Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 2969 Last Stand

An hour before.Gwen saw the Grand Magus elder of Greymoor break from the encirclement.

He was bleeding badly. Some kind of escape art carried him clear of the swarm in a blur of fractured light, and the moment he landed he turned and loosed a volley of spears behind him, impaling the closest of his pursuers. For an instant it looked as though he had bought himself room to breathe.

Then his expression turned grave.

Gwen followed his gaze, and she saw it too.

Beyond the northern gate, one figure stood apart from the rest of the horde. It was not the Grand Magus aura radiating from its twisted frame that froze her blood — it was the eye.

A single massive yellow eye had opened across its shoulder, lidless and unblinking, sweeping over the battlefield with a cold, ancient awareness that did not belong to anything that had once been a man.

It threw back its head and roared, and the infected around it answered as one.

It took Gwen only a moment to understand. This was the reason the infected had been moving with such coordination, herding the defenders street by street instead of simply swarming them.

This thing was a leader. A mind among the mindless.

And the eye — she had read Kayelin's compiled reports and know that It could reach past flesh and armor and strike directly at the soul.

"Senior, don't look at the eye!"

Her warning came an instant too late.

The wounded elder screamed, both hands flying to his head as though something inside his skull were tearing itself loose. Whatever discipline had carried him through a hundred battles abandoned him in a single heartbeat. Without another word, without a backward glance, he turned and fled the battlefield entirely.

Gwen watched him shrink into the smoke-choked sky.

Within minutes, the defensive position they had bled to reclaim was swallowed beneath a fresh tide of infected. Every street they cleared filled again the moment they turned their backs. The surviving cultivators who had volunteered to defend their own homes had long since reached the limit of what courage alone could buy.

They were forced back down the main avenue, step by grinding step.

Then they reached the great junction at the heart of the district — and the horror of it became plain. The infected were not pouring in from one direction. They came from everywhere, flooding every mouth of every street that fed into the square.

If this line broke, everyone behind her died.

Gwen tightened her grip on her sword and faced the approaching horde.

They came on like a black sea, climbing over corpses and shattered barricades without slowing. Some still wore the simple clothes of ordinary citizens, others had already been twisted past anything human. But what made the sight truly unbearable was not their faces.

It was their number.

There were simply too many.

Around her, the last of the defenders gathered. Foundation members stood shoulder to shoulder with Alliance guards. Gladiators gripped bloodstained weapons.

They fought, and they retreated, and they fought again.

It was during that retreat that the great stone statue at the center of the square — the carved figure of a woman . Cracks raced up its base and it toppled, a mountain of falling masonry.

Gwen saw the boy directly beneath it.

She did not think. She lunged, swept him into her arm, and threw them both clear.

BAM

The statue shattered against the pavement where the child had stood a breath earlier.

She had saved him. But the cost was immediate — the impact had thrown her to the wrong side of the collapsing line, cut off from her own people. When she looked up, the infected leader was already staring at her.

The yellow eye fixed on her, and a soul attack lashed out, soundless and merciless.

It never reached her.

Dark smoke unfurled before her face, swallowing the strike whole, and dispersed into nothing.

Her shadow protection — spent in a single instant to keep her alive.

There was no time to mourn it. She hauled the boy tighter against her chest and ran.

Infected closed in from the left and the right. The leader came straight down the middle, fast, deliberate, hunting her specifically now.

Then a figure rose out of the shadows beside her.

Livi.

The baphomet swept one arm in a wide arc, and the infected pressing in around Gwen burned to ash in the space between heartbeats. The leader itself was hurled backward by the force of it.

"Livi — your are here... your line —"

"This is my line now." Livi's voice was flat, her frown deeper than Gwen had ever seen it. "There's already another Grand Magus holding the other one. You're the priority."

For a few precious moments, the pressure eased. Livi's flames cleared the street, and the surviving guards rallied behind her. But the leader recovered quickly, and soon she was locked against it alone, the two of them carving the air apart while the lesser infected flowed around them like water around stones.

And once again, the defenders were pushed back.

---

Screams echoed across the square.

Gwen stood at the center of what remained of the formation. Her sword had cracked along its length. She held the boy against her side with one arm, and she could barely lift the blade with the other.

Yet the enemy never stopped coming.

The first rank fell. Then the second. Then whole sections of the line simply ceased to exist, dragged down and buried beneath the weight of bodies.

Still they fought.

Minutes passed that felt like hours. The dead accumulated. The living thinned.

And for the first time since the battle had begun, Gwen understood — clearly, without flinching from it — that she might die here.

"Retreat!" Livi roared from across the square, her voice raw between exchanges with the infected leader. "GO!!!*"

But Gwen could not go. If she broke now, the line beside her would crumble, and everyone behind it would be lost.

She hesitated.

Then

SPLATTT !

A claw tore through her shoulder.

A second struck her side.

Blood sprayed across the pavement, bright and shocking in the gray light.

She staggered. For a moment her vision swam and the noise of the battlefield fell away.

Distant.