The indistinct buzz of the protective mana shield had become a constant accompaniment to the battle for Ghost Reef. The turtle shell shaped projection flickered with energy ever since the first weeks of the Eradication Protocol. It protected the courtyard from a bombardment of attacks so that the fighters could concentrate on the raiders that rushed in from all angles.

The low, humming sound had become a subconscious reassurance for the defenders who fought for the island. It was the feeble heartbeat of their final stronghold, a whirring engine of mana that kept the nightmares from invading their core. As long as it existed, they had something of a refuge to escape from the overwhelming pressure emitted from the forces of mana. When the walls failed to physically hold the corruption at bay, it was the shield that represented the high ground they needed to resist the siege.

However, with every projectile absorbed, the consistent hum was faltering more. The sound was replaced by sporadic thrumming before smoothing back out, like the choked breaths of a dying creature. The obvious difficulties it experienced weighed on their consciousness as the spurts of struggle revealed the limited amount of time they might really have to enjoy their continued existence. Stone dust, golden sands, and hellfire embers were the primary threats, squeezing through the energy barrier and drifting into the interior, but without the shield it was death that would rain down on the courtyard, making the central cleanup much more difficult if not impossible.

With the passing of the hurricane, the shield was once again resisting the full force of the armies of mana. It didn’t seem like it would last much longer. The temporary interruption had done little to rejuvenate its structure. The problem was that the leylines were no longer on their side, so the primary source of energy for the civilization shard had been cut off, leaving them with only the ambient fuel from the territory. That obviously wouldn't be enough to repel a planetary invasion, especially as their territory was eaten up by their foes.

Groups of human mages stood by the mana siphons, their knuckles white as they gripped the cold pylons and sought to individually bridge the gaps in energy to prevent the shield from going down. Their faces were grim, etched with the strain of so many days of repeatedly burning through their pools of mana, then rejuvenating their resources with the corrupted energy of the Eradication Protocol just to restart the draining process. They were pushed to the limit, desperate to support the others who fought with the invaders more directly.

Vronk witnessed it all from his position at the edge of the western canal. His aura control was so profound he was aware of every individual battle all the way to the eastern ships circling the monstrous dragon in the deep sea. Those mages supporting the shield were warriors who deserved recognition, and as a natural survivor, he etched their spirits in his memory, as he had countless times before. So long as he lived, their contributions would not be forgotten. The shield mages battled valiantly, inspiring him to do the same.

Vronk had been a part of many battles in his lifetime. Some were fought by himself, but most of the other contests were with much larger numbers on both sides. The prizes had been everything from simple experience to survival, and he had even contended for entire planets, including his most infamous conquest.

Despite all of his experience, he had never witnessed an enemy like the forces of mana. That such a collection of power existed throughout the galactic community was a horrible revelation. It called into question everything about the hierarchy that served as the foundation for life as they knew it. Humans had revealed something profound, though Vronk only understood it on an instinctual level, rather than as an intellectual. When he expressed himself, his human companions told him he had awoken from the matrix. He had no idea what they were talking about specifically, but he gathered that he had been exposed to a grand truth that would never allow him to return to blissful ignorance.

He turned the information in his head over and over as he fought, defending the section of Ghost Reef that had become a playground for himself and the native pigs of the islands. Then, with an errant blast of rainbow energy from the Icon of Angels, the shield finally overloaded. The turtle shell manifestation shattered like a dropped crystal and the mana siphons that were manned by the mages faded away like burnt paper. The last wisps of energy leaked through the fingers of the shield mages as the charge suddenly depleted.

An elongated silence descended on those within the walls of the old stone fort as they all recognized the loss of the reliable hum in unison, subconsciously holding their breaths to listen for its return. It obviously wasn’t coming back. Whether they liked it or not, it was a turning point in the war with the forces of mana. As the absence of the energized shield settled in, the quiet felt heavier than any physical weight. Even Vronk felt it. Then, the first fiery explosions landed in the courtyard.

Concussive blasts ripped through the carefully crafted streets, forming craters so deep, the limestone bedrock was exposed. The ground buckled and people were sent sprawling as entire buildings were swallowed in the onslaught that had been constantly resisted by the shield. Secondary explosions followed as many of the defenders were forced to cast counterspells or otherwise protect themselves against the steady bombardment of ranged attacks from millions of enemy casters.

