Chapter 135: The Wolf's Throat (Part 1)
The sky above the usually golden and blistering Dragon Bone Desert had been dyed a sickly, humming electric blue.
It was not the natural, diaphanous tone of the celestial vault at dawn, but the gigantic, unnatural static glare projected by the immense energy shield of the Leviathan Battleship, which floated completely motionless, like a cyclopean mountain of black steel and inverted ice, after having miserably failed its first, apocalyptic annihilation shot.
Immensely far below the flagship, the monumental silver barrier of the Morningstar Citadel rippled. It was covered in fissures, smoking profusely and crackling with dissipating lightning bolts of static energy, but it still stood proudly, intact in its purpose, silently and absolutely mocking the immense destructive power of the northern gods.
On the exposed, frigid main bow deck of the Leviathan, Judge Alpha—a monster at the apex of the Stage 2 Great Saint Realm (Perfection)—looked down at the fortified city with a contempt so dense it froze his own breath.
His icy eyes, surgically and alchemically modified in Viktor Cryon's laboratories to see the quantum flow of Qi in the material world, detected the deep instability and frictional heat within the enemy barrier's array network.
"Their fucking light shield doesn't seem far from its structural stress limit," Alpha decreed. His voice sounded completely metallic, devoid of organic vocal cords. "We will use another maximum charge of Shiva's Cannon. There is no physical or conceptual way that pathetic southern array can withstand another Great Saint-class impact consecutively. Their cores must be red-hot. I want to see the damned face of that arrogant brat when his glass sky collapses on his head."
Judge Alpha raised his hand sheathed in black ice.
"Engineers! Redirect the power from the repulsion engines! Prepare another charge of the main cannon and fire at will!"
In the belly of the steel beast, the immense gears groaned. Shiva's Breath flared again with a blinding light that threatened to evaporate the clouds.
BOOOOOOM! A second beam of thermal annihilation descended like the spear of an enraged titan, striking the exact same fissure point on the Citadel's silver barrier.
The impact generated a massive aerial earthquake, but when the light dissipated, Judge Alpha's fury reached its boiling point.
Down below, Seraphina—the newly awakened Eternal Lotus Empress—kept her hands raised. Her blue eyes, ringed in silver, shone with an authority that defied the heavens. The Aegis of the Twelve Golden Dragons had not only resisted; it had used the kinetic energy of the first strike to fortify the cracks for the second, sealing the dome with a layer of divine frost. The Leviathan's cannon began to emit black smoke from overheating, rendering it useless for an immediate third shot.
Judge Alpha, seeing that the superiority of his divine artillery had been neutralized by a mathematical heresy, lost his temper. Rage clouded his usual tactical coldness.
He raised his colossal dark ice scythe toward the vast deck of the ship and the open cargo bays, pointing toward the Legion.
Fifty thousand elite shock troopers of the Black Winter Legion stood in absolute silence. They were killing machines; veteran men and women who had conquered, razed, and subjugated three minor kingdoms in the last decade. Their full plate armor, forged of metal and reflective blue crystal, was impeccable. Their auras were sharpened, coordinated, and disciplined by a thousand battles.
"Heavy infantry!" Alpha roared, his mechanical voice amplified by the battleship's loudspeakers. "The artillery is on cooldown! Descend right now! Abandon ship! Land down there, pierce their roofs, and take that wretched city stone by damned stone! Violate their flimsy internal defenses, loot every coin from their treasuries, and bring me the severed heads of their leaders mounted on your pikes!"
"FOR THE FIFTH FAMILY!" fifty thousand throats roared in unison, a sound so massive it shook the battleship's steel.
The immense lower and lateral landing bays slammed open.
The sound that followed was deafening. Tens of thousands of Qi propulsion arrays integrated into the boots and backs of the armors activated at the same time, glowing like a sea of blue stars.
The Legion leaped into the void.
Seen from the surface of the desert, the spectacle was apocalyptic. It looked like an immense, lethal shower of blue meteorites plummeting downward. An endless plague of shiny metal locusts and sharp spears plunging directly onto the roofs, plazas, and walls of the Morningstar Citadel.
As they plummeted, cutting through the wind, many of the northern soldiers laughed behind their closed helmets. They saw below them a relatively small walled city, architecturally gloomy, totally isolated in the middle of a sea of useless sand. Their minds no longer thought of survival tactics; they thought arrogantly of the immense booty of spirit stones hidden in those towers. They thought of the exotic southern women. They thought of the easy glory of crushing a clan that didn't have even one percent of their numbers.
They didn't have the slightest, sickening idea that they were willingly jumping, with a smile on their lips, directly into the open maws of an industrial-scale meat grinder.
The Soul Grinder (The Obsidian Plaza)
Captain Vort (a consolidated cultivator in the Stage 1 Saint Realm) proudly led the vanguard of the first assault, commanding 5,000 heavy infantrymen.
