Free Web NovelChapter 57: 057. Ren’s Beloved...
The eastern flank of Astelvern Town transformed into a roaring, apocalyptic crucible of survival.
The blinding concentrated destruction of Astrid’s aerial bombardment served as a massive beacon of hope in the pitch-black night.
The exhausted terrified human defenders witnessed the sky clear of the Corrupted Wyverns and Obsidian Gargoyles.
They saw the devastating craters carved into the earth by the Vice Guild Leader’s Twilight Beams.
The routing vanguard lines abruptly halted their desperate retreat as a blood-soaked cheer ripped through the muddy plains, traveling rapidly down the shattered human formations.
Seasoned adventurers tightened their grips on chipped swords and dented shields, fueled by a sudden surge of adrenaline.
Mages drank their last emergency mana potions, forcefully ignoring the burning, agonizing cramps in their depleted cores.
The Twilight Witch had taken the field and they prepared to hold the line.
Astrid stood firmly in the center of the muddy wasteland.
Her golden hair plastered to her cheeks with sweat and freezing rain.
The glowing purple aura of her twilight mana cast long eerie shadows across the mutilated corpses of the abyssal horde.
The warm radiant silver pendant Ren had given her rested securely against her throat as a thunderous earth-shattering roar pulled her focus entirely to the front.
Carving a brutal, relentless path through the churning sea of lesser monsters was the Dread-Minotaur.
It violently shoved Armored Orcs and Shadow Beasts aside as it trampled its own allies into the mud in its singular, furious drive to reach the human mage who had decimated their aerial forces.
’The plan is simple... I just have to execute it to the best of my abilities.’
The beast gripped a colossal blood-stained iron greataxe with both hands.
The weapon alone weighed more than a draft horse, its rusted edge glowing with sickening dark abyssal mana.
Thick, highly acidic saliva dripped from the Minotaur’s tusked jaw, burning small hissing holes into the wet earth upon impact.
The Dread-Minotaur locked its burning bloodshot red eyes onto Astrid. It stomped forward.
The ground shook violently beneath its cloven hooves, preparing to engage the Vice Guild Leader in direct, catastrophic combat.
Astrid spun her heavy enchanted staff smoothly, bringing the dense wood into a balanced two-handed guard as she fully unleashed her A-rank aura.
She channeled her twilight mana directly into the core of her staff, artificially increasing the specific gravity of the weapon.
The wood hummed, vibrating with a terrifying hyper-dense mass that rivaled solid tungsten then she stepped forward, embracing her role as a frontline anomaly. freewebnovel.cσ๓
Astrid refused to hide behind a shield wall... She intended to shatter this beast face-to-face...
The Dread-Minotaur crossed the final thirty yards in three massive, explosive bounds.
It launched its colossal frame into the air, raising the massive iron greataxe high above its horned head and it brought the weapon down in a devastating vertical cleave designed to split Astrid and the very bedrock beneath her completely in half.
Astrid planted her boots firmly into the mud. She swung her hyper-dense staff upward, intercepting the descending iron blade perfectly.
KRA-KOOM!
The collision generated a catastrophic shockwave of displaced air as the muddy ground beneath Astrid’s boots instantly compressed forming a spiderweb of deep cracks that spread outward for twenty feet.
The overwhelming physical strength of the twelve-foot beast clashed directly against the hyper-condensed gravity matrix of the A-rank mage.
Sparks showered violently over Astrid’s face.
The heavy iron blade ground harshly against her enchanted staff, screaming in high-pitched metallic protest.
Astrid gritted her teeth.
Her muscles burned with the extreme exertion as she twisted her wrists, actively manipulating the gravity field coating her weapon.
She altered the directional pull, caught the edge of the greataxe and violently dragged the beast’s massive weapon down into the mud beside her.
The Dread-Minotaur stumbled forward with its balance entirely compromised by the sudden overwhelming shift in local gravity.
Astrid capitalized instantly.
She reversed her grip, driving the blunt butt of her heavy staff directly into the beast’s exposed steel breastplate.
BAM!
The impact sounded like a siege cannon firing.
The concentrated gravity magic exploded outward upon contact and the thick steel plating buckled inward, shattering the beast’s massive ribs.
The twelve-foot Dread-Minotaur launched backward, its hooves leaving the earth entirely as it crashed heavily into the mud ten feet away.
The surrounding Armored Orcs roared, surging forward to protect their fallen commander.
Astrid swept her staff in a wide horizontal arc as a crescent-shaped wave of condensed purple gravity tore through the air, hitting the rushing Orcs at chest height.
The spell sheared completely through their rusted armor and thick flesh, bisecting a dozen monsters in a spray of corrosive black blood.
