Free Web NovelChapter 13: The First Wave
There was only the violently abrupt earth-shattering reality of the Gore-Tide.
WAAAAAAAOOOOUUUU!
The magically amplified warning sirens did not just wail... they shrieked with an agonizing intensity that vibrated directly against the marrow of Caius’s bones.
The sound was deafening, entirely drowning out the panicked hysterical screams of the new penal recruits scrambling for their heavy iron weapons behind him.
Caius stepped out from behind the heavy leather curtain of the dugout, his iron-plated boots sinking immediately into the freezing blood-stained slop of the trench.
He looked up, and his crimson eyes narrowed at the sheer craziness of the sight.
The sky above the Carrion Front was completely gone.
The suffocating, bruised-gray smog that usually blanketed the sector had been violently pushed aside by a massive, rolling tidal wave of corrupted black magic.
It eclipsed the horizon, casting a terrifying, unnatural twilight over the sprawling trench network and cresting the reinforced outer palisades was a literal tsunami of flesh, razor-bone, and gnashing teeth.
Thousands...
There were absolutely thousands of them...
Massive, feral Blight-Fiends poured over the thick wooden spikes like a waterfall of rabid, armored wolves.
Their sickly purple eyes glowed with starving malice with their hydraulic jaws snapping wildly at the air as they tumbled over one another in their desperation to reach the mortal flesh waiting below.
Behind them, completely obliterating the defensive barricades simply by walking through them, were the Siege-Class monsters.
They were towering, four-story behemoths built of jagged obsidian bone and rotting, hyper-dense muscle.
They swung massive, club-like appendages that could effortlessly flatten an entire squad of men in a single strike, their guttural, vibrating roars shaking the very foundations of the earth.
The ground violently quaked with every simultaneous step the horde took.
"Hold the line!" Sergeant Vance’s voice roared over the deafening sounds.
The towering Sergeant stood atop a muddy parapet, his heavy steel broadsword drawn. freewebnøvel.com
His slate-gray eyes were wide with terror as he looked at the sheer volume of the first wave raining down into the muddy corridors.
"Do not break formation!" Vance bellowed, his voice cracking as he desperately tried to rally the terrified mercenaries and penal troops. "High Command is dispatching a Saint from the Main Camp! The Storm God’s Blessed is on his way! We just have to survive until he arrives! Hold them back!"
A Saint...
In the absolute hierarchy of the Divine Ascendancy, an experienced Saint was a demigod...
They were the pinnacle of mortal combat, capable of leveling entire battlefields with a single wave of their hand but a Saint wasn’t here right now and the vanguard of the Gore-Tide was already violently crashing into the trench floor.
CRASH!
A Siege-Class beast violently slammed its massive, club-like fist into a wooden watchtower on the right flank.
The structure instantly exploded into a shower of lethal, jagged splinters, sending three archers plummeting to their deaths in the black mud below.
Vance gritted his teeth with his tactical mind racing as he watched his men being immediately overwhelmed.
Penal troops were being ripped in half before they could even swing their swords. Veterans were being crushed beneath the sheer kinetic weight of the Blight-Fiends.
They needed firepower... They needed an indiscriminate miracle...
Vance violently turned his head, his desperate eyes locking onto the blonde woman standing quietly in the mud beside Caius.
Aurelia Solis.
The nameless exile... The walking weapon of mass destruction...
Vance didn’t know her true identity as it was hidden, but he had seen her turn a two-hundred-pound mercenary into a pile of smoking, charred ash in less than seven seconds.
"You!" Vance roared, violently sliding down the muddy parapet and landing heavily in the trench beside them.
Aurelia’s glowing crimson eyes slowly shifted toward the Sergeant, entirely apathetic to the carnage unfolding around them.
Vance didn’t ask for permission... He didn’t offer a tactical briefing or beg for her assistance...
He raised his heavy, steel broadsword high above his head with his muscles straining under the dark iron of his breastplate.
"Keep us alive!" Vance snarled.
He brought the heavy blade down with absolute, terrifying kinetic force.
CLANG!
The broadsword violently struck the magically reinforced iron chains binding Aurelia’s wrists.
The physical impact of the veteran’s desperate strike shattered the physical locks.
The heavy, dark iron violently fractured, exploding into dozens of jagged pieces that fell uselessly into the freezing black mud.
The microsecond the chains left her pale skin, the suppression on her mana core vanished.
The air around Aurelia Solis violently warped. freewebnσvel.cøm
It didn’t just get hot... The ambient temperature of the freezing trench instantly skyrocketed to the point where the deep black mud beneath her boots began to violently boil, hissing and cracking into dry earth in a matter of seconds...
Her golden, cascading hair began to defy gravity, floating softly around her perfect face as a terrifying, blinding aura of golden holy fire ignited across her skin.
