Chapter 43: Empire Front Line
High above the sprawling, ash-choked skyline of Aureth Kalian, the Black Capital of the Kalian Empire, Kaiser Aleksandr von Hohenzollern stood before the colossal war map in the Vargareth Palace.
The map was a masterpiece of imperial artificers, a living, glowing projection of the entire continent, meticulously carved from enchanted obsidian and illuminated by pulsing veins of liquid mana.
Aleksandr, the twenty-seventh seat of the Empire, the Head of the Supreme Guardian Council, and the absolute ruler of the most powerful nation in the world, stared at the northern borders.
His icy blue eyes were unblinking, reflecting the violent red markers that indicated the movement of the Sin of Gigantum.
It had been exactly one month since the boy in the Leo Principality had crowned himself Alexander I.
A month since the Empire's western expansion had been thwarted by the upstart's bizarre, thundering weaponry.
But the Leo Principality was a minor annoyance compared to the existential threat breathing down the Empire's northern neck.
The Sin of Gigantum, a walking mountain born from the toxification of ambient mana, had united the Giant races. It was ravaging the northern provinces, devouring human livestock and growing to a staggering three hundred meters in height.
Aleksandr turned away from the map, his pristine white military greatcoat billowing behind him. He looked down at the remaining members of his war council.
"The Empire has bled enough land to this abomination," the Kaiser's voice resonated through the massive chamber,
"The time for containment has passed. We shall execute an extermination campaign the likes of which this world has never seen."
He gestured to the map, and the glowing red markers of the Imperial forces shifted, reorganizing under his command.
"We will launch the full might of the Supreme Guardian Council against the Gigantum," Aleksandr decreed.
"Ten Rank 8 Imperial Sword Masters and five Rank 8 Grand Mages will spearhead the northern vanguard. You will be accompanied by one hundred thousand elite troops, comprising our most devastating and specialized magic divisions. You will march into the frozen wastes, find the beast, and reduce it to ash."
A murmur of awe rippled through the attendant officers. Such a deployment was unheard of. Ten Sword Masters and five Grand Mages possessed enough destructive capability to sink a small continent.
To deploy them all in a single vanguard was a display of overwhelming, absolute arrogance—a statement to the rest of the world that the Kalian Empire's power was boundless.
"To ensure the stability of the realm while our vanguard marches,"
"eight Rank 8 Sword Masters will be dispersed along our western, eastern, and southern borders. They will garrison the lines against the Republic Alliance and the Federation of Libertas, which includes inferior animals (Elves, dwarves, and beastkins). Let them try to capitalize on our distraction. They will find only death."
Aleksandr walked toward the great mithril doors of the chamber, pausing just before the exit.
"The remaining two Sword Masters and two Grand Mages will remain here, in Aureth Kalian, to guard the capital and the Imperial Throne. General Viktor von Raskolnikov. Count Der von Gnadenlose. You will lead the vanguard. Bring me the heart of the mountain."
"Long live the Emperor!"
the council roared in unison, their voices shaking the obsidian walls.
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General Viktor von Raskolnikov, the Elven Doom, rode at the forefront of the one hundred thousand-strong army.
Beside him rode Count Der von Gnadenlose.
Behind them, the horizon was swallowed by a sea of black steel and crimson banners. The ground trembled endlessly beneath the synchronized march of the Empire's finest magic divisions.
For the first two weeks, the invasion was a resounding, glorious victory.
The Frost Giants of Nordgaard, who usually plagued the border settlements, were slaughtered like livestock. The ten Sword Masters barely had to draw their blades.
The five Grand Mages—masters of the Aqua, Glacial, Aether, Lightning, and Inferno towers—unleashed localized natural disasters that wiped out entire giant encampments before the infantry even engaged.
"Look at them,"
Viktor sneered, his breath pluming in the freezing air as he watched a tribe of fifty-foot-tall Frost Giants melt under a coordinated barrage of high-tier Inferno magic.
"They call this an existential threat? The Kaiser gives us too much credit.
I could have cleared this wasteland with a fraction of these men."
