The air in the Canyon suddenly thickened, becoming icy and stifling all at once. From the openings in the four obelisks, hundreds of black, smoky shapes began to pour out.
Grudge Spirits materialized one after another, baring faces contorted in hatred. Their bloody eyes locked onto the invaders, and a second later, the Canyon was filled with a piercing, deafening shriek as the apparitions plunged downward like a swarm of locusts.
"Oh damn!" Zariel yelled, instinctively raising his weapon. "What are these things?! Are they the Demon King's servants?"
The white she-wolf feverishly began weaving a protective barrier.
"Is this Demon King some kind of necromancer?!" Kaelen added, seeing their numerical advantage suddenly lose all meaning.
One of the elite werewolf warriors reacted lightning-fast. He activated his racial [Buff], and his muscles swelled as he sliced through a spirit charging at him with his powerful claws. However, his triumph lasted only a fraction of a second.
The severed apparition simply dissolved into black mist, only to reform instantly right next to his head. The spirit's claws shot forward, tearing through the werewolf's thick fur and leaving deep wounds from which blackened blood began to ooze. Before the warrior could launch a counterattack, the spirit clung to his chest like a parasite and flared with blinding black energy.
BOOM!
A [Self-Destruction] occurred.
A powerful explosion threw nearby werewolves back, and the warrior hit directly fell to the ground with a painful howl that quickly went silent. It was obvious that this combination of a single-target attack and a powerful area-of-effect explosion was lethal.
The confident group of Heroes was surrounded in the blink of an eye. From the four Obelisks, waves of spirits continuously poured out, creating a black vortex of death around the pack. Lilith observed the carnage from the top of the rock, a new system notification pulsing before her eyes.
"Now I understand..." she whispered to herself, her gaze resting on the gold counter.
The building had a specific mechanic she hadn't noticed before. Activating each Obelisk didn't require manually buying units, but it cost 25 gold pieces per minute. With four active towers, 100 gold coins were evaporating from her account every sixty seconds.
Lilith furrowed her brow, feeling physical pain with every escaping coin, but as she looked down at the chaos in the Canyon, her anger quickly gave way to admiration.
"A hundred gold a minute for this kind of slaughter?" she muttered under her breath. "It's still a bargain."
She quickly counted the apparitions circling in the air.
Each one can control roughly a hundred spirits at a time. That means these werewolves are facing an army of four hundred immortal suicide bombers...
With a predatory smile, Lilith leaned back comfortably against a boulder. 100 gold coins per minute was a high price, but the sight of desperate opponents fighting for their lives against her "savings" was worth every penny.
The Canyon filled with chaos, the howling of dying werewolves, and the dull explosions of black energy. Zariel raged in the center of the vortex, his claws slicing through the smoky silhouettes of spirits with a fury worthy of a beast, but every time he tore an apparition to shreds, it reformed a second later and dove toward him with even greater hatred.
"DIE ALREADY, YOU CURSED TRASH!" he roared, pure desperation beginning to ring in his voice alongside the rage.
The White She-wolf, clenching her teeth so hard that blood ran down her chin, focused solely on survival. Time and again, she raised barriers of pure mana to shield herself from the suicidal attacks, but every spirit impact shattered her shields and drained her energy.
Kaelen observed the carnage with growing horror. He saw his elite warriors falling one by one, torn apart by claws or crushed by explosions. He knew that if he did nothing, the entire pack would be buried here. After a moment of rapid thinking, a cold, calculating light flashed in his eyes.
Instead of running away from the spirits, he began to provoke them.
Moments later, he gathered a massive swarm of black wraiths around himself and started running... straight toward his own subordinates. As soon as the spirits were close to other werewolves, Kaelen performed a sharp turn, letting the apparitions cling to his soldiers and self-destruct there.
They only use that explosion skill when they are a meter away from a living being, so I can exploit that by provoking the spirits and pulling them toward these wolves! That way, I can reduce their numbers... We just have to survive this wave until their numbers drop! he thought feverishly, sacrificing warrior after warrior just to clear the battlefield around himself.
Lilith, watching all this from the summit, froze for a moment, surprised by the pack leader's behavior. She tilted her head, trying to understand the logic of this madness. Only when she saw Kaelen lead the swarm onto another group of wounded werewolves in cold blood did everything become clear.
"He's using his own pack as living shields?" she whispered, a crooked, contemptuous smile appearing on her face. "I thought wolves were pack creatures, loyal to the grave... but I forgot one thing."
She ran an Analysis, which confirmed her suspicions.
Of course. The Heroes have no bond with these creatures. They simply occupied bodies that already existed in this world. To them, these werewolves are just stats, cannon fodder to be sacrificed for their own level-up.
She looked at Zariel and the White She-wolf, who were barely breathing as they fought for every inch of space, and then back at Kaelen and his "brilliant" plan. She laughed quietly, her voice icy and devilish.
"Your idea to reduce the number of my spirits by murdering your own people is simply pathetic, little hero," she murmured, looking at the pulsing Obelisks. "Do you really think these are finite resources?"
She extended her hand toward the Canyon, feeling the gold drain from her account, fueling the murderous machinery.
"The moment a spirit dies or explodes, the Obelisk immediately summons another. It is an infinite stream of despair that will flow as long as I can afford this game. You can slaughter your entire tribe, and my spirits still won't decrease!"
At that same moment, another, even denser wave of black smoke shot from the towers, creating new spirits.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the Obelisks of Cursed Spirits proved to be one of the most effective defensive structures in Lilith's arsenal. Their versatility was terrifying - they decimated ground targets and had the ability to attack flying targets with equal effectiveness.
Though individual grudge spirits did not possess great durability, they made up for it with attack stats that made every touch felt. In reality, fighting them was a pure nightmare for classic warriors for three reasons:
Uncontrolled Mobility: As ethereal beings, they could fly freely and pass through obstacles, making them nearly impossible to hit for traditional archers or swordsmen.
Apparent Immortality: As spirits, they possessed no physical organs. Even if a powerful blow tore their form, the black mist would fuse back in the blink of an eye, returning to the attack with even greater fury.
Self-Destruction Capability: Every attempt to approach them ended with the risk of a powerful explosion that ignored a significant portion of physical armor.
The only effective way to defeat these apparitions was to possess rare spiritual attack skills - which in this case seemed impossible - or to survive thousands of consecutive explosions, praying for the Demon King to run out of gold coins.
Lilith, watching the werewolves' panicked attempt to survive from above, smiled to herself. She knew something they could not. The correct tactic for fighting this construction was not to strike the spirits, but to attack the Obelisks themselves directly. At the moment of a stone monolith's destruction, all grudge spirits linked to it would naturally lose their anchor in this world and vanish into nothingness.
"Go on then, little doggies..." Lilith whispered, narrowing her eyes. "Show me your 'heroic' intelligence. Will you figure out to bite the stone instead of the shadow?"
But how could the werewolves have known about the specifics of this building beforehand? To them, these black towers were just an ominous part of the landscape, a backdrop for the horde of spirits tearing their pack apart. In a world where information was more valuable than gold, their ignorance became a death sentence.
Kaelen, despite his Hero status, was too busy avoiding the next explosions and sacrificing his subordinates to notice the simple correlation between the pulsing blue of the Obelisks and the number of attacking wraiths. The pride that had driven them into this canyon was now effectively blinding them to the only way out.