Lieutenant General Liang Chu-Rong very carefully read the recommendation placed in front of him by the IIUC Sino-Committee.

He looked up.

"You had this ready, when?"

"That's a need to know... Look, I wouldn't worry, what's the worst-case scenario? One sorceress?" Magister Eric Walken, Fudan's advisor, carefully explained. "If the Planar Ally works— all's well, ends well. If not, you are neither liable nor is your task any more difficult."

"And this… Shoe Goliath," the Lieutenant-General pronounced the unfamiliar word.

"Shoggoth," Walken intonated helpfully.

"What is it?"

"Nobody rightly knows." Walken's eyes were sparkling. "Why do you think there's so much interest? Our lack of knowledge is precisely why we want it manifested away from human cities and in a place full of potential targets."

"And… what is Yog-Sothoth?" Liang felt his skin crawl.

"We believe it's an intelligent entity that resides in the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Void. The girl once said that 'Yog' is the gate and the way, the origin of the Void things that lurk in the dark of space and time. Yes, she's got a talent for the theatrical."

The commander of Dalian's Tower grunted, clearly disliking this talk of theatre.

"And this Shub-Niggurath?"

"The mother, I suppose, of all Void beings. The lass says she's a planar goat of sorts. I'd put it as the overimaginative mind of a girl-child."

"… and you expect me to believe this?"

"Do you expect ME to believe this in your stead?" Walken shrugged. "General, we know intelligent Spirits exist in every Elemental Plane. If so, why not the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Void? I don't know if the girl dreamed up these names or if they really exist, but we all know that what the will makes, the magic manifests. We're not High Elves, you know, we're still knocking on the front door of Spellcraft and asking to be let in. For now, what really matters is the practicality of this thing she's dreamed up. Gwen has never touched Faith Magic. I believe it is safe to assume this is a 'being' inside the Void, no different to Salamanders or Undines or Sylphs."

"And Shenyang shall prove if this Shoggoth is benevolent or malevolent?"

"Where better?" Walken pointed to a scaled model of the city and its surrounding troop movements.

In the decades since its fall, much of Shenyang's exterior settlements had decayed to nothing. What remained were ruins of the old CBD marked by a harrowing expanse of concrete four kilometres in diameter, encircled by a crumbling orbital highway.

As the oldest of China's satellite Frontiers, Shenyang had been the antiquity provincial capital of Liaoning before being subsumed into China's Dynastic expansions. It was initially founded by the neolithic Xinle, a group of nomadic Demi-humans who took advantage of the Hunhe River's spring passage through the valley. During the Han Dynasty, the middle-folk took, then rebuilt Shenyang into a northern wonder of commerce, only for to it be razed by the Demi-human Empire of Liao. During the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese retook Shenyang and rebuilt it again as a fortress city. A mere century later, the Centaurs returned, transforming Shenyang into the "Rising Sun on the Hill"— the new capital of a Demi-human Empire.

Shenyang's ownership was thus a revolving game of hopscotch, each time devastating the city in unimaginable ways. From Centaurs to the Qing, then a short stint under Russia, then to the Japanese, then to the Communists and finally to the Undead, the city's strategic significance was the only reason it continued to exist.

As a result, beneath the city's ancient city wall and its Soviet-era bunkers were endless warrens and tunnels connecting an ant-hill dozens of kilometres in every direction.

That was why, although barely a structure stood in between the city's war-ravaged edge and the central administrative blocks, the PLA's forces were encamped twenty kilometres away.

"And this creature… this 'Shoggoth', it is capable of slipping into the tunnels?"

"We shall see. By all accounts, I would imagine that it possesses excellent permeability in invading narrow and cramped spaces."

"And it's banishable?"

"Indeed, given enough mana," Fudan's advisor assured the General. "At worst, we can restrain Gwen if she loses control. It's bound to exhaust its internal supply once the link is severed, and there isn't life here for it to feed. Besides, the Tower will keep it well away from your troops and our allies."

"I won't alter our existing mission projections." The man tapped his table.

"No need." Walken indicated first to the map, then to the request form. "The contestant will set up a separate incursion point from Grid G44-P39. I will personally oversee the test AND take responsibility for its success or failure. As you know, Miss Song is a subject of great interest to Central. Have you been informed of the exchange taking place?"

"I've been briefed."

"And you have reviewed what happened in Shimenzi?"

"I've seen enough."

"Good." Walken leaned back in his chair, looking smug. "Then let the girl have her moment. For the present, her glory belongs to Fudan, and thereby to your nation. After that, whether she succeeds or fails, she'll be out of the PLA's hair."

"And out of our reach?"

"Hardly, she has family in Shanghai, doesn't she? Her Uncle is an enlisted member of your organisation and a war hero."

The General remained mum.

"This order from Secretary-General Miao…" Lieutenant General Liang Chu-Rong very carefully intoned. "Says to give her free reign to succeed or perish."

"It's a part of a larger deal. Remember that in exchange, you would receive Magisters from Cambridge, as well as the Meistership for your pet researcher. An unequivocal exchange, to be sure, but that's politics for you. You wouldn't want to compromise the Secretary's plans, do you?"

Again, the General remained contemplative.

"Do you fear the girl will gain too much influence?" Walken cocked his head. "The recordings for the present IIUC should make an interesting broadcast, don't you think. In a prudish country like yours, the Party can easily displace whatever sympathy she had gained. For a Mage, and for a girl— it won't be easy to gain back… what is it that you call it here? Mien?"

"Mian-Zi. It means esteem."

"Yes." The Englishman grinned. "Our little 'Devourer' made quite the obscene spectacle, didn't she?"

General Liang nursed his now warm cup of water, trying to read fallen Magister known as Eric Walken. It was rare to see a certified Oxbridge Magister so committed to a cause.

As for the girl's Mian-Zi, even without the audio recording, the visuals had been shameless enough to make her inclusion in the PLA's designs undesirable to the core. The displacement of such an uncontrollable, anarchic element, one with such pull in the military, was in Liang's opinion, good riddance.

From her dossier, he understood that the girl's rapid rise equated that of a firecracker wrapped in festive red-paper. One day, sooner or later, she would explode, showering them all with debris.

As for the standing order from Secretary-General— Liang felt doubt. The Secretary-General was discretion personified. Still, he knew Central well enough to understand that the Inner Party operated at a level he shouldn't be questioning, not if he wanted to retire as a General.

What troubled him was who in the Mageocracy possessed the clout to move the Secretary-General to issue such a permit? If what Eric Walken said was to come to pass, the IIUC shall soon witness the power of one-woman strategic-class invocation.

A patient man, Liang studied the smug Magister.

The IIUC.
The recording.
The Planar Ally.
The Songs.
The Hero of the North.
Tonglv Canal.
Magister Wen from Fudan.
The Cambridge offer.

The dossier had been quite thorough.

One by one, Liang rearranged the pieces until they made sense.

"I am starting to see your stake in this," Liang answered after a minute of carefully scanning the memo from Secretary-General Miao. "You're trying to salvage the girl's reputation. For when she leaves China for the West. Am I correct? You think those greedy Clanners in Tonglv are going to make a move on her stake by using her departure and her Shimenzi incident!"

Walken's flawless teeth gleamed like polished ivory.

"Well... You know what they say. One man's trash." He chuckled, golf-clapping at the Lieutenant-General's sudden clarity. "… is another man's treasure."

Four hardwon days and almost a week into the competition, Fudan's B-Team arrived at Shimenzi. In its battle-worn halls, haggard and OoM, they met with the account of A-Team's pyrrhic victory.

One received with ambivalence.

Of the three teams that participated in the Purge of the waterworks, Fudan was the "victor", after defeating the most potent foe and having worked diligently during the approach. Unfortunately, in the struggle for dominion, Gwen had lost Eunae and Mayuree, and she could not summon Golos again until she and Petra reconvened at Shenyang's outskirts.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

As a result, even taking into account their vice-captain's capacity for damage output; the three remaining members were crippled. Without healing, buffs, or Divination, their efficacy was no match for the synergy-heavy Auckland or the all-star Pretoria in the subsequent lead up to Shenyang.

Even if Gwen and her companions took willing risks to hunt the ever-larger Zombie Hordes, spell fatigue would wear them down. Even with the PLA's hand-picking targets for the trio, there was only so much an Abjurer, a Sword Mage, and a jack-of-all-Schools could arguably achieve.

"Poor Gwen." Anita glanced at Rene, seeing her disappointment mirrored on her friend. "I guess we can't complain, not with what we've seen on the way."

"Gwen had done her best," Petra returned, her tone tart and defensive. "The intelligence was improperly scouted."

"I hope she's not beating herself up." Jiro was more sympathetic.

"Don't be discouraged. We'll continue to do our very best," Fudan's Captain agreed with his Fire Mage. "If Gwen had trouble with this Diego, then there's nothing the rest of us could have done. Since Eunae and Mayuree are both safe, we should focus on the task ahead."

"Right." Rene nodded, though it was clear her heart wasn't in it.

Together with Fudan and the other defensive teams were the 78th, 82nd and 88th Quasi-Magical Infantry Division, supported by four Golems from the 209th Magi-Tech Armour and one Flight from the 4th Aerial Recon.

