They came from the fog. Faceless men. It was expected that two forces crashing against one another would howl and scream, bay for blood. Shout prayers to their gods. But these men with their blank fleshy masks made no noise other than the marching of their boots. Marching on and up the incline without fear or hesitation. If anything, it was even more terrifying than the opposite, the mechanical way by which they moved – faceless and eerie, featureless...

They were so quiet, not even crying out when the sleeting arrows tore into them. Magic rained down on them, too, and yet they marched on. Slow. None of that frantic wild thrashing he'd expected out of the conflict. They weren't monsters, just men. Cursed men, maybe, but he could feel some twisted approximate of a soul burning in their breasts.

Slow enough that he could approach one, effortlessly avoiding the sweeps of their crude bronze weapons. Even if they struck, they were so poorly forged and ancient in design that he doubted they could do him any harm at all. He roasted one, just to see. Igniting it with a gout of flame to watch it march on and unconcerned. No screaming, no dancing, until finally it's body failed and 'it' fell. Still burning as the others walked through the flames. They felt no fear, no pain, no anything. Like golems...

Before the army stood a long, multi-tiered row of sharpened stone spikes. They'd been given fair time to prepare, digging out ditches and trenches. Laying oil and pitch over the grass and making the entire incline a killing field no sane commander would march an army through. Tyr had called the adventurers up and commanded the archers to start firing. They listened to him, bizarrely, considering that there was an actual commander of the military here. Somewhere...

Abe and a group of others were waving their arms, stomping rhythmically on the ground to spread a belt of quicksand on the flattest part of the land between themselves and the enemy. Ensnaring the dumb things as they marched right into it, struggling to continue walking. Tyr had Yana fish a few out of the muck, effortlessly disabling their bodies and staring at them with lowered brows. Tyr killed them, but only after performing a series of seemingly random acts on each one. Oftentimes cruel and unusual, with those observing turning away in discomfort as he skinned one of the things alive, pinning it down to the ground and tearing the flesh free with both hands.

“This is easier than I'd thought.” Xavier yawned, perched on a rock, waiting for the moment when Tyr called for him to use his magic again. Allomancy wasn't infinite, it had well defined limitations and pushing it too far was possible. It would not be wise to pour all of their energy into the initial conflict. This was not a battle, but a siege, and it could go on as long as the fog wanted it to. Ideally, the days or weeks needed by Gerald to locate this 'singularity' and rid them of it.

“Yes.” Tyr replied, staring at the blackened outline of the body he'd just burnt. They didn't stay, they always left, but not in the way monsters did. They had no 'loot', and according to the tablets they were not 'real'. They just... 'Poofed', disappearing into multicolored mist, about fifteen seconds after their apparent death. “It is.”

“Do you see something?” Yana asked, letting her pendulum whistle around, crushing the skull of one of the faceless men with every rotation. Tyr liked the way she fought, with great grace and skill, it was beautiful to behold, her dance of death, that chain screaming through the air in precise arcs. “This is making me nervous. There are so many of them that they're starting to walk over one another through the barrier Abe made. Are they undead?”

“They are not.” Tyr frowned. Taking a spyglass from his dimensional ring and fitting it to his eye. He was fairly sure he could use a level one farsight spell, but nothing beat the classics. “They are alive. Or at least... A facsimile of a living thing. Not anima constructs, either, I'm... Not sure.”

“Are they men?” Girshan asked curiously. “Sapient creatures of intelligence?”

“I believe they were men once.” Tyr nodded. “But not anymore. As for thinking, I doubt that very seriously. In any event, we have a bigger problem.”

“What is it?” Girshan asked, but all Tyr did was hand him the spyglass. “I don't see... What? Why do one of these things have your name carved into its breastplate?”

Tyr chuckled softly at that, though there was a doom on him in that realization. As expected.

This legion, whatever they were, was infinite. They could be killed, but they would disappear only to later reincorporate. Something beyond the fog wall was resurrecting them. As for their purpose, that was a good enough question for any. It seemed obvious to Tyr, and the others with a mind for strategy agreed with him. This was an attempt to exhaust them. Not a very creative one, but there were fairly impressive mana signatures just at the edge of Tyr's senses. These more powerful beings that might serve as the real troops, bound to only appear when the republic forces either ran out of arrows, stamina, or both.

“I have no idea what to do.” Tyr mused. But there was no answer other than to keep fighting. To wait for Gerald and his mages to formulate some kind of solution. There was no desperate struggle against dark forces. It was almost boring after he'd gone to such lengths to rally the men for what he'd expected to be a more dramatic conflict. The enemy could only come from one direction, and only up a sharp incline. They gave the tower a wide berth and crowded together in the valley. At times trudging single file up the hill, and they were by no means fast, a normal man could outpace them easily.

–

“I can't fucking stand magic.” Tiber cursed. A week passed inside while runners passed information to the outside where only two hours had passed. Two hours! The time dilation was so incredible that mages from all over the world had begun to rush toward the location to study it. Time was an incredibly valuable resource, finite for everyone and everything that they knew. Throwing their life savings at whatever black market dimensional gate would bring them closer to save even more. Those early and fortunate arrivals clustered around the opening, constructing temporary lodgings for themselves. And the nobody seemed to be stopping them. “First, this enemy. Now, they are freely letting mages enter a secured city without credentials, and into an astral gate? They've gone mad...”