Marcus rallied the defenders from the citadel, prioritizing their access to the chasm and the protection of the civilization shard above all else. It was the Viceroy’s shrewd decision-making that kept the defenders from fully collapsing as panic ran rampant.

Shortly afterwards, Caisalya fully exposed her individual power, taking responsibility for their ranged defense. Her feet were entrenched in the soil, roots snaking across the courtyard and extending beneath the stone foundations of the fortified walls until they rose from the shallow seafloor. Her legs morphed and thickened, and she grew into a huge tree that swallowed the burning ruins of Vronk’s bakery and the rest of the pie-shaped block. Her fingers elongated until they branched into an enormous canopy, and the leaves that made up her clothes and hair thickened into a massive umbrella with a width equal to the entire fort. She was individually protecting the whole settlement with her body, shielding it like it was a vulnerable child.

The hellfire burned the freshly exposed leaves, but it didn’t take long for the shocked humans to catch on and start dousing her with their own abilities, supporting her as she shielded them. Her roots impaled enemies as they rushed through the shallows and even made their presence known as far as ten layers down, wrapping the chasm and sending filaments in the crippled bodies that she captured, freezing them in states of harmless agony. The lowest hanging branches pummeled the largest forces of mana, even as her leaves burned with hellfire and smoke rose into the crimson atmosphere.

Vronk felt ashamed that he couldn’t do more himself, recognizing that he was almost certainly stronger than she was, but he lacked the dynamic skills to handle more nuanced situations. Only Caisalya was capable of doing what she had done, but it would come at great personal cost. She was already becoming another spirit for him to remember.

During this war, the Lighthouse had only ceded ground to the forces of mana. He felt in his bones that it was about time he demonstrated that victory was possible. When they were at their lowest, he would strive to show them all that they still had the strength to fight. Vronk wanted to claim the head of the most aggressive of the enemy leaders as proof. He stepped forward, slowly picking up speed as he left the mouth of the canal behind, passing the exterior of the newly formed roots to press further into the shallows filled with monsters.

The Icons only moved within their domains, restricted by their own power so that the edge of the Lighthouse’s core territory was their limit. Vronk would brave the corrupting mana and take the fight to them.

The Icon of Demons known as the Monolithic Destiny arbitrarily pointed directly at the ogre as he emerged from the masses, marking him as a target as it noticed him surging through smaller demons with little resistance. A huge explosion of red fire erupted from Vronk’s body. The hungry inferno ripped across his skin, nothing like the searing heat of his ovens. It reeked of sulfur and foulness, washing over him in an instant. The wave of liquid flame incinerated all that it touched in brief flashfires, but it couldn’t destroy the Worldbeater.

Vronk roared, not out of pain, but out of respect for such a monumental display of strength, both from his ally as well as his enemy. It was a primal response from a creature that must have been at the top of a food chain even before being uplifted by the system. He noted the agony of his mana seething from his body and pushed it from his mind, sending it into his veins where it fueled him like an arcane battery. The disgraced ogre prince, smoking and scorched, stood in a spot of blackened sandbar where the sea had rapidly boiled. He only had one way to properly contribute to his new home.

He had to smash their enemies. He would do so with one of the most notorious weapons in the galactic community. His scarred and stained club, pulled from a meteor core that had supposedly extinguished a star, wasn't as basic as it appeared. It had claimed the lives of entire planets worth of enemies and enhanced his already ponderous stats beyond the realm of the galactic community. Vronk wanted to add this false god to the list of his conquests and show that he had never been truly bound by the chains of the system, no matter what it claimed.

The demonic behemoth stood impassively in the distance, an entire army between them, fires roaring all along the surface of the ocean behind it, already preparing another attack. It was far from the frontlines, where crimson haze masked its specific features, but it had finally drawn close enough to the island that Vronk might reach it without swimming.

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It was clear that the icon wasn’t just another enemy. It was a manifestation of pure destruction on a scale normally reserved for catastrophes. Vronk revealed his crooked and yellowed teeth in an eager grin, glad to have found a worthy opponent even after he had believed he was long retired.

He stomped forward, splashing through shallow water, smashing himself in the head hard enough to see red and cause blood to dribble down his scalp. His berserker rage took over from there, the throbbing pain just enough to push him passed the edge after being scalded by hellfire.

