CHAPTER 186: The March of Calamity and the Spear of the Primordial Void
The heat in the Bone Desert, located in the desolate reaches of the Realm of Eternal Dawn, was an oppressive, almost tangible force. The Yang-attribute Qi radiating from the mini-world's artificial sun beat down on the immense dunes of calcium dust and crimson sand, creating an atmosphere so suffocating it would dry out an ordinary cultivator's meridians and lungs in a matter of minutes.
But the vast legion waiting motionless on the red dunes didn't care in the slightest. They didn't sweat. They didn't breathe out of biological necessity. They lacked the concept of fatigue.
Vexia, the Grand Marshal of the Morningstar Clan, floated a hundred meters high, suspended in the hot air through her absolute dominion over space. With her arms crossed over her chest and her glass spectacles reflecting the immensity of the arid landscape, she observed her masterpiece with calculating coldness.
Below, spreading like a plague over the desert, twenty-five thousand soldiers of the Dead Blood Guard formed a perfect block, an immense and terrifying rectangle of death. Their new armors, forged entirely from the supreme alloy of Cold Star Iron, did not gleam under the scant sunlight; on the contrary, they seemed to absorb the ambient light, turning the immense military formation into a black abyss, a well of absolute darkness violently silhouetted against the crimson sand.
They were automatons, war golems with emptied souls, powered by stellar jade motors and connected by veins of beast blood. They were the incarnation of the tyranny Samael Morningstar was about to unleash upon the outside world.
The air in front of the legion's vanguard suddenly vibrated with deafening violence. The laws of space twisted, groaning under the weight of an external force, until an immense runic portal, torn directly into the fabric of the mini-world, opened wide.
From the blackness of the dimensional void, General Orion Alpha—the entity once known in the Primordial Era as the Demon King Xaloc—took his first step onto the desert.
His colossal armor measured three and a half meters tall. He was a mass of dark, pulsing metal, furrowed by thick, exposed veins of Blood Gold that beat with a heavy, terrifying rhythm. As he set his boot on the earth, the crystallized sand and bone fragments crunched, turning to fine dust under his immense weight. The spiritual pressure radiating from his figure was suffocating, an oppressive force that distorted the light around him: it was the genuine aura of a Stage 1 Holy King.
Yet, not a single trace of the millennia-old ego remained within him, not a single word betrayed his former arrogance as a sovereign who had witnessed the fall of the heavens. The immense metal colossus simply looked up, located the small figure of Vexia floating in the sky, and knelt with a crash that made the dunes tremble.
"Commander," Orion Alpha's voice echoed across the wide valley. It didn't come from a biological throat; it was an acoustic synthesis, metallic, cold, and devoid of all emotion, which made the very air vibrate with its heavy frequency.
Vexia smiled. It was a clinical, sadistic, and sharp smile, an expression that promised pain to anyone who crossed her path.
"Rise, General," Vexia ordered, her voice amplified by her immense Qi, falling over the army like divine thunder. "The Patriarch has given us the supreme tools to devour this world and reduce the sects that believe themselves untouchable to ashes. Today, right here, you will prove to me if this cold metal and these broken souls are worthy of bearing the Morningstar Clan's standard. Matrix Link!"
The colossal General stood up in a single, fluid motion, turning to face his twenty-five thousand troops. In the smooth visor of his helm, a void crystal glowed with an intense, lethal red. The command pulse traveled through the invisible laws binding them.
The connection was established immediately. The twenty-five thousand soldiers ignited their crimson visors in unison. There was no delayed echo, not a single fraction of a second's difference between the first and the last soldier. It was a single movement, a single simultaneous blink that dyed the black abyss of their armors red.
"Terrain and Density Assimilation!" Vexia shouted from above, raising a hand. "I want to see death move!"
The General sent the order through his artificial sea of consciousness. In a millisecond, the twenty-five thousand golems executed the [Movement Technique: Quicksand Steps].