He pierced the citadel's thermal shield and landed with a brutal, heavy thud in the exact center of the immense Great Obsidian Plaza.
CLANG!
His heavy magnetic boots gripped the smooth, polished black stone firmly. Immediately behind him and at his flanks, his five thousand men landed in a perfect, geometric shield formation, the sound of thousands of boots striking the stone echoing like thunder. They raised their large ice crystal shields, their three-meter spears pointing at all flanks. They were ready for a bloody massacre.
But the only thing that welcomed them was silence.
The silence in the colossal parade ground was so absolute, vast, and heavy that it was suffocating. There were no regiments of defenders entrenched behind barricades. There were no visible fire traps. There wasn't a single guard on patrol. The only sound was the sharp whistling of the desert wind slipping between the tall, dark, gothic obsidian towers that surrounded the plaza in 360 degrees.
"Where the hell are they?" Vort muttered through his helmet's internal communication channels.
His survival instinct, honed and sharpened in a hundred bloody siege battles on the northern steppes, began to scream frantically at the base of his skull that something was deeply and viscerally wrong. He stared up at the tall dark windows, the unlit balconies, and the stone gargoyles of the immense surrounding buildings. He saw not the slightest movement, detected no heat signatures... but he felt eyes. He felt the psychological pressure of thousands of sadistic eyes watching them from the darkness, as if they were cattle in a pen.
Vort turned slightly and saw a thick bead of cold sweat running down the temple of his own lieutenant, visible through the visor of his helmet. It was the micro-expression of doubt and irrational terror infecting his men: Why aren't they attacking us? Why are they letting us into their heart so easily?
Far from there, in the impregnable, armored, dark Underground Control Tower of the Citadel, Cedric Morningstar (Sequence 4) watched the central plaza through dozens of projection crystal monitors.
Cedric's mind no longer functioned like that of an organic human being. The genetic effects of his Metal and Arrays Dragon bloodline had physically transformed the entirety of his neurons and brain synapses into a hyper-complex quantum runic computing network (Fractal Consciousness Network).
In that very millisecond, Cedric's brain was processing over 10,000 simultaneous combat variables: the fluctuation in the weight of the enemy armors, the air density in the plaza, the tension of the obsidian, and Captain Vort's accelerated heart rate. His mind compared current reality with a million past simulations, granting him a terrifying Tactical Omnipresence within a one-square-kilometer radius. He knew exactly what the enemy soldiers were going to do before their brains sent the signal to their muscles to move.
His hands, encased in immense divine-alloy gauntlets, rested gently on a heavy dark gold Master Lever forged into the command console. His gray eyes were sunken into dark circles so deep they looked like bruises after three days without sleep, and his veins glowed with a sickly liquid mercury, but the smile that split his pale face was immense, macabre, and perverse; it was the smile of a sociopathic child holding a magnifying glass on a sunny day directly over a red ant nest.
"Welcome to your new home, scum," Cedric whispered to himself, metallic static leaking into his voice.
Cedric pulled the master lever down with a sharp, violent motion.
CRACK-BOOM!
The sound that followed was not that of a magical fire or ice explosion. It was an immensely worse sound. It was an entirely physical, industrial, and mechanical sound—the groan of tens of thousands of tons of ancient machinery moving beneath their feet.
The immense, perfectly fitted black obsidian slabs that made up the floor of the huge plaza (each weighing ten metric tons) unlatched from their runic locks. In a millisecond, they rotated ninety degrees on colossal adamantite axes hidden in the bedrock.
The solid ground beneath the feet of five thousand soldiers simply disappeared from the face of the earth, turning the entire plaza into a gaping abyss.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH!"
The collective, agonizing, terrified scream of five thousand war-hardened men and women shattered the false peace of the morning. Their perfect shield formation, useless against gravity, fell apart in the air.
They fell in free fall, flailing and colliding with one another, plummeting thirty meters down into the darkness of Level -3 of the Citadel, a sector designated in Cedric's secret blueprints simply as the "Recycling Level."
Down there, in the immense pit, there was no solid floor to land on and break their legs.
What awaited them in the darkness were dozens of immense, jagged, unstoppable industrial rollers forged entirely of pure Adamantite and stellar steel. They were massive cylinders, covered in blades as thick as tree trunks, originally designed and runically enchanted to crush raw stellar iron ore. Now, they were spinning relentlessly at fifteen hundred revolutions per minute.
Vort, demonstrating why he was a Saint Stage cultivator, tried to react desperately mid-fall. He violently channeled his Qi to use the flight ability and escape the pit.
But Cedric left no loose ends. When Vort tried to halt his descent in mid-air, Cedric's Emperor of Seals Manual glowed on the console. A gigantic array hidden in the walls of the pit flashed with purple light. It was a x20 Gravity Seal.