Tei wanted to say something to up the cheer but lacked the charisma of his vice-captain. At any rate, it wasn't the unexpected upset that had sapped the party's spirits, but rather the rigour of their four-day sojourn from Dalian to Shimenzi.

It was the fatigue of seeing death on an industrial scale.

For the young Mages, the inclusion of NoMs in overland battles had always been an abstract reality. Of Fudan, it was only Tei who had some experience of the Front's horrors. Nonetheless, over the last four days, each member of Fudan, arguably one of the top universities in a country of almost half-a-billion people, witnessed the stark fate of being a citizen-soldier.

Theirs was an unavoidable fate. The Purge of Liaoning was a national effort, one that called upon the nation's able-bodied citizenry to add their blood and tears to the future of China's prosperity. To wit, Tei was very proud of China's NoM Military. Distinct from the Westerners, Mao's rise to power wasn't built on the back of Noble Mages or Magical Entrepreneurs, but NoMs. During the People's Revolution, it was the NoMs, aided by sympathetic Mages, who overthrew the Scholar Bureaucrats of old. Against the Japanese, it was the scorched flesh of citizens that exhausted the wands of Emperor Hirohito's soldiers. In the Great Purge, it was NoMs who dragged the land-owning Mages and their industrial ambitions from their saffron-roofed manors.

And with no less fervour, buttressed against the Beast Tide and then the Undead Front, the People's Liberation Army paid in blood and bone.

As elites, Tei's teammates were a prideful lot. But their brittle pride wasn't equipped to deal with frustration on such a scale. That a single mishap translated into a dozen casualties, hour after hour, was enough to mangle the mind of any Mage not sufficiently fortified for the fact.

For the PLA, casualties were a necessary reality and progress often paralleled body count.

In China, the PLA's soldiers were numberless and renewable— through devotion and numbers, they made up for the nation's gap in Spellcraft, Golems and Magitech.

As solace, Fudan's liaison from the PLA had explained that compared to the dark days post-Beast Tide, the army had come a long way. Now a "Modernised Quasi-Magical Soldier", the everyman troop of the PLA, was reasonably equipped. Compared to the peasant soldiers fighting with pitchforks and pikes, the soldiers now wore enchanted combat boots, damage-resistant pants and vest, a steel helmet, and a well-supplied canvas pack. Most importantly, each man carried a Type 95 Element-LANCE made for NoMs by SinOrdin, with time-decayed crystal cartridges each capable of thirty shots.

"And of course, our soldiers are armed with nationalism," the liaison had boasted. "They don't fear death because the families of the deceased are treated well."

Fighting in formation, the troops had been trained to never break rank on pain of execution by the embedded Commissars wielding Type 44 anti-personnel wands. It was an anti-Undead tactic that the PLA had taken years to perfect. In Central's opinion, so long as unmolested divisions could rid the battlefield of Undead while they busily fed on another division without breaking, then the battle as all but won.

It was a bitter tactic, but it worked. Though each individual soldier was weaker than a Ghoul, when rows of a thousand NoM soldiers five-deep opened fire, a living sheet of raw lightning washed over the landscape, piercing the Horde. Once their spear-points grew white-hot, the first row retreated. The second row took aim, waited for their targets to clear the smoke, then fired. After that came the third, and them the fourth and the fifth in an endless rotation.

And it was under these conditions that Fudan, Pretoria and Auckland fought beside their NoM comrades.

Straight away, Pretoria expressed complete disdain for the NoM soldiers, choosing instead to neutralise threats on their own.

Auckland attempted to hold the line with Fudan. With a sub-par team-make up, however, all they could manage was a battalion-wide Hakka buff, followed by intermittent interventions where possible. Against swarms of corpses numbering in the thousands, a thirty-meter Wall of Water or a twenty-meter Sand Well was little more than a blip on the kilometre-long Front.

At first, the unaccompanied Hordes weren't impressive enough to tax the soldiers' wills. That changed when the main force made contact with a swarm lead by a Grafter and his Acolytes.

Once engaged, Pretoria left to hunt the enemy Necromancers while Auckland and Fudan supported the soldiers against the four-thousand deep throng of teeth and nails.

For two hours, Tei managed to keep the Undead at bay, but as one man, even supported by Petra's Spell Cubes, the incoming tide proved too much.

When finally he was near OoM, the levy broke. As a mass of roaring brown water, the leaping, crawling, skittering shoal of bodies broke over his Dust Wall, swallowing the still-firing platoons.

Without hesitation, Tei had ordered his party to withdraw and regroup into the air. Anita, Rene, Jiro and Petra obeyed, but their expressions spoke wildly of disbelief, anguish, frustration and bewildered helplessness.

Jiro especially had reached his alchemical limits in the first hour, having laid waste to some two-three hundred Ghouls and Zombies. Rene as well, fighting beside the idealistic Fire Mage, had depleted herself trying to prevent the approach of two Abominations. The exertion proved to be her undoing, for the creatures' monstrous resistances exhausted the sorceress even as the fat sizzled from their lava-locked bodies.

Then there was Anita, whose confidence was undermined most profoundly by the mass casualties among the NoM soldiers. Her style of magic was ideal for small groups but was woefully underprepared for engagements of mass melee. All Anita could do was aid Tei with barriers that slowed and funnelled the zombies into kill zones, that and ward two dozen Commissars with Crystalline Mage Armour.

Of the group, it was only Petra who truly shone. A versatile Enchantress, she dispensed healing, defence, damage and control where ever she landed. Spell cube after spell cube, the Flower of Fudan proved herself an angel of the battlefield.

And after that, the party watched the mutual carnage as their countrymen advanced, never faltering, never breaking, never retreating. Like an Iron Golem, only wrought of human flesh, the PLA's battalions marched toward Shimenzi, clearing a swarth four kilometres wide and eighty kilometres deep from Dalian.

From start to finish, Tei recalled seven engagements.

On the first day, they had keenly asked to review casualty reports.
On the second day, they chose silence.
On the third day, they grew numb to the slates handed down to them by their liaison officer.
On the fourth day, they fought without words, each performing their duties, then meditated behind the reserve troops so that they may sooner rejoin the fray.
And on the fifth morning, they arrived at Shimenzi to receive news.

"Tei, let's eat." Rene could smell the thousand-year-old egg porridge bubbling in the Officer's Mess. Far from her peppy self in Shanghai, her eyes were now bloodshot and lacking in lustre. Her bright face, as well, was so weighted with fatigue that she was starting to resemble the fabled Panda people of Sichuan.

"Right." Tei felt glad that in moments like this, Dust dulled not only his capacity for wonder, joy and pleasure but also the impact of undesired emotions. "Eat up, we rest for a day, and then we leave for Shen Yang."

"I am as dry as a billabong in Broken Hill." Gwen rested her spell-numb fingers. "And fresh out of True Silver as well."

"Here, take mine." Heila materialised four rods as repayment. "Your VMI… Praise the Lord, you are truly blessed, Miss Song."

"Nothing to it!" Gwen shook her head, receiving the reagents without complaint. "Izette, are we good here?"

"Yes, Miss Song," Pretoria's Diviner returned her Message from afar. "Jean-Paul is finishing up as we speak."

"Now that's a blessed boy." Gwen sighed at the thought of Jean-Paul's Signature Spells.

A few of Pretoria's constants returned with strange looks.

"Something the matter?" Gwen smiled back, wondering if praising Jean-Paul was something that the Void Mage's companions found strange. If anything, she suspected it may be because Jean-Paul had replaced one of their original core members.

"You should ask Jean-Paul about his childhood sometimes." Schalk's smile was very polite and not at all sarcastic. "If he's willing to share, you'll hear quite the tale of how our country faired under the Mageocracy."

"And the Nun who raised him." Lencho wormed his way in between Gwen's conversation with the others. Ever since Gwen offered to alternate between helping out Auckland and Pretoria, Schalk's Lightning Mage had felt like a cat on a hot tin roof. Though Lencho's mastery and teamwork were leagues above Fudan's Lightning Sorceress, the girl possessed superior firepower, not to mention an inexplicable ability to multiply her output.

"Lencho, hou jou bek," Schalk snapped, silencing the Lighting Mage at once. "Miss Song is our guest."

"Ja, ja…" the prideful Mage mumbled. "Meisie, you should know that Jean-Paul and I, we're piele vleg."

"Did he just say…" Gwen almost bit her tongue. She had no idea Lencho was so openly liberal. "Well, good on ya, mate."

Lencho squinted suspiciously. "I am not your mate."

Gwen gave up. She could empathise, though. Jean-Paul wasn't a looker, but he oozed talent.

Thus far, she rather enjoyed her role as a supporting caster. Whether backing Pretoria or Auckland, Fudan's inclusion in the margins of any quest expanded operational capacity by leaps and bounds. The solution had been Walken's idea. As CCs were awarded for teamwork and support, Walken had said. They may as well attain a score proportional to their competitors' gains.

That way, her instructor hypothesised, assuming their final hand was a royal flush, they would indeed end the competition with a "Bang".

Presently, Lulan and Richard aided Auckland, while she supplemented Pretoria. Thus embedded, Gwen took the humbling opportunity to watch and learn.