It was a spectacle of fluid, unnatural terror. The immense army was no longer rigid. Their heavy stellar metal boots manipulated the Earth-attribute Qi to completely nullify resistance and friction against the ground. The solid earth beneath them seemed to ripple, visually breaking down into billions of invisible grains. The entire immense legion seemed to slightly "sink" into the red sand, as if the desert had become a shallow ocean, and they began to glide at breakneck speeds.
They moved like a tide of dark, boiling tar, zigzagging and changing geometric formations on the fly without kicking up a single cloud of dust, erratic and impossible for the human eye to lock onto as a target.
Simultaneously, as they glided at wind-breaking speeds, the entire legion activated the [Black Iron Scales].
Beneath the impenetrable Cold Star plates, the soldiers' Qi forged a network of dark metallic fibers directly into their artificial tissues. The mass density of each soldier multiplied exponentially all at once. The desert began to tremble and groan violently; the earth crunched and sank beneath the massive weight of twenty-five thousand entities that, suddenly, individually possessed the immovable mass of entire hills.
"They attack gliding like erratic shadows, but weigh like mountains..." Vexia murmured, adjusting her glasses with her index finger, fascinated by the military machine's efficiency. "They are a fluid mirage that crushes you and turns you to pulp before you even realize the metal is real. But let's see if they can survive the weight of the Heavens."
Vexia knew perfectly well that her total power, derived from her status as a summoned deity and tied to Samael's terrifying transformation, far exceeded the limits of the Holy Kings of this world. If she attacked with her true unleashed fury, she would vaporize Sienna's work in an instant and destroy the soldiers' valuable cores. Therefore, she restrained her murderous instinct, sealing her power and limiting her attack to the absolute pinnacle of a Peak Great Saint. It was a mathematically calculated strike to push the legion's metals to the exact point of extreme melting, testing their endurance without erasing them from existence.
The Marshal raised her hand toward the firmament. Dense, volcanic Fire Qi swirled around her, dyeing the mini-world's crimson clouds a blinding orange that completely eclipsed the artificial sun.
"Prepare defenses!" Vexia warned, her voice rumbling like the doomsday bell. "[Sky-Piercing Phoenix Spear]."
The Marshal of shadows dove from the heavens. Her immense power ignited the atmosphere around her, transforming her body and the long spear she held into the immense beak of a mythological Phoenix composed purely of solar flares and liquid plasma. The heat emanating from her descent was so monstrously extreme that the sand beneath the legion began to melt immediately, turning into bubbling liquid glass seconds before impact occurred.
Below, General Orion Alpha processed the fall trajectory, the ignition temperature, and the raw force of the attack with the immutable coldness of a killing machine. He felt no panic. There was no hesitation. He simply applied the hard, pure mathematics of war.
The colossus issued the counter-order through the hive mind.
The twenty-five thousand soldiers stopped their swift, chaotic glide dead in their tracks. The monumental inertia of their charge was abruptly canceled by the immense density of their bodies. In a blink, the scattered shadows converged, violently grouping into a monolithic block, locking their immense, heavy metal shields toward the sky at a perfect angle.
"[Iron Phalanx Formation]," the metallic, unified voice of the legion resonated, like the echo of a single entity.
But Morningstar's golems did not rely solely on cold metal. Driven by the peerless [Ancient Codex: Art of War of the Tyrant Dragon], they activated the true tactical nightmare: the Tyrant's Network and Mass Indestructibility.
The twenty-five thousand stellar jade motors beating in their chests fused at a conceptual level, creating a single infinite ocean of martial energy. Visible only to those with spiritual eyes, heavy ancient law chains and glowing crimson threads connected every chassis, every reinforced structure, every runic circuit. The individual Dantian ceased to exist; they were now a single organism of absolute defense and slaughter.
Vexia's gigantic solar Phoenix struck directly against the exact center of the defensive formation.
The resulting explosion was of cataclysmic proportions. An immense dome of white fire, so bright it would blind a mortal leagues away, expanded to encompass three kilometers in diameter, completely swallowing the entire vanguard. The shockwave incinerated all remaining air in the area and kicked up gigantic tsunamis of molten sand and liquid glass that violently swept across the red horizon. Any army from the outer continent, even one composed of venerable Saints from orthodox sects, would have been vaporized on the spot; the monstrous thermal pressure would have burst their organs into ash and boiled the energy in their Dantians to the point of implosion.
