The thunder of horse hooves was clear despite the endless Narkal growls and howls.
Even Alice, who hung on his back listlessly watching the incomprehensible sight of one man and one spear tearing through hordes of monsters, heard it as she groggily lifted her head.
However, while their imagination conjured the sight of a great army coming to their rescue, reality stopped at the sound of one.
Instead, they noticed weird green smoke drifting on the horizon.
Ashen's enhanced sixth sense flared so violently that he felt his head ringing just from its presence.
And his instincts were proven true when he saw the Narkals' reactions upon inhaling it.
They started falling in droves.
First, their movements turned sluggish, limbs wobbling as if they'd forgotten how to coordinate. Then came the bleeding: noses streaming red, mouths frothing pink, dark stains spreading across their hides from internal hemorrhaging.
Some gasped and wheezed, chests heaving desperately as if drowning on dry land. Others began convulsing, bodies wracked with violent tremors before collapsing into seizures. A few simply froze mid-stride, paralyzed, toppling like felled trees.
Vomit splattered the ground. Blood leaked from mouths and anuses. Abdomens swelled grotesquely. Some stared blankly at nothing, confusion replacing predatory focus before death claimed them.
Bit by bit, the smoke propagated further into the Narkal wave until it was eventually blanketing the sky.
Ashen's mind froze at the sight. Daydream snapped. Trance receded. His body went back to normal functioning as Lucid Dreamweaving released its hold.
Alice, seeing the usually blue sky turn green, weakly nudged the frozen Ashen. "Run..."
He didn't need to be told twice. He turned and sprinted—and yes, it was sprinting now, because even the usually bloodthirsty Narkals were running for their lives alongside him.
'Damn it.' Ashen cursed bitterly. 'Feels like the world is conspiring to have us die here by hook or crook.'
It didn't take a genius to know where the green poison was coming from, so how could he not think so?
The human side had probably decided to spread this poisonous mist instead of risking head-on confrontation.
That was also why there was no sight of them despite almost ten days passing from Rowan's call for help. They were most likely spreading this toxic substance across the Pride domain during that time.
'Damn it...'
In hindsight, it was logical to use other means against such an overwhelming force. It was just that Ashen had refused to think about such a scenario, even though it would have been the first solution he'd suggest if asked.
It was just that his brain had refused to go there when all his hopes for survival rested on the human's main army clashing head-on with the Narkals.
"Damn it...!!!"
Ashen ran with the fastest speed he'd ever achieved in his whole life, outrunning every Narkal and leaving them in the dust—but unfortunately not the green mist that fell like an avalanche from the now-verdant sky.
Both Ashen and Alice held their breath the moment it engulfed them, and it seemed to work for a moment.
Until the poison started digging into their skin pores and every orifice of their bodies.
Ashen reacted instantly, invoking Somatic Autonomy for both him and Alice to make their bodies resistant to the poison. However, unlike last time, SA seemed to be struggling despite the continuous stream of mana being fed to it.
Ashen felt the consequences first.
It started with a wave of lethargy numbing his legs, then paralysis halting his next step, making him finally fall to his knees.
A seizure struck him next—his breath catching in sharp gasps, body convulsing violently, vision swimming as the world tilted and spun. When he came back to himself, he found his chest splayed with vomit.
Only, it wasn't his.
BLURRG—
Another splash of vomit spewed on him. He glanced sideways to the source. It was Alice, who had her chin resting on his shoulder, sporting a listless look. He could feel her constant shaking, and he knew he had to do something.
Ashen looked around, trying to find shelter from the toxic air, but to no avail. The Narkals had destroyed everything.
He didn't know who would win the race. Would SA save them once more, or would their bodies give up first?
The only thing he could do was buy his skill more time by reducing exposure to the toxic air.
Finally, his eyes settled on the monster corpses.
'Fuck it.'
With a grunt, he did his best to move to the nearest mountain of corpses and buried himself with Alice in tow right under it.
He settled her beneath him with his back to the disgusting corpses and hugged her tightly. Right after, he felt every inch of his body surrounded by paralysis at last.