So far, she had observed the nuances of formation fighting and spell staggering, concepts her team had exercised through incidence rather than emphasis. Likewise, courtesy of Izette's Link Mind, she was opening up to profound and subtle ways in which Divination could be used to coordinate team movement. As for the others, even the abrasive Lencho had shown her new ways to combine Evocation and Transmutation. His Signature Spell, Tempest Rush, was especially impressive as it created movable anchor points from which the caster could rebound Lightning Bolts.

But of Pretoria's august members, it was only Jean-Paul for whom Gwen had to repress her growing envy. From what she could discern with her limited knowledge, Jean-Paul's repertoire was almost all Signature Spells she had never before seen in the Tower's Tomes. Each invocation was a painstaking creation from the august Mevrou Bekker, who had taken a novel approach to the pitfalls of Void Magic. Consumptive Orb, for example, stole residual mana from the target. On a Magical Creature, it commandeered passive mana inherent to upper-tier creatures. Against a Mage, the spell was most effective against Negative-alignments but fizzled against Positive Energy spectrums. As for the theoretical framework of Jean-Paul's magic, "Usurp" was the base upon which the Mevrou's Signature Magic was founded.

"The difficulty must be astounding," Gwen cooed.

"You patronise us, Miss Song. Once you reach a sufficient tier of knowledge," Schalk professed. "You should stop thinking about Spells as from Scrolls, but collated effects made harmonious through custom-formulae. Range, Area of Effect, Shape, Size, Element, Seeking, Channelling, Scale, Pre-Manifestation, Post-Manifestation, Meta-Magic, Spell Triggers, the variations are almost infinite… assuming you have the time and the resource."

"Then, I could also…" Gwen licked her chops.

"I don't entirely agree with Schalk. The Mevrou says that Spells should never be made for the sake of making spells, that there have to be explicit rationales," Jean-Paul quickly added, watching Gwen's eyes glaze with anticipation. "There's a reason Fireball remains the greatest Evocation Spell of all time. It's simple to cast, difficult to disrupt, easy to learn, fast to manifest, stable, low-cost and mana-efficient."

"That's incredibly astute! Ahh—" Gwen sighed. "I wish I could have an instructor like yours in London."

"You probably will," Schalk's interjecting voice resounded assuringly. He glanced at Jean-Paul, then back toward the guileless sorceress. "But remain vigilant. In London and everywhere— there is no such thing as a free lunch."


The Northern Black Zone.
Dengta Forward Operating Base.

On the seventh day of the invasion, the imminent arrival of the Dalian Tower was preceded by the deployment of twenty divisions in the central staging area. Altogether, Dengta alone had amassed some twenty-thousand standing troops, eleven-thousand-two-hundred support personnel, five-thousand reserve infantry, and four-hundred odd Mages of varying talents.

In the distance, Shenyang's wilted silhouette perched in the gloom like the carcass of a dead Leviathan, awaiting its next victim, inviting the invaders into its many-layered tunnels and bunkers.

In silence, the 70th, 72nd, 79th, and 91st Quasi-Magical Divisions settled into the dugouts excavated by the Combat Engineers. As one, the grim-faced NoMs lined the criss-crossing bastion of transmuted fortifications, their positions layered and staggered to form kill zones. On either side of the earthen fort, construction continued, polluting the air with the roaring of Golems, the invocations of Transmuters, and the crunch of ferroconcrete crashing into place. Behind the main battle line, a network of portable Divination Towers hummed, tethered to dozens of trucks each laden with crates of High-Density Mana Crystals. Together, the network fed a beacon Mandala half-a-kilometre wide, carved out overnight by the logistic Mages.

In addition to the entrenched troops, towering Golems from the ubiquitous Dusty 266s to the monolithic Atlas 388s lined the perimeter, their blast wands attuned for artillery. Below their great stature, umbilical cables snapped into mana packs, snaking through stockpiles of enclosed HDMs.

And upon the battlement, Colonel Qíao stood, a technical aide by each side, reviewing the mana scripts.

Thus far, Shenyang had yet to react, though Qían was sure an all-out counteroffensive was coming. Logistically, if the Necromancers lost Shenyang, Beijing would reduce the buffer between Pyongyang and the new Front to a mere one hundred and fifty kilometres of Black Zone. The strategic advantage was the reason why the PLA had decided to go all-in. As the new millennia dawned, China could no longer afford to bleed out its resources on the Undead Front.

"Good." Qíao exhaled mist. The frigid atmosphere of Shenyang's winter was warmth sapping, a necromantic chill that drained the vitality from their bones. Even now, where the city's edge began, a visible ring of rime smothered the crumbling orbital highway, encasing the central business district in decade-old, accumulated ice.

And at the centre of that dark and dilapidated urban preserve sat the seat of a Necromancer who had transformed a living city into an Undead Necropolis.

Qíao wondered if a single Tower was enough to make the difference in numbers. Three decades ago, they had contended with both a Beast Tide and an Undead Incursion simultaneously. The worst of it was that in the aftermath, many of the slain beasts had simply been re-risen in their Undead forms. What he feared now was how many monsters had been dissected, sutured and remade into new abominations. If he was a Necromancer elite, what manner of ritual could he engender if given two decades? Could the PLA, now equipped with the best Magi-tech armaments China could import or manufacture, finally turn the tide?

"Sir." Qíao's aides connected a Message from Lieutenant-General Liang Chu-Rong. "Dalian is ready to proceed with the Teleportation."

"Very well." Qíao turned to face the Mandala. "All troops to their posts. BEGIN the Signal."

Lieutenant-General Liang Chu-Rong stood on the bridge of Dalian's Tower, one of eight mobile platforms China had built for itself since the 1980s. Unlike the PLA's super-structural Tower in Shanghai, Dalian was a modest design bought from the Mageocracy. It was originally a research Tower with a Dwarven-made Levi-plate just under a kilometre in length, the smallest in the Party's national armoury— and the most cost-effective.

Inevitably, battles were fought with currency.

To translocate a Tower from Dalian to Shenyang costs just over a million HDMs. To further activate the Tower's Shielding Crystal without the help of ley-lines, ten thousand HDM crystals had to be consumed each day. Factor in the additional cost of defensive Mandalas, spell amplifiers, embedded blast-wands and troops teleporting into and out of the Tower, another million HDMs may yet be exhausted.

The Party, therefore, could not afford catastrophic failure, not when the annual production of a medium-sized city had gone into the reclamation. Already, the sheer volume of collated HDMs stockpiled for the operation had impacted the exchange rate for Chinese-Minted currency.

"Sir, we will shortly re-enter the Prime Material." His junior officer informed the Lieutenant-General. "Materialising in THREE… TWO… ONE…"

Liang's innards lurched. There goes the first million.

The Tower was protected by a Bothe-Geiger Negation Field. Even so, the once in forever translocation had filled its crew with unspeakable dread. In the most unlikely of circumstances, a misalignment meant that the Tower could end up in the Primary Plane of Fire, or if they were very, very unlucky, in the Quasi-Plane of Ash.

"We're materialising!" The Major's voice rose a whole octave.

The floor thrummed. The lumen-screen projecting the grey expanse outside burst into activity. A second later, a three-hundred and sixty-degree projection of Dengta's desolated plains came into view.

"Absolute altitude, thirty-three meters— holding steady!"
"Stabilising horizontal drift. Dropping Dimensional Anchor!"
"The Ley-line is right below us! Beginning disruption. Switching to internal supplies."
"Weapons are live. Fire crew reports that they are at the ready, sir! Auxillary systems are charged, sir!"
"Shields are at five per cent and regenerating."
"Engine Room reports all systems normal. Capacity at seventy-five per cent!"
"Teleportation Circles are HOT! Maximum range is set at twenty kilometres."

A slew of tactical information washed over the Lieutenant-General, as did a surge of adrenaline tingling his spine. They were back! The PLA was back with a vengeance!

Below his dais, both in the control room and across the plain, a cheer broke out, first in waves, then as an undulant tide of shouts and hoots. A few of the older Mages who had gained their lapels fighting on the Front visibly wept.

But their commanding officer remained stoic.

Poor bastards, Liang forced his fervour to cool. Retaking Shenyang was well and all, but what of the cost? With the Tower now committed, the privilege of a retreat no longer existed. Be it the Mages or the NoM soldiers, their only recourse was to retake Shenyang or die trying. In the worst-case scenario, Dalian would reduce itself and its target to a twenty-kilometre crater.

"Give me a region-wide scan of the city," the Lieutenant-General ordered. "I want the place mapped twenty-meters deep from the Governor's Building to the bunker-shelters."

An enormous illusory projection appeared over the control theatre, courtesy of the Tower's embedded Diviners and Illusionists, some of the best in the nation.

Outside the Tower, a visible ripple of Divination rang out.

The Clairvoyance echo took several seconds to cycle. Once the intelligence theatre parallel-processed the data, the results were then transmitted to the command room.

Within the projected three-dimensional diorama of the landscape, friendly units were outlined as green blips, while the Golems and the machinery were triangular blocks. As Undead units appeared, unmasked by their unique Negative Energy signatures, they manifested as pulsing red dots.

Presently, a sea of green blinked below the Tower's massive silhouette.
Not far, pulsing faintly to indicate their place underground, was an ocean of all-enveloping red. At best, their foe was two kilometres away and slowly moving toward the viridescent markers.