Vronk bulked up, activating all of his personal enhancements so that he was twice the size of the demon soldiers and half the size of their Raid Boss equivalents. His mass may not have directly rivaled theirs, but his Strength was absolutely a match for even the largest bosses.

He rushed even further ahead, deep into the enemy forces that climbed across coral reefs and into the protected sandbars that surrounded Ghost Reef, and with a final massive leap he hurdled over hundreds of monsters. When he crashed deep within the enemy army, planting both enormous feet, he transformed the battlefield into his personal arena.

His arrival sent the backlines of demons into chaos. He turned into a blur of blood and fury as he smashed his club back and forth. It was like a bomb was detonated within the relatively organized legions, and at its epicenter was Vronk.

It didn’t take long before millions of enemies surrounded him, but he was drawn into the mess without any fear. To follow him would be suicide, but even in his focused state he could recognize the sudden shift in support he received. The ranged attackers tried to keep the enemies from overwhelming him, but with every step he took his mana pulsed from the soles of his feet and massive numbers of the weaker enemies evaporated into the haze, doing most of the work.

The cannons, catapults, and siege weapons were left with the boss level targets, and they all sent volleys that landed across the shifting battlefield. He was surrounded by countless smaller minions, daring the Icon of Demons to face him as well. He roared his challenge and sensed the way the sound ripped across the ocean and was swallowed by the distance.

The Icon was still quite far, so his aggression was forced onto the legions and their middle commanders. Vronk swept his club through the masses of demonic bodies, crushing a dozen at a time, then reversing it to destroy a dozen more that already filled the space created by the first deaths. Demon dogs and axe wielding soldiers leapt on his back and hacked at his flesh, unable to dig deep enough to cause him true damage, though they left scars covered in flames. If the Icon failed to tear his defenses down how could its underlings have any hope?

Still, they piled on, dragging him to his knees with sheer numbers before he burst back up, ripping one demon off his face and tossing it into the air while he ripped and clawed at the others, flailing his club, biting and kicking, and went into a full frenzy. He sidestepped the pile that had formed, launching himself into yet another group, splitting demons in half as he sought a target on their opposite side. Even when he recoiled, he collided and killed enemies. They left him with no space whatsoever.

He dual wielded a demon in one hand and his club in the other, using both to crush his opponents until the demon liquified and needed to be replaced by another to be used as a boxing glove. Still, countless more piled onto him, latching onto his body as they desperately tried to take him down.

When he shook another group off, sending a handful flying in the air, he noted the distance he still needed to cross. To his surprise, bloody fire rained down when the flailing forms of those he had tossed from his shoulders were carved into pieces by precise blasts of air. Then, a moment later the tiny burrowing owls streaked low across the battlefield and twisted back toward the fort, avoiding countless projectiles with unmatched Agility. When their strafing run completed, long strips of destroyed demons were already being filled by reinforcements.

There was no time for thanks as more monsters collapsed into the gaps, and Vronk just kept fighting, but it was another moment that he intended to remember, even if he was the sole survivor of the battle for Earth. As he kept fighting, he felt the weight on his back decrease and out of the corner of his eye, he watched as a giant bat used its clawed feet to drag a pair of demon dogs higher into the air, battering protesting Imps with its wings before throwing one backwards where it was pierced by hundreds of smaller bats. It then used both of its feet to hold the other demon in its grip and tear it apart, letting its fiery innards crash into the other monsters before dodging the intercepting valkyrie and winged dragons that could fly high enough to compete for air superiority.

At Vronk’s flank, the giant pig had already grown to its maximum size, even larger than Vronk himself. It bucked repeatedly, lifting its tusked head and launching unlucky demons into the air so that the bats, owls, pelican bombers, seagull swarms, and predatory osprey had their pick at the throats of the land-based monsters.

Further ahead, phantom ships blasted through the shallows, leaving long strips of clear water as they crashed into both angels and demons that dominated the west. When they lost momentum, the phantoms leapt from the wrecked vessels and dove into the fights, completely lacking the near invulnerability of Vronk, but openly sacrificing any effort to retreat in favor of claiming scalps.

When the Siege Boss level demons kicked through the larger warships, transforming their sturdy decks into splinters, they found their legs covered in phantoms, each with thousands of levels bolstering their stats beyond what the assimilation implied. They used the giant demons like living cliffs, scaling them to attack limbs, necks, and eyes that were hundreds of feet in the air before base jumping onto other monsters as they toppled over.

