Free Web NovelChapter 15: Saint? More Like A Thief!
CRACKLE!
It wasn’t a subtle shift in the weather.
The Carrion Front had been defined by its oppressive bruised-gray smog... a thick choking miasma of roiling black clouds fueled entirely by corrupted beast magic and the rising greasy smoke of the trench fires.
For hours, this toxic canopy had trapped the heat, the stench of blood, and the agonizing screams of dying men in a claustrophobic dome of pure misery but then, the atmosphere simply broke.
It did not part like a natural cloudbreak.
The corrupted smog was completely torn apart by an overwhelming, oppressive atmospheric pressure that crashed down upon the earth with the weight of a falling mountain.
It felt as though the entire miles-long trench network had been violently plunged thousands of feet underwater.
CRACKLE!
The instantaneous density of the air forced the surviving penal troops to drop to their knees as the pressure violently popped their eardrums.
Blood began to freely trickle from the noses of the disgraced mercenaries.
A blinding apocalyptic white light flooded the entire sector.
The shadows in the trench violently vanished.
The dark muddy corners where men had been bleeding to death, the deep craters filled with severed limbs and shattered iron, and the obsidian-plated armor of the encroaching Blight-Fiends were suddenly bathed in an exposure so incredibly bright it made Caius’s crimson eyes physically water.
The deafening roars of the Blight-Fiends, the sickening, wet crunches of the Siege-beasts pulverizing men into the mud, and the desperate bloody screams of the surviving mercenaries were completely drowned out by a sound that defied mortal comprehension.
It was the sound of the heavens tearing open.
CRACK-OOOOOOOOOOOOM! freewebnσvel.cѳm
The concussive force of the thunderclap did not merely shake the air. It acted as a solid wall.
It actually knocked several massive, multi-ton Siege-beasts entirely off their feet, flipping their heavy bodies through the air like discarded toys.
The trench walls violently shuddered.
Deep fissures spider-webbed across the bedrock. Loose dirt, severed limbs, and discarded, rusted weapons vibrated upward, momentarily hovering in the air as gravity itself seemed to momentarily fail under the absolute dominance of the noise.
Caius snapped his head upward, instinctively raising his uninjured left arm to shield his watering eyes from the blinding radiance pouring through the torn sky.
Suspended high above the chaotic, blood-soaked meat grinder of the trench, hovering entirely untouched by the filth and the despair of the mortal world below, was a man.
He was the picture of divine arrogance.
He didn’t just exist in the sky; he commanded it...
The gray bruised clouds that remained at the edges of the tear violently churned with blinding webs of blue and white lightning, entirely subservient to his presence.
The atmospheric pressure radiating from his core was so incredibly dense that the freezing rain couldn’t even touch him.
The water droplets were physically repelled, disintegrating into fine mist a dozen feet away from his body.
He wore immaculate, spotless silver armor that gleamed with an eye-watering holy radiance.
Every single interlocking plate of the metal was polished to a flawless mirror finish, reflecting the horrific carnage of the Carrion Front without absorbing a single ounce of its grim reality.
A heavy, sky-blue cape, woven from threads that seemed to catch the light of a star, fluttered majestically behind him.
It actively defied the heavy winds of the battlefield, remaining entirely unsoiled by the soot and boiling black blood raining down below him.
He did not look like a soldier... He did not look like a warrior who had come to bleed and die alongside his fellow men...
He looked like a god who had been forced to step into an overflowing sewer.
He looked down at the thousands of snarling Blight-Fiends, the towering, recovering Siege-beasts, and the dying, weeping men with an expression of disgust.
His features were sharp, flawless, and completely devoid of human empathy.
"Foul, crawling creatures," the man’s voice boomed.
It wasn’t shouted.
He didn’t strain his vocal cords to project his voice over the din of the monsters.
It was conceptually amplified to echo perfectly across the entire miles-long sector.
The words vibrated directly against the collarbones of every single living entity in the trench, ensuring that everyone heard his judgment.
A Saint of the Storm God...
