Free Web NovelChapter 19: Attached Tendencies
Aurelia did not move.
She remained perfectly curled against his chest, resting her pale cheek against the slow thudding beat of his heart.
The sound was hypnotic.
It was the rhythm of her salvation.
She felt his strong heavily muscled arm wrapped securely around her waist like a physical tether anchoring her to reality in a world that had tried to tear her apart.
The broken shivering victim entirely vanished.
The terrified isolated princess who believed she was a monster was dead, buried in the mud alongside the Blight-Fiends.
Deep within the darkest, most traumatized depths of her soul, something entirely new violently awakened.
It wasn’t the subconscious malice that the Inquisitors had diagnosed... It wasn’t the indiscriminate hatred for a world that had locked her away...
It was a terrifying and beautiful obsession.
She had found her anchor.
She had found the single, solitary anomaly in the infinite uncaring universe that did not burn when she touched him.
To the rest of the world, to the Empire, to her father, she was a walking apocalypse.
She was a weapon to be aimed and fired but to Caius, she was completely harmless.
He had looked at her flames and hadn’t flinched... He had pulled her out of the jaws of death... He had allowed her into his space...
And more importantly, to Caius... she was entirely devoted.
The golden flames in her core, the divine authority of the Sun God, slowly began to reignite deep within her meridians but they did not pulse with the destructive pressure of an impending explosion.
They did not leak out of her pores to melt the dirt walls.
They pulsed with an unhinged fiercely devoted possessiveness... The mana stabilized, locking onto a singular, absolute focal point....
Aurelia tightened her grip on his ruined shirt with her slender fingers bunching the fabric into tight fists.
Her glowing crimson eyes narrowed in the dark, cutting through the shadows with a brilliant light.
The gentle warmth she had used to heal his shoulder remained, but it was now fueled by a dark, fathomless well of unconditional dependency.
’He is mine,’ the Mad Sun decided with her thoughts crystal clear, ringing with the finality of an imperial decree. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
A terrifying smile slowly stretched across her flawless face.
It was a smile completely devoid of sanity, a smile that promised absolute ruin to anyone who dared to stand in her way.
’And I will burn the entire continent to ash before I let anything take him away from me.’
BOOM!
...
Miles away, the bruised, smog-choked sky above the deep wilds violently flashed with a blinding, pristine white light.
KRACK-OOOOOOOM!
The deafening, rolling thunder shook the earth as the Saint of the Storm God casually dropped another hurricane of divine lightning onto a massive swarm of stray Siege-beasts gathering on the horizon.
Suspended high in the stratosphere, entirely untouched by the filth, the freezing rain, and the apocalyptic squalor of the world below, the Saint hovered with his arms crossed over his immaculate silver breastplate.
The air around him crackled with high-voltage ambient mana.
His sky-blue cape whipped violently in the atmospheric updraft created by his own divine authority, yet not a single speck of ash or corrupted soot dared to cling to his polished greaves.
He was a being of Ascendancy and currently, he was thoroughly annoyed.
’Pest control,’ the Saint sneered internally with his aristocratic features twisting into a mask of condescending disgust as he looked down at the smokin glass-lined craters he was actively carving into the eastern wastes. ’They have reduced a Demigod of the Storm to the role of a glorified exterminator...’
He slowly uncrossed his arms, raising a single, silver-gauntleted hand.
The ambient moisture in the clouds violently condensed.
The atmospheric pressure dropped to terrifying vacuum-like levels.
With a casual, almost bored flick of his wrist, a blinding spear of solid blue plasma materialized from the ether and aggressively slammed into the distant tree line.
VZZZZT-BOOM!
A localized thermobaric explosion completely eradicated a pack of two hundred heavily armored Blight-Fiends.
Their hyper-dense obsidian armor didn’t even have time to crack... it was instantaneously vaporized into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated red mist and white ash.
The Saint didn’t even bother to watch the impact. He was already scanning the bruised horizon for the next cluster of mutated heat signatures.
’Why?’ the Saint thought with his glowing blue eyes narrowing in deep suspicion. ’Why has the High Council suddenly taken such a vested interest in this forsaken mud pit? For a decade, the Carrion Front was nothing but a disposal bin... A place to throw the political exiles, the bastards, and the criminals so they could be quietly digested by the wilds...’