The sudden gravitational pressure didn't just nullify Vort's flight; it was so absurdly massive and sudden that his own internal organs crashed violently against his ribs. The Saint Captain coughed up a huge mouthful of blood as the pressure burst the capillaries in his eyes and ears in mid-air, dragging him down at a speed even greater than normal free-fall, making him feel as though he weighed dozens of tons.
The last thing Vort saw before he died, looking up desperately with bloodshot eyes, was the light of the blue sky squaring off and disappearing as the immense ten-ton obsidian slabs rotated back and sealed shut hermetically over them.
And then... came the sound.
RRRRRRR-CRUNCH. SPLAT. SKREEECH.
The infernal, deafening sound escaped through the immense grated vents surrounding the edges of the sealed plaza. It was a wet, disgustingly crunchy, liquid, sickly noise. It was the symphony of thousands of resistant Earth Grade crystal armors, magic spears, skulls, femurs, and cultivator torsos being brutally and indiscriminately caught, chewed, and ground together by the relentless adamantite grinders.
The air inside the pit was compressed by the extreme gravity and the massive slaughter. The blood pressure of five thousand bodies bursting at the same time found the only possible escape route.
From the immense vents of the obsidian plaza, clean smoke did not emerge. A red, thick, hot, sticky mist shot out at monstrous pressure. Dozens of geysers of human blood, mixed with bone dust, erupted toward the sky like fountains in a macabre garden.
Above, on the surface, the remaining 45,000 soldiers of the Black Winter Legion who were still slowing their descent in the air, or who had just landed on the immense roofs of the citadel's surrounding buildings, froze completely.
Abyssal silence returned to the surface. But now, the air didn't smell like sand and wind. It smelled like pure iron, split entrails, and hot, fresh blood.
The rain of blood shot from the vents fell over the soldiers on the roofs. The red mist stained the impeccable crystal visors of their helmets, fogging them with the thick, hot vital liquid of their own vanguard, giving them a visceral, sticky, and horrifying welcome to hell.
"It's a siege trap! The ground is fake! Don't land in the open streets!" the General Commander shouted frantically from the sky, uselessly wiping his own men's blood from his visor, his heart galloping in panic at having lost ten percent of his forces in five seconds. "Infantry, change vectors! Go in through the fucking windows! Seek cover! We'll take the close-quarters combat inside the buildings!"
Tens of thousands of soldiers obeyed, terrified by the blood-spewing vents. They violently smashed the tall, immense glass windows of the Citadel's West Wing (the sector designated for the Dormitories and lower Armory) and poured into the wide, dark obsidian corridors.
They thought they would be tactically safe inside solid structures. They thought the walls would protect them from massive area-of-effect traps.
It was the biggest, most painful, and most lethal mistake of their disgusting lives. The corridors of the Morningstar Citadel had not been designed by Cedric for comfortable living; they had been narrowed and designed as asymmetrical funnels with a single, exclusive purpose: to facilitate systematic slaughter.
The Hall of Melted Flesh
A heavy elite battalion of 2,000 infantrymen advanced with quick but trembling steps through an extremely long, wide, and claustrophobically dark corridor in the West Wing. Their boots crunched over the broken glass of the windows through which they had entered.
"Lights! I want full vision, fast!" ordered a Sergeant Major, raising his shield and looking frantically in all directions.
The battalion's mages quickly ignited dense orbs of cold light that floated to the ceiling, illuminating the enclosure.
The corridor was completely empty of enemies... except for an immense, dense, almost solid mist of a sickly, glowing emerald green and neon violet that hovered heavily near the ground, crawling toward them like a living snake.
"Poison gas?" The Sergeant scoffed behind his mask with a snort of recovered arrogance. "These rats have no honor! Front line, Qi Filtration arrays activated! The empire's helmets protect us from lower-level airborne toxins! Advance in turtle formation, cross that cloud!"
Confident in their Earth Grade armor and the magical oxygen filters of their helmets, the entire battalion marched heavily, stepping blindly into the green fog bank.
At first, for the first ten meters, they felt absolutely nothing. The filters hummed, purifying the air, and the Sergeant smiled, believing the trap had failed.
Then, a front-line soldier stopped dead in his tracks and dropped his heavy shield. He began frantically rubbing the back of his neck, right where the helmet metal met the chest plate.
Then, another soldier beside him dropped his spear and began convulsively clawing at the crystal plate on his stomach.
In seconds, the formation ground to a halt, hundreds of men writhing in place.
"My... my neck itches, Sergeant," the first soldier said, his voice trembling hysterically over the comms, losing all military bearing. The itch instantly transformed into a burning that eclipsed human comprehension. "It burns! It burns like fire!"
Desperate, the soldier violently tore off his right gauntlet, unlatching the pressurized seals, and brought his bare hand to his neck to scratch the irritation beneath the armor.