But even paralyzed, his body did not give up. It still worked tirelessly to make itself immune with SA's guiding hand. The same went for Alice—or perhaps she had it easier, since her body was clearly much superior to his human one.
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The siege of the Pride domain was a thing of terrible grandeur.
Humanity's combined armies stretched across the entire border between Pride and Wrath—a living wall of steel and flesh that encircled what had once been their frontline territory. Tens of millions of soldiers stood in coordinated formations, weapons ready, eyes fixed on the green-tinged horizon.
Between the siege line and the poisoned zone lay a killing field of corpses—Narkals that had fled the toxic mist only to die before reaching safety, their bodies piled in hideous mountains that stretched for kilometers.
The soldiers worked methodically, cutting down the weakened beasts that staggered into range. Swords rose and fell with mechanical rhythm, spears thrust without passion, axes cleaved with the bored efficiency of laborers performing routine tasks.
Because that's what it was—routine. The Narkals that reached them were already dying, limbs sluggish, coordination shattered, barely able to lift weapons or snarl threats. Killing them was less battle and more of... harvesting.
A soldier drove his blade through a Narkal's skull. The creature barely registered the strike before collapsing. He withdrew, moved to the next one, repeated. Just like the thousand times before.
At the center of this massive operation, hundreds of meters ahead of the main siege camp, stood a tall but lanky man.
His arms spread wide, face serene as if attempting to hug the world—but the continuous liquid spreading from every pore of his body told otherwise. He was attempting to poison it.
The tips of his wavy hair were brown, indicating the original color, but the roots were slowly being overtaken by the same sickly green of his poison. The same transformation was happening to his eyes—brown irises bleeding into toxic emerald.
A thin blue thread of mana connected from behind him, feeding into his back, sustaining the endless flow of venom that poured from his skin and vaporized into the air.
Hundreds of meters behind him stood the main siege camp.
And at the very top of its command tower stood three figures: two men and one woman.
On the front, Cornelia Arde stood proudly with a look that resembled fire itself—long crimson hair and matching eyes that seemed to burn even in stillness. She was the new Wrath Domain Lord and the commander of this operation, by virtue of her domain being next on the chopping block if they failed here, and of course, by virtue of her strength and the military might of Wrath domain soldiers at her command.
To her right stood an obscenely obese man, his bulk almost comical if not for the power radiating from him. If one focused, they'd notice a blue string of mana going from his swollen belly all the way forward to the poison-spreader's back.
To her left stood a very tall man, reaching two meters in height, with sun-kissed skin and a bald head. His green eyes were hardened in silent rage as he looked straight ahead. But if one looked closer, one would notice the intense sorrow hidden behind the obvious anger.
He was Edward James, the Kingmaker, and the new third step Pride pathway powerhouse. Ashen would have known him better as the coach who'd trained him to the bone.
Cornelia glanced sideways and let out a sigh. "Teacher, I know that losing students could be quite devastating, and you've lost two, in your case, but even then... You have to be at least reasonable. There's no way they were surviving those hundreds of millions of Narkals with only their numbers, no matter how resourceful and mighty they are."
Edward didn't glance at her, continuing to stare at the horizon, thoughts unknown. "What? After getting the system's blessing and reaching the third step, you now dare talk back to your teacher?"
Cornelia huffed. "It's not about talking back! It's about it being simply impossible! No one can survive that."
Common sense dictated that Cornelia was right, but Edward's stubbornness was as strong as it was futile. "I know my students. With Rowan's personality and Morikawa's strength, if they wanted to get out of there, they'd be able to. But this poisonous man won't leave them any leeway…"
His molars ground loud enough to be heard as he spat out the last words.
Cornelia helplessly shook her head. "Even if that was true, with their personalities, do you think they'd abandon everything and flee just like that?"
"..."
"If so... How come the Narkal wave slowed enough for us to set up this siege? Did they have mercy on us? ...Or did someone do something to somehow slow them down... perhaps they'd throw their lives away... and even their soldiers—"
"Enough!"
