time I got there. He was covered in blood. Not just the familiar red version, but the insects’ whitish-green blood as well.

  “Thanks for the assist,” Hamsik said gruffly. “You stink.”

  “Speak for yourself.” I quickly relayed what I had been up to as quickly as I could. “How are things looking? Do you think we’ll need to fall back?”

  “We’re holding for now, I think, but…”

  He hesitated, and if he had something more to say, he never got around to it. We both turned as a set of heavy steps hurried towards us. It was a city guard, carrying a torch to ward off the ravenous flying critters.

  He looked a little amazed as he entered my vicinity and was suddenly basking in my Flare Aspect’s effect. The small, vicious bugs were completely gone. I coughed. He flushed a little, apparently remembering he was here for business.

  The troubled Scalekin glanced once at Hamsik before focusing on me. “Are you Cultist Moreland?”

  “Yes,” I said. I supposed my armour made it harder to tell I was a cultist. “What’s going on?”

  “I was asked to relay an urgent message. Some of our scouts and spotters located a new wave of the Blight Swarm heading in our direction. And they’re going to start it off with bombardment.”

  The only reason he had come all this way in the middle of a war to tell me that was because of the unsaid implication—they wouldn’t be able to protect Ring Four from that bombardment.

  “You mean like the kind with the giant monster that the Councillor killed?” Hamsik asked.

  The guard shook his scaly head. “No, that was merely an attempt to soften up our defences and create openings for other monsters to rush in via various means. This time, they’re using the insects themselves as artillery ammunition.”

  I was a little confused by that. Were they just going to throw down huge bugs like they were cannonballs? That sounded like an expensive waste of manpower—bug-power, I supposed—for the Swarm. Unless… the bugs being thrown down were going to survive the experience.

  The look on the guard’s face confirmed it was most likely the latter.

  “Do you know how soon it’s going to start?” I asked.

  “Any moment now,” he said. “That’s why I hurried all over to find you.”

  It was lucky he had found me as soon as he had. I could still be mired in a battle somewhere on Ring Four and he might still have been busy wandering around all over the place.

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  “Then there’s no time to waste,” I said.

  I conferred a bit with Hamsik on what our next move was going to be. Even for something like this, we had prepared countermeasures. Of course, it wasn’t going to be ideal. But we were wary of aerial assaults and now we’d need to fall back on the best plan to counter it.

  “Send the signal to draw back to the temple,” I told Hamsik.

  He nodded. “Where are you going to go?”

  “Rounding up as many people as I can on my way there.” Under ideal circumstances, I’d find and rescue everyone in my neighbourhood. But that wasn’t going to be a possibility. I needed to prepare for the next set of bombing. “I’ll try to be fast. You head there—”

  “No, I’ll be doing the same. We can cover different areas and take less time together.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Wait,” the guard said, a little confused. “The temple? Didn’t you sell it to House Brasvay? Are they allowing you back in there?”

  I offered him a sardonic smile. “You might want to go past it on your way back if you want the answer to that question.”

  The guard looked confused—and a little miffed I was leaving and taking my repellent aura of constant Flares with me—but there was no time to entertain his questions. We needed to get going. Hamsik and I quickly decided the areas we were each going to cover before heading out.

  My skin itched as I got going as fast as I could. Every muscle in my body was jumpier than ever.

  Things were still too uncertain. Despite my successes and those of ones I had seen and helped, the Swarm seemed endlessly relentless. The little bugs in the air just kept coming and coming. We were prepared for all sorts of invasion tactics that our enemies would be using, thanks to poring over old books and accounts, but the sheer numbers were almost overwhelming.

  I had only been walking for half a minute before I heard the telltale bang of Hamsik’s Icon gun. There. The signal was up.

  A red glow enveloped the whole area from above. I looked back to see he had fired straight up. As soon as his shot had reached a few hundred feet in the air, it exploded in a massive burst of red flames. Now everyone on my side of Ring Four would know to retreat to the temple.

  Well, those who weren’t too busy fighting or dying. I was hoping I’d reach those people soon enough.

  My wish was fulfilled within the next few moments when I came across a group of people running away from a horde of what looked like mastiff-sized hornets.

  Eminently killable, even for people who only had basic training and possessed no special Paths, but there were a lot of them. I was just glad to see that the defenders had rerouted their withdrawal towards the temple according to the signal. Normally, they’d be heading towards one of the kill zones that could take care of the bugs, but not this time.

  Now we all had a different priority.

  Unfortunately, my Ignition Charge on Gravity had run out. I still had two charges left, but I wanted to save those for emergencies. For real use cases like the last one had been.

  So instead, I pulled a large piece of fallen debris to my grip with Field Manipulation. Once it was in my hand, I threw it at the little army of nightmarish wasps, my actions drawing their attention.

  It drew the defenders’ attention too, but I yelled at them to keep going towards the temple. They complied.

  Killing the horde didn’t take too much effort. I reduced my Flare output so that the bugs wouldn’t hesitate to rush at me. As soon as they were close, I channelled Gravity with Infusion and Field Manipulation in front of me as hard as I could, creating a region of intense gravity that immediately chained all the bugs down to the ground.