“Is that bad?” Tyr asked.

Tiber shrugged. “I don't know, I'm not a mage. But allowing them through a gate en masse is unheard of, and I don't like it. International law regarding astral spaces is very strict, I've never seen it flaunted like this.”

“I don't see the problem, more heads when it eventually gets worse, no?” Tyr crossed his arms, watching as Abe and those mages gifted with earth magic labored to perfect the redoubt. Now, the entire incline was terraced like the farms in the republic, designed to make better use of the mountainous terrain. Except full of spikes, pitfalls, and winding paths. Necessitating a true single file march up the mountain from the faceless. They were infinite, but they used no magic, not even trying to stop the spells that tore them apart with vicious efficiency. “Gerald said that time is linear, but your biological clock behaves differently here. People... Age slower? I don't really get it. Mechanically, we should age at the same rate, all of us. It's not like our metabolisms change, right?”

“And...?” Tiber raised an eyebrow. He'd never been much for academics. He knew of magic but only in the sense of learning just enough to allow him to counter it if necessary. To equip himself properly with artifacts before a confrontation with a mage. That was the way of the Ordo Sicario.

“Think about it.” Tyr said, pointing. “First, this place is probably the best opportunity mages around the world will ever have to study a singularity. Time dilation, astral mechanics, and basically anything else they want to. Topics of study that humanity understands very little. If it really is consistent, we are moving at a ratio of 1:168 'real' time. Or... 168:1? One hundred and sixty eight hours here per hour in our world. Before a month passes passes in our world, over thirteen years would have passed here. I think...”

“Time is money.” Tiber snorted contemptuously, a bit mystified at Tyr saying something that actually sounded educated for once. He was growing into a fine man, albeit a bit slowly. “They want to use the slower time here to profit?”

Tyr nodded. “In a manner of speaking – and it's not like I can blame them. Maybe not in coins, but in the knowledge they've gained. A lot of senior mages get stuck at a point, stagnant and unable to keep progressing. Most are academics, but they are also constructing some sort of gantry over there. Engineers, too. They want to push forward to that next level and make use of the time however they can. And the republic would naturally profit from it, I'm sure all the diplomats of all the nations around the world are going mad with lust. There are even barrels of aged spirit being buried in that hill over there. Creative, honestly. Given the time they were allotted to prepare for this trip... If anything, they are certainly industrious.”

“Industrious.” Samson's eye was twitching, alternating between the conflict ever present on the incline and the mages playing about nearer the gate. There was a literal war happening and they'd ran straight to it, aging wine and playing at games...

“You went and got smart on us.” Mikhail laughed aloud. “Never thought I'd see the day you'd be lecturing us on arithmetic.”

“My math might be wrong.” Tyr said, glaring at the man. “But it's true that whatever they do here, it's like fast forwarding their progress if they stayed on the other side. Imagine a decade of study in this dilated space, while only a month or two passes in the real world.”

“Killing two birds with one stone.” Girshan said, approaching. The battle lines had blurred. Turning the assembled army into an ambiguously organized camp. “Too bad that pretty speech of yours was a total waste. Gave me chills, not that I believe a word that you said.”

Tyr pursed his lips. “Killing two birds with one stone? How do you mean?”

“The ambient mana here is incredibly rich.” Girshan explained. “Simply throw a block of steel on the ground and it'll begin to grow crystals. People do that in the Krieg gate, big latticed farms of dead mana crystals and the like. The mana here is so compressed that it makes it look a poor thing in comparison. They'll come here to charge artifacts, awaken basic materials... And the republic will use it all to strengthen themselves and recover from their conflict. Replenish their numbers, maybe. I would be careful what words you use and who you share them with. We can't stop it, but I can't imagine it's necessarily bad either. This can't last forever.”

“I hope.” Girshan added with a sigh.

That was exactly the plan. Or, given the small amount of time that had passed, the senate stuck in its state of emergency required none of the time that bureaucrats did to make decisions. The instant that the time dilation effect had become known, they'd sprung into action. Dropping an anchor array for dimensional magic right outside the city gates. A typical time dilation was a factor between .89 to 1.1 – nothing so incredible as this had happened in living memory. Maybe ever.

Hundreds and thousands of people were entering the city even as they spoke, for all sorts of reasons. But most importantly, to study the time dilation effect. Mechanically, the greatest achievement of human magic was the dimensional ring or other similar devices. Gate magic was child's play compared to anchoring a pocket dimension outside of time, not that it was 'hard' – but neither was the invention of the wheel. Both had changed the path of mankind irrevocably.

It was, in essence, evidence that dimensions could be isolated. Time operated in a dimension that was above matter. It was immutable. Matter could be influenced, but time could not. Not willfully, at least. The only conjecture to this universal law were the poorly understood astral spaces, but centuries of study had revealed nothing about their nature. Here... If they could grasp the true nature of time and its underlying concepts... It stood to reason that it could be anchored and used to their advantage, just like a physical dimension. Imagining a house, chamber, or permanent dwelling where a year could pass inside and only an hour in the outside world. Hell, maybe even a second. It would be revolutionary beyond revolutionary. Giving mankind the power of gods, maybe even power surpassing the divines themselves.

Humans were often the greedy sort and they were mad with it in the moment. As obviously impossible as it was, there were many other ways to profit from the phenomena.