"… Cao…" The Lieutenant-General swore before he could catch himself. "Colonel Qìao! Get your men ready! The Undead are coming! Dalian Tower! All teams to battle stations!"

ArroooooooOOOOooo—

A blaring proximity alarm indicated that the enemy was close enough to be soon within the range of the Type 95 LANCE-wands.

"There goes tea time." Gwen dematerialised the team's SPAM sandwiches. "Pats, let's get going."

"Will do." Petra cleaned her hands with water from Lea. "Tei, guys, are you going to be alright?"

"Don't mind us," their captain returned. "We've been defending the soldiers for a week. We know how they fight, what they need, and what type of enemies need to be neutralised first. Go help Gwen, we'll wait for the good news."

"Thanks, everyone." Gwen dispensed a round of hugs among her companions, noting their bruised eyebags. "I won't let you down."

"Let's buff up before you go. Mage Armour!" Anita was beyond glad that she was once again reinforcing her own team and not a non-commissioned officer incapable of withstanding a single swipe from a Ghast. That a low-tier Mage could be so fragile wasn't an occurrence the Abjurer had at all anticipated. In her experience, even the petite Mayuree, a Diviner, possessed the VMI and expertise to defend a least a few blows. "Resist Elements! Enhanced Ability! Be safe, Vice-Captain!"

"I will." Gwen gave Anita a pat on the shoulder, touched Rene on the arm, brushed the dust from Jiro's chest plate, then held Tei's mailed hand. "Thanks for understanding."

After the B-Team's arrival, the contestants had shared a few hours of respite, enough to catch up on the events of the last seven days. As Walken had anticipated, the performance of Fudan's B-Team was adequate but unimpressive. Comparatively, Auckland had most definitely fallen behind, while Pretoria's B-Team performance was more pronounced.

Now, the conquest of Shenyang had entered its second stage. From their briefings, the students knew that the rulers of the Necropolis would scramble all available resources under their command to topple the Tower. It was an obvious conjecture, for as long as China was willing to feed crystals into Dalian's mana furnace, Shenyang would remain under siege.

What remained now was a time-sensitive occupation.

But any response from Pyongyang would be intercepted by troops from the 1st Force-Recon, joined by elites recruited from other single-digit Mage Flights. For the occupation force, it meant that within the week, Shenyang had to be cleared and its ley-line activated and fortified.

Dalian Tower would, in effect, transform into Shenyang Tower.

And in the middle of the madcap scramble was Pretoria, Fudan and Auckland's students, hoping to carve out CCs and glory for their institutions.

Which was why for the final leg of the match, Petra rejoined Gwen's A-Team at the expense of a CC penalty so Gwen could bring forth her Allies, Golos and the Shoggoth— Fudan's aces in the hole.

"Which way to G44-P39?" Petra took to the air.

"Er…" Gwen's orbs glazed over. She looked at Richard for help, finding her cousin unhelpfully marking "North" with his eyes.

"This way." Lieutenant Jinwei Hān, their liaison, steered Gwen in the opposite direction she was facing. "The Lieutenant-General has teleported a recon force to the location in order to clear the area so you and your Enchanter may construct the Summoning Circle unmolested."

"Thanks," Gwen said. "How far—"

_—B-BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!_

In the distance, where the Tower faced the Front, the battle was joined. From the Dalian's central column, a line of Disintegration thicker than two Whetus sliced across the landscape like a scalpel, vaporising the topsoil to reveal the tunnels being dug below. An eerie silence passed, then like a poked ant-hill, a horizon of Undead appeared from the frigid earth, clambering onto the cold soil. Suddenly, innumerable bodies formed into numberless throngs, stamping the virgin frost underfoot as they charged.

In retort, the Tower shimmered, dialling its Shielding Core to the maximum allotment. Against low-tier Undead, Shield Barriers served as mediocre deterrents. But, its ability to impair powerful constructs like Golems and Abominations mixed into the Horde was a necessity to ensure victory in a mass-melee.

"Wow." Gwen gasped as a bone-throbbing thrum of mana rippled from the Tower's mid-section.

"The artillery is about to begin—" Lieutenant Jinwei Hān advised. "Hold your ears."

_B-BOOM—BOOM! BOOM!_

Gwen had never felt so abused by anything so noisy and so intense in all her years. The sounds from the shockwaves were like a construction zone going off inside her skull. Unlike the sharp "CRACK!" and "BANG!" of her Flashbangs, what she now witnessed was a real-time earthquake erupting with spellfire.

"OTHER THAN THE UNDEAD, THE SHOTS ARE BREAKING UP THE GROUND SO THE HORDE CAN'T MOVE FREELY!" Jinwei hollered, shouting despite the Message device on his wrist, deafened even to the howl of his own voice.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"CAN'T THEY USE THE DISINTEGRATE AGAIN?"

"NO! TOWER ARTILLERY CONSUMES TOO MUCH MANA, IT'S ONLY USED FOR SIEGES AND AGAINST MYTHICS!"

Gwen shivered, thinking of what might have befallen Almudj if Melbourne and Brisbane Tower had been keen in their pursuit of the Mythic. If a Disintegration Ray had struck her rainbow-hued companion, could her "Kin" have kept its cool? Morbidly, she could imagine the mountainous corpse in the harbour, along with at least one destroyed Tower, besides which was what remained of Sydney.

_VOOOSH! VO—VOO—VOOOOSH!_
 _— BOOM BA-BOOM! CRACK! BOOM!—_

Next to unload were the Golems. With their portable artillery wands raised high, an unending fusillade of citrine, cobalt and sunburst filled the sky and the distance between the Horde and the Tower. As the spells connected, Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, Bounding Flames, Elemental Arrows raked the line of Undead from east to west with splendiferous spellfire.

"Gwen," Petra urged her cousin, her face warmed by the heat from the arcanistry. "We need to get to our fight."

"Right." Gwen turned to face the east, her vivid irises illuminated by the refracted spells. "Let's fly."

Shenyang.

West of its business district, a flight of Mages from the PLA had secured grid G44-P39.

It was a tedious but humble task, for the battle some six-kilometres to the east had the Necromancers well-preoccupied. As a result, the soldier-tier Undead they had encountered were all dusty old ghouls and ancient zombies, all of which were quietly dispatched by the elite taskforce.

"Magister, they've arrived," a PLA Seargent informed their VIP.

"I see them." Eric Walken, the advisor to Fudan, waved at the incoming foursome and their PLA liaison. "Gentlemen, lets us welcome our star sorceress."

"Bloody oath, Eric!" Gwen could hardly believe that one of the cloaked figures as her instructor. "You're here, personally? Is that even allowed?"

"Where else would I be?" Walken replied, his old face bemused by her excitement. "I promised I'd see you through, didn't I? And yes, my presence is authorised."

"I was expecting you to watch from the Tower's top floor," Gwen marvelled, landing heavily. With a hiss, the Shen-Teī suit cushioned her forceful descent. "It's dangerous here, what if we get attacked."

"I might be rusty, but I should be able to obliterate a small Horde without too much trouble." Walken gave her a puzzling look. "But that's not why I am here. Petra, are all of Gwen's preparation's ready?"

"Yessir." Petra's response was terse. Gwen suspected her Russian cousin didn't have the best opinion of Eric. Both thanks to Wen and her misadventures at the hands of Moscow Magisters, Petra possessed little reason to love someone like Walken. "We may proceed."

"Good— Richard, Lulan, it's good to see you're both safe."

"Allow me to apologise for what happened at Shimenzi, Teacher." Lulan bowed deeply.

"No need." Walken waved a hand. "It was bad luck, coupled with Gwen's inexperience. As for yourself, it was a poor match up. You've done excellent work otherwise."

"I would say Gwen performed excellently, all things considered," Richard retorted in their quiet vice-captain's stead. "She choked that Necro without using magic, through a Bone Shield no less."

"Of course she did. A lesser Mage would have... not done it. But— let us waste no time." Their instructor guided them toward a half-collapsed, abandoned brutalist office building. "Gwen, what do you make of this?"

"A parking multi-storey?" Gwen said, studying the ugly structure.

"Ha!" Walken chortled. "No, there weren't that many cars back in the 70s. THIS is the old MSS headquarters, sans windows and walls. Its northern branch building. Sergeant? If you would? I believe the Lieutenant-General has given you the authorisation?"

"Please follow me, Magister."

One of the soldiers led the party around the destroyed building. Near its rear, they found an intact wall. Urging the others to step back, the Seargent then activated a concealed Glyph console. A slow rumble shortly followed, depressing the base until it revealed a set of stairs spiralling into the depth.

"We'll lead," the Sergeant offered. "Meng, Jei, take point—"

"Hold— allow me to excuse you." Walken waved a hand. "Gwen? Richard? Let's not risk the lives of our helpers, shall we?"

"Ariel! Caliban!"
"Lea!"
"Shaa shaa!"
"Ee ee!"

The students conjured their Familiars.

It was a curious juxtaposition. Caliban slithering into being was enough to drive the soldiers back; Ariel and Lea's resplendent forms were oppositionally enticing enough to leave them in awe.

"Cali, you take the lead," Gwen commanded her Void serpent. "Ariel, stay behind us."

"Lea, scout ahead." Richard turned his Undine transparent and misty. "Report back any enemies you encounter, do not engage."

