With the arrival of the reinforcements, Dianene was going to strike back against the undead, but before they could mount a counterattack, the undeads moved first. With the bells in the city alerting every soul within, Lucienne rushed back to her barracks and rejoined Eva.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“The undead are finally attacking. Get ready. We’re going to be heading out soon as soon as the undead are close enough to fight in close quarters and the signal is given.” Eva gave Lucienne’s armor a friendly thump before she went back to her own preparation, cramming bloodstones in easily accessible locations.

“Right…”

 

“Are we going now?” Camilla asked as she hovered high above the city, hidden by a concealment barrier created by Victoria. 

She looked down at the dark mass moving across the open field in front of Dianene. Even after two days of bombardment, there were still more than half a hundred thousand undead remaining, and according to what Victoria told her, the numbers were constantly being replenished as undead continued to cross over the border between human and vampire territory. Being around so many active undead also breathed unlife back into some of the slain undead, as long as they weren’t too badly damaged.

Ultimately, the tide of undead making their way to the city seemed almost unstoppable. If she could, Camilla wanted to wipe them all out right now before any more casualties appeared. 

However, Victoria shook her head. 

“What? Why not?”

“Why do you think I asked so many people to come help?” she asked. “It may not seem like it, but this is all the strength I can muster for a defense outside of Celrantis.”

Camilla thought of the other three cities that had come to the aid of along with them. So they came because of strings that Victoria pulled. “Are they not for the assault on the tower? The undead king is there, so we need this much strength, right?”

Once again, a shake of Victoria’s head. “Since the undead king arrived, my scrying probes have been getting destroyed on sight, so I have no idea what is going on at the tower. To be on the safe side, we cannot risk the army here falling back to reinforce their king, so before we move, we must convince the enemy that we truly intend to fight them here.”

“You’re going to sacrifice so many lives…”

“It’s necessary. More will die if we fail.”

Camilla looked away. She knew that Victoria was right, but it didn’t mean that she had to like the decisions made. In order to make sure the army camping outside the gates of Dianene did not have enough time to react once the time came, they had to make sure the undead committed to their attacks. The city must tie up the undead down in battle and not let them leave. Sacrifices had to be made.

She squeezed her fists. “Are we going to participate as well?”

“You may, but keep a low profile.”

“But that defeats the whole point of joining the battle!” Camilla wanted to shout. If she could not make an impact and decrease the number of people that had to die because she needed to keep a low profile, then there was no point to fighting. 

The reason was probably to prevent the undead from noticing that something was wrong when a powerful adversary suddenly disappeared, and the logic made sense, but it was still infuriating.

Sighing, she averted her gaze, choosing to stare up at the clouds instead. She didn’t want to see the aftermath of her inaction.

 

The city gates opened and the militiamen, a thousand or so trained volunteers, flooded out of the city. Most of those in the militia stood on top of the walls, with magic weaker than those wielded by hunters, yet still potent in numbers. Following closely behind those militiamen on the ground were the hunters that were there to support them.

Feeling the ground quake beneath the footsteps of the incoming army, Lucienne shivered. “How many are there again?” she asked Eva.

“Supposed to be seventy thousand, but maybe more or less.”

“That’s like twice Dianene’s population, isn’t it? If all of us killed two undeads, we can just go home…'' She tried to make an attempt at a joke, but her voice failed her in the end. She couldn’t help it, as she couldn’t even imagine seventy thousand people.

Now, that unimaginable number of undead was charging straight in her direction.

In comparison, Eva looked in control of herself, chewing on a blade of grass idly as she waited. “Well, since there’s only two thousand of us, we each have to kill just thirty! Not too bad, right?”

“...”

Thirty lesser undead wasn’t a lot. If someone put her into a room with thirty undead, Lucienne could kill them all with her eyes closed. However, it wasn’t one against thirty, but two thousand against seventy thousand, and on top of that, there were greater undead mixed into the crowd. The difficulty of such a battle increased many folds just by that final detail, since she had to constantly be on guard for undead that were stronger than normal.

Such vigilance will strain her nerves…

“I’m surprised that you’re still calm enough to joke at a time like this,” Lucienne muttered.

A reply came, not from Eva, but from Marion. “You don’t think she’s nervous? When did she ever have the habit of chewing on things?”

With that reminder, Lucienne took another glance at Eva and found that the blade of grass that had been ten centimeters long was reduced to a mere five inches. The other five disappeared down Eva’s stomach without Eva realizing. Caught red-handed, Eva blushed and spat out the rest of the grass. 

“Shush! Focus on the battle! They’re coming!”

“Yes ma’am.” Lucienne turned away and readied her sword as she was told. The undead were almost upon them, and the mages on the walls had already begun to bombard the incoming army with their spells now that the once-spread-out army had converged once more, offering ripe targets everywhere.