The upper halves of the Orcs slid off their waists, tumbling into the freezing mud.
The Dread-Minotaur scrambled back to its feet, bellowing in pure fury.
It ripped its greataxe out of the mud, tossing aside the broken bodies of its underlings.
The monster charged again, abandoning all tactical restraint, relying entirely on a relentless blinding flurry of heavy sweeping attacks and Astrid met the charge head-on.
’My Lord did not lie... this woman is truly too confident.’
The battlefield around them became an absolute dead zone.
The collateral damage of their clash forced both human defenders and abyssal monsters to pull back, leaving a massive circular clearing for the titans to fight.
CLANG! CLANG! BOOM!
The Dread-Minotaur swung its axe in a wide horizontal arc and Astrid ducked effortlessly beneath the massive blade, allowing the iron to cleanly sever the top half of a nearby boulder.
She stepped inside the beast’s guard, thrusting her palm forward.
A point-blank burst of twilight mana struck the Minotaur’s shoulder.
The blast ripped the steel plating away and exposed the corrupted, pulsing muscle beneath as dark blood sprayed across the chaotic clearing.
The beast retaliated instantly, bringing the flat of its axe down in a crushing backhand.
Astrid raised her staff catching the blow. She slid backward through the mud, her boots carving deep trenches into the earth, but she maintained her footing.
She pushed forward with her golden hair whipping around her face as her striking blue eyes glowed.
"That won’t be enough... It won’t be enough for you to kill me!"
She loved the adrenaline of a high-stakes duel pumping through her veins.
She pushed her physical and magical limits simultaneously, dismantling one of the Demon King’s elite lieutenants in single combat.
The freezing rain hissed as it made contact with her blazing purple aura.
The Dread-Minotaur raised its axe for another vertical cleave, entirely exposing its lower body.
Astrid flooded her staff with the maximum threshold of twilight gravity as the purple aura surrounding the wood flared with a blinding searing intensity.
She dropped her center of mass, stepping deep into the beast’s range and then she brought her staff down in a punishing diagonal strike aimed perfectly at the exposed joint of the Minotaur’s right leg.
CRACK!
The sickening sound of thick reinforced bone violently snapping echoed across the clearing.
The hyper-dense staff completely shattered the Dread-Minotaur’s kneecap as the beast’s leg folded backward at a grotesque unnatural angle with the sharp edges of the fractured tibia piercing through the thick green skin.
"RAAAAAA!"
The twelve-foot behemoth let out an agonizing gurgling roar. It dropped heavily onto its remaining knee with the massive iron greataxe slipping from its grasp to hit the mud with a heavy thud.
The beast’s chest heaved and dark blood spilled from its mouth... It was entirely immobilized and completely at her mercy.
Astrid exhaled a sharp victorious breath.
’That was a nice warm-up.’ Astrid thought, she had learned all of her movements from sparring with Jace.
She raised her glowing staff, aiming the tip directly at the beast’s throat, preparing to unleash a point-blank Twilight Beam to end the duel.
The Dread-Minotaur looked up at her.
It maintained a terrifying calmness as the beast’s bloody tusked jaw curled upward into a slow smirk.
A suffocating chill violently seized Astrid’s spine.
Her seasoned combat instincts screamed a warning so loud it felt physical.
She was already entirely committed to her forward stance as the heavy follow-through of her staff strike locked her muscles for a crucial microscopic fraction of a second.
The ambient light directly behind her vanished and from the dark, elongated shadow cast by Astrid’s own boots, the Void-Stalker materialized.
The ethereal shifting mass of living abyssal shadows rose completely silently, bypassing her sensory wards entirely.
It was the ultimate apex assassin of the Demon King’s vanguard, utilizing the loud destructive duel with the Minotaur as the perfect distraction.
The creature possessed no solid form, acting purely as a conduit for lethal space-rending void magic.
Astrid’s eyes widened as she tried to violently twist her torso, desperately attempting to bring her staff around to block the blind spot.
Her locked muscles slowed her reaction.
Two massive shadow-forged claws dripping with a highly volatile void energy shot forward.
They aimed directly for the exposed, fragile skin of her upper back, intending to seamlessly sever her spine and rip her heart out through her ribs.
Astrid saw the shadow stretching across the mud in front of her and she felt the icy suffocating proximity of death closing in on her neck.
She was completely defenseless, entirely off-guard and trapped in a lethal expertly coordinated crossfire.
The shadow-forged claws struck.
FWOOSH!
The glowing silver pendant resting tightly against Astrid’s throat flared with the brilliance of a dying sun.
A massive blinding explosion of pure, highly concentrated holy light erupted outward from the gemstone.
