Free Web NovelChapter 6: To Carrion Front [II]
The night offered absolutely no rest.
The freezing biting draft of the late autumn wind howled entirely unimpeded through the violently obliterated remains of Caius’s bedroom door.
He didn’t bother trying to sleep.
He spent the remaining hours of darkness sitting cross-legged on the floor, mentally conversing with the ancient deity residing in his soul and actively reviewing the absolute nightmare his life had become.
Dawn broke with the subtlety of an executioner’s axe...
The sky outside his window hadn’t even fully transitioned from black to gray when a heavy unceremonious thud echoed in his room.
Caius slowly opened his eyes.
A standard-issue rough canvas military duffel bag had been casually tossed onto the expensive carpet at his feet.
Standing in the ruined doorway was the same unnervingly thin, impeccably dressed butler from the night before.
The glowing pale light in the servant’s eyes had dimmed slightly, but the lethal pressure radiating from his frame was just as suffocating.
"Your transport is waiting in the main courtyard, Young Master," the butler stated with his voice completely devoid of any warmth or familial sympathy.
There was no grand farewell.
There were no servants lining up to wish him luck, no mother weeping into a handkerchief and certainly no Patriarch waiting to give him a final word of gruff encouragement.
He was being shipped off to an active apocalyptic warzone like a crate of unwanted defective cargo.
"Right," Caius muttered.
He slowly pushed himself off the floor with his joints aching from the residual phantom trauma of having his soul violently altered just a few hours prior.
He slung the heavy canvas duffel bag over his shoulder.
It contained nothing but standard-issue steel plating, a few basic medical supplies, and a week’s worth of dry tasteless field rations.
It was a survival kit meant for cannon fodder.
Caius walked past the silent butler, stepping out into the freezing, dimly lit stone corridors of the Draxos estate.
The walk down to the main courtyard was entirely silent.
The massive iron chandeliers had been extinguished for the morning leaving the estate draped in heavy oppressive shadows.
He reached the grand stone staircase that led directly down to the open-air courtyard.
Through the massive archways, he could see the heavy reinforced steel carriage waiting on the cobblestones, hitched to a pair of massive heavily armored war-beasts that snorted thick plumes of steam into the freezing morning air.
Caius took a step down the stairs and suddenly, the air around him violently ignited as a massive calloused hand shot out from the shadows of the nearest stone pillar, moving with terrifying speed.
Before Caius could even blink, the hand violently wrapped around his throat.
"Gah—!"
Caius was forcefully lifted completely off his feet.
A terrifying mountain-like weight violently wedged him backward, slamming his spine incredibly hard against the jagged, volcanic rock of the staircase wall.
The heavy canvas duffel bag slipped from his shoulder, dropping down the stone steps with a dull thud.
Caius gagged with his hands instinctively flying up to grip the massive iron-like forearm currently crushing his windpipe.
Kane Draxos...
The oldest brother leaned in with his massive scar-covered face completely twisting in aggression.
The violently deep raging crimson aura of the God of War leaked from Kane’s pores, physically radiating enough heat to scorch the edges of Caius’s silk collar.
"Listen to me very closely, you pathetic little chimney sweep," Kane snarled.
Caius kicked his legs frantically with his vision immediately beginning to blur at the edges as Kane’s grip completely cut off the oxygen to his brain.
"You are a stain on this bloodline," the oldest brother whispered as his glowing crimson eyes completely devoid of any brotherly affection. "You are an insult to Valerion’s name... I do not care if you get yourself gutted by a feral beast within your first five minutes at the Front."
Kane leaned his massive face even closer with the martial pressure of his aura making Caius’s bones groan under the strain.
"But if you cower," Kane threatened as the crimson heat rolled off his skin in visible waves. "If you turn your back and run, and embarrass the Draxos name out there in the mud... I will ride out to the Carrion Front myself, and I will personally rip your head from your shoulders."
Caius was choking.
His face was turning a pale sickly shade of blue with his fingers desperately clawing at Kane’s unyielding grip.
He was entirely helpless against the physical strength of a true martial Blessed but inside his mind, the temperature violently and abruptly plummeted.
The cool observant presence of the Goddess suddenly shifted into a state of apocalyptic irritation.
’How utterly insolent...’ Ereba’s voice did not echo this time. ’No mortal touches my Champion.’
Caius didn’t even consciously reach for his magic... The Goddess did it for him...
For a single immeasurable microsecond, the absolute, reality-devouring authority of the Void surged from the depths of Caius’s soul and leaked into his physical vessel.
Caius’s eyes, which were rolling back in his head from the lack of oxygen, violently snapped forward.
The crimson irises flashed with an impossibly deep terrifyingly cold shade of abyssal purple.