He channeled another surge of raw divine mana into his fingertips, preparing to cull a lumbering, four-story Siege-behemoth that was blindly marching toward the imperial palisades.
’And now, they deploy the Vanguard... They deploy the Saints... They order me to expend my core swatting these mindless, rotting insects before they can even reach the palisades. There is no strategic value to this sector. The Abyssal Leyline rupture is a threat, yes, but to fortify this specific trench line with such overwhelming force...’
The Saint lowered his hand with his expression darkening.
The High Council was hiding something. The Emperor was playing a game on a board that the Saints were not allowed to see.
The volume of the Gore-Tide was being used as a smokescreen for a much deeper purpose but it didn’t matter. He was a weapon of the Empire, and weapons did not question where they were pointed.
The arrogant demigod hovered safely in the clouds, utilizing his massive authority to cull the distant stragglers. freeweɓnøvel.com
Outside the dugout, the reality of the Carrion Front continued its brutal unforgiving cycle.
Sergeant Vance stood near the shattered remnants of the outer palisade.
The freezing rain had washed the worst of the gore from his battered iron breastplate, but it did absolutely nothing to soothe the horrific radiating trauma of his recent amputation.
His severed left arm was tightly bound in thick blood-soaked linen bandages.
The hastily cauterized stump throbbed with a sickening relentless agony that no low-tier imperial healing potion could entirely erase.
Every time his heart beat, it felt as though a white-hot iron spike was being driven directly into his shoulder socket but Vance did not collapse. He did not seek the warmth of the medical tents.
His slate-gray eyes were hollow, completely stripped of any lingering illusions, as he watched the massive heavily reinforced steel carriages of the Imperial Army rumble heavily into the sector.
The massive, eight-legged draft-beasts snorted clouds of white steam into the freezing air with their heavy hooves churning the black slop of the trench floor into a thick foul-smelling paste.
CLANG!
The heavy iron doors of the carriages were violently kicked open from the inside.
Heavily armed Imperial Guards, clad in pristine, untarnished silver armor that stood in stark contrast to the miserable reality of the Front, stepped out.
They didn’t offer a helping hand.
They raised their heavy steel halberds and began aggressively, mercilessly shoving dozens of terrified, wide-eyed men out of the carriage and directly into the freezing black mud.
They were a pathetic trembling assortment of broken humanity.
Vance’s single eye categorized them as they fell into the slop.
There were disgraced minor nobles, still wearing the ruined, mud-stained remnants of their expensive silk doublets, weeping openly as the horrific stench of the warzone hit their privileged lungs.
There were branded criminals, their faces tattooed with the harsh black ink of the Inquisition, shivering violently in their thin standard-issue linen tunics.
And there were desperate mercenaries, men who had sold their swords to the capital’s deepest dungeons for a pardon, clutching rusted iron spears with white-knuckled terror...
In other words, fresh meat.
The grinder had consumed its previous batch in the apocalyptic fires of the first wave, and the Empire was simply refilling the hopper.
Vance spat a thick glob of blood into the slop with his jaw tightening so hard his teeth audibly ground together.
He was grateful they had at least sent reinforcements.
The Carrion Front was critically undermanned.
They needed every single breathing body, every single terrified heartbeat they could get to plug the massive, smoking breach in the palisade before the true main body of the Gore-Tide arrived but as the towering Sergeant watched the terrified new recruits stumble toward the dugouts, he felt a deep sickening twist in his gut.
A young noble boy, no older than eighteen, was violently shoved face-first into a puddle of coagulated black monster blood by a sneering Imperial Guard.
The boy scrambled backward, vomiting violently as he looked up at the towering mountains of incinerated beast corpses that lined the trench walls.
"Line up!" Vance roared with his gravelly voice cutting through the freezing wind like a rusted saw blade. "On your feet, you miserable, lucky bastards! Form a line before I start breaking jaws!"
The fresh recruits scrambled, slipping and sliding in the mud, frantically trying to form a rigid military formation before the terrifying one-armed veteran.
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering uncontrollably with their eyes darting wildly toward the bruised flashing sky where the distant thunder of the Saint’s lightning continuously rolled.
Vance slowly walked down the line.
His heavy iron boots splashed loudly in the mud as he didn’t look at them with hatred nor did he look at them with anger.
He looked at them with the certainty of a mortician surveying fresh corpses.
"Welcome to the edge of the world," Vance announced.