But when he ran his fingers over his skin, he felt no living flesh.
The skin, dermis, epidermis, and thick layer of fat on his own neck peeled away as easily as a piece of wet toilet paper, sticking disgustingly to his bare fingers.
Beneath the flayed skin, there was no red, bleeding muscle. What the soldier saw, looking down at his own hands, was the bone of his own collarbone, which had already turned coal-black and was actively bubbling with a toxic green slime.
"AHHHH! MY SKIN! MY GOD, MY SKIN IS FALLING OFF!"
The most primal, absolute, and disgusting panic exploded in the corridor like a bomb.
The lethal, horrifying [Mist of Withered Souls] belonging to Tamsin (Sequence 13) was not a common tear gas or respiratory poison that rudimentarily attacked the lungs to asphyxiate. Thanks to her bloodline mutation, the Poison Basilisk Dragon, the toxin had evolved to a conceptual level: it operated under the Infection of the Fabric of Reality. It directly attacked connective tissue at a molecular level and poisoned inanimate concepts.
The mist didn't need to be breathed in to kill. It was adhering to the surface of their unbreakable, flawless blue crystal and steel armors. And the poison, recognizing the metal and defensive Qi, was generating a "Corrosion of Laws."
Before the Sergeant's terrified eyes, the beautiful armors of his two thousand men began to melt, bubbling like boiling acid, and, in a body horror nightmare, began to chemically fuse with the living flesh of the soldiers beneath them.
The men desperately tried to tear the metal plates from their chests and faces, but they couldn't remove them because the melted stellar steel had literally welded itself to their exposed nerve endings, muscles, and ribs.
The soldiers began to scream with a tear that shredded their vocal cords, falling to the ground, writhing like worms in a hot pan, tearing out their own hair, skin, and armor in shreds as they melted alive into puddles of flesh and smoking metal, fusing with the obsidian floor.
And in the midst of that Dantesque ocean of chaos, wet shrieks, liquefied flesh, and screams of madness, a slender figure walked calmly.
Tamsin emerged from the thick green mist. She carried her elegant black feather fan in one hand and a delicate dagger in the other. Unlike the panic around her, she walked with the aristocratic calm of a lady strolling through a blooming rose garden. Her eyes glowed with a toxic, cruel violet.
An infantry lieutenant, with half the breastplate of his face melted and fused to his jaw, showing his teeth through the dissolved cheek, saw her walking and raised his sword with a strength fueled by the pure adrenaline of agony.
Tamsin didn't move aside. She didn't summon a shield. She simply quickened her pace with a spectral grace, slipped beneath the lieutenant's heavy guard, and used her tactile contact assassination technique: the [Widow's Kiss].
Tamsin touched the lieutenant's intact steel forehead plate softly, almost with maternal affection, with the tips of her fingers, which were dyed an almost-black purple dripping thick, oily smoke.
The instant of the minuscule impact, a mark in the shape of a vibrant red hourglass was magically tattooed onto the molten metal of the officer's armor.
The ultra-condensed poison didn't burn or dissolve. It traveled at lightning speed through the metal straight into the lieutenant's central nervous system.
The man froze on the spot. The heavy sword fell from his hands. The neurotoxin caused instant, absolute sensory and motor paralysis throughout his body; he couldn't move a single muscle, not even his eyelids. But, as the perverse mechanics of the poison dictated, he didn't lose consciousness at any point.
The lieutenant stood paralyzed like a macabre standing statue, his bloodshot eyes bulging with absolute horror, perfectly aware of his surroundings, while feeling—unable to move or make a single sound—his lungs and internal organs begin to dissolve internally into green, bubbling acid, slowly drowning in his own toxic bodily fluids silently rising up his trachea.
He fell flat on his back with a dull thud, drowning in mute red gurgles while his brain, fully intact, felt absolutely everything.
Tamsin smiled at the efficiency of her art and continued walking among the mass of paralyzed and melting men, gently touching foreheads, shoulders, and necks, silently distributing the Widow's Kiss like a nun handing out communion in hell itself.
Dust and Chalk
If the west corridor defended by Tamsin was a slaughterhouse of wet screams, shrieks of pain, collective madness, cloying smells, and bubbling flesh, the North Wing of the Citadel was the most disturbing and desolate of contrasts. It was the total absence of life.
A group of three thousand Cryon shock infantrymen had managed to penetrate and establish a beachhead in one of the grand main northern atriums. The obsidian columns rose majestically toward the vaulted ceiling.
However, they didn't manage to advance even fifty meters.
The temperature in the immense atrium wasn't hot or freezing; it was suffocating, heavy, and stale. The entire air was saturated with a disturbing sepia tone, as if they were walking through the filter of a thousand-year-old photograph forgotten in a drawer.
In the exact center of the atrium, blocking the main hallway leading to the citadel's core, stood a single young man.
