LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

The battle in the central square was heating up as a flood of bodies descended upon the candidates, their packed bodies creating wind and pushing it in front of them, and causing a cyclone of wind and ash to cover the young Siphons fighting for their lives.

If a mortal were here, the spawns would resemble a storm of flesh moving faster than their eyes could follow, since these spawns were mostly leaning towards Agility.

This could not be helped; no one knew that the first spawn was a junior scribe who focused on growing his Agility and Mind in order to be a better scribe and messenger. Now, these spawns were his abominable inheritors.

At this point, there was a thin line between enduring and defeat, as the weight and numbers of enemies pressing down on them did not seem to have any limits and even seemed to be growing.

Disaster nearly stuck when two of the defenders were pulled from the ranks and swallowed by the tide of bodies and before the entire defense could crumble, a boy with ice in his blood, directly linked to the Arathor bloodline but was not blessed like Tarian who controlled lightning, raised his hands, and the ground beneath the western street froze for nearly a thousand feet.

He collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, but the cobblestones cracked under the weight of so much ice, and the spawns were slipping and falling.

This slowed down the charge of the spawns as they crawled over each other, climbing over the bodies of their fallen, and they kept coming.

"Shield wall!" Someone in the crowd roared. "Hold on to your damned shields, or we will be overrun!"

The defenders pushed through the tiredness and locked their shields tighter. The spawns hit them like a wave, their claws scraping the metal, their teeth finding the gaps as the candidates behind the shields pushed back, their boots sliding on the stone, their muscles straining.

"Push!" someone shouted. "Push for the love of the fallen gods!"

They pushed, showing the power in the bodies of a Siphon as hundreds of candidates pushed back thousands, causing the spawns to fall back, just for a moment, and the ranged specialists released again. Fire, Ice, Lightning, Poison, Decay, and all sorts of unknown attacks.

The talents of a hundred young Siphons blazed in the darkness, and the spawns burned, and shattered, and fell. But there were always more.

"They're endless!" someone screamed.

"Hold the line!" Tarian finally roared. "Hold!"

He stepped to the front of the shield wall, his Warg beside him, his blue hair bright against the darkness and he raised his hand to the sky, the entire space around them seem to draw in a breath and the lightning came down from the heavens on a tempest that was a hurricane of light and heat that swept through the spawns and turned them to ash.

Lightning kept falling from the sky for several seconds, killing tens of thousands and giving the candidates a breathing space as there were no more spawns near them for the moment.

"Now!" Tarian shouted, his face a bit pale. "Push forward! Drive them back!"

He had returned back to the central square because he realized he needed more bodies with him if he wanted to reach the pit, and not for once did he want to retreat.

The display of power from Tarian was so potent that no one refused his command, and they surged forward, with their weapons raised and their talents blazing.

They began to push the spawns back, step by step, inch by inch, until the square was clear and the streets were empty.

More were coming, but there was an eerie emptiness that now surrounded them, giving them a few dozen seconds of respite.

They stood in the ash, breathing hard, their weapons dripping with wet ash from their sweat and blood.

"How many was that?" someone asked.

"Thousands," another answered. "Maybe tens of thousands."

"And how many did we lose?"

A healer, a girl with gentle hands and sad eyes, looked up from the wounded. "A few dozen," she said. "Mostly from the first wave. The ones who didn't have time to form up."

Tarian nodded. "We can survive a few dozen. We can survive a hundred. We can survive until we find the source."

"And if we can't find it?"

Tarian looked at the pit, still disgorging spawns in the distance.

"We find it," he said. "Or we die trying. Do not forget that this is an opportunity others would die for."

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The candidates here were young and were growing into their strength, and they had trained for situations like this their whole lives, and had been told that they were the best, the brightest, the future.

They had killed tens of thousands of spawns, had held the line against a tide that should have overwhelmed them, and had lost only a few dozen of their own.

"This entire district of a hundred thousand was wiped out," a boy with a sharp face and sharper tongue said. "But look at us. We're still standing!"

"It is to be expected, don't you think?" another replied. "Their talents were weak, and there are barely any formations here that are not outdated."

Covered by ash as they talked, the first time it happened, no one noticed, but a young girl now given time to breathe, felt changes in her body and her eyes widened when she realized that her talent, a simple thing, the ability to sharpen her blade beyond what steel should allow, and had always been limited, had changed when she wasn't noticing it.

She could hold the edge for a minute, maybe two, before the strain on her Lumina became too great. But now, with the ash still settling in her chest, she felt something shift. The edge held longer. The strain lessened. She was better.

"Did you feel that?" she asked the boy beside her.

He turned to her, and there was a weird look in his eyes because he was also realizing that his legacy techniques were now easier to understand.

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It spread through the ranks like wildfire.

A boy with the talent to harden his skin found that the ash made him harder, his flesh turning to something closer to stone than to skin.

A girl who could summon a single bolt of lightning found that she could summon two, then three; the ash seemed to be feeding her talent.

A young man who could move through shadows found that the shadows were deeper, darker, more welcoming, as if the ash had thickened them.

"The ash," someone shouted. "The ash is making us stronger!"