As the Familiars took to the basement, Walken explained their present course of action.

"Originally, I was expecting to take us to a rooftop to conjure the Shoggoth. BUT, the Lieutenant-General was thankful enough for your selfless contribution to Shimenzi that he proffered the MSS's drafts for the installations under Shenyang. From the civil blueprint, we can discern that there's a long-sealed escape tunnel that connects into the main bunker at the heart of the city, under the People's Hall."

"Incredible, and the shelter had remained undiscovered?" Lulan enquired with disbelief.

"The MSS's transit tunnel was naturally a well-kept secret," Walken explained. "As for its present state of occupancy, we shall shortly find out. Richard? What does your Undine see?"

"Magister Walken is right." Richard kept one eye open while he focused on Lea's Empathic Link. "It's safe down there, but…"

"But?"

Richard's mien was expressionless. "Gwen, take a gander through Link Sight and tell me what you think. I'll get Lea to guide Cali down to the central chamber."

His cousin obliged. A minute later, she let loose a yelp.

"Oh, Eric, it's horrible…"

"Are you being vague on purpose?" Walken loathed having partial knowledge. "Out with it, girl, what is it?"

"I think it's the MSS agents." Gwen felt the blood drain from her face. "They're… they were trapped inside when Shenyang fell!"

"We'll arrange for them to be buried and their families contacted." The Sergeant saluted at the two-dozen bodies sitting by the wall of the spacious chamber. Once, the vast vault may have served as an emergency bunker of sorts, now, it was just an elaborate coffin. "As true sons of the motherland. They died with dignity."

When the team had earlier arrived in the building's belly, they were met with a dozen carcasses hunkered in a row. Each by each, the slumped cadavers had assumed a kneeling position, their skulls blasted apart by a wand. In a far corner, the agents' executioner sat with his Type-22 stuck in between his clenched teeth, bits of brain decorating the concrete behind him.

"How morbid," Gwen muttered. What was worse was that she could empathise. Weighed against a slow death brought on by thirst, starvation or asphyxiation, or being raised as a Revenant, wasn't sudden death preferable?

"Detect Magic." Walken ran a scan through the bodies regardless of the delicate sentiment of their observers, briefly illuminating the cadavers with motes of Lightning. "Good, they've passed on."

The Sergeant glared, dismayed by the Magister's paranoia.
Walken ignored the soldier, in Shenyang, he was taking no chances.

"I'll watch you set up the Mandala here," the instructor's voice echoed through the high ceiling. From the looks of the different furnishings and the incomplete construction, the bunker was initially intended to be an underground archive. Now, it served only as an enormous concrete coffin. "Richard, Lulu, our PLA colleagues, can you check the lower ground access, maybe unlock the transit tunnel. Let's give the girls some room."

"Yessir." The others moved for the sealed exit opposite the entrance.

"Right." Gwen gulped as Petra produced her inscription kit and its many-layered toolbox. Though an inexpert Enchanter, she aided her cousin by setting up the Mana Cache, bundled in crates Marong and Mayuree had helped prepare. According to the House of M's general manager, some of the HDMs were sourced from the Tyrant's despoiled lair, meaning they were very dense indeed.

_Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!_

Crate after crate landed. Despite the seals designed to retain the mana contained in its precious cargo, the room felt instantly more alive.

The PLA soldiers sucked in breaths of frigid, mana-rich air. For the Mages whose mana pool had been taxed by their earlier Purge of the grid, the natural recovery of their internal mana doubled.

Without warning, here were more HDMs than any of them had ever seen at any point in their lives.

"Gwen, take the Mithril Thread," Petra requested of her vice-captain. "Once the cache is done, start by marking out the Summoning Mandala. First, we'll bring back Lord Golos."

The drawing of Glyphs wasn't an impossible endeavour once an Enchanter learned the patterns. In training, the chief preoccupation of junior Enchanters consisted of line tracing while attuning their mana to match the ebb and flow necessary to imbue arcane symbols with mystical power.

Naturally, the concentration required was no mean feat. Thankfully, Gwen, with her phantom age, was no stranger to tedious chores that called for meticulous attention to detail. In a way, the stressful concentration was therapeutic, for even now, the suspense of days past threw up unnecessary remembrances, writhing like mired worms in the murk of her memory.

The misery was almost burlesque. Even during Gwen's peppy forays with Yue and Jean-Paul, no matter how she distracted herself, the pallid face of the Necromancer molested her mind.

_But why worry?_ She wanted to say— _Another day, another victim, wasn't that the rational way of things?_ Logically, it was easy to placate the ambivalent loathing bluntly hammering at her conscience. One would think she was used to it by now. Didn't Babulya warn her that the Path of Violent Conflict was full of thorns? If so, why worry over a little bloodletting? With her friends' lives threatened, what better excuse was there to exercise her wrath? Without her spells, how else was she going to nail a reborn Necromancer?

Was it the pleasure then that was eating her from inside out? Seeing the Necromancer's despair before Caliban's maw closed over him? Or the infusion of Essence that had mangled up her guts and made her eyes roll up inside her skull? That for almost fifteen minutes, she had felt the closest she had ever been to the time Almudj possessed her mortal body?

"Gwen, you've messed up the Piguet-Cox parallel, your Marden Glyph is missing a syntax." Her instructor complained, standing on the sideline. "Focus."

"Sorry, I'll fix it right away."

Or, Gwen wondered. Was it that she wanted to avoid the hard road of raiding Shenyang with Richard and Lulan?

The rationale behind borrowing the Void's malevolence was inevitably tied to her close call in Shimenzi. No matter the pretty words Walken used to dress her fears, the reality was that she neither wanted to lose the IIUC outright— nor did she want to risk Lulu and Richard— nor subject herself to another Soul Flayer.

Like the old saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.
That feeling of helplessness...
It was almost like she was back in the cave with Edgar.
Almost.

"But what of the living beings still residing inside the city?" She had confronted Walken with her hypocrisy. The Necromancers still ate mortal food, meaning the number of NoMs living in Shenyang should be in the thousands.

"Collateral damage," Walken answered without pause. It was the same horrible phrase she had heard so many times in her old world.

"Don't turn the nincompoop now, Gwen. Did you really think the PLA will let anyone live? Let these NoMs roam its cities? Whether those people were livestock, servants, aides or otherwise, nothing dead or living will be leaving Shenyang— Even in England, we're not so kind as to be THAT stupid. Make a call, 'vice-captain'. This time— make the right one. If not, it would be better if you head home and start preparing for London."

Gwen recalled feeling hurt. Yet again, her mawkish predilections had been checked. But injury aside, she was astute enough to see that Walken was offering to bear her burden. Her instructor was offering her a way out, an excuse to clear her conscience by saying, "He made me do it, I didn't want to. I was goaded."

Like the gutted wife of the Thane of Fife had once said, in an earthly world, to do harm is often lauded, while careless altruism was dangerous and foolish. As a learned sorceress equipped with the means, why shouldn't she be bloody, bold, and resolute? Why shouldn't she laugh to scorn those who wished her harm? Even assuming there was a place for the milk of human kindness, and it sure as hell wasn't in Shenyang, not when her team had near lost their lives.

When almost a million people in Shenyang had already lost their lives.

"Gwen, are you alright?" Walken's voice drifted across the room.

"I am fine... and Eric?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks."

Gwen took a deep breath.
First, she would bring back Golos.
Then, her all-consuming Shoggoth would follow.

Gwen stood in the Summoning Circle, gently inbreathing.

Re-summoning Golos was easy.
She knew the Thunder Wyvern by name and scent, sight, sound and Essence.
She also knew him by blood, first as foe, then as a comrade against her enemies.

When the princeling re-appeared, angrier than a trodden cane toad, she had hugged her Wyvern's snout to placate his frustration. Gogo's response was to scrape her suit, growl against her body until his upset was spent. After that, she asked her friends and her instructor to wait in the relative safety of the outside world, where they could reliably flee from kilometre-long, rampaging tentacles.

Then came the witching hour.

"Yog-Sothoth!" she recalled what she could of the books she had obsessed over as a sullen adolescent. With a mother like Helena, the idea of calling upon an Elder being to destroy a shit-stained world was a fantasy she had entertained daily. As for the visualisation portion of the invocation, she hoped a pastiche of Shakespeare and Lovecraft would suffice; at worst, she'll toss an added verse of Poe.

"Lä, Shub-Niggurath! Bring forth the creators of the dark cities! Birth unto this world ye servants! O ye Manglers from the Mount! Hunt mine enemies! Lä— YE MOUTHS OF MADNESS! CONSUME MY FOES!"

"SHAAA! SHAAA! SHAAA!" Caliban sang.
"EE! EE!" Ariel cowered.
"Calamity!" Golos swore. "The Dragon father preserve us!"

With complete liberty, the Fudan's Worm Handler offered up the collated vitality from the Soul Flayer.
Instantly, her glowing face turned anaemic.
Unlike Golos, summoning the Shoggoth was an exhausting endeavour.

It was coming.

"Yog-Sothoth!" Lei-bup wept salty tears as bubbles blew from his greasy lips. Finally, the Great Being had responded to his call.

"Lä! Great Elder One! O key to the Gates where the Spheres Conjoin!" The chieftain of Turd Island howled in his fishy way, his tooth maw gnashing with spittle. "Come! Come to us! Saviour of the Deep!"