"Do not grow arrogant, Viktor," Der Gnadenlose replied, mechanical rasp from beneath his dark red helm.
"We have not yet faced the Sin itself. These are merely the parasites that follow in its wake."
"Let it come," Viktor laughed, his Rank 8 aura flaring, melting the snow in a fifty-foot radius around his warhorse.
"Ten Sword Masters. Five Grand Mages. One hundred thousand troops. Even a demi-god would bleed against us. We are invincible."
As they pushed deeper into the frozen tundra, reclaiming lost Imperial territory and driving the giants back toward the harsh, uncharted peaks of the far north, the morale of the army skyrocketed.
The magic divisions marched with their heads held high, chanting songs of Imperial glory.
They were winning. The Sin of Gigantum was nowhere to be seen, and the Empire's might was absolute.
But as the vanguard crossed the final mountain ridge and descended into the deep, inner territory of the Giants, the air grew unnaturally still.
The biting cold of the winter wind vanished, replaced by a suffocating, lukewarm dampness that smelled of rotting meat and ozone.
Viktor pulled on his reins, his warhorse whinnying nervously and refusing to step further.
He looked up at the sky.
The clouds were wrong. They were no longer the gray, heavy snow clouds of the north.
The sky had turned a bruised, sickly purple.
Jagged streaks of black lightning flickered silently through the unnatural atmosphere, casting eerie, disorienting shadows across the snow.
"What in the hell is this?" Viktor muttered, his confidence slowly faltering.
Der Gnadenlose dismounted, his heavy boots crunching against snow that had turned a repulsive, slick black. He knelt, scooping up a handful of the slush. It hissed against the metal of his gauntlet, burning like acid.
"The mana…" whispered Grand Mage Anya von Stauffenberg, Master of the Glacial Tower, as she rode up beside them. Her face become pale, trembling as she clutched her staff.
"The ambient mana here… it's dead. No, it's not dead. It's… sick. I can't draw from it. It feels like it wants to consume me."
"Explain," Gnadenlose demanded, his combat instincts screaming that something was fundamentally wrong.
"I don't know!" Anya replied, panic edging into her voice.
Imperial scholars and mages from the specialized divisions were already running diagnostic spells, their magical circles flickering and shattering before they could form.
"We have no records of this. The toxification of a Sin is supposed to be dense, chaotic mana. This isn't mana. It's the absence of reality. It's like a void."
The Void.
The word hung in the air, heavy and meaningless to them.
It was a phenomenon completely alien to the world they knew, a catastrophic corruption leaking from the absolute furthest edge of the continent, far beyond civilized maps where the Grey Witch stood her eternal guard.
They did not know of the Grey Witch, nor did they know of the Void Gate.
To the Imperial commanders, this was an unthinkable anomaly.
"Look!" a scout screamed from the vanguard line, pointing toward the valley below.
Gnadenlose walked to the edge of the ridge.
Scattered across the valley floor were the corpses of thousands of giants.
Their massive bodies were twisted in agonizing, unnatural shapes.
Bone and horn protruded from their skin in jagged, chaotic patterns. Their flesh dripped with a foul, bubbling miasma that poisoned the earth beneath them.
As the Imperial forces watched in mounting horror, the corpses twitched. Slowly, the dead giants rose to their feet.
Their eyes snapped open, blazing with a sickening, glowing green light.
"Necromancy?" Viktor asked, drawing his massive crimson greatsword.
"No," Gnadenlose said, his heart hammering in his chest.
"Necromancy requires a soul to anchor the flesh.
"There are no souls in those things. They are just… empty. Puppets."
Then, the ground began to shake, a cataclysmic, seismic upheaval that threw thousands of Imperial soldiers off their feet.
The purple sky seemed to tear open as a shadow cast a dark blot over the sparse light.
Rising from the center of the valley was the Sin of Gigantum.
But it was no longer just a three-hundred-meter-tall walking mountain born from mana toxification.
The foul miasma of the Void had integrated with the creature's massive form, triggering a horrifying, unthinkable metamorphosis, becoming a singularity of rotting space and dark magic.