The light rapidly expanded, forming an absolute, impenetrable spherical barrier of radiant energy completely enveloping Astrid’s body.
The sudden illumination cast the entire battlefield into stark blinding relief.
The Void-Stalker’s claws slammed directly into the holy barrier and the collision produced a reaction of pure elemental eradication.
The corrupted, abyssal shadows making up the creature’s limbs violently reacted with the divine purity of the barrier.
The holy magic acted as absolute poison to the creature of the void as the Void-Stalker let out an inhumane agonizing soul-tearing scream.
"CREEEEEEE!!!"
The holy light gripped the creature’s shadow-forged hands, immediately incinerating the void energy.
The white-hot flames of the barrier aggressively climbed up the Stalker’s arms, rapidly consuming the ethereal beast, turning its shifting shadows into burning radiant ash.
The creature thrashed wildly, desperately trying to pull its melting limbs away from the impenetrable shield.
Inside the blazing spherical barrier, Astrid stood perfectly unharmed.
The sudden blinding light washed over her face.
She felt the incredible soothing warmth of the pendant vibrating intensely against her collarbone and she stared at the burning, shrieking shadow creature thrashing just inches from her back.
’Ren...’
Ren possessed terrifying foresight.
He sensed the unparalleled danger of this invasion... He actively sought out a messenger, navigating a panic-stricken town, solely to ensure she possessed the exact countermeasure required to survive an ambush.
He wrapped his protection around her throat from wherever he was, ensuring her safety even while he operated in a completely different sector of the warzone.
’Haah... You keep stealing my heart everyday... Stop it...’
A surge of love flooded Astrid’s chest.
It burned hotter and brighter than the holy barrier protecting her as her heart hammered against her ribs, completely washing away the icy grip of her near-death experience.
The terror of the ambush evaporated, replaced entirely by the euphoric certainty of his devotion.
A breathtaking smile broke across Astrid’s face.
She embraced her reality completely.
Astrid was a Vice Guild Leader fighting a desperate war, and she was his beloved so she was unequivocally going to return home to him tonight.
Astrid gripped her staff.
The purple twilight mana within her core responded to her massive emotional surge, flaring to a level of density she rarely ever achieved.
The air around her violently distorted, humming with catastrophic power.
She turned smoothly on her heel, facing the burning shrieking Void-Stalker directly.
"You picked the wrong shadow..." Astrid whispered and she thrust her free hand forward, aiming her palm squarely at the center of the shifting, burning mass of shadows.
A singular hyper-compressed purple magic circle materialized instantly as she unleashed the spell at point-blank range.
A massive roaring Twilight Beam erupted from her palm.
The concentrated lance of destructive purple mana punched directly into the Void-Stalker’s chest.
The overwhelming magical force of the beam completely erased the creature’s core, violently blowing the abyssal shadow into nothingness.
The Stalker’s shrieks silenced instantly as its remaining ethereal fragments scattered into the freezing wind, entirely eradicated from existence.
Astrid pressed the assault without missing a single beat.
The Dread-Minotaur, kneeling in the mud with a shattered leg, realized its perfect ambush had failed spectacularly.
"GRAAAA!"
The beast roared in a desperate final frenzy of survival.
It grabbed the handle of its massive iron greataxe from the mud, violently swinging the colossal weapon upward in a sweeping diagonal arc aimed directly at Astrid’s legs.
Astrid pivoted gracefully, stepping entirely out of the greataxe’s trajectory.
The heavy iron blade buried itself harmlessly into the mud where she had just been standing.
She brought her glowing staff around in a fluid continuous motion with the tip of the enchanted wood pointed directly at the Minotaur’s hulking armored neck.
A secondary rapid-fire Twilight Beam blasted outward.
The purple mana cleanly sheared through the thick steel collar and the dense corrupted muscle.
The Dread-Minotaur’s massive horned head violently detached from its shoulders spinning high into the air before crashing heavily into the bloody mud.
The twelve-foot, headless corpse remained kneeling for a fraction of a second with thick black blood geysering from the stump, before collapsing sideways into the earth.
Astrid exhaled a long breath and she lowered her staff.
The blinding holy barrier surrounding her slowly dissipated back into the glowing silver pendant resting against her skin, leaving only the soft ambient glow of her purple aura.
She stood victorious over the absolute remains of Malakor’s elite lieutenants however the battlefield granted zero reprieves. freёwebnoѵel.com
A terrifying ground-shaking roar tore through the remaining ranks of the monster tide originating from the dense cluster of beasts advancing near the western ridge.
The lesser beasts frantically scattered, diving into the mud to clear a wide path.