With one claw, Lei-bup crushed a fistful of roe, splattering the unhallowed earth with lives of a hundred young.

"Help us, Shub-Niggurath! Master of the woods that wend! Birth your children!"

All around Lei-bup, the stones grew suddenly slick.
Unbeknownst to the Merman performing his daily ritual, sympathetic magic channelled across space and time conjoined, harkening to the desperate desire of the Jifen-folk of the Dawugui archipelago.

A dark ooze wept from the Summoning Circle left behind by the negligent human Mages. Unbeknownst to them, Lei-bup possessed enough knowledge of his kindred to scrap together the most rudimentary of Conjuration. The circle won't be enough to manifest even a ten-thousandth of the great Shoggoth's form— but for the Mermen, any evidence of the Elder One's meagre mysticism would suffice.

_Weee—Weeee—Weeee—_

The air sang.

Lei-bup freely wept.

Ever since the Pale Priestess had gifted the Mermen a hundred kilos of brown rice and a whole container of mysterious meat in cans, his tribe had thrived.

It was for this reason that ever since the departure of the Pale One, Lei-bup had anointed the sea in her master's name, blessing the circle with unseeded eggs.

And what BOON the rite had brought!
Under the guardianship of the Pale Priestess and the Elder One, the thriving Jifen Folk had subjugated all the surrounding tribes, adding new females and slaves to their domain! And when the newborns grew up healthy and well-fed, they had ventured further, foraged deeper, and dominated the whole island chain!

And with every new victory, Lei-bup believed more and more that his conjecture had been correct. With every tribe flocking under the Jifen's banner, the number of faithful grew. Their prior meekness now seemed ridiculous.

Before the tribe had received nourishment from the Pale Priestess, they were a plate of loose sand snails, subject to the undulating tides of fate.

Now, they were united by the strength of something larger than themselves! Already, the other elders had started to call Lei-bup the Priest, for it was Lei-bup who had won the rice, and it was Lei-bup who had given them mysterious meat for the winter!

"Praise be to the Pale Priestess!"

"Praise!" a thousand voices answered.

"Praise be to the Shoggoth! It of many eyes!"

"Praise!" a thousand voices echoed.

"Praise be to the Elder ones, who art Mother and Father!"

"Praise!" a thousand voices cried out.

The Summoning Circle sizzled.

"PRAISE!"
"PRAISE!"
"PRAISE!"

And so it was that on Turd Island, a thing of the Void, a formless protoplasm of primordial ages past, sullen, intelligent, all-enveloping, half-mad with teeth and all-seeing with its wealth of eyes...

Descended.


Oi Kuk-ryol began life in '21 as a war orphan under the care of the Great Leader's first spouse, the illustrious but short-lived Kim Kyi-Sui.

After Oi's induction, he quickly rose to power as the Vice Secretary of the National Defence Commission with his fellow orphans, each Awakening serendipitously to talents of their own. In '45, during the Japanese Occupation, he single-handedly defeated three Imperial Chrysanthemum Mages while retaking Incheon, earning a new lapel as the Secretary-General of the National Operations Department.

In '50, when the Great Leader demanded the reunification of both Koreas, Oi was at the forefront, wielding his spells of destruction, cutting down the American invaders.

Then, in the spring of '57, when the Americans pushed the People's Army back toward Pyongyang, Oi was the last of the twelve Generals to return to the great leader's hall.

And finally in the same winter, when the Great Leader gathered his Officers to discuss the Path called "Juche", the art of "Man mastering his destiny through autonomy, self-reliance, and independence" Oi was the first to take a spell to blasphemers who refused the Gift.

After that, Oi remained dormant until the spring offensive of '82. In Liaoning, Oi spearheaded the invasion of Northern Manchuria, leading the People's Army into northern China, crushing all resistance, succeeding in surrounding Shenyang.

Naturally, the living refused to surrender.
Oi didn't mind.
Once the walls fell, Oi entered with the will of the Worker's Party behind him, committing the city's one million exploited labourers to the ideology of Juche, freeing them from the cycle of brutal karma.

And when Oi's natural lifespan expired, he gifted his heart to the Great Leader as a keepsake, re-awakening as the Secretary-General of Shenyang, having attained the apex of Juche.

"Secretary-General, the PLA has decimated the Zom— the workers! AND their Tower has intercepted the ley-line powering our wards. The city— cannot hold."

Presently, Oi oversaw the assembly of the Disciples of Juche at Shenyang, sending only the most talented to receive higher education in Pyongyang.

"And what of it?"

"We should contact Pyongyang by any means possible! We need to relocate the Disciples of Juche! We need—"

The speaker was a Flayer of no small talent.
Oi extended a finger.
It's skeletal tip glowed pale green.

"— time to move our ingredients, we— NO!— Secretary! Mercy— I just—!" The Mage in the black robe wilted like a desiccated flower. Visibly, the pale shadow of his escaping soul fled from his body to twirl around Oi's withered digit.

"Who else would speak of weakness?" Oi asked his audience of a hundred Necromancers. As much as he needed the living to tend to the workers in his domain, their propensity for self-preservation was something Oi often found disappointing.

"None, Secretary!" the chorus chanted as one.

"Then move to your sectors and defend the city with your creations and your still-living carcasses..." Oi needn't move his jaws to speak, though old habits died hard, far harder than the frail flesh of the aspirants. "We shall hold Shenyang until the Great Leader sends the united will of the workers to chase these foes from our domain..."

"But for how long…" a Necromancer, this one a dark-skinned practitioner from the high plains, gingerly requested of Oi. "I DO intend to defend our home, Master. You know as well as we do that we have nowhere else to go. I merely wish more knowledge to ration our resources more effectively."

"… until I perish," Oi's cold voice rang out, resonating against their quivering souls. Within the hollow sockets of his gaunt skull, two pinpoints of illumination flashed, irradiating Oi's olive dress uniform. On his right breast, rows and rows of medals appeared almost like antiquated scale mail. "… and Shenyang falls."

The cavern shook, displacing enough dust to rattle Gulnaz al-Bashkir.

"Inkar, Inzhu, keep vigilant," the bearded Mage commanded his apprentices. "How's our flock?"

"Agitated, my liege." Inkar, with her eyes like dark pears and lips like red wine, replied in that husky manner familiar to Gulnaz. "Why wouldn't they be? There are more materials out there now than the last two decades combined."

"Don't underestimate our enemies." Gulnaz flattened his beard, surprised himself that he of all people felt so uneasy. "They have a Tower, meaning the city's defences are down. Our job is to hold this quadrant until 'help' arrives."

"Will reinforcements from Pyongyang be enough?" Inzhu, the younger sister, demanded of no one in particular. Compared to her senior sister, Inzhu had honey-coloured eyes and a smile to match. "Aren't we all spell-fodder for that corpse in the People's Hall?"

"Inzhu!" Inkar looked around them. "The walls have eyes."

"Indeed, Inzhu," Gulnaz berated his Apprentice. "— but Master Oi is what we all aspire to be one day, the Great One permitting. Whatever he thinks of us, the path of Juche speaks for itself."

"Then, do you think we'll hold the city?"

"That's our business," Gulnaz al-Bashkir, the Summoner of Shelek, intoned with a hint of bitterness. "Know that Shenyang is our home now, and with it gone, we will perish."

Inkar shivered.

Her Master was, of course, correct. Until the trio's decade spent studying in Shenyang, they had fled from city to city, pursued by Human Mages and Wildland Demi-humans. Without the protection of a Theocracy or the blessings of an ancient religion, the free-practitioners of Necromancy were no more than rats bolting across a busy market choked full of terriers.

The two women remained mum.

Gulnaz sighed. He wondered if they'd been spoiled by the glut of necromantic energies welling from the city's mass graves. In Shenyang, there was an inexhaustible supply of corpses, both from its internal stock and raids conducted in Chinese-controlled Manchuria.

But now came the settling of accounts.
He should hardly be surprised, Gulnaz supposed. China's power had been on the rise; its population of NoMs has always been the densest in the world. How could a rising power stomach the presence of a Necropolis so close to its capital?

But it wasn't all bad news. IF Gulnaz and his fellow Necromancers held the bunkers, then the new materials left behind by the retreating Chinese would bolster their expansion into Jinzhou. If they could capture the Tower, then the rewards from Pyongyang would be unimaginable.

And if they failed?

As a whole, Necromancers didn't fear death. What they feared instead was a supreme sense of regret, that in having their lives cut short, they would return to the karmic circle, wasting a lifetime.

"Guurrrrgh—" the foremost rank of Zombies groaned.

Within the bunker's claustrophobic tunnels, the air turned oppressive; the walls grew slick with moisture.

Something was coming.

The area which Gulnaz guarded was the western quadrant of the bunker network under the People's Hall. Together, there were at minimum a hundred practitioners like him forming blockages in every segment of the subterranean bastion. Their goal, as the apex-embodiment of Juche in the People's Hall had commanded, was one of delay. For each hour they managed to hold off total annihilation, the likelihood of survival increased.

"Let's get to work."

"Resist Elements! Ghoul Skin! Ivory Armour!" Inchu was originally an Abjurer. With a few well-practised invocations, the trio grew clad in ivory plates of clattering bone.