Altair (Sequence 10).
He wore no gleaming armor, only worn gray robes. His exposed skin lacked the rosy color of life; it was an ashen gray tone, constantly shedding motes of dead parchment dust. His mere presence caused the tapestries on the atrium walls to rot, lose their color, and fall to the floor like dry leaves in late autumn. He was the Lord of Entropy, and his [Passive Aura: Inevitable Aging] claimed everything within a hundred-meter radius.
An elite Cryon soldier, seeing that only an unarmed, sickly-looking youth blocked the main path, felt his wounded pride and bloodlust take control. The soldier, wielding a two-handed siege mace capable of pulverizing a ten-ton rock, charged blindly toward Altair, screaming with the fury of immortals.
"DIEEE, HERETIC!"
Altair didn't adopt a defensive stance. He didn't step back or summon a dazzling magic barrier. He simply raised his index finger, gray and bony, toward the soldier hurtling toward him like a runaway freight train.
When the massive soldier entered direct range and Altair barely grazed the crystal plate of his chest with the tip of his finger, he executed the [Touch of Withering].
The physical momentum and immense kinetic energy of the huge Cryon soldier kept him moving forward, but over the course of those last three meters separating them, his biology catastrophically collapsed.
In the first meter, the soldier's flawless blond hair turned snow-white, withered, and fell from his scalp in rotten clumps. In the second meter, his teeth fell from his receding gums, and his massive, trained musculature wasted away, sucking in until only a skeleton wrapped in leathery, mummified skin of old parchment remained. In the third meter, the magic steel of his mace itself rusted completely, turning orange, red, and finally flaking off into dead rust in the air.
The soldier, who had begun the charge as a twenty-year-old youth in his martial prime, fell at Altair's feet as a decrepit one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old old man. He didn't even have the energy to scream. His mummified legs, upon striking the stone, literally turned to a texture akin to fragile chalk and pulverized into clouds of calcareous dust under the very weight of his fall. His decrepit torso hit the obsidian floor and shattered completely, exactly like an ancient ceramic burial urn that someone had kicked by mistake.
He crumbled into a huge pile of fine gray ash, brittle bones, and rust, without spilling a single, miserable, disgusting drop of living red blood in the entire process.
The rest of the three thousand men in the atrium stopped dead, the most absolute and instinctive terror freezing the blood in their veins upon seeing one of their strongest warriors die of natural old age in under three seconds of a charge. They began to slowly back away, their boots scraping the floor. Their biological bodies instinctively refused to approach the "black hole" of time and vitality that was the youth in gray.
Altair slowly looked up at the mass of terrified soldiers crowding the narrow corridor, trying to retreat. His eyes, devoid of any passion, scanned the crowd.
"The time for all of you... has expired," Altair decreed.
Altair inhaled deeply, the air swirling around him, and executed the lethal [Monarch's Secret Art: Breath of the Pyroclastic Cloud].
Altair opened his mouth and exhaled a massive, brutal column of pressurized destruction. It was not a conventional blast of fire that superficially burned the skin. It was an immense, solid, opaque wall of dense gray and black gas, composed of real, super-condensed volcanic ash and millions of micro-fragments of molten metal at temperatures exceeding two thousand degrees.
The Pyroclastic explosion did not dissipate like normal smoke; it advanced through the atrium like a heavy physical wall, devouring the torchlight and instantly engulfing half of the three thousand men.
The microscopic inferno proved its lethality inside the bodies. When the dense gray cloud reached the soldiers in the vanguard, the oxygen was literally ripped from the air. The men, in a panic reflex, gasped sharply in surprise.
The volcanic ash and molten metal flooded through their open airways. Upon contact with the biological moisture of the soldiers' throats and lungs, the ash rapidly hydrated and cooled, instantly solidifying and petrifying their entire respiratory system from the inside.
The sound in the corridor was not screaming; it was a horrifying, deafening hiss. It was the moisture of the blood and water of three thousand human lungs instantly turning to toxic steam.
The soldiers enveloped in the opaque gray darkness couldn't even scream. They suffocated in silence, comically writhing in the midst of a two-thousand-degree atomic heat that melted their helmets directly onto the skin of their skulls.
When the thick gray cloud began to dissipate heavily toward the ventilation shafts, it left behind a scene pulled from the darkest abyss.
Thousands of soldiers stood frozen in place like macabre statues of gray stone and metallic slag, their hands clutching their own hardened throats, their faces petrified in expressions of extreme, silent agony.
Altair languidly walked through the ash "statues," wielding his colossal rusted scythe. With the slightest friction of the dull blade, or simply by brushing them with the folds of his gray robe, the petrified soldiers crumbled and collapsed into noisy mounds of coal rubble, stone, and dead dust. The young Ash Monarch swept the atrium in absolute silence, like a gravedigger cleaning a forgotten cemetery.
