Free Web NovelChapter 14: A Saint Descends On Carrion Front
Through the clearing smoke of their massive explosion, Caius saw the grim reality of the warzone.
The disgraced noble, who had survived the skirmish missing two fingers, was entirely gone.
A massive Siege-Class monster had stepped directly onto his chest, completely crushing his torso into the mud in a sickening spray of blood and bone.
Mercenaries were being ripped in half by packs of Alphas with their desperate screams echoing into the smog and so many other people...
"Hold the line! Hold the damn line!"
Sergeant Vance’s desperate roar echoed from the right flank.
Caius turned sharply.
The towering veteran was locked in a brutal, desperate clash with a massive, four-story Siege-beast.
The monster’s thick bone plating easily deflected Vance’s heavy broadsword strikes with sparks flying into the air as steel met obsidian.
Vance overextended, his boots slipping in the frozen blood-soaked mud.
"Agh!"
The Siege-beast didn’t miss the opening. It swung its massive, club-like arm with terrifying, hydraulic force.
CRUNCH! freeweɓnovel.cøm
The massive blow bypassed Vance’s heavy iron breastplate entirely, slamming directly into the Sergeant’s left side.
"GAAAH!" Vance roared in pure, unadulterated agony.
The impact violently shattered the bones in his left arm, completely tearing the limb away at the elbow in a massive, horrific spray of dark crimson blood.
The severed arm flew through the air, landing with a wet thud in the mud a dozen feet away.
A normal man would have instantly gone into systemic shock... A normal man would have collapsed into the mud, weeping and clutching the bleeding stump until his heart stopped pumping...
But Vance was a veteran of the Carrion Front so the towering Sergeant didn’t fall.
He violently stumbled backward, his scarred face entirely pale, but his slate-gray eyes burned with an unyielding defiance.
He let out a feral, blood-curdling curse, completely ignoring the massive fountain of blood spraying from his severed elbow.
Vance gripped his heavy broadsword tightly in his remaining right hand, planted his iron boots, and violently charged back toward the Siege-beast, screaming at the top of his lungs.
"Keep fighting!" Vance roared at the surviving mercenaries.
Caius watched the veteran charge with his jaw tightening.
The battle was a chaotic nightmare.
The air was completely choked with smoke, burning magic, and the deafening roars of dying men and monsters.
’This is great...!’
Caius used the chaos to his advantage as he became a ghost in the inferno.
He separated slightly from Aurelia, diving into the thickest clouds of residual smoke.
Caius was a not a fool so he didn’t focus on fighting the massive Siege-beasts... he left those to Vance and the Villainess.
He focused entirely on the aftermath of the slaughter.
He moved through the piles of incinerated, decapitated, and crushed beast corpses littering the trench floor.
His hand darted out with lightning speed, brushing the chests of the fallen monsters.
Consume!
Consume!
Consume!
He was secretly extracting and devouring the corrupted cores at a staggering rate and there were enough monsters here that these people wouldn’t notice.
The system tabs violently cascaded down his vision, blurring into a continuous stream of golden light that only he could see.
He devoured ten... Then twenty... Then fifty...
By the time he reached the far end of the trench, using the thick cover of his own ash clouds, Caius had extracted and completely consumed over a hundred cores!
’Amazing...’
The volume of refined physical vitality aggressively flooding his system was intoxicating.
It felt like swallowing liquid lightning.
His heart hammered with the powerful thud of a war drum.
While the other men were collapsing from exhaustion, Caius felt like he had just finished a warm-up.
’This is fucking amazing!’
’You don’t need to shout in your head, Champion.’
He stood up straight in the smoke, gripping his pristine steel shortsword as his crimson eyes glowed with an unhinged ambition.
He felt invincible...
’I need to kill more...’
The slaughter within the Carrion Front had long since transcended the realm of a mere battle.
It had become a suffocating industrial process.
Flesh met steel... Bone met fire... Blood met the freezing black mud.
For nearly an hour, the vanguard of the Gore-Tide had poured over the splintered palisades in an endless, terrifying waterfall of corrupted mass.
And for nearly an hour, Caius and Aurelia as well as other people had acted as the unyielding bulwark against the apocalypse.
Caius’s highly volatile, chemically modified ash clouds provided the perfect, blinding canvas, and Aurelia’s golden holy fire provided the apocalyptic spark.
