Shadow Slave

People had always imagined hell as a place full of fire. But, as it turned out, hell was full of wind and water instead.

NQSC was swallowed by a storm. The sky was obscured by a dark, menacing veil of clouds, and hurricane winds howled as they tore through the crumbled remains of the city barriers and collapsed buildings in the outer rings of the city. Rain fell like a wall, flying sideways from the sheer force of the powerful gale. Flashes of lightning burned the darkness away, and deafening claps of thunder roared high above, as if there was a malevolent, hungry dragon hidden in the storm.

Storms like this one had been happening more and more often over the past four years, eventually fusing into a never-ending deluge of calamity.

Of course, despite all the damage caused by the unceasing natural catastrophes, it was merely a background for the true disaster.

The true disaster was the Nightmare Gates that now surrounded the city like siege towers and the endless swarms of abominations escaping them each day.

The world was truly and utterly ending.

In fact, it was already halfway gone.

It had started slowly, but then proceeded swiftly. There were simply more and more Nightmare Gates, more abominations, and more casualties among the soldiers who desperately protected Earth from being torn apart. Then, pieces of the waking world began fusing with the Dream Realm, adding their weight to its patchwork surface.

Once the two realms became partially fused, the Nightmare Creatures did not need Gates to travel between them anymore. That alone added immense pressure to the strained defenses of humanity, but there was even more damage. A planet was a closed and finely tuned system, after all. Once a hostile mystical realm started taking bites out of it, nature itself went insane, causing rapid and unpredictable changes.

Hence, the storms.

Here in NQSC, at least, it was mainly storms. Elsewhere, it was something else — volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, sharp temperature changes...

It was not all bad, though. Yes, the infusion of alien air had caused the sky above NQSC to go insane... but it was clean air. Even now that the air filtration barriers were breached or collapsed, people were not being poisoned on the street — in fact, they could breathe freely without face masks for the first time in hundreds of years.

Even the end of the world had its perks.

“Move aside, bastards! Let them through! As soon as the rear vehicle clears, close ranks!”

“What are you doing, fool?! This guy is still alive! Drag him back and hand him over to the medics!”

“Report! Left highrise turrets, ammunition spent!”

“Sir! They’re coming!”

“Argh, curse it all! Anyone whose armor still has more than thirty percent charge left, advance to the front row!”

“Best seats in the establishment! Let’s enjoy the show, gentlemen!”

“Light them up!”

On a street between two battered dormitory towers, the joints of powered armor suits hissed as soldiers unleashed a hail of bullets and explosive rounds into the rushing tide of Nightmare Creatures. Behind them, towering MWPs charged their mass drivers, rising monstrous machine guns to bathe the abominations in lead and tungsten hail. The turrets above the highrises spun, spitting out long streams of tracer rounds.

The roaring salvo of countless shots drowned out the deafening blast of thunder... but it failed to drown out the chilling wails of the rushing Nightmare Creatures.

The soldiers of the first line of defense paled, preparing to deploy their bayonets.

”I... I don’t think I like this show, guys!”

“Wow, really?! You don’t say!”

“It’s about to end, though! At least for us!”

”What a silver lining!”

The soldiers had been fighting the entire day, slowly retreating street by street as the civilians of the breached district were being evacuated deeper into the city. Now, however, it looked like for many of the soldiers, this was going to be the last stand.

Just before the tide of abominations overwhelmed the makeshift defensive position, a swift figure streaked through the air and plummeted into their mass.

“Brace for impact!”

There was a muffled boom.

In the next moment, the entire center of the Nightmare Creature horde was pulverized, hundreds of them dying in an instant. It was difficult to see because of the torrential rain and furious wind, but countless abominations that were close to the figure simply turned into bloody mist, while those that had been further away were merely torn to tiny pieces.

Hide, chitin, flesh, bone — everything was crushed and ground to dust in a split second, as if struck by a celestial hammer, flung outward by a heavy shockwave.

A heartbeat later, lightning illuminated the world, and the startled soldiers saw a blurry streak moving through the swarm of Nightmare Creatures with astonishing speed. Wherever it passed, scores of abominations were severed, beheaded, and split open — as if the binds that held their bodies together were being undone.

One soldier, whose visual acuity was better than most, caught a glimpse of a great zweihander flashing in a magnificent arc.

”It’s... it’s the Lady of Sorrow!”

”What?! Isn’t she a Saint?!”

“Since when is Lady Sorrow in NQSC?!”

“A Saint has descended from the sky... now that’s an ending!”

“Stop staring and push forward, fools! Support the lady and her people!”

“Left highrise turrets have finished the reloading sequence!”

“The last convoy has entered the Barrier, sir!”

”Advance!”

The situation on this battlefield had changed in an instant. Lady of Sorrow — Tamar of Clan Sorrow — was one of the youngest Saints of humanity, having conquered her Third Nightmare only recently. However, her fame had been steadily spreading among people even before that, when she was a mere Master. Most of the renowned figures of humanity were affiliated with one of the great powers in one way or another. There were Saints serving one of the two queens, Morgan of Valor or Song Seishan, and those who served Nightwalker and the House of Night. There were some who followed Ananke of Weave or one of the three Supreme protectors of the waking world.