The Mad Sun was unchained...
Aurelia didn’t scream... She didn’t strike a dramatic martial pose...
She simply raised her right hand toward a massive pack of thirty Blight-Fiends charging directly down the trench corridor.
FWOOSH!
A roaring, liquid wave of golden flames aggressively erupted from her palm. The inferno instantly swallowed the entire pack of monsters.
The beasts didn’t even have time to shriek.
The corrupted marrow inside their thick bones was instantly flash-boiled, their massive, armored bodies completely incinerated into drifting white ash before they even hit the ground.
"Push forward!" Vance roared, completely ignoring the blistering heat radiating from the Villainess as he charged into the fray alongside his surviving mercenaries.
The meat grinder had officially begun.
Aurelia stepped forward with her hands becoming a beautiful, terrifying blur of devastating apocalyptic magic.
She hurled spears of condensed golden fire, creating massive, molten craters in the trench walls and turning dozens of corrupted beasts into absolute nothingness with every flick of her wrist but despite her sheer, overwhelming lethality, her glowing crimson eyes kept darting to her left.
She was actively watching Caius...
In her mind, the young man with the crimson hair was an absolute anomaly.
Aurelia fully expected to look over and see him being violently torn apart by the feral horde.
She was already subconsciously preparing to shift her golden flames to save him, feeling a strange protective tether pulling at her soul but when her eyes found him through the thick smoke and chaos, she paused.
Caius was perfectly, flawlessly feigning weakness.
To the untrained eye, he looked like a desperate, terrified noble struggling to survive the onslaught.
He was constantly retreating, taking wide, sweeping parries with his pristine steel shortsword, and occasionally stumbling backward into the thick mud but Aurelia was a royal prodigy, trained by the greatest martial instructors in the Solis Empire.
She saw the terrifying truth beneath the theatrical act.
Caius wasn’t a frail young man.
The heavy interlocking iron chainmail he wore wasn’t weighing his frame down in the slightest.
A massive Blight-Fiend lunged at him from the smoke, its razor-claws swiping aggressively at his chest but Caius didn’t dodge.
He intentionally let the claws scrape against his iron chest plate.
A normal, unconditioned noble would have been violently thrown backward by the momentum of the strike with their ribs shattered from the blunt force trauma.
Caius didn’t even yield a single inch.
His muscular legs were planted firmly in the mud as his dense core mass completely absorbed the impact.
As the beast overextended, thinking it had secured its prey, Caius raised his left hand.
He wasn’t producing pathetic sputtering chimney sweepings. He was meticulously modulating his magic.
Using the deep, abyssal ocean of Void mana resting within his soul, Caius manipulated the residual Ash husk to absolute perfection.
Fshhh!
A concentrated, hyper-thin stream of gray ash shot directly into the beast’s gaping maw.
It didn’t blind the monster. It violently coated the inside of its corrupted lungs, instantly suffocating it.
The beast gagged, its eyes bulging as its respiratory system completely, catastrophically failed.
In that microsecond of paralysis, Caius smoothly reversed his grip on his shortsword.
With a terrifying, effortless display of grace, he drove the blade directly into the beast’s armpit, cleanly severing the thick tendons, before sweeping the sword in a brutal arc that completely severed the monster’s spinal cord.
He kicked the massive corpse away, instantly flowing into his next calculated movement.
It was a masterclass in efficiency, perfectly disguised as desperate clumsy survival and inside his mind, the Goddess of the Void was having the absolute time of her life.
’Wow, the aggro on these mobs is completely broken, Champion~’ Ereba mused, her smooth melodic voice echoing pleasantly against his skull.
Caius violently parried a lunging fiend, driving the heavy iron pommel of his sword directly into its optical cavity.
’Ereba,’ Caius gritted his teeth internally, sidestepping a spray of acidic blood. ’Please stop using the gaming terminology.’
’Why? It perfectly encapsulates this pathetic,scripted reality,’ the Goddess hummed while being completely relaxed.
She was practically reclining in the VIP section of his soul, treating the apocalyptic warzone like an interactive entertainment stream.
’Look at them. Mindless variables charging blindly into our blade. Oh, watch your left flank, Caius... A high-level brute is attempting to flank your position.’
Caius effortlessly pivoted, ducking beneath a sweeping blow from a larger beast, blowing a thick, blinding puff of ash into its eyes before hamstringing its hind legs.
’Excellent footwork,’ Ereba praised, entirely shameless in her newfound degeneracy. ’Now, stop playing with your food and farm their cores. I want to see your agility stat increase before the boss wave hits. We have a quota to meet.’
’I’m working on it,’ Caius replied internally, moving swiftly through the blood-soaked trench.
Despite his personal success, the battlefield was rapidly deteriorating.
