Chapter 1348: Hope Came on Burning Wings

Within minutes, the ground started to shudder.

Far off, dense shapes began to spill into view—an endless smear of moving bodies that grew clearer with every heartbeat.

Everyone on the wall went rigid. Faces drained of color.

They’d done all the mental prep they could. They’d told themselves it was just numbers, just meat, just targets.

But the moment the zombie tide actually came into sight—when it stopped being a report and became reality—fear rose up anyway, cold and automatic.

Edmund swallowed hard. His own heart was hammering like crazy.

Then he glanced back at the compound behind him, gritted his teeth, and forced his voice out.

"Brothers! This is it—life or death!"

"Pick up your weapons—kill!"

But the people below hesitated.

They didn’t surge forward.

They wavered.

Everyone understood the same ugly truth: charging a tide like that looked an awful lot like volunteering to die.

A horde this big didn’t feel defendable. It felt inevitable.

A lot of them had only come out because Edmund had said Fallen Star City was sending support.

Now the zombies were here—and Fallen Star City still hadn’t shown.

Other compounds had sent only a little over a hundred thousand total.

How were they supposed to hold this?

Edmund’s face darkened when he saw the hesitation spreading.

"Listen to me!" he shouted, voice raw. "We don’t have the option to retreat anymore!"

"Behind us is our home!"

"If we take one step back, the compound gets torn apart—and everyone inside, including your parents, your kids, your family... they’ll become food!"

"So for them—and for ourselves—we hold the line no matter what!"

"Our reinforcements are on the way. We just have to last a little longer. They’ll get here—Fallen Star City included!"

That finally punched through.

Down below, eyes hardened. Fear didn’t disappear, but something heavier replaced it.

Resolve. Desperation.

Because Edmund was right.

There was nowhere left to run.

If they didn’t fight, they died.

And not just them—the people they cared about would die with them.

"Kill!!"

A huge roar went up from the crowd, and the defenders finally surged forward.

"Kill!"

The answering shout rolled like thunder—half battle cry, half self-hypnosis, people screaming to drown out the terror in their own heads.

Tens of thousands—then hundreds of thousands—charged toward the incoming tide.

The distance between them collapsed fast.

And then, suddenly, a sharp cry cut through the noise.

"Look—what’s that?!"

Heads snapped up.

In the far sky, a dense mass of red shapes was streaking toward them at insane speed.

"Flamebirds!"

"It’s Fallen Star City’s Flamebirds!"

The reaction was instant.

Like someone had flipped a switch, faces lit up—relief crashing in so hard it almost made people dizzy.

"Thank god—Fallen Star City is here!!"

Despair that had been hanging over the battlefield like fog got ripped apart in a single breath.

Hope ignited—hot, fierce, contagious.

The Flamebirds were moving so fast they were practically on top of them the next moment, closing the distance in a blink as they dove toward Crownfall’s battlefield.

Only now did the Enhanced on the ground get a clear look at the reinforcements.

More than ten thousand Flamebirds. Two people standing on each bird’s back—just over twenty thousand total.

Compared to the other compounds’ numbers, it wasn’t much.

But nobody even thought about "not much."

Fallen Star City’s support was never measured by headcount.

The Flamebirds swept straight over their heads without slowing, a red storm ripping toward the endless zombie sea.

In seconds, they were above the horde.

Then the Fallen Star City fighters jumped.

Twenty thousand-plus figures dropped right into the middle of the zombies, hit the ground running, drew weapons—and started slaughtering.

Skills detonated across the horde in brutal waves, each burst carving out another clearing. Zombies collapsed by the hundreds, by the thousands, as if someone was mowing wheat.

Above them, the Flamebirds refused to be upstaged. They circled hard over the battlefield, raining sheets of fire down in scorching arcs and burning swaths through the tide.

Everyone on the wall stared, mouths hanging open.

"This is Fallen Star City?" someone breathed. "They’re diving straight into the center?!"