The Gallery of Mirages
Those few hundred infantry survivors who managed to escape the North Wing atrium did so by stepping on the pulverized remains of their own comrades. They ran with burning lungs and fractured minds. They had left Altair behind, the youth in gray who turned flesh to dust with a single touch, naively believing that if they managed to distance themselves from that nightmare of ash and petrification, they would find conventional combat. Something their swords and crystal arrays could strike.
They turned desperately down a curved hallway and spilled into the majestic Gallery of Mirages, in the East Sector.
This immense and ornate corridor had been designed by Cedric with walls, floor, and ceiling forged entirely from super-polished obsidian. The black stone shone so brightly that it acted as one immense, continuous dark mirror. Furthermore, the Black Winter Legion's own armors—crafted from the Cryons' vain and lustrous blue crystal—reflected the torchlight in thousands of flashes.
The regiment Commander, panting and covered in the gray dust of his dead men, raised his sword to reorganize the three hundred survivors. "Form ranks! Keep your shields high! Don't let panic...!"
The Commander couldn't finish his sentence.
Beside him, a young private glanced sideways at the polished blue crystal breastplate of his own leader's chest. In the clear reflection of the metal and crystal, the soldier did not see his own frightened face. In the reflection of the Commander's chest, he saw a woman of lethal, unreal beauty. She wore light robes, her hair floated as if underwater, and her skin gave off a pale, cold, lunar light. It was Lirael (Sequence 18).
In the physical world, the gallery was empty. But inside the armor's reflection, Lirael slowly raised a curved, translucent dagger, sketched a pitiless smile, and executed a quick, clean horizontal slash directly across the Commander's reflected neck.
In the physical world, three meters away, the Commander's real throat suddenly burst open.
A deep, perfect, surgical cut opened on his jugular out of thin air, completely ignoring the physical armor protecting his neck. A stream of pressurized blood shot out, staining the polished obsidian wall. The Commander dropped his sword, clutching his mutilated neck, and fell to his knees, drowning in his own blood without even having seen his killer.
The most absolute, incomprehensible, and irrational terror seized the soldiers. Lirael's [Authority of the Lethal Reflection] was not a common ranged attack technique. Her bloodline imposed the Broken Duality: to the laws of physics she controlled, the reflection was infinitely more real and vulnerable than the physical object. Murdering the image in a mirror was murdering the soul of the body. Physical distance was a useless, nonexistent concept.
If she saw your reflection, you were already dead.
"We're under attack! From where?! Where is she?!" the soldiers screamed, forming a frantic circle, pointing their spears into the empty corridor.
The Commander's hot blood splattered the impeccable, polished crystal shields of the front line, creating new, macabre reflective surfaces. Suddenly, in the puddles of blood on the floor, on the black walls, and on the visors of their own helmets, Lirael's figure appeared multiplied by hundreds.
In the reflection of a shield to the left, Lirael drove her dagger into a soldier's eye. In reality, the shield owner's eyeball exploded in a geyser of vitreous humor and blood, falling dead instantly. In the reflection of a blood puddle to the right, Lirael severed the knee tendons of three men. In reality, the three soldiers screamed in agony as their legs snapped backward unnaturally, collapsing uselessly to the floor.
"She's in the shields! She's in the armors!" a veteran shrieked, losing what little sanity he had left, watching his comrades being surgically dismembered by ghosts trapped in the glass. "Don't look at your own reflections! Gods, close your eyes!"
But the visual terror was just beginning. Lirael decided that passive assassination was too slow. She released a massive pulse of her Qi, activating the [Midnight Mirage].
The corridor's illumination was swallowed by a deep, suffocating cobalt blue. The "false night" fell over the three hundred men. Their depth perception was instantly ruined; they felt like they were floating beneath the dark waters of an infinite ocean. Small spheres of moonlight began to float around them like distracting fireflies.
And then, from the end of the corridor, Lirael emerged into the physical world. She looked like a wraith of pure living silver. With an elegant flick of her wrist, she released a few drops of her own blood: a shiny, silver liquid metal like mercury. The Lunar Mercury Vapor instantly condensed in the air, creating three physical, tangible, exact clones of herself.
The four beautiful and lethal women walked toward the terrified formation, executing the [Dance of Broken Mirrors]. Around them, dozens of large shards of solid-light silver crystal began to orbit. These panes acted like a maddening kaleidoscope.
The Cryon soldiers, desperate, screamed and charged, launching thrusts and fireballs at the silver women. One soldier drove his spear directly into the chest of a Lirael. But there was no resistance of flesh. His spear pierced a refraction hologram, and the false Lirael burst into a thousand shards of cyan light crystal that blinded the attacker. From the blind angle of the floating mirrors, the real Lirael glided in, her weapon shining with a terrifying white light.