But when the thick black smoke and orange flames began to dissipate, whipped by the hot wind, the unbreakable rawness of the "Meat Grinder" was exposed to the world.
The Iron Phalanx remained firmly standing.
The overwhelming massive damage Vexia had unleashed had clashed against the central point of impact and, through the esoteric and dictatorial laws of the Tyrant Dragon Codex, had been diluted and fragmented in nanoseconds, distributed millimeter by millimeter among the twenty-five thousand connected bodies.
It was a sight that radiated a silent, grotesque torture. The thick Cold Star armors of the hundreds of soldiers located at the epicenter were red-hot, glowing intensely in the gloom like coals fresh from an infernal forge. The potent Beast Blood Essence pumping frantically through their artificial circuits boiled, hissing and escaping as thick streams of red steam from the joints of their mechanical necks, elbows, and knees. The very divine metal covering them slowly warped and buckled under the scorching, radioactive heat.
But none fell to the ground.
There were no desperate gasps for air. There were no shrieks of agony, nor the slightest instinct to break ranks to retreat and save their pathetic lives. If their artificial minds registered that their vital circuits were melting, they ignored it with absolute devotion. They were war machines conceived for suffering; pain was a useless concept to them. Only the slight, almost imperceptible and terrifying tremor of their immense, locked metallic arms betrayed the absurd, inhuman physical pressure they were enduring as a collective.
Vexia, who had rebounded into the sky and now hovered a few meters above the dome of shields, surrounded by the floating embers of her own apocalyptic attack, threw her head back and let out a long, deep, maniacal laugh.
"You survived the fall of a fiery sun!" the Marshal yelled, her eyes shining with uncontrollable martial ecstasy, reveling in the invulnerability of her troops. "Your bodies forged in the abyss withstand the punishment! Now... SHOW YOUR CLAWS! Tear the sky apart!"
Orion Alpha, standing in the exact center of the still-smoking formation, slowly raised his immense, heavy hand.
The order crossed the intricate hive mind in far less than a heartbeat. The gigantic army went from maintaining a monolithic, impenetrable defense to deploying an overwhelming, lethal offense, splitting into two gigantic wings with a fluidity that defied their immense combined weight.
The Left Wing of the formation, composed of twelve thousand colossi, brought their hands to their waists and executed the [Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash].
Twelve thousand swords left their coated sheaths simultaneously. However, there was not a single clash of metal against metal. The friction of steel against leather or wood was not heard. The terrifying "Acoustic Void" of the technique literally swallowed all the noise of the process. A sepulchral, thick, unnatural, and intensely uncomfortable silence fell abruptly over that half of the vast desert.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, an immense and intricate network of thousands of silver slashes carved through the empty air. The concentrated waves of pure sword Qi cut the laws of local space, traveling immensely faster than the sound barrier toward the towering distant dunes. The sand on the horizon was sliced and sectioned into gigantic perfect blocks. If an enemy cavalry had been stationed miles away, its riders would have seen their own bloody heads fall before even hearing the sound of the Morningstar executioners drawing their blades.
Simultaneously, the Right Wing of the army advanced swiftly bearing heavy spears and short serrated swords, executing the cold steps of the [Waltz of the Lunar Frost].
Thirteen thousand golems danced macabrely over the glass sand that still burned and bubbled from Vexia's previous attack. Their movements, although executed by iron giants, were elegant, cruel, and supernaturally fast. In their relentless advance, they left behind thirty-nine thousand residual "Frost Images". The ambient temperature on the right wing of the desert experienced a brutal thermal shock, plummeting violently to countless degrees below zero.
Powerful cold-attribute shockwaves swept across the scorching dunes, freezing on the spot and turning the still-molten glass into sharp, jagged glaciers permanently stained with the red hue of the crimson sand. The thousands of icy illusions remained motionless on the battlefield, adopting perfect combat stances, turning into deadly black ice traps ready to amputate and freeze to death anyone stupid enough to try and strike them.