The true, untouchable elite of the Divine Ascendancy had arrived...
The Saint didn’t draw a weapon from a scabbard... He didn’t reach for a holy catalyst... He didn’t weave complex, desperate, sweating hand seals like the frontline fodder mages currently bleeding out in the mud below.
He didn’t even bother to assume a combat stance. To do so would imply that the entities below him actually posed a threat.
He simply raised his right arm slowly.
He extended a single, pristine, silver-gauntleted finger downward, pointing dead center into the largest, most violently writhing concentration of the remaining horde.
"Perish."
VZZZT-BAM!
The Saint didn’t cast a spell... He simply dropped a natural disaster.
A massive hurricane of pure lightning violently dropped from the parted clouds.
It wasn’t a single lightning strike... It wasn’t a bolt... It was a torrential, apocalyptic rain of blinding electricity that aggressively slammed into the earth.
The sheer voltage was entirely impossible, carrying the unfiltered authority of a Major God.
The air itself instantly turned into plasma, leaving a thick, burning trail of ozone that scorched the insides of Caius’s lungs.
The lightning struck the freezing black mud of the trench floor and instantly chained outward.
It violently arced between the thousands of remaining Blight-Fiends and Siege-beasts in a fraction of a microsecond.
The electrical current didn’t search for conductivity... it sought out the corrupted mana cores within the monsters’ chests like heat-seeking missiles, connecting the entire horde in a singular, blinding web of divine judgment.
The destruction was absolute.
The electric current instantly superheated the beasts’ corrupted, toxic black blood to the exact point of flash-boiling.
Their massive, hyper-dense, obsidian-plated bodies didn’t burn as they didn’t have time to char or melt.
They violently exploded from the inside out.
The intense pressure of their boiling marrow shattered their thick bones.
Thousands of monsters were instantly vaporized into massive, rapidly expanding clouds of superheated red mist and fine white ash.
The air was filled with the sickening, concussive pops of heavily armored bodies completely failing to contain the thermal expansion occurring within their own veins.
The ground violently shook.
The remaining trench walls completely collapsed under the atmospheric pressure of the divine miracle, burying the dead and the dying alike.
The iron-reinforced wooden watchtowers splintered into toothpicks, instantly catching fire from the ambient heat.
The chaotic storm of lightning lasted for exactly ten agonizing seconds...
For ten seconds, the world was nothing but white light, the smell of burning ozone, and the roar of absolute eradication.
When the thunder finally, slowly ceased rolling across the bruised horizon, and the ozone-choked superheated air began to clear...
The vanguard of the Gore-Tide was completely, utterly gone...
Where thousands of snarling, lethal, heavily armored monsters had stood just moments prior, preparing to tear the surviving humans limb from limb, there was now nothing but a massive, smoking, blackened crater of fused glass and drifting white ash.
The mud had been subjected to such intense, apocalyptic temperatures that the silica in the dirt had literally melted into a smooth, smoking basin of jagged glass.
The surviving mercenaries, covered from head to toe in black blood and missing limbs, collapsed into the mud.
They dropped their rusted iron swords, their chipped halberds, and their broken shields.
They fell to their knees, weeping openly in relief.
Hardened killers who had spent the last hour fully expecting to be eaten alive pressed their dirty, soot-stained foreheads directly to the glass-lined dirt.
They sobbed uncontrollably, screaming their praises to the Gods for their miraculous salvation but Caius did not weep.
Caius stood entirely frozen in the trench with his hanging completely limply at his side.
He slowly let go of Aurelia’s arm.
He completely ignored the bleeding deep claw wounds on his own right shoulder as he tilted his head back, staring entirely blankly at the massive, empty, smoking crater where thousands of highly valuable, stat-boosting mana cores had just existed mere seconds prior.
His right eye began to aggressively twitch.
The blistering fury of a gamer who had just watched an entire field of massive EXP be completely deleted by a scripted NPC washed over his soul.
’That... kill-stealing... bastard!’ Caius roared internally as his inner voice vibrating with pure venom.