She used the [Lunar Shadow Slash]. Lirael didn't strike with the edge of the dagger; she struck with the space beneath it. She traced a slash in the air, and a "shadow" of solid black light projected in an arc distinct from that of her hand. The soldier raised his shield to block Lirael's arm, but the black shadow passed right through the magic crystal as if it didn't exist. The impact was devastating, but silent. The soldier was not cut physically; the shadow of moonlight directly cut and burned his network of spiritual meridians and his soul, leaving a glowing silver mark on his chest. The man fell into an instant coma, his spirit frozen.
The massive paranoia in the corridor reached its climax. The soldiers no longer knew what to attack. If they attacked the silver women, they hit mirages that burst and blinded them. If they defended against the real attacks, they blocked the wrong way and the inverse light "shadows" tore them apart. And, above all, silent death kept raining from the reflections of their own armors.
"THE ARMORS! OUR ARMORS ARE THE WEAPON!" a crazed soldier screamed, his mind shattered by psychological panic. He grabbed the heavy pommel of his sword and, in an act of pure hysteria, began violently smashing his own crystal shield until it shattered. "Destroy the mirrors! Break everything that shines!"
The psychological contagion was instantaneous and catastrophic. Terrified by the idea that looking at the reflection of the comrade next to them meant an invisible scythe would cut off their head, the soldiers of the Black Winter Legion began to mutilate their own defenses. They began frantically smashing the polished visors of their helmets with the hilts of their daggers, embedding glass shards in their own eyes so they couldn't see the reflections. They struck and shattered the gleaming breastplates of their allies, causing brawls to the death among their own ranks. They mutilated, cut, and blinded themselves to escape the visual nightmare.
Lirael simply stopped at the end of the corridor, merging back into the blue shadows. With a frigid, impassive smile, she watched as the soldiers of the most powerful northern empire massacred and blinded each other, consumed by a psychological terror their disciplined minds were unprepared to process.
The Void Staircase
Those few lucky regiments who, by pure statistics, managed to evade the corridors of Tamsin, Altair, and Lirael, desperately sought alternative routes to descend toward the citadel's supposed weak core, far from the bottlenecked alleys. Around eight hundred light infantrymen and scouts found one of the immense vertical ventilation shafts and spiral staircases that descended for kilometers into the depths of the floating island.
Believing they had found a blind spot in the defense, the eight hundred men began a rapid descent down the immense obsidian spiral staircase.
But after descending fifty meters, something strange began to happen. The atmosphere changed unnaturally. The air grew strangely... thin. Light. The soldiers' ears began to pop with painful bursts of pressure, identical to those felt when climbing thousands of meters of altitude in a single second, but they were going down.
"My... my nose is bleeding," a scout said, wiping a red trickle falling from his lip. He looked at his comrades and saw that the capillaries in their eyes were extremely dilated and bloodshot.
Suddenly, the silence of the great vertical shaft was broken. Not by a roar, nor by the clash of steel, but by a dull, high-pitched, constant sound. It was the terrifying whistle of a massive decompression; the sound of air being violently sucked through a microscopic crack.
And then, in the exact center of the immense hollow shaft of the spiral staircase, a figure appeared floating in the void. It was Joren (Sequence 17).
The young assassin wasn't falling or flying with conventional magic. His boots treaded upon empty air. Using the [Shadow of a Hundred Steps], Joren created solid, invisible platforms of compressed wind beneath his heels. He moved at such an absurd speed that his physical body blurred, becoming translucent, a heat mirage vibrating in the cold shaft. Every time he took a step, he left behind "echoes" of air, static silhouettes of himself that confounded visual tracking.
The eight hundred soldiers, seeing him exposed in the center of the abyss, immediately raised their repeating crossbows and magic bows. "Fire at will! Sew him with arrows!" ordered the platoon captain.
Thousands of heavy arrows, imbued with ice penetration Qi, flew in a lethal swarm toward Joren's suspended body.
Joren didn't draw his daggers to deflect the projectiles, nor did he try to dodge them. His face remained impassive beneath his hood. He exhaled slowly and activated the [Heart of the Unstoppable Hurricane].
In a fraction of a second, Joren became the physical epicenter of a miniature meteorological catastrophe. An immense dome of furious, dense, dark winds erupted around him. The air began to rotate in a narrow radius at supersonic speeds, spinning so brutally fast that the center of the dome turned pitch black, like the imperturbable eye of a Category Five tornado. Emerald green static lightning began to jump between the gusts due to the immense molecular friction of the air tearing itself apart.
The thousands of enemy arrows entered the range of the supersonic dome and were instantly caught by the current. They didn't bounce off; the friction of the air was so absurd that the iron oak shafts and steel tips splintered, shredded, and disintegrated into sawdust and metallic dust before they could touch a single hair on Joren's head.
"Impossible!" the captain yelled, backing into the staircase wall.