Cornelia shut up, recognizing that she'd indeed gone too far.
But it wasn't totally her fault; the sudden integration of the Wrath concept with her being made her prone to anger... but also to provoking anger in others, even in the teacher she owed everything to.
Jumping all the way to the third step from the seventh might have sounded impossible and even suicidal to others, but not to a certain caste of people.
Seravelle possessed many uncovered ruins left behind by their ancestors after the mysterious era of the Reign of Terror. Among them was mention of the system, its powers, and the conditions of advancing along the pathway it laid, and its eventual comeback.
Those who'd first discovered this information sold it to the ruling class of Seravelle. And so the cultivation of men and women suitable for system integration began from there, in wait for the system's return.
Each domain chose a Sin. The candidates started from their infant ages and were conditioned to the chosen sin, living their lives immersed in it.
Cornelia was the same. Since she was a child, she'd only interacted with angry people, people with short fuses, provoking people... And the only way she was taught to ward them off was to use her own wrath in retaliation.
Before she met her teacher, who taught her to control her temper and acknowledge the many other emotions that existed beside anger, Wrath had been her constant and only enemy and friend.
Cornelia knew why she'd been subjected to this, but she'd only thought the system was an excuse invented to torment her further. Only now did she understand: She'd been embodying her Sin in advance.
And while she wasn't the only one, she was the best product of the experiment when it came to Wrath.
The one spewing the poison was the best candidate from Envy. His third-step skills were perfectly suited for this siege: one to siphon mana from a target of his envy, and another that manifested every kind of envy he'd ever felt in his life as poisonous liquid he could propagate into mist.
He envied the Gluttony candidate's vast mana reserves, so he siphoned from him. The obese man, in turn, used one of his third-step skills: Mana Snatch, which allowed him to steal mana from anyone willing or unable to resist, storing it in his fat like a living battery.
Together, they formed a perfect loop. Gluttony stole mana from the thousands of soldiers behind them, all volunteers who'd agreed to fuel humanity's salvation. That stolen mana fed Envy, who transformed it into poison that spread across a designated area, infecting it persistently.
The size of the affected zone and quantity of poison depended on mana consumed. With thousands feeding the loop, the scale was... apocalyptic.
Greed was overseeing other siege operations, so he wasn't present. The candidate from Lust stayed in Paradise as the last line of defense.
Sloth and Pride, unfortunately, hadn't produced any candidates at the third step.
As for Edward, he wasn't a candidate, but a surprise instead. It seemed the man had clawed his way to the third step from his fierce pride in his students alone.
The experiment could be considered successful for the human council—the organization tasked with humanity's protection and the one that had first hatched this plan—but it wasn't all good news.
The demi-humans had gotten wind of this, and their reaction had been fierce to say the least. That was what had spurred the empire to send the nine-tailed queen to strike the human side preemptively.
Cornelia hadn't comprehended their incomprehensible actions and their obvious fear of the word "system" at first… but looking at the two people who were single-handedly able to poison an entire domain, she started to understand why.
As to how they knew of the system, many of the demi-humans were long-lived species, so it wasn't strange that their historical archives were more complete.
⛧
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Two weeks had passed since the poison began spreading.
The toxic mist had propagated to every point of the border between the Wrath and Pride domains, completely halting the Narkal tide. It killed every living thing that passed through it and even contaminated the earth, rendering it completely uninhabitable for generations to come.
Humanity had sacrificed one of its domains and more than three million humans to avoid extinction.
But they didn't know that one human and one demi-human had lived against all odds.
Crack—
A hand pushed out against a small hill of corpses, slowly pushing the bodies bit by bit until it revealed the silhouette of a man completely drenched in gore.
He held a nine-tailed fox woman whose beauty seemed to defy even these outlandish circumstances.
Ashen pulled himself free of the corpse-pile, Alice cradled in his arms, and stood on unsteady legs atop the mountain of dead.
The green sky stretched endlessly above them.
And ahead, through the toxic haze, he could just barely make out the distant line of humanity's siege.