Free Web NovelChapter 16: Overpowered Skill... That Can’t Be Used
The Saint turned away, fully preparing to float back toward the safety of the heavily reinforced, luxurious command tents located miles behind the front lines.
He had done his part.
He had flexed his divine authority... and he had no intention of standing in the mud and bleeding with the infantry when the real threat arrived.
"Rest while you can, fodder," the demigod ordered dismissively, his sky-blue cape fluttering cleanly in the wind as his boots slowly lifted off the dirt. "The real slaughter begins at dawn."
Vance stared at the Saint’s retreating back.
The scarred expression on the veteran’s face utterly crumbled.
The towering Sergeant didn’t argue.
He didn’t scream at the unfairness of it all. He didn’t curse the Gods or demand that the Saint stay and fight.
He knew exactly how disposable penal troops and disgraced mercenaries were to the Empire.
They were ablative armor... They were meat meant to be ground into dust to slow the horde down so the real army could prepare its defenses...
"Fall back," Vance rasped to the weeping survivors.
His voice was completely hollow.
It was entirely devoid of any remaining fighting spirit, stripped of the roaring defiance he had shown just an hour prior.
"Return to the dugouts as we wait for the end."
Caius stood in the drifting smoke, his dense frame rigid with lingering adrenaline and intense irritation.
He let out a heavy breath, slowly turning his head to look over at Aurelia.
The Villainess was still kneeling in the freezing mud, exactly where he had violently pulled her down to avoid the Alpha’s snapping jaws.
She wasn’t looking at the retreating Saint.... She wasn’t looking at the massive crater of fused glass.
She was staring entirely blankly at her own pale arm.
Her golden flames had completely flickered out, leaving only the chilling, ash-gray reality of the trench but her glowing crimson eyes were dilated to their limits with her mind visibly fracturing as it desperately tried to process an impossible reality.
Her curse had failed...
’I don’t understand.’
...
The deafening silence that followed the Saint’s apocalyptic intervention was somehow infinitely heavier than the ear-splitting roars of the Gore-Tide.
The freezing air within the Carrion Front reeked of flash-boiled blood, and the sickeningly sweet scent of completely vaporized flesh.
Fine, white ash drifted down from the bruised, torn sky like a morbid snowfall, dusting the shattered wooden barricades and the weeping survivors who were desperately trying to comprehend their continued existence.
Caius and Aurelia walked away from the smoking, glass-lined crater in suffocating silence.
Their heavy boots trudged through the freezing, ankle-deep slop of the trench.
Every single step felt infinitely heavier than the last.
The intoxicating rush of adrenaline that had fueled their flawless synergy was slowly beginning to violently crash, leaving behind the hollow reality of the meat grinder.
Caius violently shoved the damp leather curtain aside, stepping into the dim claustrophobic interior of their dirt dugout.
Aurelia followed silently behind him like a ghost. Her golden, cascading hair was entirely plastered to her pale skin with sweat, trench soot, and the residual humidity of her own explosions.
The microsecond the leather curtain fell shut, blocking out the horrifying vista of the dead frontline,
Caius let out a long, shuddering exhale.
He didn’t collapse as his newly leveled physical vessel, heavily fortified by the covert absorption of over a hundred corrupted cores, was far too dense and powerful for that.
He simply walked over to his crude wooden crate in the darkest corner of the room and sat down heavily.
His broad, muscular shoulders slumped slightly as the coiled tension slowly drained from his spine.
But before he did anything else, before he even addressed the bleeding wound on his shoulder, Caius needed to address the massive arrogant elephant in the room.
’How do I call upon this again... Status?’
He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the damp dirt wall and sank his consciousness directly into the depths of his soul.
He mentally summoned the Grimoire of Emulation.
The pristine golden system UI violently cascaded down his internal vision, illuminating the darkness of his mind with a brilliant triumphant light.
And there, resting perfectly at the very top of his newly updated inventory of stolen divine authorities, was the ultimate prize he had snatched during the chaos...
[Skill Recorded: Storm God’s Heavenly Judgment - Tier 6]
Caius’s heart gave a greedy thump against his ribs.
It was an apocalyptic hurricane of divine lightning.
It was a literal, undeniable nuke disguised as a spell. If he cast it with the Grimoire’s fifty-percent mana discount and his bottomless Void reserves, he would be fundamentally unstoppable.
He could walk into the capital tomorrow and level the imperial palace but right beneath the glowing gold text was a harsh, violently flashing crimson warning box.
[WARNING: Current physical vessel and structural integrity insufficient.]
[WARNING: The recorded skill relies on raw Divine Authority, lacking mortal hand seals for mana stabilization. Attempting to channel this Tier-6 Authority will result in instantaneous cellular combustion, central nervous system overload, and catastrophic death.]
Caius stared at the crimson text, his mental jaw clenching tightly.