Joren disappeared from his static position. In a blink, propelled by an explosion of wind at his back, he materialized directly amidst the tight formation of soldiers on the stairs.
The dome of the Unstoppable Hurricane crashed into the troops. The effect on the human bodies of the assailants was a hundred times worse than on the wooden arrows. The cutting wind and extreme friction surrounding Joren didn't just push them. It acted like millions of invisible, relentless, supersonic razor blades. The instant Joren landed among them, the soldiers standing a meter away felt their thick leather armors, their tunics, and then the very skin on their arms and faces being literally flayed, torn, and ripped to shreds by the centrifugal force of the wind, stripping them to raw flesh in a millisecond.
As the vanguard soldiers fell screaming, flayed alive by the air, Joren finally unsheathed his two curved daggers.
But the terror of Joren's combat style didn't lie in the sharpness of his steel. It lay in his horrifying mastery of physics. Joren activated the [Fangs of the Inverse Breeze]. The blades of his daggers seemed to blur, vibrating so fast they became almost invisible. Around the metal, there was no cutting wind; there were vortices of zero pressure. There was Local Void.
A soldier, seeing an opening as Joren gutted a comrade, launched a thrust at his back. Joren turned with deceptive slowness and threw a defensive slash with his dagger that, to the naked eye, missed miserably, passing nearly thirty centimeters away from the attacking soldier's outstretched arm.
The soldier smiled, believing his spear would connect. But then, the dagger's vortex activated. The horrifying and lethal suction effect of the local void ignited.
The air pressure around the soldier's arm collapsed. The immense atmospheric pressure difference didn't cut the enemy; it dragged him. The soldier's physical arm, along with his heavy armor, was violently and uncontrollably sucked in and pulled, bending his bones and joints at an impossible angle, forcing the limb to be drawn directly into the path of the invisible edge of Joren's dagger.
ZSHHHT! The sound of the amputation was drowned out by the constant whistling suction. The soldier's arm was cleanly severed at the elbow, not because Joren had calculated the impact, but because the void itself had dragged the flesh to the steel.
Joren moved like a macabre dancer in a waltz of silent wakes. With every zigzagging step, he left stationary sheets of void in the air. When his body passed over them, the void sucked him forward, multiplying his acceleration speed. He seemed to physically teleport down the staircase, and in his wake, the soldiers of the Legion were immolated. If Joren missed a neck slice by half a meter, the enemy's head was magnetically drawn backward, straight into the wind guillotine. If he missed a thrust to the chest, the enemy's breastplate was sucked into the steel. It wasn't a fencing match; it was assassination through the tyranny of barometric pressure.
But the peak of physiological horror arrived when Joren encountered the bulk of the battalion squeezed onto a narrow flight of stairs, trying to flee upward to escape the wind demon.
Joren stopped, took a deep breath, and channeled the entirety of his mutated Qi into his twin blades to execute his final technique: the [Slash of the Celestial Dawn].
Joren performed a wide, horizontal X-slash. From his blades surged an expansive, extremely thin, and beautiful sheet of sky-blue light, which traveled at the speed of sound through the bodies of twenty soldiers packed in a row, slicing through stone pillars, thick metal shields, and medium-grade armors as if they were made of wet tissue paper.
The cut was so fast and perfect that, for an entire second, the twenty men split in half didn't even realize they were dead. They didn't fall immediately.
And then, the relentless physics of the Void took action. The Celestial Dawn Slash didn't displace the air with brute force; it parted space, creating a zone of pure vacuum along the wound.
The twenty severed bodies suffered the effects of explosive, instantaneous decompression. The immense internal, biological pressure of the human body suddenly found an escape to an environment of extreme zero pressure at the exact site of the cut. There was no normal bleeding. The atmospheric pressure difference literally and with Dantesque force sucked their tissues outward.
The intestines, stomachs, and blood of the twenty soldiers were violently ripped out and spat outward from their severed bodies, dragged by the immense suction of the vacuum through the clean wound, scattering a disgusting web of entrails three meters away in all directions. At the same time, the sudden and brutal drop in barometric pressure in the air around them caused the fluids inside the heads of the remaining soldiers to instantly boil at room temperature. Their eardrums burst, and the eyeballs of the unfortunate witnesses to the massacre popped out of their sockets, exploding into small red clouds from the lack of pressure holding them in.
The deafening sound that followed the slash was not a clash of swords; it was a horrifying, inhuman SPLOOSH! mixed with an ear-piercing, deafening whistle—the eerie sound of the air in the staircase rushing frantically to fill the vacuum created by the attack and the hollowed bodies of the fallen.
Joren walked calmly over the suctioned entrails and stained stone. He wiped the blood from his invisible daggers with a flick of his wrist as the air whistled around him, claiming its toll, having turned a simple, clean evacuation staircase into an abomination of forcefully extracted anatomy.