It was a perfect, terrifying symphony of military chaos: hellfire absorbed without faltering, sound eradicated to deal silent death, and deceptive frost that froze souls, all masterfully and perfectly orchestrated by the artificial mind of a general with millennia of experience.
"Enough showing off against the air!" Vexia roared, her energy rising until space trembled, raising her empty hand high. "You have unbreakable bodies and possess killer techniques. But now I want you to manifest your Patriarch's Absolute Will! Attack me! Destroy everything!"
General Orion Alpha did not hesitate at the order to raise his weapon against his commander. He drove his metallic fingers deep into the crystallized earth. The entire immense legion, in a perfectly synchronized movement, struck their armored chests heavily. The metallic impact sounded like the hammer of a wrathful deity striking the anvil upon which the world was forged.
The powerful and ancient Tyrant's Network activated and pushed to its maximum and most terrifying conceptual capacity.
The overwhelming Qi of twenty-five thousand colossi, a thick, turbulent amalgam of pure darkness, coagulated blood, and devouring void, was extracted, absorbed, and channeled directly through the connecting veins toward Orion Alpha's stellar motor. A titanic, boundless pillar of pure dark energy shot violently toward the mini-world's crimson sky.
But this vast, heavy energy didn't limit itself to forming a simple storm cloud. It physically condensed into thick celestial scales, flesh forged from abstract concepts, and an aura of absolute void.
The dreaded Manifestation of the Apocalypse Dragon came to life above the heads of the Dead Blood legion. A gigantic physical avatar of colossal energy, an eastern dragon several kilometers long, forged purely from the army's unified Killing Intent and the devouring Laws of Space.
But the colossus Orion Alpha did not settle for simply summoning the beast.
With a brutal sweep of his arm, the General made his core boil and activated the essence of his former life. He summoned his ultimate weapon: the [Crimson Spear: Scepter of the Exiled King].
The dark, dense, primordial blood, rivaling the incredible atomic density of a collapsed star, flowed directly from the soldiers' bodies and condensed in the claws of the Dragon avatar. The terrifying weapon took on a grotesque, twisted structure, emulating the thorny spine of a humanoid dragon, forged in blood crystal so deep it devoured light. Inside the weapon, countless wails of distant souls and flashes of stolen imperial Qi swam frantically, crying to escape their eternal torment.
The General fused the spear's immense power with the Dragon's Manifestation. The apocalyptic beast wrapped its colossal scaly body around the blood weapon, becoming the very vector of the attack.
"[The Judgment of the Blood King]," the order of the supreme Law echoed not only in the air but in the minds of everyone present.
The Crimson Spear expanded monstrously until it reached fifty meters in length. The weapon's tip did not possess a mundane metal edge; it was an edge forged in Pure Void, designed to erase the very existence of whatever it touched. This was not a simple attack of brute force; it was an attack based on the concept of "Authority."
"Cease to exist," Orion Alpha dictated with a sepulchral voice, a verbal command backed by the immense channeled power of the dragon and the legion. An attack whose conceptual authority and lethality threatened to destroy the body and expel the soul of a Stage 6 Holy King.
The immaterial spear, guided by the Apocalypse Dragon's roar, descended from the heavens like karmic punishment straight toward Vexia's solitary figure.
Far from feeling fear in the face of the colossal combined attack threatening to erase her from the fabric of space, the Marshal let out a shrill, deranged laugh, her blood boiling from the thrill of extreme combat.
"THAT'S HOW I LIKE IT!" Vexia screamed, her eyes shining through the splintered glasses. "BUT AUTHORITY MEANS NOTHING BEFORE THE VOID!"
Vexia extended her hand and unleashed the weapon of absolute suppression she kept sealed deep within her being: the [Spear of Annihilation].
This was not a physical weapon forged in mortal smithies, nor a conventional spiritual artifact. Its shaft was composed of black light, but its blade... the tip of her spear was a receptacle of absolute, contained void, the very representation of the primordial nothingness that preceded the creation of the universe. Its sole, terrifying function was to abruptly halt the incomprehensible and unstoppable.
