CHAPTER 63: THE QUARANTINE ZONE [2]

A siren whooped... one long, two short.

In response, the turrets pivoted as the floodlights cut left like a turning school of fish. Then out of the dark, they came... Runner Knots.

Runner Knots, dozens of quadrupeds linked belly-to-back by strands of sinew like pulsing rope, moving as one organism that could absorb gunfire like a sponge until it chose to throw parts of itself forward.

It was grotesque, it was eerie, and it was monstrously terrifying.

The knot accepted gunfire rounds with hideous patience, reallocation shivering through flesh cables.

At twenty meters, it suddenly flared open, flinging a dozen sprinting bodies toward a weak angle between towers.

"Brace!" An authoritative voice blared across the wall.

"Right there," Ethan said, pointing even though no one could shoot from this range. "That seam..."

Reid was already shaking his head. "They see it."

On the tower seam, four shadows rose all at once.

The nearest defender tossed signal flares brilliantly into midair. The flares detonated into spheres that hung in the sky like floating suns that turned the seam into day. That became a beacon on the wall.

The runner knot threw its bodies into the light and met a wall of shrapnel

.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Canister shots erupted from the parapet’s inner cannon, timed in a heartbeat. The sprinting bodies became paint and sound as the knot recoiled, found itself smaller, and scuttled backward like a wounded tide.

Kara finally spoke, voice flat. "They’ve turned the siege into breathing. In, out. Burn, cool, and repeat. There’s literally no rest".

There was a certain gravity to her tone.

"It’s a routine," Reid said again, admiration and something like grief tangled in the word.

"Do you think they can hold forever?" Travis asked.

"No," Reid said. "No one holds forever, but long enough? Maybe".

"Long enough for what?" Ethan asked.

Reid looked at him, tongue-tied.

"Long enough for the apocalypse to stop?" Ethan looked at Reid, and seeing no answer in his eyes, he pursed his lips and looked back at the ongoing siege.

Another surge slammed against the wall, and this time Ethan saw what lay beneath the choreography... exhaustion.

Not panic. The defenders were trained, drilled, and were bound by discipline and something beyond it, but there is something called wear and tear.

Subjected to a siege of this scale for most of the day and night, Ethan doubted if even a defense wall of gods could survive it indefinitely.

’What has the world turned to?’ He gritted his teeth.

And suddenly, a gun team hosed a lane a beat late. A loader fumbled a shell and lost two seconds he didn’t have.

To make up for their blunder, the lightning-caster shook blood from his nose and forced another spear through his hands.

"Look," Holt said, voice flat. "The gate’s opening".

They all stirred at his words and stared.

And there, at the wall’s base, a segmented rectangle lifted open just high enough for a strike team to pour out; ten figures in matte armor with glowing stripes at their collars and wrists.

They ran as if the ground had been mapped onto muscle memory; two with tower shields that unfolded from their forearms, four with compact rifles, and one dragging a heavy cable to a stubby machine that looked like a miniature drill rig and hummed with Rift resonance.

Two more carried satchels that steamed in the cold.

"Why leave the wall?" Travis breathed.

"To cull leaders," Reid said. "You can’t hold if you never prune".

The squad drove deep into the churn, then... collision.

KABOOM!

The squad was not crushed though as the tower shields took the brunt, bullets stitching lanes beyond them.

The cable team jammed a stake into the earth, a resonance anchor, and the humming rig spat a wave the color of old ice.

The ash-threshers at the front faltered all at once, like a hand had swatted their inner ears.

At that moment, the squad finally moved as they pivoted and cut their throats with the tidy efficiency of soldiers that had done this countless times before, and then they fell back in a broken-field pattern that somehow looked like a dance in the chaos.

An angry roar rolled along the wall. It did not come from the defenders, it came from something else, something more terrifying.

From the dark beyond floodlights came something bigger.

It moved like a bulldozer with a spine, wide and low, its back scabbed in a mosaic of steel and bone.

Floodlights immediately swung and painted it in strokes. It was a Carapace Crawler, E Rank, maybe bordering higher if the plates told truth.

It shouldered corpses aside and came straight for the opening in the gate, as if it had seen the pattern enough times to understand the heartbeat it needed to stop.

"Come on," Ethan whispered to a wall that could not hear him, sounding desperate. "Come on!"

The lightning caster lifted his hands again and found nothing.

He swayed; he was spent.

’No!!! Now?!’ Ethan felt anxiety twist his chest.

Someone grabbed the lighting caster’s harness and dragged him down behind the battlement. Another quickly took his spot without missing the count, but her sparks were smaller, her face already pale.

The Carapace Crawler hit the squad like a slow train.

KABOOM!

One tower shield bowed inward as the man behind it screamed.

The Crawler’s mouth opened in four petals of serrated glass and bone. It bit through shield and arm as the scream was cut in half.

Reid’s breath left him in a low, vicious curse.

Holt’s jaw tightened until the tendon showed. "They’ll lose the team!"

"Watch," Kara said.

On the parapet above the crawler, three defenders suddenly rose together.

They wore no heavy armor, just fabric wrapped around arms and throats. Their eyes were dark pits in the floodlight wash.

They moved as one and sang...

What they sang was not music though, neither was it language, rather, it was a resonance chant, a ribbon of sound that made Ethan’s teeth ache and the hair on his arms stand on edge.

’What the hell?!’