They had vaporized hundreds of monsters in thermobaric detonations but a war of attrition is rarely won by the few.
With the sheer volume of corrupted cores Caius was covertly devouring... he was a physical anomaly.
Aurelia Solis was not.
The Villainess possessed a mana capacity that rivaled the greatest mages in the empire, but her physical vessel had spent the last several weeks heavily chained, starved, and actively suppressed by imperial inquisitors.
She was a royal prodigy, but she was still human.
The relentless exertion was beginning to collect its toll.
Her breathing was turning ragged. Her pale chest heaved beneath her mud-caked, tattered clothes.
The blinding terrifying aura of golden holy fire that wreathed her skin began to flicker, dimming for microscopic fractions of a second as she pushed herself past her own limits.
’I need to fight...’
Aurelia hurled a condensed spear of liquid gold through the chest of a charging Siege-beast, melting its heart instantly, but the recoil forced her to take a heavy step backward.
Her boot slipped in a deep puddle of coagulated black blood.
In the chaotic ecosystem of the Carrion Front, a single slip was a death sentence.
The monsters of the Gore-Tide were not mindless... The lesser Blight-Fiends were feral, yes, but the Alphas which were the heavily armored pack leaders that directed the slaughter... possessed a cruel sentience.
From the thick, roiling black smoke of a nearby crater, a shadow detached itself.
It was an Alpha Blight-Fiend, its massive, obsidian-plated body entirely cloaked by the smog.
It hadn’t charged blindly into the golden flames... It had been waiting.
The microsecond Aurelia stumbled with her attention entirely focused on the collapsing Siege-beast in front of her, the Alpha violently launched itself from the smoke.
It aimed directly for her exposed, unguarded blind spot.
Its massive hydraulic jaws unhinged as rows of jagged razor-sharp bone teeth gleaming in the dull light.
It wasn’t aiming to injure her... It was aiming to cleanly cleanly snap her neck and decapitate her in a single brutal motion...
From twenty feet away, Caius’s Void-enhanced perception caught the blur of movement.
Time seemed to violently dilate, slowing to a glacial crawl in his hyper-accelerated mind.
’Fuck!’
He saw the Alpha soaring through the air and he saw Aurelia, entirely unaware of the lethal shadow descending upon her flank.
’If she dies right now,’ Caius thought. ’the entire scripted timeline of the continent fractures beyond repair.’
But far more pressingly, Aurelia Solis was the firstborn daughter of the Solis Empire’s ruling monarch.
Her father was a notoriously unstable tyrant.
If the Emperor found out that his daughter had been slaughtered by a stray beast in a mud pit because the frontline fodder failed to protect her... he wouldn’t just send reinforcements.
He would send the Imperial Fleet to literally glass the entire Carrion Front, burning Sergeant Vance, the mercenaries, and Caius himself into absolute nothingness just to satisfy his wrath.
He had done it before in the game too... so Caius needed her alive.
’Ereba!’ Caius roared internally, his dense leg muscles already aggressively compressing against the mud. ’If I grab her bare skin to pull her out of the way, will the Mad Sun instantly incinerate me before you can consume the flames?!’
The Goddess of the Void, who was currently entirely engrossed in treating the warzone like a live-action roleplaying game, let out an incredibly loud annoyed sigh.
’Ugh, you are interrupting my stat analysis, Caius...’ Ereba huffed.
’Just tank the tick-damage, Champion,’ she advised casually. ’Her core is potent, but I am Nothingness. I’ll nullify the combustion if she forgets to turn off friendly fire~’
Caius didn’t need any further confirmation.
BOOM!
The freezing black mud beneath Caius’s iron-plated boots violently exploded upward.
He triggered an explosive burst of momentum, his newly leveled physical agility allowing him to completely cross the twenty-foot gap in a blinding blur.
Aurelia only caught a flash of crimson hair out of the corner of her eye.
"Move!" Caius roared.
Caius didn’t politely ask her to step aside. Instead, he slammed his entire muscular shoulder directly into her side with the force of a battering ram, violently shoving the Villainess out of the Alpha beast’s direct trajectory.
But he was a microsecond too slow to completely clear the strike zone himself.
The Alpha Blight-Fiend’s massive razor-sharp claws violently raked downward. The beast didn’t hit Aurelia... It hit Caius...
SKRRRRT-SHK!
The heavy, pristine iron chainmail protecting Caius’s shoulder violently shrieked as the obsidian claws tore through the metal rings like wet tissue paper.