Vexia did not dodge. She did not retreat a single millimeter in the air. With a powerful thrust of her entire body, she threw the Spear of Annihilation in a straight line, directly against the Apocalypse Dragon's jaw and the immense descending Crimson Spear.
The clash between both forces did not generate an explosion of fire, light, and deafening sound.
It generated a deep, silent, and terrifying eradication.
The exact instant the tip of the Spear of Annihilation touched the overwhelming combined attack, it asserted its property of conceptual annihilation. Vexia's weapon didn't attempt to "block" the force of the impact or compete in brute strength; instead, the Void Spear devoured the energy itself. The thick fire disappeared in an instant, Xaloc's boiling primordial blood evaporated without a trace, and the imposing, kilometers-long dragon manifestation simply went out like the fragile flame of a candle exposed to a hurricane.
The "Authority" command, that order to cease to exist, clashed against the incarnation of Contained Void and, finding nothing physical or spiritual to destroy on the tip of Vexia's spear, the enemy Qi was reverted to primordial nothingness, collapsing in on itself in a silent implosion that sucked the light out of the sky within a five-kilometer radius.
The immense cosmic pressure oppressing the desert vanished in a single stroke. The red sky of the Realm of Eternal Dawn regained its color, free of the calamity beast.
Vexia descended slowly, floating with deadly grace until landing softly in front of Orion Alpha. She was breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling, a thin layer of sweat covering her forehead after channeling the annihilation attack and pushing her own limit to the maximum, but the sadistic, triumphant smile on her face was undeniable.
The Marshal walked slowly, inspecting the legion's front ranks. She assessed the damage with an expert eye. Some soldiers had armors severely dented, blackened, or partially deformed by the brutal heat of the first attack and the monstrous stress of channeling the dragon's power. Others had lost valuable vital fluids, dripping red essence onto the sand due to the extreme overload of the joint effort and the titanic spiritual strain imposed on their circuits.
They were at the very brink of structural failure, with their artificial bodies groaning under the stress of the simulated combat. But none had broken formation, none had fallen to their knees. And behind the crimson crystal visors, their optic eyes shone with an insatiable thirst to devour enemies that wasn't at all artificial; it was the pure instinct of slaughter.
Vexia nodded slowly. The martial satisfaction on her face was absolute, genuine, and profound.
"They are ready," Vexia whispered, her voice trembling slightly from the residue of pure adrenaline flowing through her veins, adjusting her glasses to hide the savage gleam in her own eyes. "They have surpassed the immense fusion limit, they have withstood the punishment of the void, and they have ignored the paralysis of death. They are the perfect meat grinder."
The immense General Orion Alpha, who had borne the brunt of the annihilation backlash, knelt once more. The creak of his heavy armor resonated in the desert silence, casting a long shadow over the Marshal.
"We await your target, Commander. Where do we march?" the iron machine asked, utilizing the imposing but emotionless voice of the fallen king.
Vexia turned and stared up at the crimson sky of the Realm of Eternal Dawn. In her mind, she thought of the vast outside world, of the conceited empires and arrogant sects wholly ignorant of the unstoppable storm of metal, death, and void silently brewing under Samael's aegis.
She still didn't know the specific names of the sects that were to be massacred; that was tactical information the Patriarch would hand her in due time, when he finished his isolated cultivation. But it didn't matter in the slightest. Whoever their opponent was, orthodox or demonic, they were already dead and buried.
"We won't cross the veil just yet, General," Vexia replied, turning around and walking with firm steps toward the imposing spatial portal still open behind them. "The Patriarch himself will point out the prey when the pieces on the board are perfectly aligned. Meanwhile, repair your battle chassis. Recharge the pure energy of your cores to their maximum capacity. Keep the edge of your swords thirsty."
Vexia stopped right at the portal's threshold and glanced over her shoulder at the immense black army covering the crimson desert, her lips curling into a lethal promise.
"Because I swear to you, when we finally leave this desert and touch the land of mortals... the entire outside continent is going to bleed until it drowns in its own hubris."