"That’s insane... Is that the Fallen Star Guard?"

"No," another person said quickly. "I heard Ethan took the Fallen Star Guard overseas. This has to be another unit."

"Wait—so Fallen Star City has a team this strong

besides

the Guard?"

"Of course they do," someone else said, voice shaking with awe. "That’s Fallen Star City."

Edmund snapped out of it first and bellowed, "Fallen Star City’s already in it! We’re not standing here watching!"

He drew in a breath and roared, "All units—move! Kill!"

"Kill!!"

This time, the shout that answered him came out full-throated and sharp.

Not forced.

Not shaky.

The fear was still there, but it had been drowned under something hotter.

They slammed into the zombie tide.

Crownfall City Compound had mobilized six hundred thousand fighters. Add the three compounds’ reinforcements, and they were pushing close to eight hundred thousand total.

Of those, over three hundred thousand were Tier 15 and above. The rest were below Tier 15—still far weaker than the horde overall.

Without Fallen Star City, this would’ve been nothing but a desperate last stand.

But with Fallen Star City here... it was a different battlefield.

Those twenty thousand-plus reinforcements—every single one at peak Tier 19—plus ten thousand Flamebirds overhead...

They hit the zombie tide like a steel wedge.

The horde’s front line buckled and collapsed into chaos.

The battle turned white-hot in an instant.

Fallen Star City’s forces became the blade. The other Enhanced became the body behind it. Flamebirds ruled the sky, pouring suppression fire down nonstop.

And the slaughter began.

On the walls of Crownfall, women and children stood packed together, knuckles white on the stone, eyes locked on the distant storm of violence.

Out in the zombie sea, a small figure watched the same fight with icy calm.

As its "subordinates" fell in sheets, its expression didn’t change.

Not even a twitch.

Its gaze stayed glued to the cluster of terrifyingly strong humans cutting through the horde.

Zombies were dying at a horrifying rate.

But humans were dropping too.

Under the tide’s frenzied, endless pressure, Enhanced after Enhanced went down into the blood-mud, swallowed by claws and teeth.

There was no war without blood.

Even if Fallen Star City’s people were monsters on the battlefield, they couldn’t protect everyone in a swarm this massive.

The fight dragged on. Numbers on both sides kept shrinking.

Just... the zombies were shrinking faster.

With Fallen Star City’s crushing strength and the Flamebirds’ relentless fire from above, the horde’s body count exploded.

Then, in the middle of it all, the small figure in the zombie tide took one last, deep look at the Fallen Star City fighters.

And quietly turned away.

It left without drama—taking only a few Tier 19 zombies with it and ordering the rest to keep attacking.

It clearly didn’t care about the ones being fed into the grinder.

A zombie tide at this level? It could gather one whenever it wanted.

This was only a test. A probe to measure humanity’s strength.

Now that it had its answer, next time it would come prepared.

No one on the battlefield noticed the Zombie King slipping away.

There were simply too many zombies. Too much noise. Too much blood.

They kept fighting.

Later, more reinforcements finally arrived from the farther compounds.

And by the time evening fell—through sheer grind and sheer will—the last zombie was wiped out.

Corpses carpeted the land for dozens of miles in every direction.

None of the zombies ran.

They fought to the final one, mindlessly throwing themselves forward until there was nothing left to throw.

When the last zombie finally collapsed, people all over the battlefield dropped where they stood—sitting hard in the dirt, lying flat on their backs, staring at the sky like they didn’t quite believe they were still alive.

Then, from inside the compound, a roar of sound erupted.

Cheers so loud they shook the walls.

"We won—we won!!"

"God... thank god... we held it—!"

"We’re alive!"

People cried and laughed at the same time. Some jumped up and screamed until they were hoarse. Others collapsed and sobbed with their faces in the dirt.

This battle had been everyone’s life on the line.

Every second, their hearts had been hanging by a thread.

Now it snapped—finally—and what rushed in after was pure, shaking relief.

They’d won.

They’d lived.