Chapter 16: First Large Deviant Attack
The mathematical certainty of Samael's twenty-three-hour countdown was abruptly, violently shattered.
He sat upon his obsidian throne in the Forbidden Zone, his baseline Heralds still locked in their comatose state of hyper-regeneration on the glass floor below. He was meticulously calculating the trajectory for the Zagros Hive assault when his Kagura Shingan—the vast, invisible sensory net cast across the Mesopotamian basin—was overwhelmed by a staggering wave of biological static.
Samael's pale lavender eyes snapped open, the tomoe of his Rinnegan spinning with sudden, intense velocity.
The Hive is moving, Samael realized, instantly parsing the chaotic telemetry. Not a scouting party. Not a border skirmish. A localized mass migration.
He stood up, his gaze piercing through the towering, mutated conifer canopy, looking toward the east. The subterranean Deviant Warlord had not waited for Samael to march on the mountains. The cosmic flare—the massive, ionized aurora that Samael had suppressed just hours ago—had acted as an undeniable beacon. Despite Samael's swift containment, the Warlord's hyper-sensitive network had registered the brief, terrifying spike of Yang Release.
The Warlord had recognized a rival apex predator, and it had deployed a massive preemptive strike to eradicate the threat before it could mobilize.
But the swarm was not heading toward the heavily concealed Forbidden Zone. They were tracking the residual energetic footprint of the aurora, which had been centered directly over the human proto-city.
Targeting the Grid, Samael's internal monologue was a cascade of cold, tactical adjustments. Quantity: Estimated three thousand minor units, four hundred heavily armored shock troops, and at least three Siege-class anomalies. Estimated time to intercept: Thirty minutes.
If three thousand Deviants breached the fragile mud-brick palisades of the river city, the human population would be exterminated in less than an hour. The 842 Dormant Nodes—Samael's planetary-scale thermal exhaust system—would be wiped from the board.
"Awaken," Samael commanded, his voice carrying the absolute, resonant authority of the Shinju.
On the crater floor, Ur, Vael, and Tala convulsed. Their comatose states were violently terminated. The advanced cellular regeneration fueled by the Absolute Seal had knit their torn chakra coils back together, though their baseline muscles still screamed with phantom exhaustion.
They scrambled to their feet, instinctively dropping to one knee before the throne, their minds instantly linking to the conceptual mesh network.
"The timeline accelerates," Samael declared, descending from his throne. "The Zagros Warlord has launched a massive swarm at the river settlement. The Grid is under immediate threat of total annihilation."
Vael's golden eyes widened, the tactical geometry of a siege instantly mapping out in his mind. "The mud walls will not hold three thousand beasts, Lord Samael. The hunters have only bronze and flint."
"They have you, Warden," Samael corrected.
Samael raised his right hand. The emerald threads of Eldritch magic pulsing within his intricate black tattoos ignited. He traced a massive, fiery orange-gold circle in the air—a Sling Ring portal wide enough to march an army through. The portal tore through space, opening directly into the central plaza of the sleeping proto-city.
"Deployment," Samael ordered. "Vael, you will anchor the primary breach point. Ur, take the Combat Cluster and break their vanguard. Tala, utilize the rooftops; sever the command tethers of their specialized units. Do not allow a single beast to reach the Dormant Nodes."
"We are your shield and your spear," the three Heralds chorused.
They stepped through the fiery portal, leaving the quiet sanctuary of the Forbidden Zone and stepping into the terrified, chaotic heart of human civilization. Samael followed, floating seamlessly through the spatial tear just before it snapped shut behind him.
The proto-city was already in a state of primal panic. The massive, synchronized footfalls of three thousand Deviants crossing the eastern plains sounded like rolling thunder. The earth shook. The primitive watchmen on the mud walls were screaming, pointing into the darkness where a chaotic sea of shifting, chromatic armor and glowing golden sensory pits was rapidly approaching.
Samael ascended, hovering fifty feet above the central plaza, his form entirely cloaked by his passive cosmic camouflage. To the humans below, he was invisible. He was the silent architect, overseeing the board.