Tamar of Sorrow and her small band of elite warriors, however, were one of the few independent forces that roamed the realms while serving no one. Nobody ever knew where they would pop up, which battlefield she would grace with her presence... wherever it was, however, countless Nightmare Creatures died, and tides of battle were usually reversed.

Invigorated, the soldiers pushed forward, aiming to eliminate the remaining abominations before organizing an orderly retreat.

Tamar, meanwhile, cleaved far into the crumbling horde, moving deeper and deeper like a whirlwind of blood and steel.

[Don’t get too excited. Pull back.]

The voice came from a Memory used by members of the Shadow Clan — with this many Gates, technology became more and more unreliable, causing a crisis of command and communication among the soldiers of humanity. Where technology failed, sorcery and Awakened picked up the slack.

In that regard, the Shadow Clan was better off than any other faction.

Tamar smiled grimly.

[Who says that I am excited?]

Finally, she reached the Tyrant who controlled the horde from the rear. Leaping into the air, she stepped on it to change her trajectory and avoid a deadly blow, then did it again to launch herself toward the creature’s massive head.

[I am exhausted. I want to lie down. I want to take a hot shower. I want to eat something warm, too...]

The creature’s head split apart, a fountain of fetid blood mixing with the falling rain. Tamar landed on the wet asphalt, slid a few dozen meters, and brought herself to a halt by transforming her momentum into a blast of concussive force that tore a hole in the nearest abomination.

[Most of all, I want to get somewhere dry. Damn rain...]

Her Memory spoke again:

[Hey. That was uncalled for.]

In that moment, a powerful gust of wind slammed into Tamar, obscuring her vision with a veil of water.

Half-blinded, she looked around.

‘It is time to pull back, indeed.’

She had performed well in front of the soldiers, but in truth, she was not in good shape. Beneath the armor, her body was bruised and battered, littered with wounds — and beneath them, there were the wounds from the previous battlefield that had been treated, but had not healed fully yet.

Things had been getting worse and worse as of late, and there was no respite in sight. Antarctica had fallen first. By now, it was most likely fully absorbed by the Dream Realm, most of it transported to somewhere beyond the Burned Forest. As such, it had become an open wound in the flesh of Earth, unleashing an endless flood of Nightmare Creatures — that alone would have been enough to overwhelm the remaining Quadrants... if not for Revel and the Shadow Clan.

Somewhere out there, on the unknown northern front of apocalypse, Saint Revel was leading the forces of the Shadow Clan, including the powerful Shadows and the legion of shades their boss had left in her care, against the Barrow Wraiths and countless abominations of the Burned Forest. In fact, she had staged a counteroffensive and invaded the charred Death Zone a couple of years ago.

Because of Revel pulling the attention of all those Nightmare Creatures to the Forgotten Shore, fewer of them were spilling into the waking world.

Still... their number was enough to make the oceans of Earth completely inaccessible. Navigating them had always been perilous, but now, it was pure suicide. Even Saints did not dare to traverse the oceans.

The colonies in South America had been evacuated, but the three remaining Quadrants were completely isolated from each other now. With global infrastructure in tatters, famine had long become a real possibility — even with most population centers possessing robust food self-sustenance systems, those had long been cripplied by the spreading influence of the Call.

In the end, the only thing that was preventing humanity from starving was the Night Garden and its captain, who could both carry people from the waking world to the Dream Realm and bring food from the Dream Realm to the waking world on the way back. Raised by Wolves could help, as well.

It was quite ironic... before, people of the Dream Realm staved off starvation with supplies from Earth, But now, the situation was entirely reversed.

Which was not to say that the people in the Dream Realm knew no hunger. The more the situation in the waking world worsened, the more refugees poured into the human enclaves there. By now, a good one-third of humanity had left its cradle, pushing the population of the Dream Realm well beyond one billion.

And the Dream Realm... the Dream Realm was in no way ready to accept this many people.

Things weren’t going well there either, after all.

On Earth, the three remaining Quadrants were under a constant siege, both from beyond and from within. In the Dream Realm, meanwhile, the same was true for the three Domains — even with the Sovereigns leading the battle, humanity was struggling to hold on to its land.

Expanding their reach, of course, had become completely impossible.

The wilderness was too dangerous, and the Citadel Cities weren’t made of rubber. By now, every single one of them was overpopulated and suffering from resource shortages.

A few had already been lost.

’We are not dead yet.’

Tamar looked at the ravaged urban landscape in front of her with a grim expression.

They were not dead... but they were certainly dying.

Humanity was like a wounded soldier slowly bleeding out on the ground, hoping that a medic would arrive in time to save them.

It was only that the medics who could save humanity were stuck in a Nightmare.

They had been gone for four years already, and nobody knew when they would come back.