The weight of the beast’s strike bit deeply into his flesh, violently carving three deep agonizingly painful gashes across his right deltoid and collarbone.
"Gah!" Caius grunted through gritted teeth, hot crimson blood instantly spraying from the wound.
Before yesterday, a strike of that magnitude from an Alpha would have completely severed his arm from its socket and thrown his frail noble body across the trench.
But today, his muscle fibers were heavily fortified by the raw vitality of over a hundred devoured cores.
His hyper-dense musculature clamped down, physically stopping the claws from reaching the bone.
Caius took the hit, grounding his boots into the mud, and refused to fall but the Alpha wasn’t finished. As it landed in the slop, its massive, hydraulic jaws immediately snapped sideways, aiming to crush Aurelia as she stumbled from Caius’s shove.
’I have to pull her down!’ Caius thought.
Without a single shred of hesitation, Caius violently reached out his uninjured left hand.
He bypassed her tattered sleeves and forcefully grabbed Aurelia Solis directly by her bare, pale arm, aiming to drag her violently downward into the safety of the muddy trench floor.
The microsecond his bare skin made physical contact with hers, her cursed magic reacted.
It was an entirely involuntary, subconscious defense mechanism.
The Mad Sun’s authority was designed like that... It was to kill anyone that touched her...
Aurelia’s glowing crimson eyes widened in panic. She saw the boy with the Ash contract bleeding for her and she saw him grabbing her.
"No!" Aurelia shrieked, desperately trying to mentally choke her own magic.
But the golden flames had already aggressively flared to life. A blinding pulse of solar heat violently erupted from her pores, rushing directly up her arm toward Caius’s gripping hand.
Caius braced his jaw, fully expecting blistering agony. He waited for Ereba to aggressively swallow the fire with the Void but Ereba didn’t do anything.
The Goddess of the Void remained entirely, passively silent in his soul because she didn’t need to intervene.
The conceptual rule of Aurelia’s mutated magic... the very foundation of her cursed flames violently overrode its own destructive nature.
The golden flames violently collided with Caius’s bare hand and then... they simply melted.
The apocalyptic, bone-melting heat instantaneously vanished.
The roaring, blinding fire completely lost its lethal edge, transforming in a fraction of a millisecond into a warm, gentle, almost liquid-like energy.
It didn’t singe a single strand of hair on his arm and it didn’t blister his skin.
Instead, the golden holy fire lovingly, softly wrapped around Caius’s hand, feeling like nothing more than the comforting warmth of a hearth on a freezing winter night.
It completely enveloped his grip, radiating a gentle, protective heat against the freezing cold of the mud.
Caius dragged her down.
Aurelia crashed heavily to her knees in the mud beside him, completely avoiding the snapping jaws of the Alpha beast as it sailed harmlessly over their heads but Aurelia didn’t look at the beast.
She didn’t look at the battle raging around them...
She landed on her knees, completely paralyzed, staring absolutely blankly at Caius’s hand wrapped tightly around her bare arm...
Her glowing crimson eyes were dilated to their limits. Her lips parted slightly, her breath hitching in her chest as her mind completely, utterly short-circuited.
He wasn’t burning...
The boy with the crimson hair, the man who had fed her bread in the dark... he was touching the Mad Sun, and his flesh was not turning into charred, smoking ash.
For her entire life, her flames had been a curse.
They had kept her entirely isolated.
They had killed her own brother... She had accepted the horrifying reality that her soul was fundamentally broken, filled with so much subconscious malice and hatred that she was incapable of safely touching another living creature...
Until exactly this moment.
Her worldview did not just crack. It violently shattered into a million irreparable pieces.
Her flames were currently wrapping around his hand, radiating undeniable warmth.
It wasn’t something they had ever done before... Why did it feel so warm? Her flames were usually so hot... So why was it so warm?
She stared up at Caius’s face.
Caius, entirely unaware of the psychological nuke that had just detonated inside the Villainess’s mind, kept his eyes locked on the Alpha beast as it recovered its footing.
"Stay down!" Caius commanded roughly, tightening his grip on her warm, glowing arm, preparing to raise his shortsword to finish the monster but before Caius could swing his blade... before the Alpha could lunge again... before Aurelia could even process the terrifying beauty of his touch...
The sky above the Carrion Front was violently obliterated.
A Saint had descended...
