Free Web NovelChapter 8: Imminent Death
The thick suffocating cloud of white steam slowly began to dissipate.
The roaring echo of the S-Rank explosive ordinance faded into the freezing smog-choked air of the Carrion Front leaving behind a silence so absolute it felt heavier than the artillery fire.
The battle had completely stopped...
Caius slowly lowered his hands.
His palms were slightly blackened by the apocalyptic heat of the Dawnfather’s golden flames, but otherwise, he was completely unharmed.
The air around him was still aggressively warping from the residual thermal radiation as Sergeant Vance was the first to break the paralysis.
The towering, black-bearded veteran violently shoved his way through the stunned crowd of soldiers with his heavy iron boots splashing loudly through the bloody mire.
Vance stopped exactly three paces away from Caius.
The Sergeant’s slate-gray eyes were wide, darting from the smoking crater back to the supposedly weak noble.
His hand was resting dangerously close to the hilt of his broadsword.
"What in the name of the thirteen Gods was that?" Vance demanded with his voice entirely lacking its previous dismissive gravel.
The burly mercenary from the dugout... the one who had laughed at Caius just twenty minutes prior took a hesitant trembling step backward, his massive battleaxe suddenly feeling very heavy.
"He’s an Ash Contractor..." A mercenary stammered from the back of the crowd with his face completely pale. "He’s a crippled chimney sweep! I saw his aura! How... how the hell did he just cast a Tier-3 Dawnfather ordinance?!"
The tension in the trench skyrocketed.
In the world of Ur, casting magic outside of your patron deity’s authority was a literal impossibility.
If they realized Caius was carrying an anomaly that bypassed the absolute laws of the gods, they wouldn’t just be confused. They would execute him on the spot for extreme Heresy.
Caius’s heart hammered violently against his ribs.
He was entirely drained. Emulating that massive spell had consumed a significant chunk of his Void mana, and his physical vessel was screaming in exhaustion but he couldn’t show a single ounce of weakness.
He had only done that since if he hadn’t used the spell... he would have died but now, he had to play the role he was born into.
Caius slowly stood up straight, brushing a layer of dried blackened mud off his expensive silk collar with an air of arrogant nonchalance.
He looked Sergeant Vance dead in the eyes with the haughty confidence of a high-born Draxos heir.
"Relax, Sergeant," Caius drawled, injecting his voice with the perfect amount of spoiled irritation. Caius reached into the pocket of his trousers.
His fingers brushed against a piece of useless junk he had found in the standard-issue duffel bag... a small, slightly rusted, completely empty iron ring meant for attaching gear straps.
He pulled it out, concealing the mundane nature of the object in his closed fist.
"Do you honestly believe the Patriarch of House Draxos would send his own bloodline to this godforsaken meat grinder completely defenseless?" Caius asked, letting a cruel mocking smirk touch his lips.
Caius squeezed his fist.
He allowed a microscopic fraction of the residual heat in his palms to transfer to the cheap iron.
Crack!
The rusted ring violently shattered in his grip, crumbling into a pile of blackened, metallic dust that slipped through his fingers and fell into the mud.
"A Divine Storage Artifact..." Caius lied flawlessly, not breaking eye contact with the towering Sergeant. "A one-time use consumable containing a sealed Dawnfather spell. Given to me by my father to ensure I don’t die in the mud with the rest of you common fodder."
Vance stared at the metallic dust falling from Caius’s hand and the towering Sergeant’s jaw feathered.
He was highly suspicious. Divine Storage Artifacts were incredibly rare, costing tens of thousands of gold pieces, and usually reserved for the high nobility or the direct Saint-level Blessed.
But then again, this was a Draxos.
House Draxos was one of the wealthiest, most militaristic bloodlines on the entire continent. If any family had the resources to casually hand a son a pocket-nuke to keep him alive, it was them.
Vance slowly took his hand off the hilt of his broadsword.
"I see," Vance grunted, his eyes narrowing to incredibly dangerous slits. "A rich boy’s toy... Just remember, Young Master. Artifacts run out. The beasts do not."
Vance violently turned around, barking orders at the stunned soldiers to secure the breach and begin harvesting the dead.
Caius let out a microscopic, entirely invisible sigh of relief.
The lie had worked but more importantly, the entire dynamic of the squad had violently shifted.
The soldiers slowly dispersed, but not a single one of them dared to make eye contact with Caius.
The burly mercenary swallowed hard, practically pressing himself against the trench wall to give Caius a wide, respectful berth as he walked past.
They no longer saw a scrawny pathetic noble waiting to be slaughtered.
They saw a wealthy, unpredictable noble who was entirely willing to detonate S-Rank apocalyptic magic at point-blank range...
He was officially off the bottom of the food chain.
