No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

Not when the beasts were still storming across Henan.

Not when satellite imagery showed a new breed of flying leviathans circling over the Yellow River.

Not when the third wave of tunneling hydras had burst through into Hubei's subsurface shelter grid.

The S-Rankers were all deployed, scattered across the country in a desperate effort to hold back the largest coordinated beast assault since the Cataclysm.

General Riki personally led a strike team into Nanjing, where an awakened lightning drake had flattened three square kilometers in under ten minutes.

General Maru was waist-deep in molten rock in Sichuan, holding a cracked containment seal together with his bare hands and compression runes.

General Hong Fei hadn't left the skies in two days, his inferno burst trail visible across three provinces as he flitted from battle to battle, setting entire fields alight to deny beast advancement.

There was no one to spare.

They knew what was happening in the west.

They knew the Europeans were slaughtering civilians.

And still… they couldn't move.

"We have to act!" a young commander shouted on the first day. "They're killing our people!"

"I know." President Jiang said, her voice like glass. "But if we break now, there won't be a nation left to defend."

That was the truth.

If they pulled back the S-Rankers from the beast frontlines, the whole country would collapse.

Cities would fall, towns would burn and the capital would be overrun in hours.

They had no choice but to bleed.

So they bled.

Every minute bought with flame, frost, thunder, and sacrifice.

However, there was one front that had defied every prediction.

Beijing's southern wall.

It was supposed to fall within the first twelve hours before the S-Rankers joined the fight.

What defenders had survived the initial wave were students and instructors from Pearl Institute and War God College, half-trained prodigies, scarred veterans forced out of retirement, and a handful of support mages who had chosen not to retreat.

And yet, they fought.

Not with flawless formation or perfect coordination. But with desperation and something fiercer beneath it… Defiance.

Students who had never seen real combat hurled fire and ice from broken rooftops. Instructors shouted orders over the chaos, weaving shields with trembling fingers. Dozens had fallen. More were wounded.

Still, they held the line.

Professor Wu from Pearl Institute stood atop a pile of rubble, his robes scorched, face split by a gash that refused to close. He bellowed spell after spell into the sky, his voice hoarse but unwavering.

Below him, a group of second-years from Pearl Institute linked arms and chanted in unison, summoning a fragile barrier between the wall and the next tide of beasts. It cracked almost immediately but it held just long enough for another volley of spears and spells to cut down the first wave.

The defense was fragile. Chaotic. But it was real.

Then came Damien.

He had been there from the start, but not even the instructors could claim to understand what they were seeing anymore. The armor he wore was nearly pristine, completely unmarked despite the horrifying trail of dead beasts in his wake.

His blade pulsed with something unnatural, flickering between forms, colors, even dimensions. He fought without hesitation, without rest, and with a fury that made even the battle-hardened instructors keep their distance.

Where others faltered, he advanced.

Where lines broke, he stepped in.

Where students screamed in fear, he answered with silence and steel.

And behind him, rising steadily over the course of hours, came the dead.

It began with a few twisted shapes clawing their way out of blood-slick mud. No one paid them much mind at first. In the chaos of the battlefield, it was easy to mistake friend from foe. But these things didn't attack the defenders. They went after the beasts.

Decomposed wolves lunged from beneath collapsed buildings.

Rotting wyverns launched themselves from shattered towers, intercepting airborne threats mid-flight.

Half-destroyed serpents slithered through the dust, dragging flaming insectoids into the ruins and tearing them apart in silence.

Soon there were dozens. Then hundreds. Then a thousand.

The dead, bound by no formal command, fought alongside the students. Their movements were erratic, often grotesque. But there was a brutal efficiency in how they filled the gaps, how they intercepted swarms, surrounded larger beasts, and held chokepoints no living soldier could reach.

Instructors exchanged brief glances but said nothing.

Anything that killed the awakened beasts was their ally.

Even if they were rotting, misshapen things bleeding blackened blood.

Even if their hands were bony and broken, clawing through monsters with silent purpose. In a way, their violence was almost beautiful.

But for all their eerie strength, the dead could not blunt the creeping terror that came with each new wave.

The insects were the worst.

Wave after wave of chittering, acid-slick nightmares poured from underground hives and ruptured metro tunnels.

Giant mantids cracked walls with single strikes. Burrowers exploded from the sewers beneath the fallback zones, dragging screaming defenders below. Flying glass-wings shredded through shields like paper, their speed too fast for most to track.

Still, the defenders held.

Every crashing wave of chitin and fang was met by a blast of fire from a Pearl instructor.

Every tunneling jaw that broke through the earth was met by a wall of frost from a third-year student, cracking but holding, if only for a moment.

But when the spells faltered, Damien's undead rose to meet what remained.

And when they rose, they did not hesitate.

A student cast a wind blade and a moment later, a skeletal lion charged through the gap and finished what the spell had started.

An instructor collapsed from mana exhaustion and a dozen undead vultures took his place in the sky, ripping apart the creatures overhead.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't coordinated.

But it was enough.

In the command center, the southern wall's status hadn't turned green.

But it hadn't turned red either.

"Sector 7 holding," someone murmured, staring at the data stream. "Still holding…"

Another technician stared at the feed and frowned. "What the hell are those things? They're not tagged. No signal. No control protocols."

"They're not attacking our troops," another said.

"They're fighting for us."

President Jiang said nothing for a long time as the footage played. The brave defenders all moved like a force of nature, but the swarm behind them, undead of all shapes and sizes, moved as one. They didn't speak. They didn't roar. They simply fought.

And Beijing still stood.

"Do we try to identify the source?" someone asked cautiously.

President Jiang finally looked away from the screen.

"No." she said. "Let them fight for us. Divert our S Rankers to other more critical regions."

And no one said another word.