Vronk surged forward, running with dozens of demons on top of him and thousands in his way, but he was flanked by whole squads of pigs and bats, individually picking off the monsters that he left stunned. He drew closer to the demonic Icon of Mana, witnessing it receive an equally sized bloodstone meteor to the back of its neck, causing it to stumble as the giant stone projectile exploded into red crystalline blood. The Icon roared, frustrated to be damaged at all, but all it received in response was more focus fire from the increasingly distant siege weapons and human defenders.

Nearby, Garod’s mech had all of its blades spinning through the stone flesh of the demons as he airdropped into the mess and more squads of phantoms and humans avoided letting Vronk’s momentum go to waste. A temporary sun appeared, lashing out at the enemies and incinerating creatures that should have been born in fire while human parties waded forward. The battlefield shifted as Ghost Reef reclaimed the sandbars, even if only for a moment, so that its courtyard might stabilize itself.

A hundred thousand skeletons climbed from the sands to the south of Vronk, and as they exposed their bleached white bones, they received armaments out of thin air. The undead archivists revealed their ultimate abilities and generated an army of the dead.

Every skeleton became a powerful warrior, wielding an ice blade and a shield of burning fire. Larger individuals rose from their masses, bones fusing together into gargantuan constructs, joining the push and widening the coverage so that the entire west side of the fort was resisting the onslaught of enemies. The archivists were targeting the Icon of Angels that was more to the south, hoping to overwhelm its incredible defenses with an equally incredible coordinated assault.

As Vronk finally came into leaping range of the Icon, he witnessed the culmination of effort on the opposite side of the fort, where humans and phantoms had come to the same conclusions as he had, realizing that with the loss of the shield they needed to act quickly or have all of their efforts fizzle into defeat. The surge of energy at its culmination was impossible to ignore, causing even the demons near Vronk to hesitate for a moment.

While the golden Icon of Dragons focused on the largest of the naval warships, far off shore, the Aeromancer had released an attack that she had been building up for months. The act of god she summoned was then multiplied by her Interceptor partner and sent at the Icon with such force, the dragon’s head disappeared in a flash of searing electricity and the rest of its body was split in half. The combination attack from Charlie and Camila bore a hole straight through the entirety of the largest Icon and defeated it in one strike. It was the only way the time-controlling creature would ever be destroyed and they had done it.

Vronk roared with delight at the amazing conquest, not upset in the slightest to lose the chance to draw first blood from the Icons. He finally leapt into range of his own target, more enthusiastic than ever. At the same time, on the opposite side of the island, a third of the skyscraping legs of the parasite Icon were cleaved by a blade of divinity, as Gibson was supported by Shane and Madison to take down the biggest threat to the dunes beyond the main fate of the fort.

As Vronk’s club hammered the Icon of Demons, all four of their primary enemies were suddenly on the wrong side of the momentum. He and countless others scaled the titanic demon, smashing it even as flames engulfed its form. Vronk would only accept his own death if he took the demon to hell with him, but nothing had been able to kill him before, so he had no expectations of making such a sacrifice.

When his club broke through the skull of the massive demon, sending plumes of lava high into the atmosphere, and the demonic Icon lost its balance as its life escaped, it seemed like they would actually win. He jumped back into the sea expecting to roar so that even the heavens would know of their imminent victory, leaving billions of soldier minions to clean up afterwards. But when he looked past the dying Monolithic Destiny, his significant aura detected powerful enemies approaching on the horizon.

As the crimson haze slowly revealed the twin of the Icon of Demons they had just defeated, then its triplet, and kept going, Vronk started backing away along with all the rest of the Lighthouse defenders. If there had ever been a signal to regroup, that was it.

A hundred demonic Icons of Mana were wading toward Ghost Reef surrounded by soldiers. It was a titanic army that only had one goal: to exterminate humanity and the Lighthouse that had been born from the unacceptable species.

As if the infinite soldiers weren’t enough, they even had a limitless supply of pinnacle bosses. The same was true for the other sides, as the forces of mana demonstrated what happened when they met with such incredible resistance. Whatever rules the defenders had been promised didn’t seem to exist. Seizing victory by defeating a single Icon was impossible. Vronk suspected survival might be just as impossible, even for him.

The sight of hundreds of Icons slowly approaching the battle for Ghost Reef was unforgettable.