  Then I eradicated them with Flare, Manifestations quickly creating a huge wash of heat energy that drew into explosive bursts that incinerated them alive.

  I was following after the group I had saved in a minute, catching up to them in seconds. Gold-ranked Agility was something else, honestly. They were all awed to see me too, going on to thank me profusely for coming to their rescue. I just nodded.

  “Keep an eye out for other people who might need help,” I said. “No one will be at the kill zones since those there will already be gone and everyone else not there will be heading to the temple instead.”

  “Will the temple really be available?” a woman asked.

  “Don’t you worry about that.”

  The next group we came across was also running away, though I wasn’t paying attention to them. I could only focus on the screams.

  “Who…?” It wasn’t surprising they had been forced to leave someone behind. But the screaming should have stopped by now. The bugs would have eviscerated the fellow already. I hadn’t seen any evidence that they preferred to toy with their targets or had a penchant for torture.

  “It’s one of the Thr—the Scarthralls!” the man said. “He said he’d remain behind so we could escape. And—and we had to! There were too many of them.”

  I did my best to suppress the shudder at realizing just what the Scarthrall had intended. “Keep going.”

  “But Cultist, you can’t—”

  “Go!”

  They hurried away as I headed in the other direction. No doubt he had convinced them that he’d be fine since he was basically unkillable. I wasn’t so sure.

  There were a crap ton of worms attacking him, each the size of a telephone pole. Their ravaging mouths were trying to tear apart the poor Scarthrall. The man was a bloody mess. Still alive, though. I intended to keep it that way.

  Field Manipulation with Infusion locked the rear ends of the worms to the ground. Several turned around to see what was going on, only to gurgle out their own screeches when my massively weighted-up body crashed down from above to squash their rear, splattering insect gore in all directions.

  The worms twisted around to face me. I was already smashing in with my mace, not giving them a single opportunity to overcome their surprise.

  It took only a moment to free the dying man.

  No, the dying boy.

  It was Tural.

  “What in the world are you doing?” I could barely even look at him without my guts roiling like it wanted to upend its contents. Not just because of his torn-up state which was actively healing. My stomach was turning into knots because now I was suspect if the intention to save all those defenders had been noble to begin with. “You could have been killed.”

  He stared at me. Gawking disbelief was etched across his half-chewed-off face. When his expression flickered across a few different ones, I couldn’t read a single one. His face was partially gone. “Why are you saving me?”

  “What?”

  “I killed the Elder. I—”

  “Shut up. We don’t have time for this. We need every able-bodied person to contribute or we’re all going to die.”

  “I was contributing. Why do I need to contribute exactly how you think everyone needs to do so? Why can’t I do what I think is right for me?”

  I took a deep breath. Now really wasn’t the time for this. “Look, Tural. You’ve been avoiding me, but it’s also partly my fault because I’ve been busy with so much shit. But listen—I just came here to help when I heard someone screaming. That’s it. It was only afterwards I found out it was you. Do with that information what you want.”

  Without another word, I hurried off. If Tural followed, that was his decision. I had a Ring to protect.

  Walking was taking too long, which was rich of me considering I had Gold-ranked Power and Agility now to move a lot quicker than before. But my urgency arose when I saw the first of the second wave of huge insects take to the air in the distance.

  Insects that were dive-bombing straight towards Ring Four.

  I took to the air with Gravity and Siphon, Manifestation calling up Flare and its explosive bursts to drive me through the air much faster than I could have walked. By the time the first of the blue-shelled insects were arcing over Ring Four airspace, I was on top of the temple.

  A part of me was glad to see how many people had already gathered and were still coming in from all around. Hamsik’s signal had already faded by now, but it seemed a huge chunk of my quarter of Ring Four had seen it.

  The temple wouldn’t even be able to fit them all, but that was fine. I just needed them to remain close by.

  It was also relieving to see that the folks of Ring Four weren’t being blocked from entering. There was no one to block them. Just as I had suspected, when things had turned messy and chaotic, the Rakshasa from House Brasvay had vacated the temple. Fucking cowards.

  “Cultist Ross.” Vandre said, joining me on a section of the temple’s roof that hadn’t caved in yet. “They’re almost here.”

  “And we’re already here.” I held out my hand, using Manifestation to create a black-purple Gravity Orb just above my hand, keeping it in place with Field Manipulation and Infusion. “Can you drop some of your electric blood on it? I could try using my Gravity Orbs directly to stop the bugs, but I think combining will make it more effective.”

  Vandre’s eyes widened at seeing the orb manifest, then widened some more at being asked to combine his abilities with mine. He complied quickly. Tiny serrations in his arm dripped way too much blood for the size of the wounds, all of which started sparking with dark lightning instantly.

  The liquid dripped onto my Gravity Orb. I felt the tether between the sphere and me reduce again as the orb caught all the blood, turning into a tiny red planet.

  “First one’s coming!” Vandre said urgently.

  He wasn’t the only one. Several people were shouting from below, murmurs turning to frightened cries as the monster arced towards our location.

  I ignored it all. Pulling my arm back, I changed Infusion to Siphon and launched the Gravity Orb.