Its stony flesh had turned translucent, revealing a swirling, infinite abyss within its chest. Giant, skeletal wings made of crystallized black lightning extended from its back, scraping the heavens.
Its head was a featureless mass of glowing green eyes and a gaping maw that inhaled the very light around it.
It was an unthinkable, corrupted being.
An entity that defied the laws of the world.
"Formations!" Viktor roared, amplifying his command voice with wind magic, desperately trying to break the paralysis of terror gripping the one hundred thousand troops.
"Magic divisions, unleash everything! Sword Masters, with me!"
"Fire! Burn it to the ground!"
The five Rank 8 Grand Mages synchronized their casting, drawing upon the absolute limits of their internal mana cores since the ambient mana was too corrupted to use.
Meteors of blazing magma, torrents of hyper-pressurized water, and spears of aetherial lightning bombarded the colossal, corrupted Sin.
Simultaneously, Viktor, Gnadenlose, and the eight other Imperial Sword Masters launched themselves into the air.
Ten Rank 8 auras blazed like falling stars.
"Imperial Tempest!" Viktor screamed, unleashing a wave of pure, crimson sword intent that could have cleaved a mountain range in twain.
Ten ultimate strikes converged on the Gigantum's chest, hitting the creature with enough kinetic and magical force to shift tectonic plates.
A blinding explosion of light and dust consumed the valley.
For a fraction of a second, Viktor felt a surge of triumph.
Nothing could survive that.
Nothing.
But as the dust cleared, the triumph turned to absolute despair.
The corrupted Gigantum hadn't even flinched.
The terrifying void abyss within its chest had simply absorbed the Grand Mages' natural disasters and the Sword Masters' auras, swallowing the energy as if it were a light snack.
The creature slowly lowered its massive head, its thousands of glowing green eyes locking onto the floating Sword Masters.
Then, it exhaled.
A shockwave of pure Void miasma—a devastating ripple of anti-reality that swept across the frozen plains.
Viktor raised his sword to block, but the miasma bypassed his physical and magical defenses entirely.
The shockwave hit him, and he felt a cold so absolute it burned his very soul. His Rank 8 aura shattered like brittle glass. He plummeted from the sky, crashing into the corrupted snow, gasping for breath as his veins turned black.
Below him, the true horror unfolded.
The shockwave rolled over the front lines of the Imperial army. The elite magic divisions, —they had no Rank 8 auras to protect them.
In a matter of seconds, fifty thousand troops— half of the entire expeditionary force—were wiped out instantly.
The soldiers caught in the miasma screamed as their armor rusted to dust.
Their flesh disintegrated, flaking away into black ash, or worse—they collapsed, their bodies twisting and breaking as they were instantly corrupted, rising a moment later with glowing green eyes, turning their weapons on their former comrades.
"Retreat!" Grand Mage Anya shrieked, her glacial staff cracking as she tried to cast a teleportation array.
"We can't fight this! It's eating our magic! Retreat!"
"Hold the line!" Viktor tried to yell, but he coughed up a handful of black, corrupted blood.
"You fool, look around you!" Gnadenlose grabbed Viktor by the breastplate, hauling him to his feet. The Merciless Count's armor was pitted and corroded, his legendary composure shattered by sheer terror.
"The army is gone! If we stay here, the Empire loses ten Sword Masters and five Grand Mages in a single day! We have to pull back!"
Viktor looked at the valley. Fifty thousand men. Gone in a single breath.
The remaining fifty thousand were in a completely disorganized, panicked rout, throwing down their weapons and running blindly into the snow, only to be chased down by the corrupted husks of their brothers.
"Sound the retreat," Viktor rasped, his spirit utterly broken.
The Imperial army, the greatest military force on the continent, turned and fled.
They abandoned all their conquered ground, abandoning their siege weapons and their pride, running southward until their lungs burned.
They transitioned into a desperate, heavily fortified defensive line miles away from the inner territory, erecting massive barriers not to conquer, but to desperately pray they could prevent the corrupted Sin from pushing further south.
Within just one month of the Leo Principality's coronation, the seemingly unbreakable frontline of the Kalian Empire had completely, catastrophically collapsed.
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(Continue.....)