Free Web NovelChapter 691: Daybreak Judgement
The concentrated hammer of the Doom Monarch’s assault reached the southern front at midday, and the southern front was waiting for it.
From the command center, the three remaining commanders watched through the shared picture. Ronaisan had thinned the other fronts as far as he safely could and pushed the strength outward, exactly as Almond had asked. Jaskrit’s storm fleet held the gaps. Joaka’s barriers covered the seams. The rest of the ocean was secure.
Which meant all three of them were free to watch the south.
The Doom assault was the densest thing the war had produced. The Monarch had compressed the strength of three ordinary waves into a single front, siege creatures packed shoulder to shoulder, Tier-98 units marching in ranks, and at the heart of the formation, two of the surviving Doom Titans from the Mountain, rebuilt and re-armored, anchoring the hammer like the heads of a spear.
It crossed the final stretch of ocean toward the Suryax-Regalon island.
And the island answered with something no one on the ocean had ever seen.
It began with light.
Along the outer ring of the Suryax-Regalon defensive walls, new structures rose out of housings that had been sealed all war. They unfolded in segments, gold and white, each one blooming open like a flower made of architecture, petal after petal of gleaming alloy spreading outward until each structure stood as a crowned pillar taller than the towers around it. There were dozens of them, rising in sequence around the entire southern arc, and as each one opened, it began to drink.
Not energy from the island. Energy from the sky.
The ambient light of the world bent toward the pillars. The red-tinged glow of the Doom-darkened horizon, the shifting reflections off the ocean, the radiance of the dome itself, all of it curved inward, drawn into the blooming crowns, and the pillars began to glow from within with a deep, building gold that pulsed like a heartbeat finding its rhythm.
In the command center, Joaka rose halfway out of her chair. frёewebnoѵēl.com
"That is solar architecture," she said. "That is harvesting at a scale that..." She stopped. Her own kingdom was built on light. She knew exactly what she was looking at, and she knew that nothing on this ocean, including Celestara, had ever built it at this scale. "Where did they get this?"
Neither Ronaisan nor Jaskrit answered. Both of them were watching the pillars charge, and both of them were thinking the same thing, and neither of them said it aloud.
On the southern front, the Doom hammer entered range.
The pillars fired.
There was no barrage. There were no beams in the way the ocean understood beams. Each pillar released its charge as a single descending blade of condensed sunlight, vast and silent, falling across the Doom formation like the light of a sun that had decided to take a side. Where the blades fell, the sea turned white. The front rank of the Doom assault, hundreds of siege creatures and thousands of infantry, did not burn. Burning would have taken time. They were simply converted, their dark mass flashing into drifting motes of pale light that scattered across the water like ash made of dawn.
The blades kept falling.
The pillars cycled, drank, and fired again, and the rhythm of it settled into something terrible and beautiful at once, a slow pulse of golden devastation sweeping the southern approach in overlapping arcs. The Doom hammer, built to crack the strongest front through sheer concentration, found that its concentration was the problem. Packed that densely, every falling blade of light reaped a harvest, and the assault was losing strength faster than it could close the distance.
The first of the two rebuilt Titans pushed through the light-storm, half its armor flashing away in golden scatter, and committed to a charge.
The southern wall let it come.
And then the second layer of the new system rose to meet it.
From the wall itself, a lattice of golden geometry unfolded into the air, lines of solid light weaving themselves into an immense, slowly turning array that hung above the southern approach like a crown laid flat across the sky. The Titan charged beneath it. The array turned. And a single column of focused sunlight, fed by every pillar on the arc at once, came down through the array’s center and onto the Titan like the judgment of a star.
The column held for three full seconds.
When it lifted, there was no Titan. There was a circle of fused, glassed ocean floor, exposed where the water had been vaporized for a hundred meters in every direction, and the sea rushing back in to fill the wound.
In the command center, nobody spoke.
The second Titan, watching its twin be deleted, did something no Doom unit had done in the entire war.
It hesitated.
And in that hesitation, the rest of Suryax-Regalon fell on the broken hammer.
The army came through the dome’s southern seam with the full force the war had never yet required of it.
Rudra led from the front, crossing the water in a streak that split the waves, and he hit the hesitating Titan before it finished deciding. Absolute Breaker took its leading arm off at the shoulder, the limb’s structure simply revoked, and the Titan reeled, and Ainen’s flame world rose around it and began to eat. Lily’s Dreadlings poured across the fractured Doom formation in a black tide, dragging down the Tier-98 units in knots of ten and twenty. Silvester and Hiroshi swept the flanks. Maya hunted the command nodes. Marcus anchored the advance with his shield-wall, and the Asura Executives drove their sectors forward, and Natalia’s spheres and Kayla’s threads turned the whole counterattack into a single moving organism that did not waste one strike.
And above it all, the golden pillars kept their rhythm, blades of sunlight falling wherever the Doom formation tried to regroup, denying the hammer any chance to become a hammer again.
Almond stood on the southern wall and directed all of it, and he never once reached for the Discord Bloom weapons in his vault, because he did not need them, and that was the point. The display was a message written in exactly one of the alliance’s secrets.
Suryax Regalon had successfully developed their Suryax-oriented Tier-100 weapon system, and this was its power.
Tier-100 Daybreak Judgement System.
[Rudra: Terrific power, haha.]
[Marcus: If only we could bring this system outside.]
[Maya: That’d be useless, honey. Clovelle and I recently figured out something. The energy required for these Tier-100 systems are unique in a sense that they are imprinted with powers we can’t comprehend. The theory is that these weapon systems will only work in this warfare event dimension, as the energy they need is only created in this world.]
[Lily: That does makes sense. No wonder I am also failing to reproduce its effects.]
The other three allied kingdoms were still in development phases of their blueprints.
The concentrated assault, the densest force the Doom Monarch had committed in the entire war, broke against the southern front in under two hours. The second Titan died without doing any damage. The Doom formations that survived the light and the army turned and fled north, and the golden blades chased them to the edge of the pillars’ range and then, mercifully or contemptuously, let them go.
The southern front had held alone.
More than held. It had erased the strongest blow the Doom Monarch knew how to throw, without taking a single loss, in front of the entire ocean.
In the command center, Ronaisan El Topov finally sat back in his chair, and his voice, when it came, was very quiet and very even.
"So they’ve finished developing their Tier-100 blueprint," he said. "Nothing below the Tier-100 artifacts produces output like that."
Jaskrit said nothing. He was thinking about a depth chamber he had inspected weeks ago, and a blueprint that had scanned as genuine, and a nagging feeling he had never been able to pin down. He did not say any of that aloud. He filed it where he filed everything now, in the growing folder of reasons why riding the wind had been the correct decision.
Joaka simply watched the golden pillars fold themselves closed along the southern wall, petal by petal, going quiet until they were needed again.
’Our team is working hard, but we have only built the prototype system half-way,’ she thought. ’How come they are so fast compared to others?’
Naturally, their progress was slow because they were following fake blueprints.
With the current war occupying the leaders and their most of the efforts, none of the forces had yet to find that out.
And Almond didn’t plan to let this window of opportunity go waste.