It wasn’t an attack... It wasn’t a spell... It was just a mere glimpse of the Nothingness that waited at the end of all existence...
Kane Draxos froze.
The oldest brother didn’t consciously register what he was looking at. His human mind was completely incapable of processing the anomaly but his blood knew.
The divine authority of the God of War flowing through Kane’s veins violently recoiled.
The raging crimson aura radiating from Kane’s massive frame actually flickered, physically pulling back in pure terror, as if the magic itself was desperately trying to escape the abyss staring back at it.
Kane’s survival instincts... honed by thousands of hours of brutal, life-or-death combat violently overrode his anger as he instantly let go.
Kane violently stumbled backward with his heavy iron boots scraping against the stone steps as he desperately put distance between himself and his little brother.
"Cough! Cough! Hack—!"
Caius collapsed onto his hands and knees on the cold stone stairs, aggressively gasping for air as his lungs expanded with a burning, desperate need.
He clutched his bruised throat with his chest heaving and Kane stood a few feet away with his chest rising and falling rapidly.
The massive brute was staring at his own trembling hands, completely baffled by his own reaction.
A look of sudden existential dread was plastered across his scarred face and he had felt it... just for a fraction of a second... he could feel the absolute certainty of his own erasure.
Kane quickly shook his head, forcefully masking the lingering terror with a violent ugly sneer.
He couldn’t comprehend what had just happened, so his mind desperately rationalized it as a simple moment of revulsion.
"Get your shit together," Kane cursed with his voice lacking the absolute, dominant rumble it had possessed just moments prior. "Or die in the mud where you belong."
The oldest brother violently turned on his heel and marched rapidly back up the stone staircase, disappearing into the dark shadows of the estate without looking back.
Caius remained on his hands and knees, rubbing the dark bruises already forming on his neck.
He slowly looked up, staring at the empty space where his monstrous brother had just stood.
A small raspy and incredibly arrogant smirk slowly touched the corner of Caius’s lips.
’Scared you, didn’t I?’ Caius thought bitterly with a wave of satisfaction washing over him.
’He is incredibly lucky I did not turn his entire arm into dust...’ Ereba huffed in his mind. ’To lay hands upon the Vessel of the Void... the absolute audacity of that muscle-bound ape.’
’Let him be arrogant for now...’ Caius replied internally, slowly picking himself up and retrieving his dropped canvas bag. ’In thirty days, he won’t be looking down on me ever again.’
Caius descended the rest of the stairs, crossing the frozen cobblestones of the courtyard.
He approached the massive heavily reinforced steel carriage.
The driver, a low-ranking estate soldier wrapped in thick furs didn’t say a single word to him.
He simply unlatched the heavy iron door and waited.
Caius tossed his duffel bag inside and climbed into the cabin.
The interior was stark, lacking any of the velvet cushions or luxury amenities afforded to the true heirs of the house.
It was a cold iron box designed solely to transport bodies to the frontlines without getting pierced by stray arrows.
The heavy iron door slammed shut, locking him in.
A moment later, the massive war-beasts let out a deafening echoing roar and the carriage lurched violently forward.
They were leaving the capital...
For the first few hours of the journey, the carriage rumbled violently over the paved military-grade roads of the Draxos territory.
Caius sat in the silence of the steel box, watching the landscape roll by through the small iron-barred window.
As the sun finally fully breached the horizon, casting a brilliant, blinding array of gold and orange light across the sprawling, frost-covered plains, a heavy silence settled over his mind.
Ereba had completely stopped speaking.
The ancient reality-devouring Goddess of the Void, who had casually offered to murder his entire bloodline last night was entirely captivated.
Caius could feel her presence pressed right against the forefront of his consciousness, looking intently through his physical eyes.
She wasn’t analyzing the tactical layout of the terrain... She wasn’t searching for threats...
She was just watching the sunrise.
’It is...’ Ereba’s mental voice finally whispered, sounding incredibly small and vulnerable. ’It is exactly as bright as I remember.’
Caius leaned his head against the cold iron of the carriage wall, keeping his gaze fixed on the glowing horizon so she could get a better view.
’You haven’t seen the sun in a long time, huh?’ Caius asked softly in his mind.
’Millennia,’ the Goddess murmured, her presence wrapping around him like a gentle, appreciative embrace. ’In the abyss, there is only the sensation of falling. There is no warmth... There is no color... To see the sky bleed with light again... it is a greater tribute than any blood sacrifice, Champion.’
’I promised I’d show you the world,’ Caius replied with a genuine small smile forming on his face. ’We’re just getting started.’
While Ereba quietly basked in the warmth of the morning sun, Caius’s mind violently shifted gears.
He had survived his family... He had escaped the immediate threat of execution...