"Link Sight! Death Tap!" And uniquely, Inkar was a rare Diviner capable of utilising the Craft with Divination. A novice Flayer, she could insert her mind momentarily into a semi-intelligent vessel.

"Great protector." Gulnaz walked forward as he began his chant, drawing a crimson Mandala in the air with a withered hand. "Protect your flock in this hour of need. ERASYL! Come to your brother in this hour of need!—"

Gulnaz winced as his life-blood anointed the magic circle.

"—Summon Dread Knight!"

The two women behind Gulnaz squirmed as their collective life-force fled from their bodies, blanching their vibrant, still-youthful complexions. Gulnaz himself shivered, his teeth chattering as the Negative Energy necessary for such a high-tier creature caressed his conduits, freezing his lifeblood.

A few body-lengths away, a dark mist, tinged with the scent of rot and decay, swiftly materialised the form of a man once known as Erasyl, the Hero of Almaty, a peerless Swords Dancer and a renowned Monster Slayer. In another life, he had been Gulnaz's half-brother. When the man had been alive, they weren't close. Now, the two were inseparable.

"BROTHER." The Dread Knight's voice scraped like rusty swords. "DIRECT ME TO YOUR FOE."

"I shall. But for now, protect us," Gulnaz commanded.

"AS YOU WISH." Erasyl turned to face the dark tunnel. In his hand, the infamous Black Blade, the life-sapping weapon formed from a Dread Knight's tormented soul, glimmered darkly. It was the creature's signature attribute— possessing the ability to cut through most Mage Shields like butter.

"GUARRRRLL—!" the Zombie vanguards at the fore of the arched tunnel met with their opponent.

"It's not a party of Mages," Inkar reported, her mind linked with the few intelligible Ghouls under her command. "Our enemy is—what is that? Ectoplasm?"

"An Ooze Mage, perhaps." The Summoner furrowed his brows.

"I think so." Inkar's voice grew shrill. "I think I see something. I'll possess one of the Ghasts to check..."
"It looks big; whatever this is, it's taking up the whole corridor."
"I see pale yellow light... looks almost like a willow-o-wisps..."
"Its eating our troops..."
"Ooo! The main body was hidden! I see it moving!"
"Let me get closer... I'll try to locate the caster for Erasyl."
"There's... no Conjurer? It's just— a thing by itself..."
"OH, GODS! It's looking at me! Heavens—EYES! So many eyes!"

"A quasi-ooze? What element is it?" Gulnaz cursed that of all the enemies; he had to run into such a troublesome foe. "Ink—"

"AEEEEEE! AARRRRRGH! IT HAS ME!" Inkar fell back, suddenly clawing at her face, her long nails digging into her scalp. With a scream, she tore out fistfuls of auburn hair. "INCHU! IT'S EATING ME! I CAN F-FEEL EVERYTHING! ITS… SUCKING ME UP!"

"Sis! Cut the LINK!" Inzhu caught her thrashing sister and channelled a smidgen of vitality to stabilise her anarchic conduits. "Master!"

"I-I CAN'T— BLUURRGH!" Inkar regurgitated a gutful of bile onto the floor.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Erasyl!" Gulnaz commanded his Dread Knight. "Incapacitate her!"

The Dread Knight touched a blade to Inkar's thigh.

The woman's torso jerked just once as the vitality left her body, cancelling her Divination spell.

"Death Domain!"

"AT ONCE!" The Dread Knight lamented.

A dark haze exploded from below the upper-tier Revenant, filling the tunnel with motes of Negative Energy. Where it touched the Zombies and Ghouls, the creatures grew suddenly energised, falling into rank and file.

Inkar panted on the floor, her chest rising and falling arrhythmically, her skirt covered in sick.

"Sis, are you alright?" Inchu could see her sister was not alright.

"Hunger..." The girl convulsed, her pupils dilating, her eyes seeing nothing. "Emptiness, only hunger..."

"Sik!" Gulnaz swore. "Once the danger's gone, feed her a potion."

_SPLAT!_

An ectoplasmic blob about two-meters across flattened itself against the polished concrete. At first glance, the globular entity was grey and colourless, inanimate in its passivity. Upon closer inspection, Gulnaz could see that there was a half-dissolved Zombie trapped within the blob.

"GUAARRGGL!" In the distance, the Horde continued their fearless charge. Usually, against a Creature Mage with an exotic Familiar, there was no better fodder than low-tier Undead.

"Go forth!" Gulnaz lacked access to Banish, so his only recourse was the empowered minions. Under the Dread Knight's leadership, the "workers" possessed heightened physical abilities and higher resistance to the Imperial Magic System's invocations. "Tear that thing to pieces! Wear it down!"

Gluurg—Bloop—Gloop—glug—

The rest of the gargantuan thing came into view.

"Sik…" Gulnaz felt his soul shrivel as an enormous eyeball pressed itself through the goo. "What is THAT?!"

"HUNGER—" Inkar writhed on the floor, clawing the concrete. "IT'S HUNGER ITSELF!"

Gulnaz quaked; neither the Summoner nor his Apprentice had the means to describe the creature they now faced. In and amongst the flood of grey-goo oozing through the tunnel, he saw an eyeball a full two-meters across.

And what an orb!
Its cyclopean sphere housed an octopus' W-shaped pupil, ringed in vivid emerald with a dark circumference and an amber core. As the creature slid forward, its depthless gaze seemed to swallow the world, refracting everything within its optic prison!

Their gazes met.

Gulnaz understood instantly the infinite malevolence transmitted by that slitted eye. Uncharacteristically, his body broke out with a terrific heat, making sodden the back of his silver-threaded robe.

He had to kill this thing!
His Astral Soul cried out.
Whatever the cost, he mustn't let it near him!

"Spine Splitter!" Gulnaz's conviction was immediate. Materialising a wealth of inscribed and harvested Demi-human spines, he let loose a whole year's cache of painstakingly crafted ammunition. "Creature! Perish!"

_PH—ULRK!_

The first lance struck, exploding into ten-thousand fragments of swiftly expanding bone, ripping apart the all-seeing eye, rupturing the meniscus and shredding its membranes.

_PHULRK!_

A second spine followed the first seamlessly, driving the creature back, allowing it no opportunity for regeneration.

_PH—PHLURK! SPLURK!_

The third and fourth Splitters erupted, covering the concrete walls with ten-inch fragments of razor-sharp ivory. Concurrently, bursts of Negative Energy, enough to sap the life from anything capable of holding even the tiniest mote of vitality, saturated the tunnel, furthermore empowering Gulnaz's minions.

"Well done, Master!" Inzhu had Shielded them from their Master's spell. Panting from the exertion, she cradled her still-gibbering sister.

"That should keep its Summoner honest." Gulnaz grinned. "Flock, tear it apart! Finish it off!"

"GURRRRL!" In lock-step, the Zombies rushed forward, flailing their engorged limbs, gnashing their jagged jaws, a symphony of teeth conducted by the Dread Knight.

SPLAT! The response from their unidentifiable foe was instant.
Without warning, the grey goo multiplied, expelling a new wave of scentless ectoplasm. Where it touched the Undead, the Horde grew helplessly paralysed. When it landed on the bone shards, the ivory-like surface turned black with decay.

"I-Impossible!" Gulnaz felt the Negative Energy in the area fall away as though syphoned into an enormous vortex. "What manner of creature is this? Do they have a sanctioned Necromancer on their side—? Bone PRISON!"

A pair of bony claws enclosed around the incoming tendrils. Gulnaz knew it wasn't enough to subdue a being such as this, but there wasn't much a Summoner could do other than feeding it Zombies until its caster ran out of mana. "Erasyl! Stop that thing!"

"I OBEY!" The Death Knight made the gesture of drawing a bow, materialising a shadowy bow easily the height of one of the Necromancer's Apprentices. "CREATURE! PERISH!"

Soundless, the arrow left the bow. In life, Erasyl had been a peerless spell-fighter, and in death, his body performed with equal aptitude as a Dread Knight.

_Th-THUNK!_

The Blight Arrow, a quivering construct of corrosive Negative Energy mixed with the unerring Magic Missile, struck the incoming creature between the fingers of the Bone Prison. It was one of the reasons why Gulnaz favoured the defensive spell, for trapped targets were easy prey for his all-powerful Dread Knight.

But this time, the damage served only to grow the blob haughtier, angrier, more lively. The compressed Negative Energy within the blight-afflicted projectile seemed only to feed into the creature's hunger. Within the span of a few stunning seconds, the ectoplasm squeezed past the wall and flooded into the corridor, rolling over the Undead as though an enormous eruption of dark gelatine.

"A Colossal Ooze?" Inzhu pulled her gibbering sister onto her feet. "But that's a tier-fourteen creature! Who can control such a thing! Oozes are mindless—"

In her arms, Inkar wept hysterically. "FLEE! We must flee! Go to the Master! There's no limit to the fiend's hunger! It'll consume everything! Our minions, our mana, our everything!"

"Shut her up!" Gulnaz had no time to deal with insane Apprentices. "Erasyl! Attack it directly!"

The Dread Knight became a black blur. As its mummified legs kicked off the ground, the warrior's shroud-wrapped lips let loose a wailing Banshee's moan, flooding the tunnel with soul-rending echoes.