Down in the mud-slicked streets, Vael took command.
He did not manifest his Version One chakra coat; the thermal blowback would unnecessarily stress the Grid before the battle even began. Instead, he invoked his standard Armament. The black, interlocking Doton armor rapidly expanded across his massive frame, turning him into a terrifying, obsidian-plated titan.
"Aegis Squads! To the eastern wall!" Vael's voice boomed, magically amplified by his chakra, echoing over the terrified screams of the populace.
From the chaotic crowd, sixty human hunters emerged. These were the men Vael had branded with the lesser variant of his Warden Seal over the past few weeks. They were terrified, gripping their primitive spears with white-knuckled desperation, but their loyalty to Vael—and the tangible power humming in their blood—overrode their fear.
They formed a tight, three-rank deep phalanx behind the fragile mud-brick gates.
"Link!" Vael roared, slamming his armored fists together.
Through the conceptual network, Vael pushed a massive wave of Doton chakra outward. The sixty hunters gasped as the lesser seals on their chests flared. The soft earth of the street rushed up their legs, coating their fragile bodies in a thin, jagged layer of hardened stone armor. Their bronze-tipped spears were instantly coated in dense, unbreakable obsidian.
They were no longer a militia of frightened mortals. They were the Aegis.
"Hold the line!" Vael commanded, taking his place at the absolute center of the gate.
Outside the city, Ur and his nine-man Combat Cluster did not wait behind the walls. They were the Vanguard. They stood two hundred yards out on the open plains, a tiny, defiant line of enhanced flesh facing a tidal wave of cosmic nightmares.
The swarm hit them.
It was a catastrophic collision of biological machinery. The Deviants, varying from six-legged scythe-hounds to bloated, acid-spitting horrors, crashed down upon the Combat Cluster.
But Ur's squad was networked.
Ur thrust his spear forward, channeling a massive, localized surge of Katon. A fifty-foot-wide arc of superheated violet fire cleaved through the front lines of the swarm, flash-vaporizing dozens of beasts instantly. The immense thermal recoil that should have melted Ur's arms was instantly routed through the glowing chakra threads connecting his men, and subsequently dumped into the 842 Dormant Nodes sleeping in the city behind them.
The humans in the city broke out in a collective, momentary fever sweat, but the network held perfectly.
The Combat Cluster became a meat grinder. Lightning chained between the beasts, frying their corrupted nervous systems. Spikes of hardened earth erupted from the plains, impaling the leaping scythe-hounds. They fought with the synchronized fluidity of a single, nine-headed hydra.
But there were simply too many.
The swarm flowed around Ur's localized slaughter, ignoring the casualties, their corrupted programming driving them relentlessly toward the density of human life within the walls.
The tide reached the city gates.
The heavy timber and mud-brick doors shattered like kindling under the weight of a hundred charging Deviants.
"Brace!" Vael roared.
The swarm crashed into the Aegis phalanx. The kinetic impact was staggering—enough to instantly pulverize a normal human bone structure. But the Aegis hunters did not break. The Doton armor held, and more importantly, the networked kinetic shock absorption functioned flawlessly.
When a massive, armored Deviant slammed into a frontline hunter, the crushing force was instantly distributed across all sixty men, and channeled directly down into the bedrock through Vael's anchor. The hunter merely staggered, then thrust his obsidian-coated spear upward, piercing the beast's throat.
It was a brutal, grueling stalemate. The Deviants piled against the shield wall, their acidic saliva sizzling against the Doton armor, their multi-jointed claws desperately trying to find purchase.
From the shadows of the watchtowers, Tala moved like a lethal phantom.
She did not engage the frontline. Her single-tomoe Sharingan scanned the sea of monsters, identifying the specialized, bio-luminescent "Commander" units that were orchestrating the swarm's chaotic charges.
She dropped from the sky, her twin tails of Yin-Release shadow slicing through the air. She landed on the back of a heavily armored Commander beast, driving her hands directly through its chromatic plating and crushing its cosmic core before it could even register her presence. She vanished into the shadows a microsecond later, reappearing fifty feet away to assassinate another.