As the adrenaline of the battle slowly faded, the grim brutal reality of the Carrion Front resumed. The surviving soldiers drew their combat knives and began the gruesome task of harvesting.
In the Age of Gods, magic-corrupted beasts like the Blight-Fiends possessed dense crystallized mana cores in their chests.
These cores were highly valuable, used to forge weapons, power artillery, and fuel the empire’s economy.
Caius slowly walked toward the edge of the massive crater he had created.
The Alpha beast’s physical body had been completely vaporized by the golden flames, reduced to nothing but drifting white ash.
But resting dead-center in the cracked, molten earth was a single fist-sized crystal.
It pulsed with an ugly sickly purple light, radiating corrupted mana.
Caius stared down at it, entirely exhausted. His scrawny muscles ached with a deep burning lactic acid buildup and his lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass.
Suddenly, the temperature inside his mind plummeted as the cool, observant presence of the Goddess shifted.
It didn’t feel haughty or amused...
’Champion...’ Ereba’s voice vibrated against his skull, sounding like a dark rumbling earthquake. ’I am hungry.’
Caius blinked, glancing around to make sure none of the soldiers were watching him. They were all busy hacking apart the lesser beasts down the trench.
’Hungry?’ Caius asked mentally. ’For what? A steak?’ freёwebnoѵel.com
’Do not be obtuse,’ the Goddess hummed with a terrifying eagerness bleeding into her smooth voice. ’The core... The crystallized mana resting in the ash.’
Caius looked down at the pulsing purple rock.
’You want to eat a corrupted beast core?’ Caius questioned with his brow furrowing in confusion. ’I thought the Void was Nothingness. How does Nothingness eat?’
’By doing what it was conceptually designed to do,’ Ereba explained, her presence violently swirling in his soul like a restless, starving leviathan. ’The Void consumes, Caius. It breaks down authority, mana, and matter, returning it to the abyss.’
She paused, her voice dropping to a seductive, commanding whisper.
’Touch it.’
Caius didn’t argue. He needed to secure the core anyway to present to Vance as a spoil of war.
He stepped down into the warm, smoking crater, dropping to one knee. He positioned his body carefully, using his back to completely block the line of sight from the rest of the trench.
He slowly reached out his right hand.
The moment his bare fingertips made physical contact with the rough pulsing surface of the Alpha core, reality violently shifted.
A microscopic entirely silent flicker of absolute black flame leaked from his index finger.
The Void did not burn the core... It deleted it.
The solid dense crystal violently dissolved, turning into a stream of pure, black energy that instantly sank directly into Caius’s skin.
[Ding!]
A golden system tab violently erupted in his vision.
[Void Consumption Successful!]
[Corrupted Mana broken down... Impurities erased... Converting raw energy into physical vitality...]
Caius violently gasped.
His eyes widened to the absolute limit as a massive, overwhelming surge of pure, refined kinetic energy aggressively flooded his cardiovascular system.
It was not like the cool, ethereal rush of storing a spell... This was entirely physical.
The agonizing burning ache in his scrawny muscles instantly vanished.
Deep beneath his skin, he could actually feel his muscle fibers micro-tearing and aggressively knitting themselves back together, becoming significantly denser and tighter.
The frail, brittle bones of his unconditioned noble body violently hardened vibrating with a new structural integrity.
His lungs expanded, taking in a massive, effortless breath of the smog-choked air without a single hint of strain.
"Holy shit..." Caius whispered aloud with his voice completely breathless.
His stamina hadn’t just been reset. His maximum physical capacity had been permanently, violently elevated.
’Delicious.’ Ereba purred in his mind, sounding like a sated, incredibly dangerous predator. ’The mana was filthy, completely riddled with bestial impurities... but once the Void stripped it down to its conceptual base, it provided a rather excellent surge of raw vitality.’
Caius stared at his trembling, dirt-caked hand. He slowly clenched his fingers into a fist.
The physical strength didn’t make him a Saint-level War Blessed overnight, but the difference was entirely staggering.
He felt fast and he felt like his body was finally beginning to match the terrifying potential of his soul.
His mind raced, completely short-circuiting as the absolute magnitude of this revelation hit him. The Grimoire of Emulation allowed him to steal spells but Ereba... Ereba allowed him to devour stats.
’This place...’ Caius thought. ’The Carrion Front isn’t just a place to copy magic.’
He looked down the sprawling, blood-soaked trench staring at the hundreds of dead beasts littering the mud.
’It is an all-you-can-eat buffet to fix my pathetic physical constitution.’
If he consumed enough cores, he wouldn’t just be a glass cannon relying on stolen magic.
He would forge a physical vessel capable of actually surviving a close-quarters clash with the reincarnated God of Light.
"Hey! Noble!"
Caius snapped out of his euphoria, quickly standing up as Sergeant Vance marched over to the edge of the crater.
