The walls still bled.

The remains of the last wave lay in twitching heaps, black ichor pooling in steaming rivers across the cracked concrete. Severed limbs, torn torsos, and shattered bone fused with the floor where infernal fires had scorched flesh into greasy ash. But there was no time to clear the dead — because the next wave was already coming.

It never stopped.

The first demonic screech pierced the darkness, a jagged, inhuman wail that echoed down the narrow, blood-slick corridors. Then came the thunder of clawed feet and scraping bone, growing louder. Closer.

They were coming again.

Martina wiped blood from her face — not all of it her own — and tightened her grip on the bone-bladed gauntlet fused to her arm. The air crackled with residual mana, thick with the coppery stench of burning flesh and ruptured organs.

“Positions!” she bellowed again, her voice raw, throat ragged. “Sector One defensive line — tighten up! Sector Two — dig in!”

The survivors obeyed with grim, mechanical efficiency. This was not their first night in hell. The 300 ex-military, survivalists, and battle-hardened engineers fell into squads, some patching wounds with shaky hands, others jamming fresh clips into blood-slick rifles.

Milo was first to the breach.

He stood in a widening puddle of viscera, chest heaving, eyes glowing with a feral light. His hammer — more chunks of meat and bone than metal now — swung in a lazy arc, the barbed wire wrapped around it trailing strips of demon hide.

“You ugly pieces of shit,” he growled, grinning through broken teeth. “Come get it.”

The horde burst through.

Things barely resembling life — malformed bodies, too many limbs, faces stretched and split with leech-like mouths. Some crawled on broken limbs, others hurled themselves headfirst into the defenders’ line, shrieking.

And Stillwater fought.

Milo’s hammer struck first — reducing a headless brute to splinters of bone and gore. The shockwave crushed two more behind it, their bodies popping like water balloons against the walls.

Taylor followed, his aura blazing, flames rising from the ground in snarling arcs of crimson and black. His blade, jagged and stained, cleaved through one demon’s face — jawbone splitting, molten ichor spraying across the ceiling like a fountain of ink.

“Push them back!” Taylor shouted, teeth clenched, already turning to cut down a horned creature barreling through the smoke.

Natalya moved like a shadow.

Twin pistols barked — perfect, surgical shots exploding skulls, shattering ribcages. She vanished behind a collapsed section of wall and reappeared amid a knot of lesser demons. Her aura surged, tendrils of darkness lashing out, snapping spines, yanking beasts into the black before their screams could finish.

“Cover the west hall!” she yelled, her voice almost drowned by the roar of automatic fire and bone snapping underfoot.

The defenders moved in tight, brutal formations.

Shotguns turned demons to red mist at close range. Mana-users hurled jagged spears of earth, walls of flame, and invisible force to block or crush anything in reach. Engineers rigged incendiary traps from salvaged fuel lines and chemical canisters, reducing entire clusters to writhing bonfires.

And yet they kept coming.

The ground shuddered as a massive demon broke through the barricade — a grotesque giant, its body stitched from the corpses of its own kind, skin covered in pulsing, misshapen eyes. It moved like a living avalanche, crushing barricades, bodies, and even its fellow demons beneath it.

Milo’s grin widened.

“I’ve been waitin’ for you.”

He charged, ducking a swipe that shattered a concrete pillar, and drove his hammer up beneath the giant’s sagging jaw. The impact sent a shockwave through the bunker, a wet crack as the thing’s neck bent at an impossible angle. Its malformed head lolled, eyes bursting like boils as it collapsed with an earthshaking crash.

Martina’s voice cut through the blood-soaked chaos.

“Sector Two, fall back to fallback barricade! Hold them at chokepoints — we bleed them here!”

The survivors scrambled, dragging the wounded, bodies leaving smears of blood. The walls bled too — mana scars and bullet holes oozing dark, steaming fluid. Everywhere the air shimmered with heat and the thick, nauseating scent of demon blood and scorched flesh.

Demons leapt over the wreckage.

One landed on a soldier, tearing his face away in a spray of arterial blood before a blast of crimson flame vaporized it. Another impaled itself on a jagged rebar spike rigged by an engineer who died choking on his own blood moments later.

Natalya’s pistols clicked empty.

A demon pounced — she caught its throat mid-leap, crushing windpipe and spine together, driving it back into the wall with unnatural strength. Her shadow magic formed a dozen needle-like tendrils that impaled two more closing in.

“Reloading,” she hissed, blood streaking her temple.

Taylor staggered, his aura flickering.

“I’m burning out!” he snarled.

“Doesn’t matter!” Martina shouted, slamming her armored fist through a demon’s skull with a wet pop. “We hold or we die!”

The survivors roared, a raw, defiant sound.

Shotguns boomed. Mana blasts shredded clusters of demons. Crude barricades cracked but held. Engineers tossed makeshift explosives — pressure canisters packed with shrapnel and mana crystals. The explosions turned corridors into charnel houses.

And still… they came.

For hours.

The defenders held line after line, moving back only when walls collapsed or the ground gave way under bodies. Blood slicked the floors so thick boots slipped. The lights flickered. Air reeked of ozone and liquefied flesh.

Then — the tide shifted.

The Hellmouth’s glow flickered. The demon’s advance slowed. Their movements grew sluggish, hesitant. The surviving beasts snarled, confused, staggering.

The defenders sensed it instantly.

Milo crushed one last demon’s head, panting, his hammer now an unrecognizable mass of blood and sinew.

“Looks like they’re breaking,” he grunted.

“Press them,” Martina ordered, her voice hollow but unyielding.

The survivors surged.

Shotguns and rifles barked. Taylor’s remaining mana burst in a final wave of hellfire. Natalya’s tendrils dragged demons screaming into the walls, crushed in utter darkness.

One by one, the monsters fell.

By the time the last demon hit the floor, the bunker was unrecognizable — a labyrinth of charred corpses, collapsed walls, and congealed gore.

Silence fell.

Only the crackle of burning bodies, the hiss of steam rising from blood, and the ragged gasps of the living remained.

Martina leaned against a shattered support beam, her armor cracked and streaked with black blood.

“Sound off,” she rasped.

“Clear,” Taylor managed, nearly collapsing.

“Clear,” Milo grunted, spitting blood.

“Clear,” Natalya said, voice soft, cold, as she reloaded.

The three hundred still stood.

Bloodied. Scarred. Less than whole. But alive.

For now.

They had survived the Siege Below.

The price written in gore across every inch of Stillwater’s walls.

But hell was far from done with them yet.