He had been farming!
He had been efficiently devouring those corrupted cores! He had been carefully pacing his stamina, testing his new Void-enhanced physical limits, preparing to slowly carve through the rest of that massive horde to build an impenetrable, god-tier physical vessel!
And this silver-plated, arrogant prick had just strolled in from the clouds and nuked his entire buffet!
It was the ultimate insult. The Saint hadn’t just killed the monsters... he had completely vaporized their bodies, meaning the dense, crystallized mana cores Caius needed for his cheat system had been utterly erased from reality.
The EXP was gone as the loot was destroyed.
’Oh, what an absolute, insufferable try-hard,’ Ereba huffed loudly in the back of his mind.
The ancient Goddess of the Void sounded completely and thoroughly annoyed that her absolute favorite interactive leveling session had been violently interrupted by the Pantheon.
She swirled angrily within his core.
’Showing off with a massive area-of-effect ultimate just to flex on low-level mobs? Completely devoid of tactical finesse. Disgusting, arrogant behavior, Caius. He completely ignored resource management. Should I consume his core for the insult? I could rip the lightning right out of his veins.’
’If we weren’t trying to lay low,’ Caius seethed with his muscular fists clenching so tightly his knuckles popped under his heavy iron gauntlets. ’I would let you delete him right out of the sky.’
High above, the pristine Saint gracefully, slowly floated down from the parted clouds.
"Hmph..."
He descended with the agonizingly slow majesty of a monarch stepping off a throne.
He landed lightly on a relatively clean, slightly elevated patch of dirt at the absolute edge of the massive crater.
His immaculate silver boots barely even registered the mud.
The atmospheric pressure he maintained ensured not a single drop of sludge touched his pristine metal.
He didn’t look at the weeping mercenaries... He didn’t offer a healing prayer to the men bleeding out on the ground... He didn’t even glance toward Caius or Aurelia.
To a demigod of the Ascendancy, mortal fodder was entirely beneath notice. They were background props in his grand divine performance.
Sergeant Vance slowly stumbled forward through the knee-deep ash to greet the demigod.
The veteran of the Carrion Front was completely pale, his skin a sickly, translucent gray.
He was trembling violently from massive blood loss as he heavily clutched the bleeding, hastily cauterized stump of his severed left arm, pressing it tightly against his battered iron breastplate.
Every step he took left a heavy trail of crimson in the white ash but Vance pushed through the pain. He forced his exhausted body to bow slightly in an act of grit and disciplined respect.
"My Lord," Vance grunted. "The squad... thanks you for the intervention. When is the rest of the Main Camp arriving? We need medics. We need reinforcements to seal the breach in the palisade before the stragglers regroup."
The Saint slowly turned his head.
He looked down at the bleeding, one-armed veteran with arrogant indifference.
His flawless features didn’t twitch with pity. The Saint didn’t see a hero who had just held the line against impossible odds. He saw a filthy, disposable grunt bleeding on his boots.
"I am the only reinforcement, Sergeant," the Saint announced haughtily.
His magically amplified voice carried clearly across the silent, smoking trench, cutting through the desperate sobs of the surviving mercenaries like a physical blade.
Vance physically froze.
The towering veteran’s jaw went entirely slack and his slate-gray eyes widened in disbelief. "What?"
"I saw the surge of Abyssal mana from the sky on my way here," the Saint continued.
He raised a pristine, silver-plated gauntlet and delicately, precisely dusted a single, microscopic speck of white ash off his shining pauldron, completely ignoring Vance’s horrified expression.
"This was merely the vanguard."
The Saint looked out toward the bruised clouded eastern horizon.
The pitch-black smog was still roiling in the distance.
He spoke with a chilling detachment, entirely uncaring of the crushing despair he had just dropped directly onto the survivors’ heads.
"The true, main body of the Gore-Tide is currently gathering in the deep wilds. It is entirely too massive... Even I cannot confidently wipe it without expending a dangerously high amount of my core..."