High above, Samael watched the geometry of the battle with cold satisfaction.
The system was operating at peak efficiency. The Grid was absorbing the elemental exhaust. The Aegis was absorbing the kinetic trauma. The Vanguard was maximizing casualties.
But the Warlord had not just sent infantry.
A deafening, guttural roar shook the foundations of the city. The earth violently buckled.
Bursting from the center of the Deviant swarm was a Siege-class anomaly. It was a quadrupedal behemoth, easily forty feet long and weighing twenty tons. It possessed no face, only a massive, heavily plated battering ram of solid, corrupted cosmic bone where its head should be. Its sheer mass displaced the smaller Deviants, crushing them underfoot as it built terrifying, unstoppable momentum.
It was charging directly at Vael's position at the shattered gates.
Analysis, Samael processed instantly. Kinetic mass of the Siege variant exceeds the Aegis network's absolute distribution threshold. If it strikes the phalanx, the shared trauma will instantly liquefy the internal organs of all sixty human hunters, and likely shatter Vael's Warden Node.
The shield wall was about to break.
Vael saw it coming. The golden light in his eyes flared with absolute defiance. He did not order a retreat. He stepped forward, out of the phalanx, slamming his massive stone-plated fists into the earth, pouring every ounce of his chakra into a towering, slanted wall of bedrock to intercept the beast.
It wouldn't be enough.
Samael did not issue a command. He moved.
He dropped from the sky like a localized meteor. He bypassed the speed of sound instantly, the air screaming as he descended directly into the path of the charging twenty-ton behemoth.
Samael landed between Vael's bedrock wall and the Siege Deviant. He made no sound upon impact. He did not manifest the massive, apocalyptic avatars of his past. He required surgical precision to protect his Grid.
He raised his right hand, his palm facing the charging mountain of cosmic bone.
Shinra Tensei. (Almighty Push).
He channeled a hyper-concentrated, localized wave of repulsive gravity. It did not expand outward to level the city; it was focused into a beam no wider than the beast itself.
The twenty-ton Siege Deviant slammed into the invisible wall of gravity moving in the opposite direction. The concussive shockwave of the impact shattered every glass and clay vessel within a mile radius.
The beast's forward momentum was instantly, violently arrested. The massive, indestructible bone plating on its head cracked with the sound of a falling redwood. The creature shrieked, its front legs buckling under the sheer impossibility of the force it had just struck.
But Samael was not finished. Repelling the beast was merely step one. He needed to test the limits of his newly automated Conceptual Refinery Matrix in active combat.
Before the beast could recover, Samael stepped forward, closing the distance in a fraction of a microsecond. He pressed his pale, heavily tattooed palm directly against the cracked bone plating of the Deviant's massive head.
"Absolute Seal: Combat Integration," Samael commanded, his voice cold, echoing directly into the beast's primitive, corrupted consciousness.
The golden-flecked black tattoos on Samael's arm erupted. They did not form a massive floor array. The conceptual machine learning of the Seal had advanced. The black ink poured off his skin like liquid shadows, violently rapidly expanding to engulf the entire twenty-ton creature in a web of fractal geometric lines.
The Siege Deviant thrashed wildly, but it was paralyzed, locked in the conceptual grip of the Ten-Tails.
The automated Refinery Matrix activated instantly.
In the middle of the battlefield, surrounded by thousands of screaming monsters and terrified humans, a blinding pillar of white Yin-Yang light erupted from the trapped beast.
The decomposition process, which once took hours, was executed in seconds. The twenty tons of corrupted flesh, bone, and chromatic armor violently liquefied and atomized. The massive volume of cosmic energy was sucked into the conceptual centrifuge of the Absolute Seal.
Samael stood perfectly still, his eyes closed.
Inside his localized matrix, the automated sorting was flawless. The necrotic, cancerous sludge of the Deviant mutation was instantly segregated, crushed down, and quarantined into a dozen dense, black marbles that sank into his dimensional storage.
The vast, deep reservoir of pure, highly concentrated cosmic starlight that had fueled the behemoth was violently funneled directly into Samael's core.