"Where is the core?" Vance demanded, his slate-gray eyes scanning the empty ash. "An Alpha of that size yields a high-density crystal. Hand it over to the quartermaster."
Caius kept his face entirely deadpan.
He casually dusted the ash off his knees.
"Vaporized," Caius lied smoothly, not missing a single beat. "The storage artifact I used was an S-Rank Dawnfather ordinance. It doesn’t leave scraps, Sergeant. The core was completely incinerated with the beast."
Vance’s jaw feathered in extreme irritation, mourning the loss of a highly valuable military asset, but the explanation was physically sound.
Holy fire of that magnitude regularly destroyed loot.
"Tch. Wasteful," Vance spat. "Get back to the dugout... Your shift is over."
Nightfall at the Carrion Front was significantly worse than the day.
The temperature violently plummeted, turning the deep black mud into frozen jagged ruts of ice.
The dugout was pitch-black, save for the single, violently sputtering oil lantern hanging from the ceiling.
The atmosphere inside the damp dirt room was incredibly tense.
The squad of penal troops and mercenaries sat huddled on their wooden crates, shivering in their rusted armor.
They were completely exhausted, reeking of sweat, blood, and fear.
Caius sat alone in the darkest corner of the room, intentionally keeping his distance since he didn’t feel the freezing cold.
The residual vitality from the devoured Alpha core was still pumping through his dense muscles, radiating a comfortable internal heat that kept his core temperature perfectly stable.
The heavy leather curtain of the dugout was violently ripped open.
Sergeant Vance stepped inside.
The towering veteran didn’t look angry.
He looked incredibly pale, his slate-gray eyes carrying a heavy, deeply rooted dread that instantly silenced the entire room.
Vance didn’t say a word at first.
He just walked over to the small wooden table in the center of the room and violently slammed a shattered, blood-soaked iron helmet onto the wood.
The insignia on the helmet belonged to the deep-scout riders... the men who patrolled the dead zones miles beyond the trenches.
"Listen up, you miserable bastards," Vance growled, his voice completely stripped of its usual commanding gravel.
The mercenaries leaned forward, the color slowly draining from their faces.
"The breach today was not an isolated assault," Vance stated grimly, resting his heavy hands on the table. "It was a vanguard scout party... The deep-riders just managed to send a flare before they were entirely wiped out."
Vance looked around the dimly lit room, making eye contact with every single terrified soldier.
"The scouts report a Gore-Tide."
The words hit the room like a physical shockwave.
The burly mercenary who had mocked Caius earlier violently dropped his whetstone, his jaw dropping in absolute horror.
The remaining disgraced noble buried his face in his hands, letting out a pathetic trembling sob.
Even Caius, completely uneducated in military terms, felt the sheer weight of the phrase.
"A Gore-Tide," Vance repeated, his voice barely a whisper. "A massive, corrupted wave of over ten thousand feral beasts, Alphas, and siege-class monsters and it is heading directly for our sector of the trench line."
"When?" a penal soldier choked out, his entire body shaking.
"Three days," Vance replied, his eyes dark and hollow. "High Command is refusing to send proper reinforcements though we will have someone helping us. They consider this sector a lost cause. We are the wall... We hold the line, or we die in the mud."
Vance didn’t offer any words of encouragement and he didn’t tell them they could win.
He simply turned around and walked out of the dugout, leaving the squad completely drowning in their impending doom.
Suffocating panic violently erupted in the small room.
The mercenaries began cursing the gods, the emperor, and the military command. The noble wept openly, screaming that he didn’t want to die in the filth.
Some of the penal troops simply stared blankly at the dirt wall, their minds completely snapping under the pressure.
In exactly three days, a literal tsunami of death was going to crash into their trench.
They were all going to die...
Caius sat perfectly still in the dark corner of the dugout.
He slowly lifted his right hand, staring at the palm where the invisible Grimoire of Emulation rested.
He flexed his fingers, feeling the tight dense muscles and the terrifying, newly forged strength hiding beneath his skin.
’Well if I die... at least I won’t have to face him.’
He looked up with his crimson eyes glowing in the dark as he stared out toward the heavy leather curtain, gazing out into the pitch-black horizon where the monster wave was gathering.
A slow smile spread across Caius’s face.
’A Gore-Tide?’ Caius thought, the sheer, unhinged thrill of the progression fantasy completely overriding his human fear.
Ten thousand beasts meant ten thousand mana cores...
It meant thousands of different Blessed soldiers using their highest-tier, most devastating magical skills to survive...
It was the ultimate hunting ground...
Deep inside his soul, the Chained Goddess of the Void stirred.
’Let them come, Champion...’ the Goddess whispered, her presence radiating a heavy terrifying abyss that promised absolute ruin to anything that dared cross their path.
’We have an appetite.’