Now, he had exactly thirty days.
Thirty days until the gates of the prestigious Divine Academy opened ad he would meet the Protagonist and Heroines properly... Thirty days until he was forced to step into the same halls as the reincarnated God of Light, the terrifying Original Protagonist who was destined to slaughter him. freewebnøvel.com
And conveniently, he had exactly thirty days until the Primordial Sign-In System cooled down and granted him his next reality-breaking reward.
His father thought he had sentenced him to death.
Lord Voran believed that sending a frail, unblessed cripple with a dying Ash core to the most brutal, meat-grinder trench warzone on the continent would be the end of his disgrace.
But Voran didn’t know about the Grimoire.
’The Carrion Front isn’t a death sentence...’ Caius thought with his crimson eyes narrowing with ruthless ambition as he stared out the iron-barred window. ’It is an absolute goldmine.’
He mentally pulled up the golden system tab that had etched itself into his memory.
[The Grimoire Of Emulation]
[Description: Allows the Host to store spells or martial skills from other gods simply by seeing them cast with their own eyes. The Host may then emulate and cast the stored skill flawlessly exactly once.]
The mechanics were perfectly suited for a warzone.
If he stayed locked in his bedroom at the estate, what could he possibly emulate? A maid sweeping the floor? The butler serving tea?
But out there, on the bleeding edge of the empire’s borders?
The Carrion Front was populated by thousands of desperate hardened soldiers.
It wasn’t just Draxos men out there... The empire sent penal battalions and disgraced knights from dozens of different minor and major bloodlines to die in the mud...
There would be Pyromancers of the Dawnfather.
There would be Earth-shapers of the Unyielding Shield.
There would be low-tier Blessed utilizing dozens of different, highly lethal martial skills to survive the endless hordes of feral beasts.
It was a literal all-you-can-eat buffet of divine magic!
’All I have to do is stay alive,’ Caius plotted, tapping his finger against his knee. ’I sit in the back lines... I watch them fight and I use the Grimoire to record their most devastating skills while fighting as well.’
He wouldn’t just be surviving the Carrion Front. He would be using it as a massive hyperbolic time chamber to build a terrifying arsenal of stolen magic.
By the time his thirty days were up, he wouldn’t be a pathetic cripple relying solely on a massive bluff.
He would return to the capital as a walking armory, armed with a new System reward and enough stolen firepower to actually stand a chance against the God of Light.
The carriage ride lasted for nearly fourteen agonizing hours.
The paved military roads quickly gave way to rough barring dirt paths, heavily rutted by the tracks of massive artillery wagons and marching boots.
The vibrant frost-covered plains slowly twisted into a bleak, desolate nightmare.
The trees became blackened dead husks as the sky turned permanently overcast, choked by a thick unnatural gray smog that blotted out the sun.
Suddenly, the carriage abruptly halted.
The sudden cessation of movement threw Caius slightly forward against his seat.
He didn’t need to look out the window to know they had arrived as the sensory assault hit him instantly.
The suffocating nauseating stench of rotting flesh and stale blood violently invaded the small iron cabin, making Caius gag.
It was the smell of slaughter.
Through the thick iron walls of the carriage, the deafening cacophony of war vibrated against his eardrums.
He heard the distant guttural roars of massive, unseen beasts echoing across the smog-choked plains.
He heard the chaotic thudding of magical artillery firing into the distance, shaking the very ground beneath the carriage wheels.
It sounded like hell on earth.
CLANG!
The heavy iron door of his carriage was violently yanked open from the outside.
The freezing smog-filled air rushed into the cabin, biting at Caius’s skin.
Standing in the doorway was a massive heavily armored man.
He didn’t look like the pristine, terrifyingly clean butler from the estate, nor did he possess the arrogant aristocratic sneer of Caius’s brothers.
This man looked like a walking corpse that had simply refused to stop fighting.
His armor was heavily dented and caked in thick, dried mud and black blood.
Half of his face was covered in a massive, jagged burn scar that had permanently destroyed his left eye and he smelled like cheap terrible alcohol.
The veteran soldier looked down at Caius, his remaining eye entirely dead and devoid of any respect for the nobility.
He didn’t bow nor did he salute.
He simply turned his head and spat a thick wad of phlegm onto the muddy ground next to the carriage wheel.
"Welcome to the Carrion Front..." the scarred soldier grunted with his voice sounding like two rocks grinding together.
He let out a dry, hacking, incredibly sarcastic laugh.
"I’d say I hope for the best, but out here, the best usually just means you die quickly."
The soldier turned, gesturing over his shoulder toward the massive sprawling network of muddy trenches and spiked barricades in the distance.
"Follow me, Young Master Caius. Let’s get you a weapon and your burial—I mean, battle plan."
