The Blessed Hinge had become a hellscape.
All around Aaron, the trench lines burned and broke like the final pages of a holy text torn by bloody hands.
Pilgrims fought and died against Heretic Elites who moved like broken saints, their inverted relics crackling with dark, blasphemous liturgies.
Heretic Priests stood atop corpse-piles, arms spread wide, bending the minds of the weak-willed with sermons that sounded like strangulation.
Legionnaires of Hell surged over no-man's-land, their armor carved with blasphemous prayers, roaring guns and unholy laughter blending into a tide of ruin.
Heretic Choristers sang backwards hymns, notes so wrong they cracked the banners nailed above the trenches.
Anointed Heavy Infantry thundered forward in slow, unstoppable steps, each footfall making the trenches shudder as if recoiling in fear.
Overhead, Artillery Witches shrieked as they lobbed shells that didn't just explode, they forgot the ground, leaving gaping holes of missing earth and stuttering memories.
A War Wolf Assault Beast plowed through the left flank, its jaws foaming, dragging two Ecclesiastic Prisoners who clung to their broken rosaries even as they were torn apart.
And threading through it all, Goetic Warlocks, floating, whispering unreality into the very soil, causing trenches to spiral into geometric madness, soldiers falling screaming into impossible shapes.
When Father-Commander Dren fell—
cleaved by the Red Choir Butcher's hymn of silence
The Crucible Walkers broke.
Not from fear.
From fury.
They had been taught to endure anything, plague storms, gas barrages, daemonfire, but they had not been taught how to survive betrayed hope.
They moved as one.
A howling, burning tide of faith and madness.
Some screamed his name:
"DREN! DREN! DREN!"
Others sang death-hymns louder and louder, voices cracking with rage and devotion:
"Through fire we walk,"
"Through pain we rise,"
"Through death we forge the flame anew—!"
Relic grenades exploded in their hands as they charged, hurling themselves over the parapets into a sea of Heretics.
Ash-blackened armor flashed as relic-flamers spewed sanctified fire into the mist, wreathing the no-man's-land in burning fog.
Pilgrims watched, stunned, as the Walkers threw themselves like living spears into the breach.
One Crucible Walker, a towering man with half his helmet melted from a previous artillery storm, ripped the relic chains from his own chest, wrapping them around a Legionnaire of Hell's throat before detonating the both of them in a burst of searing relic energy.
Another trio, shoulder to shoulder, stormed a broken war altar where a Heretic Priest chanted. They skewered him mid-sermon, their bayonets glowing white-hot from the purity of their hatred.
One old Walker, hobbling on a shattered prosthetic relic-leg, laughed as he leapt onto the back of a War Wolf, stabbing it repeatedly with a consecrated bayonet until both he and the beast collapsed into bloody silence.
But they weren't charging at the Heretic Troopers.
They weren't charging at the Wolves.
They were charging at him.
The Red Choir Butcher.
The titan who had murdered their Father.
The nightmare who turned their prayers into weapons against them.
They raced across the trench walls, over barbed wire and bodies, relic-flamers roaring in their hands.
One threw a grenade that exploded into a psalmic fireball, it barely slowed the Butcher.
Another plunged a relic-spear into its side, the Butcher caught it mid-thrust and shattered it with a twist of its massive hands.
A third Crusader, a veteran who still bore the cracked shoulderplate from the Siege of Silent Basilica, charged with a relic-hammer and screamed Father Dren's name.
The Butcher's cleaver hummed once—
and the veteran was cut in half like parchment.
Still they came.
Still they sang.
Still they screamed.
Aaron, dragged back toward the inner trenches by desperate Faithful, could only watch as the Crucible Walkers burned themselves alive against the unstoppable tide.
Their oath still echoed across the burning mud:
"We burned too loud.
We sang too proud.
We gave him our death."
Faith was not enough.
And as the Red Choir Butcher pressed on, unstoppably, killing hundreds in its path, Aaron realized the bitter truth—
They had never stood a chance.
The trenches burned in places they shouldn't.
Men and women fought and died in heaps around the relic pylons, fighting desperately to hold onto ground that had already spiritually cracked.
The Red Choir Butcher advanced, one heavy footstep at a time, through a world gone mad.
Pilgrims moved to protect Aaron.
A War Prophet staggered forward, robes ablaze, screaming battle-psalms from a ruined throat.
His voice cracked the sky like chain lightning, rattling relic banners on both sides of the trench.
"BY FIRE! BY SUFFERING! BY WRATH UNANSWERED—STRIKE DOWN THE HERETIC!"
The very earth shuddered under his words.
For a moment, it looked like it might work—Heretic Troopers reeled, clutching their ears.
But the Butcher only grinned wider.
Castigators stomped into the breach, enormous thunder-flails swinging in grim arcs, smashing Heretic Troopers into pulp.
Each impact was accompanied by roared verses of judgment.
"THE UNWORTHY SHALL BLEED! THE SINNER SHALL SHATTER!"
The Castigators fought like walking tanks, hammering through the lesser Heretics, flailing in brutal righteousness.
One leapt onto the back of an Anointed Heavy, wrapping its relic chain around the heretic's throat—only to be crushed in a single devastating impact.