The undead had entered the range of the archers as well, and magically imbued arrows rained down all over the undead ranks. The large number of elves present made plants spring up from the ground, entangling and tripping over huge numbers of undead, while other arrows were more direct, unleashing explosions at the point they landed at.

The sheer amount of magic seemed to saturate the air and made it hard to breathe, not to mention the earth shaking from the footsteps of thousands and the explosions that never ceased.

“Hold the line!” the captain of the militia shouted, and the sound of hundreds of shields slamming down onto the ground rang out, even if it was ultimately drowned out by the multitude of other noises. 

The militia weren’t individually trained, so they did their best to make up for their lack of skill with cooperation. One militiaman could probably take a few lesser undead at a time, but that was the extent of their abilities.

Nevertheless, they presented a firm wall a few layers deep against the undead, all while being armed with spears that they could channel their meager magic through so that even if the spear itself weren’t fatal to the undead they stabbed, the magic would rip the undead apart from the inside.

The militia didn’t make an unbroken wall, but had several sections. Hunters filled in the gaps between the sections, supported by the shield wall but remaining free to skirmish with the undead as they pleased, remaining free to switch out with their partners as they wished.

The army hit the wall then with a huge crash as hundreds of bodies crashed into the shield and attempted to get past with flailing arms, but the line held.

The wall should’ve collapsed instantly if the full weight of the undead army thousands-strong crashed into it, but much of the momentum had already been drained thanks to the mages’ interference, and by the time the army reached the defenses, they were no longer able to build up enough momentum to break through in one fell swoop.

The line quickly descended into chaos as the undead army contended with the militiamen’s shields and spears, while the rest tried to break through at the points where there weren't any shields.

But the hunters were ready.

“Lucienne, you ready?” Eva shouted. “Let’s crush some skulls!” Her cries bolstered the courage of not just herself and everyone around her. With her shout still hanging in the air, she charged forward with her shield and mace, having swapped out her sword for something more blunt and forceful.

Blood mana surged through her body as she swung her hammer down at an incoming zombie, cracking straight through the skull with the pointy hammer head. The hammer did not stop there, and instead continued downwards, collapsing the spine and breaking through part of the undead’s rib cage. 

No blood spilled, but the zombie became a mere lump of flesh that was left behind as Eva forged onwards, away from the shield wall and into the ranks of the undead. Lucienne and the other hunters followed close behind, cutting through the crush of undead bodies.

Weapons and magic flashed, bursting through living and the nonliving alike.

A cry rang out here and there, but it was far enough away that Lucienne simply tuned it out to focus on her own battles. Her eyes flicked from side to side, never stopping in one place as she analyzed the movements of her opponents, trying to find something out of the ordinary. After a while, she finally found what she was looking for. Mixed in with hundreds and thousands of staggering undead was a zombie that moved with uncharacteristic grace.

Lucienne honed in on him immediately and she laughed herself toward him. “Found a jack-class!” she shouted, drying the attention of a bunch of hunters fighting near her. Quickly dispatching their own opponents, they began to converge on her voice, weapons ready. “There!”

The zombie warrior’s eyes widened as a shield grew larger and larger in his vision until it collided with his face and knocked him to the ground. His sword slipped from his fingers as he fell and when he finally slammed into the ground, it was lost in the forest of feet.

“Got him!”

A few undead pounced at Lucienne, trying to pull her off their superior, but by then, the hunters had arrived, easily breaking through the undead line and forming a perimeter around the trapped greater undead. 

With a burst of strength, the zombie threw Lucienne off of himself, but before he could escape, a shield slammed down onto his arm, breaking the bone as easily as a twig, before an axe descended and took off his head. 

Lucienne broke her fall with a roll and shot to her feet before the other undeads could do to her what she just did to one of them, yet as a zombie grasped at her, she could not help but remember the screams that she had heard before, and was continuing to hear at that moment. Death was all around her.

Breathing hard, she cut her way back to the shield line, and with a quick nod to one of the hunters coming out from between the lines and a shield-bearing militiaman, she squeezed into the back and collapsed on the ground.

One greater undead down… but there were still so many out there. And although she managed to come back alive, there was no guarantee next time— not when one life after another winked out elsewhere on the battlefield.

An explosion of death magic wiped out a small section of a wall before the mages on the wall could react, forcing the militiamen around the breach to spread themselves thin to patch up the opening...

A hunter foraging too deep into the undead army suddenly being overwhelmed by an undead that managed to sneak up on him during a lapse in attention, dragged down and killed…

A greater undead lurking among the masses of ordinary, less undead lashing out from hiding and instantly ending another life, before fading back into the crush of bodies, biding its time for another strike.

The battle was unpredictable, and no matter how confident she had been of winning before she fought, now Lucienne felt powerless and tiny, at the whims of the flow of battle beyond her control.