The integration was instantaneous.
Samael gasped, a massive surge of cold, structural cosmic power expanding his localized chakra coils. The air around him shimmered as the Marvel Universe's physical laws actively bent to accommodate his rapidly increasing mass. The golden threads within his tattoos flared so brightly they illuminated the entire eastern plain, casting long, terrifying shadows against the city walls.
[System Protocol: Combat Integration Successful.]
[Foreign Asset: Pure Cosmic Energy (High-Mass Siege Variant) assimilated mid-combat.]
[Host Matrix Updated. Base physical density increased by 200%. Passive localized gravity manipulation unlocked.]
The blinding light faded.
Where the twenty-ton Siege Deviant had stood a mere five seconds ago, there was nothing but a faint outline of gray ash settling into the mud.
A profound, terrified silence rippled across the battlefield.
The chaotic swarm of Deviants froze. Their Hive-mind algorithms struggled to process the total, instantaneous deletion of their heaviest siege asset. The anomalous energy signature standing before the gates was no longer just a threat; it was a conceptual void that devoured their biology without a trace.
Behind Samael, Vael lowered his Doton armored arms, his golden eyes wide with awe at the casual, god-like deletion of the behemoth.
Samael slowly lowered his hand, turning his pale lavender eyes upon the frozen swarm. The faint, golden luminescence of cosmic power radiated from his skin, blending perfectly with the oppressive, apocalyptic aura of the Ten-Tails.
He had proven the concept. He did not need a quiet crater and hours of meditation to harvest the enemy. The Absolute Seal was now an industrialized weapon of war. He could eat them alive on the battlefield.
"Ur. Vael. Tala," Samael's voice resonated through the conceptual network, cold and utterly devoid of mercy.
Master, the three Heralds responded instantly, their morale surging as they witnessed their god's absolute supremacy.
"The structural integrity of their siege is broken," Samael declared, looking out over the sea of hesitating cosmic beasts. "They are biologically incapable of comprehending rapid energy deletion. Push them back into the dark. Leave none alive."
The Heralds did not hesitate.
Ur roared, his superheated spear leading the Combat Cluster in a devastating counter-charge into the paralyzed Deviant ranks. Vael dropped the defensive bedrock wall, ordering the Aegis Squads to advance, their obsidian-tipped spears marching forward in a synchronized, unbreakable phalanx. From the shadows, Tala resumed her silent, lethal harvest of the remaining commanders.
The slaughter lasted another hour, but the outcome was mathematically guaranteed the moment Samael integrated the Siege beast.
Without their heavy armor and their commanders, the remaining Deviants broke. Their survival programming overrode the Warlord's distant commands, and the survivors turned and fled back toward the eastern foothills, leaving thousands of their dead littering the plains before the river city.
As the sun began to peek over the horizon, casting a blood-red light over the carnage, the battle concluded.
The proto-city was battered, its gates shattered, but the civilian population inside remained entirely untouched. The 842 Dormant Nodes had survived the thermal venting, exhausted but completely unharmed. The Grid had held.
Samael hovered slowly back up into the dawn sky, looking down at his generals organizing the cleanup.
The preemptive strike had failed, but it had provided Samael with a crucial test. His automated Refinery Matrix was a flawless success. He could absorb and integrate massive cosmic yields instantaneously, permanently increasing his physical density and spatial authority with every beast he touched.
He turned his gaze eastward, his newly enhanced sensory perception piercing the hundreds of miles to the subterranean Hive in the Zagros Mountains. He could feel the Warlord variant writhing in its cavern, reacting to the massive loss of its swarm.
It was afraid.
Samael's lips curved into a cold, terrifying smile.
"You sent your pawns to test the architecture of my Grid," Samael whispered to the distant cosmic entity, the golden and emerald threads pulsing within his dark tattoos. "A fatal miscalculation. You have only fed the Refinery."
The First Large Deviant Attack was over. The defense of human civilization was absolute. Now, the Ten-Tails was no longer waiting.
It was time to go to the mountains and finish the harvest.