A Communicant, his chest wired to relic-vox speakers and his mouth fused into a permanent, whispering chant, stumbled through the trenches.
The endless stream of counter-prayers he broadcasted stabilized the Faithful around him, holding their panic at bay, giving them a fighting chance.
He didn't stop even as shrapnel tore his legs apart.
Even as he crawled.
Even as he prayed with no legs, dragging himself toward the breach.
Trench Pilgrims, scarred relic-runners, hardened by decades in the no-man's-lands, fought with stubborn, broken grit.
Their bayonets flickered with makeshift blessings, carved into the mud with fingers raw from overuse.
One Pilgrim slammed a blessed knife into the underbelly of a War Wolf, taking it down in a snarling, smoking heap.
Another rammed his relic-rifle like a pike into a Heretic Elite, refusing to fall even when impaled with dark scripture.
Even the Ecclesiastic Prisoners, shackled together, branded with psalm-tattoos that bled as they fought—
threw themselves into the fray,
desperate to earn redemption in bloody glory.
Some wept as they fought.
Others laughed, mad with freedom found only in death.
But none of it mattered.
Because the Red Choir Butcher kept walking.
It just walked, slow and deliberate, through walls of fire, through relic rounds, through screaming chants.
Each time someone prayed—
It moved faster.
Each time a soldier sang—
It smiled wider.
Each blessed shot that tried to break it only sank into its stolen skin like whispers into a hurricane.
Every step left footprints of melted scripture, the very words of holy writ melting into black sludge wherever it tread.
"SAINT GRAVES! TO THE REAR!" a trench sergeant screamed, firing a whole magazine into the Butcher's chest to no effect.
Aaron stumbled backward, dragging Aleric with him through the chaos.
We can still fix this.
We can still fix this.
We can—
Then Aaron stopped.
Mid-step.
Mid-thought.
Because he realized—
They couldn't.
He looked at the battlefield.
He saw the War Prophet still screaming.
The Castigators roaring.
The Choirs chanting from the rear trenches.
The surviving Crucible Walkers praying over their burning dead.
Every voice, every prayer, every hymn—feeding the monster.
Aaron felt the bile rise in his throat.
He turned, grabbing Aleric, voice raw and broken:
"We're too late."
Aleric blinked through the smoke, dazed.
Aaron staggered, looking up at the Butcher now glowing with power.
"We fed it. With hymns.
With prayers.
With songs.
We made it strong."
He wiped blood from his mouth, smearing relic-dust across his chin.
"Silence can't stop it now."
The boy said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
Aaron looked for Trenaxa.
Please still be alive.
There—
atop a shattered scaffold, barely standing, relic-pistol in hand.
Trenaxa saw him.
Raised her pistol.
Fired three blessed rounds directly at the Butcher's face.
They struck true.
Holy rounds flared on impact.
But the Butcher didn't even flinch.
Snarling, Trenaxa ripped her sanctified dagger from her belt.
Without hesitation, she leapt from the scaffold, sailing through the burning air.
For a single, heart-stopping moment, she landed squarely on the Butcher's back.
Dagger in hand, she stabbed—
over and over, slamming the blessed steel into stitched flesh.
The Butcher twitched.
It shuddered.
It almost stumbled.
Then it swung.
WHAM!
A massive backhand caught Trenaxa mid-scream.
She flew through the air like a shattered relic-banner, armor cracking apart mid-flight.
She slammed into the skeletal remains of a trench scaffold twenty meters away with a horrific crunch of splintered wood and mangled iron.
Aaron screamed her name—
"TRENA—!"
But the battlefield swallowed the sound.
No answer.
No movement.
Her condition—
Unknown.
The Butcher didn't even glance at where she fell.
It turned.
Eyes locked onto Aaron.
Relic banners fluttered and burned behind him, their prayers unreadable now.
The trench shook under the cleaver's hymn.
A final step.
Then another.
It raised its cleaver.
Aaron didn't run.
He grabbed Aleric with a bloodied hand.
Pushed him backward, hard.
"RUN!" he roared.
The boy stumbled away, tears streaming.
Aaron turned to face the cleaver.
Alone.
The Red Choir Butcher towered above him, humming louder, drunk on the prayers that had fed it fat and terrible.
It swung.
A flash of white pain.
Aaron didn't feel the blow.
Only the weightless sensation of flying through smoke and ash.
Time slowed.
He hit the ground hard, the breath ripped from his lungs.
Dazed, he blinked at the sky.
Blood-red clouds churned above.
Something was wrong.
He couldn't feel his legs.
He tried to sit up—and saw.
His lower body was still standing.
Still upright.
Still wearing the bloodied remnants of his relic-robe.
But missing from the waist up.
Aaron laughed, breathless, hysterical.
A little wet and broken.
The kind of laugh that sounded more like a gasp.
I'm going to die again, huh?
I still haven't seen the Great Wall of the Sultanate up close.
I still don't have any maiden.
I can't die peacefully yet.
.....and I never finished…painting my last miniature…..
The darkness crept in around the edges of his vision.
The Butcher loomed.
The battlefield blurred.
Not yet...
Not yet...
Please...
Everything went dark.