’Of course,’ Caius sighed internally, pinching the bridge of his nose in the dark. ’It’s heavily level-gated.’
He had just covertly devoured over a hundred corrupted beast cores.
He had successfully transformed his frail noble body into a terrifyingly powerful weapon capable of physically holding his ground against an Alpha Blight-Fiend but he was still fundamentally mortal.
Channeling the seal-less authority of a Major God without the proper god-tier physical stats to ground the massive voltage would instantly turn his newly upgraded muscles into a bloody mist.
He would literally cook his own organs in a fraction of a second.
’Ugh, this entire system is completely pay-to-win...’ Ereba complained loudly in his mind.
Her smooth, melodic voice dripped with the annoyance of a hardcore gamer encountering a hard-coded progression wall.
The Goddess of the Void swirled around the glowing system tab, deeply insulted by the restriction placed upon her vessel.
’A Tier-6 level requirement? We literally just power-leveled your physical vessel through an entire horde of mobs, Caius. The stat-scaling in this scripted reality is completely unbalanced! The developers clearly favor the Pantheon’s arrogant NPCs over the player!’
’It’s fine,’ Caius replied, mentally swiping to dismiss the glowing tab. ’We have the nuke in our pocket so we just can’t push the button until my vitality stat can actually handle the recoil. Besides, dropping a Tier-6 Storm miracle right after using a Dawnfather artifact to explain your flames would completely blow our cover as Vance and even that Saint would execute us for extreme Heresy on the spot.’
’Hmph. Let him try,’ Ereba scoffed haughtily with her presence settling back into the dark ocean of his core. ’I will devour his remaining arm.’
Caius opened his crimson eyes, his vision quickly adjusting to the dim, flickering light of the dugout’s sputtering oil lantern.
The ringing in his ears was only just beginning to fade.
He looked around the damp dirt room as the grim realization of their survival slowly settled over him like a heavy blanket.
The dugout was completely empty.
There were a dozen crude wooden cots crammed into the claustrophobic space.
Just a few hours ago, the room had been filled with the terrified breaths of disgraced nobles, branded penal troops, and desperate mercenaries eating their final rations.
Caius could still perfectly remember the tension that had occupied this exact space before the warning sirens had wailed.
He remembered the sound of the scarred, one-eyed mercenary violently throwing up his cheap ale into a tin bucket in the corner.
He remembered the frantic scraping of a whetstone as a branded criminal desperately tried to put an edge on a rusted iron spear that was fundamentally destined to fail him.
He remembered the quiet pathetic prayers muttered to entirely deaf gods by men who knew they were nothing more than disposable fodder meant to clog the teeth of the Gore-Tide.
Now, there were only empty mattresses, abandoned whetstones, and half-eaten pieces of stale bread resting on the dirt floor.
It was a still-life portrait of violently interrupted lives.
A tin canteen lay knocked over on its side, the water having long since soaked into the packed dirt.
A frayed wool blanket hung halfway off a mattress, exactly as it had been left when the man sleeping under it was aggressively shoved out into the freezing rain to die.
Out of the men in their penal squad... Caius and Aurelia were the only two that had survived the first wave.
Ten men had been violently crushed, eaten, or incinerated in the span of a single hour.
This was the true arithmetic of the Carrion Front.
It was not a battlefield where tactics and bravery won the day... in reality, it was an industrial uncaring meat grinder.
They had simply been mathematically overwhelmed by a tidal wave of obsidian bone and corrupted muscle.
They had been erased from existence with such rapid, unceremonious brutality that their names were already entirely forgotten with their blood already washed away by the toxic rainfall above.
Caius slowly reached up with his uninjured left hand and grabbed the collar of his ruined, pristine iron chainmail. freēwebnovel.com
The cold metal was practically glued to his skin by a thick layer of dried monster gore and his own coagulated blood. freeweɓnovel.cøm
He had to forcibly break the seal of the dried blood just to get his calloused fingers under the heavy leather straps near his clavicle.
The heavy metal rings shrieked in protest as he forcefully unbuckled the leather straps and peeled the heavy armor off his broad chest, letting it drop to the dirt floor with a heavy, metallic thud.
CRRRR!
The sound echoed sharply in the tomb-like silence of the dugout.
The sudden lack of weight was an immense relief to his spine, but the freezing air of the bunker immediately bit into his exposed bare chest.
’Fucking hell...’
His right shoulder was a horrific mess.
The Alpha Blight-Fiend’s obsidian claws had violently carved three deep, jagged gashes across his thick deltoid and collarbone.
They had caught the iron chainmail, shredded it like wet tissue paper, and aggressively pulverized the tissue beneath.
The hyper-dense muscle fibers had stopped the beast from reaching the bone, and the residual Void vitality was already slowly working to forcibly clot the bleeding, but the wound was still deep and radiating a throbbing agony.
"Why didn’t you burn?"