"DIE!" The Dread Knight drew its blade and swung.

_SPLURK!_ The blade plunged into the midst of the enormous grey blob, cleaving through the ectoplasm and striking the concrete floor with a _Clang!_

Erasyl's eyes, long since reduced to twin points of unhallowed light, gazed into the gloom.

Inkar hugged herself against her knees; her expression transformed into one of jibbering despair. "T-That's not even its body! That's just its voracious excretions! I saw— I SAW the creature! It has eyes—so many eyes— and mouths, SO MANY MOUTHS!"

"Where is she getting the energy?" Gulnaz felt his scalp crawl, his patience at wit's end.

Inzhu jammed her fingers into her sister's mouth. Of the two, Inkar was usually the one who was calm and collected, and that made their difficult circumstance all the more precarious.

"MNNGH— IT SEES US— MNNGH!"

Inchu looked up, then immediately wished she hadn't.

"My God…" Her Master was staring at the newly descended horror.

First came the gibbering mouths, each screaming incoherent nothings in a low, raspy whisper that stunned the ears and filled their minds with spleen rupturing terror. As Inkar had foretold, there were far too many mouths than was possible on any being that could exist in the Material Plane. At a glance, Gulnaz counted three dozen or more, some with human incisors, others with the canines of carnivores or the molars common to grazers.

Embedded between the multitude of mouths were the eyes, each an emerald orb, wetly nestled within slimy pockets, all of which stared without blinking. As the creature slid forward, the eyeballs spun, searching for something the Necromancers could not see. When finally the eyes settled on the Mages, each of the creature's observers felt as though they held its undivided attention.

"PERISH!" Erasyl swung his sword again.

This time, the black blade plunged into one of the creature's endless maws.
The mouths opened.
Erasyl's hands slid in down to the elbows.
And when the Dread Knight retrieved his extremities, his limbs were gone, appearing as though his hands had never existed.

The Dread Knight looked down.
Lacking pain, it grew confused.
But on the opposite end of its Empathic Link, its controller wasn't so apathetic.

"ARRRRGH! YE GODS!" Gulnaz felt such sympathetic agony that his hands might as well have been wrenched from their sockets by a great and powerful vice.

"Master!" Inchu acted on reflex. "Bone Barrier! Bone Splinter!"

A wall of bone skittered into place, simultaneously launching blasts of ivory shards. To Inchu's dismay, she couldn't even penetrate the ichorous slime.

"It's too late—!" her sister, now freed, began to howl. "—IT HUNGERS! IT —COMES—IT—COMES— FOR US ALL!"

"Huk!" Gulnaz circulated just enough stolen vitality to regain his clarity. His return, however, came too late. The pocket dimension he had dedicated to nurturing his Dread Knight faded, appearing as though he had never had a Familiar at all. "What is this?! How can— Arrrrrgh!"

Up ahead, the Dread Knight was halfway inside the gullet of an invading army of mouths, the upper portion of his Undead body reduced to a half-eaten carcass.

The sight was as unsettling as it was beautiful; for all the lives he had drained, Gulnaz had never before seen such a display of abominable, unadulterated horror. Each maw, restricted by the Dread Knight's natural resistance, could only take off a mouthful and no more. Yet, with so many mouths baying for the Dread Knight's mana-infused body, Erasyl's shrouded form lasted no more than a few frenzied seconds.

"To think you have found rest before me..."
Gulnaz of Shelek allowed his hands to fall. He readied himself. A Necromancer shouldn't fear oblivion. A Necromancer's death should be dignified.

"IT COMES IT COMES IT COMES—" Inkar howled, welcoming the end in her own way. "I am here! Monster! I AM HERE!"

"Master, I can't hold it!" Inchu vomited blood when her Bone Barrier broke.

The ectoplasm pushed forward.
Minion after minion advanced into the mincing mouths of madness, not slowing the Shoggoth's march by a single second.

Gwen was used to being stared at.

As a "beautiful" child, she had been paraded incessantly by her attention-seeking mother. And when her mother was absent, which was often, it wasn't queer for strangers to follow her with their eyes whenever she trained back to Forrestville. At Bondi, she sold as many Cornettos as the number of times she was hit upon. In university, she embraced the fact, wallowing in admirers and concurrently gaining an unpleasant reputation. Finally, as a junior at McKinsey, she learned to bathe in the gaze, convincing herself that from Sydney to New York, women everywhere all did the same to get ahead of the curve.

But this was a whole other kind of attention.

"So..." Gwen smacked her lips. "With all those mouths and all, do you speak?"

Four hours after the summoning, she sat cross-legged with Ariel in her lap, Caliban propped as a backrest, and Golos beside her, close enough to sniff her hair.

All around them, covering the former MSS basement from wall to wall, mating with the concrete, was the ectoplasmic manifestation of the "Shoggoth". All in all, about four hundred eyes looked upon Gwen and her familiars, while on the ceiling, an enormous, central eyeball stared directly downwards.

_Do you speak?_ Gwen again attempted to communicate through their Empathic Link last time, she swore the Shoggoth was somewhat intelligent. _Dear Shoggoth, please blink if you can understand me, any odd eye will do._

Her answer returned in the form of unpleasant vertigo.
Were it not for the suppression applied by her Essence, Gwen was sure she would be lying in a pool of her own sick.

"Oi, YOU! Cease that insolence!" Golos growled, crackling electricity. In his human form, the re-summoned princeling was sweating profusely. Gwen could tell that her Wyvern was too proud to be terrified, but his body-odour made for a terrible liar.

"Gogo, move aside a little." Her nose twitched. "You're too close."

"Calamity! I am trying to protect you here." Golos' rotten-meat breath washed over her delicate face.

"Right." Gwen grimaced. She would soon have to introduce Golos to another human invention— mouth wash.

Ding!

"Gwen, how are you holding up?" Walken's breathless voice came through her Divination Device. "Your Ally is doing very well, its breached nine sectors in the western quadrant in the last three hours!"

"Eric! Where are the others?"

"They're with me. I am tracking your Shoggoth through the Eye of Providence. It's amazing! Girl! AMAZING!"

"You can track the Shoggoth?"

"It's still your creature." Walken sounded like he had gone for a run. "It's got your mana signature."

"And you're recording its... actions?"

"All of it," Walken replied. "Hold the fort, my girl, and we'll have this in the bag. The Proctors and the Generals, they're all astounded! Everything you're doing, EVERYTHING! It's all unprecedented!"

"How deep has Shoggy gone?"

"Wouldn't you know?"

"I possess no desire to Sight Link something with THIS MANY eyes, Eric. I want to keep my sanity. Thank you very much."

And it wasn't just the eyes. There were tentacles as well, with sucker-mouths. Like Caliban's innards, the Shoggoth's limbs were akin to slithering lamprey things unique to the Void. Whatever the "Shoggoth" might be in actuality, it remained a product of her imagination in unholy matrimony with the essential elements of the Void.

"How's your health?" Walken calmed himself somewhat.

"I took precautions." Gwen eyed the eyeballs. "The beginning was a bit dodgy. I drank some of that infused Maotai just in case. I think the Shoggoth can perpetuate itself now. Maybe its attained equilibrium? Found a cache of vitality? There's still a kick from the residual Negative Energy flooding the base, but the feedback has since ceased."

"Can you control it?"

Gwen shook her head.

"Once it stopped... nursing from me— it stopped responding."

"Can you banish it?"

"I hope so. The Mandala's still active..."

"Does er... 'Shoggy' respond to friendlies?"

"It's non-reactive toward Cali, Ariel, Gogo and I."

"... Shall I see if the PLA can find out? In the name of Spellcraft?"

"Eric! I don't think that's a good idea—"

_GU—BLURP!_

The walls shuddered. At once, a hundred eyes began to spin in orgiastic agony. Gwen let loose a low-moan. The sensation bleeding through her Emphatic Link was indescribable. It was as though a frigid icicle had just passed through her amygdala.

"Shaa! Shaa! SHAA—AA!" Caliban began to wail, growing suddenly larger.
"Ee Ee?!" Ariel's fur bristled with sparkling motes of electricity.
"Calamity!" Golos growled, his ridged horns crackling with power. "Something dreadful is coming this way! Look at my feathers!"

Golos' plume, a signature genetic trait of its mythic father, was bristling like a quill boar's bone spines.

Gwen activated detect magic, though the Shoggoth covering the walls made her effectively blind.

"!"

Her Divination Sigil screeched, striking her spine with such poignancy that she grew momentarily breathless.

What was it?
Her senses searched the room of eyes.
It wasn't the Shoggoth straining against its cage, of that she was sure.
If so, it could only mean the danger came from an outside source.

"Eric!" she Messaged her instructor for advice. It was a CC penalty to do so in the middle of a quest, but the last time she had felt so in danger was when Sobel showed up in Sydney. "What the hell is happening! Shoggy's going nuts!"

"A LICH!" Walken's voice fired back, filled with excitement and horror. "ALMIGHTY CHRIST IN HEAVEN, GWEN! GET OUT NOW! DIMENSION DOOR AS FAR AS YOU CAN! BACK TO THE TOWER! THEY'VE GOT A FUCKING LICH DOWN THERE, AND IT'S COMING FOR YOU!"