Tearing through the center of the horde, its massive, blood-shot eyes locked entirely onto Astrid, was the Four-Armed Troll.
The hulking beast stood fifteen feet tall and its massive frame rippled with corrupted muscle.
Its body featured incredibly thick, naturally occurring bone plates covering its chest, shoulders, and thighs, acting as heavy, impenetrable armor.
Acidic saliva dripped in heavy streams from its fanged maw, burning the earth beneath it.
Its four massive, muscular arms ended in razor-sharp claws capable of ripping through solid steel barricades.
"GRAAAHHHH!!!"
It broke into a terrifying thundering sprint charging directly at the isolated Vice Guild Leader with the momentum of a runaway siege engine.
Astrid quickly assessed her internal mana reserves.
The rapid-fire Twilight Beams and the high-tier gravity manipulation drained a significant portion of her core.
She gripped her staff tightly, preparing to channel another dense, defensive gravity field to stall the incoming behemoth and create an opening for a precise strike.
The heavy suffocating grey clouds above the battlefield violently parted as a massive blinding pillar of pure concentrated holy light dropped directly out of the sky.
The divine beam struck the charging Four-Armed Troll dead center with pinpoint accuracy.
The collision produced a deafening sizzling explosion that temporarily blinded the surrounding monsters.
The troll’s thick bone plates offered absolutely zero resistance to the high-tier holy magic.
The beast let out a brief gurgling scream as the radiant light completely enveloped its massive frame.
The holy energy rapidly incinerated its corrupted flesh, vaporized its acidic blood and melted its dense bones into fine white ash.
The pillar of light vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving a smoking perfectly circular charred crater where the hulking monster stood just seconds prior.
Astrid blinked, lowering her staff slightly as the blinding afterimage cleared from her vision.
She turned her head, looking back toward the inner walls of the town.
Marching steadily through the muddy plains with their weapons drawn and their colorful auras flaring brilliantly against the dark night, were the fully mobilized forces of the Twilight Guild and other Guilds as well...
Hundreds of seasoned adventurers advanced in a perfect, impenetrable wedge formation with their boots moving in synchronized rhythm across the blood-soaked earth.
At the absolute front of the formation stood Guild Master Marcus.
The grizzled, heavily scarred combat veteran gripped a massive, enchanted broadsword resting casually over his right shoulder.
He possessed an aura of unshakeable command, leading the most lethal adventurers the province had to offer directly into the abyssal meat grinder.
Walking right beside him with her hands still glowing faintly with residual holy magic, was Seile.
The Guild’s elite high-priestess and primary healer offered Astrid a bright, cheerful wave, her pristine white robes completely contrasting the apocalyptic carnage surrounding them.
She had cast the orbital light strike, perfectly predicting the Troll’s trajectory.
"Did you really think we would let you have all the fun out here, Vice Guild Leader?" Marcus shouted over the din of the battlefield with a feral battle-hungry grin stretching across his weathered face.
Astrid stared at her advancing guild members as the isolated burden of holding the eastern flank alone completely washed away, replaced by the unbreakable strength of her comrades.
She stood on a battlefield surrounded by abyssal horrors, ankle-deep in freezing mud, but she felt entirely invincible.
"You took your time getting here, Guild Master!" Astrid called back with a confident smile breaking across her face.
Marcus laughed loudly as he raised his broadsword high into the air as the enchanted blade glowing with a fierce crimson light.
"Twilight Guild!" Marcus roared, his command echoing across the plains. "Form up on the Vice Guild Leader! Break their lines and push them back to the abyss! Show these monsters exactly whose territory they invaded!"
A massive unified battle cry erupted from the hundreds of seasoned adventurers marching behind him.
The sound rivaled the roaring of the monster tide. The human vanguard crashed into the disorganized reeling abyssal horde with devastating force.
Vanguard knights slammed their heavy tower shields into the Armored Orcs, shattering their rusted cleavers and breaking their chaotic formations.
Elemental mages positioned safely behind the shield wall unleashed a coordinated volley of fireballs, ice spears, and lightning bolts that tore through the ranks of the Shadow Beasts.
The battlefield erupted into a localized storm of elemental destruction and ringing steel.
Astrid turned back to face the endless sea of Corrupted Wyverns, Shadow Beasts, and Armored Orcs.
Her blue eyes glowed with raw power as the silver pendant resting against her throat pulsed warmly which was a constant reminder of the man waiting for her to return.
She felt the presence of her guild members anchoring her flanks, protecting her blind spots, and providing the crucial support necessary to push the offensive.
Astrid raised her staff high into the air as the purple magic circles materialized rapidly, overlapping and spinning with a terrifying destructive hum.
"Let’s clear the field," Astrid declared.