The first wave of the Gore-Tide was simply too massive.
Thousands of beasts continued to pour over the palisades, entirely uncaring of their own staggering casualties.
The volume of corrupted flesh was beginning to crush the squad’s defensive lines through pure attrition.
Caius cut down another Blight-Fiend and quickly analyzed the layout of the trench.
Sergeant Vance and the surviving mercenaries were fighting a desperate, losing battle near the dugout entrance, holding the line through sheer bloody stubbornness but Aurelia Solis was entirely isolated.
She had pushed too far forward.
Her golden flames had carved a massive, molten path of destruction and now she was entirely surrounded by a collapsing circle of over a hundred armored Blight-Fiends.
Her mana wasn’t infinite, and the beasts were slowly realizing that if they charged from all sides simultaneously, the fire couldn’t stop them all.
Caius’s crimson eyes narrowed.
’She’s going to get overwhelmed...’ Caius thought with his mind running a hundred different survival scenarios in a fraction of a second. ’If she dies here, the game’s timeline fractures completely. Her psychotic father will blame the entire trench and literally raze this sector to the ground.’
Though he acted as though he didn’t like her, the guy had done something quite similar in the game just for cutting her hair in battle... and Caius didn’t want to be on the receiving end of this.
He adjusted his grip on his sword.
’But more importantly... if I help her out now, if I actively dive into the horde to save her life while she’s surrounded... when she inevitably goes insane and burns half the Empire to ash in three years, I won’t be on her hit list.’
It was basic bomb defusal... You secure the loyalty of the walking nuke before the nuke goes off...
"Ereba," Caius commanded internally with his dense leg muscles coiling as he prepared to sprint. "Alter the chemical composition of the Ash and maximize the volatility."
’Oh? Getting creative, are we?’ Ereba purred, highly amused by his tactical shift. ’Very well, Champion. I will lace the husk with a highly concentrated variant.’
Caius didn’t hesitate.
He violently blitzed forward.
His newly acquired, Void-enhanced agility was completely staggering.
He didn’t just run... he exploded across the muddy trench, closing a fifty-foot gap in a matter of seconds.
Caius vaulted entirely over the corpse of a massive Siege-beast, launching himself directly into the air above the encircled Villainess.
Aurelia snapped her head up, her glowing crimson eyes widening in genuine shock as she saw the muscular Ash noble soaring through the thick black smoke directly toward her.
"Get down!" Caius roared over the deafening sounds of the horde.
He landed heavily in the boiling mud behind her, extending both of his palms outward toward the massive, tightening circle of charging beasts.
He pushed his massive mana pool to the absolute limit.
FWOOOOOOSH!
A massive, incredibly dense, and completely suffocating cloud of dark gray soot violently erupted from his hands.
It didn’t just blind the beasts... it entirely blanketed the hundred-foot radius around them in a thick, suspended mist of particulate matter.
The fiends roared in confusion, coughing and thrashing blindly as the thick smog completely robbed them of their vision.
Aurelia looked at the thick, swirling gray ash surrounding them.
She was a royal prodigy, educated in the highest echelons of magical theory so she instantly recognized the volatile scent of the modified soot coating the air.
It wasn’t just a smokescreen... It was highly, incredibly flammable...
A fierce unhinged smirk violently split across the Villainess’s perfect face.
She didn’t need to speak to him and she didn’t need to coordinate a tactical strike.
The synergy between the two greatest Heretics of Ur was flawlessly instinctive.
Aurelia raised her hand, her thumb pressing against her middle finger and she simply snapped.
A single, microscopic spark of golden holy fire ignited in the dead center of the ash cloud.
The result was an absolute, devastating catastrophe.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!
The highly flammable ash violently caught the spark.
The rapid combustion of the particulate matter instantly triggered a massive apocalyptic thermobaric explosion.
The air within the trench was violently, aggressively sucked inward for a single, terrifying microsecond, creating a massive vacuum that pulled the roaring beasts off their feet, before aggressively exploding outward with the force of a localized meteor strike.
The concussive shockwave was entirely deafening.
The intense superheated blast of golden fire and ignited ash completely leveled the entire sector.
The hundred Blight-Fiends surrounding them were instantly violently vaporized, their obsidian bone plating completely shattered by the sheer atmospheric pressure before the flames even had a chance to incinerate their rotting flesh.
The trench walls caved in... Wooden barricades were reduced to blackened splinters...
Caius and Aurelia stood directly in the dead center of the blast radius, entirely untouched by the explosion with the residual heat washing safely over their skin as burning monster parts rained down around them.
It was a display of absolute lethality but despite their flawless tactical synergy, the meat grinder of the Carrion Front continued to extract its brutal, unforgiving toll.
The regular men were dying.
