Chapter 73 The Demon Army

• The battlefield stretched before us like a canvas of despair, painted in shades of ash and blood under a sky that had forgotten how to be blue. Lord Cassius's army had positioned itself across the valley floor, a sea of corrupted banners and twisted metal that reflected the dimensional instability poisoning the air itself.
• I stood atop the ridge overlooking the carnage to come, no longer needing to squint against the unnatural winds that carried the scent of otherworldly decay. My transformed vision could perceive layers of reality that others couldn't access—I saw not just the physical army below, but the spiritual parasites feeding on the soldiers' life force, the dimensional rifts being held open by sheer malevolent will.
• "Three thousand men," Master Dorian reported, lowering his spyglass. "But many of them are no longer entirely human."