CHAPTER 193: Silence, Mass, and Madness: The Art of the Morningstar
The inner courtyard of the Iron Blood Alliance had become a thick lake of blood and viscera. As the rearguard of the Sequences ground up the thousands of low-ranking mercenaries, drowning them in gravitational terror and mortal illusions, the immense wrought iron doors separating the elite guard's barracks blew apart with a deafening roar.
From amidst the sulfuric smoke and ash rain emerged twelve imposing figures. They were the Alliance Captains, the infamous "Dogs of the Alliance." Hardened assassins, undefeated ex-gladiators, and deranged deserters who had survived a thousand battles on the borders. They did not come alone; the metallic screech of heavy siege crossbows and the dragging of massive tower shields echoed behind their heavy footsteps.
But upon crossing the threshold, they did not find a frightened or exhausted invading army. They found forty young demons wrapped in dark robes, floating or standing with absolute calmness upon mountains of mutilated corpses.
At the forefront, Kael raised his Magma Fang Sword, its plasma blade dripping molten slag onto the stone. Upon opening his eyelids, the world around him submitted to the duality of his gaze. His left eye, devoid of white light, was a black pit where a molten gold iris with the vertical slit of a dragon burned in crimson flames. Through this eye, Kael did not see the captains' armor; he saw the exact flow of their Qi, detecting the points of molecular friction and marking with a cross of fire the place where their meridians were most unstable. His right eye, in contrast, was a translucent surface of ruby crystal where the silhouette of a platinum light sword floated, mathematically calculating the fissures in the causality of their techniques.
Although his eyes were already dismantling the secrets of the strongest veteran in the enemy group, Kael lowered his sword, yielding the feast to his brothers-in-arms.
"Remember the directive, brothers and sisters," Kael's voice resonated cold and cutting, silencing for an instant the agonizing screams of the mutiny below. "Sweep away the elders. Decimate the scum. Have fun."
The forty Sequences unleashed their auras simultaneously. The clash of spiritual pressure was so massive that the cracks in the volcanic canyon walls widened, spitting furious tongues of lava. It was not a military charge; it was a hurricane of blades, shadows, and conceptual aberrations falling upon the proud Iron Blood elite.
The Eradication of the Elite
In the enemy rear, the four Stage 1 and 2 Saints of Group A—the feared Iron Artillerymen—mounted their immense heavy repeating crossbows in a blink. They loaded bolts with Explosive Obsidian tips, ammunition capable of piercing a citadel's walls in a single impact.
"Line up the shots! Activate the Lead Hawk Eye!" shouted the lead artilleryman.
Their pupils dilated violently. The world around them seemed to submerge in molasses. Their perception of time expanded, granting them three precious seconds of a thermal window to aim directly at the hearts of the invaders charging toward them. To their heightened senses, the Sequences were moving in slow motion.
Or so they thought.
A grayish flash cut through the air. No, it wasn't the whistle of the wind. It was the terrifying absence of it.
Ciro, the prodigy of speed of the Sequences, drew his Twin Swords of the Silent Gloom. By releasing the blades forged in Void Steel from their acoustic stasis scabbards, he nullified one hundred percent of atmospheric resistance. His Cloud Walker Boots cut off environmental friction. Ciro did not run; he simply dictated an absolute physical displacement through a vacuum tunnel.
The artillerymen's Hawk Eye was useless against an attack that defied inertia. For the two mercenaries on the left, Ciro simply materialized in front of them, skipping the spatial journey. They didn't even hear the sound of his approach.
The first Saint looked down, totally confused. Both hands, still tightly gripping the heavy crossbow, fell to the ground with a dull thud, cleanly severed from the shoulders. A geyser of blood erupted from the stumps. Before the pain could register in his brain, Ciro's soundproof scabbard struck both of the mercenary's knees with millimeter precision, shattering the kneecaps into hundreds of white bone fragments that pierced his skin from the inside.
The second Saint tried to fire out of pure survival instinct, but Ciro was already behind him. With two cuts so fine they looked like brushstrokes in the air, he severed the man's Achilles tendons and the extensor muscles of his arms. Only when Ciro sheathed his swords with a dull click did the air collapse back into the vacuum tunnel with a supersonic boom that broke the sound barrier.
"Ah... aaaaah... AAAAAAAHH!" The shrieks of the two Saints tore their throats. They fell to the ground, writhing in puddles of their own blood, with their leg bones protruding like stakes and no arms to crawl with.
"Too slow," Ciro muttered, observing the chaos. "They're still breathing. My quota is met."
While Ciro dismantled his half, the two remaining artillerymen aimed desperately at a figure advancing enveloped in crackling lightning. Voltar didn't use stealth or the void; he used the brazen fury of the sky.
The two mercenaries fired their explosive bolts at point-blank range, but Voltar didn't even make a move to dodge.
"Surrender to the heavens, subterranean scum!" Voltar mocked.
The aura surrounding him was not ordinary electricity; it carried the Authority of Celestial Punishment. When the lethal obsidian bolts grazed his magnetic field, Qi annihilation went into effect. The dense destructive energy inside the ammunition was devoured and disintegrated before it could detonate, causing the thick bolts to fall to the volcanic floor like simple, pathetic pieces of inert stone.
The artillerymen's eyes bulged. Voltar, channeling the energy into his heavy gauntlets, the Vajra of Judgment, appeared in front of them. He grabbed the face of one and plunged his free hand into the chest of the other. He unleashed a discharge of high voltage compressed into plasma directly into their meridians.
The Tribulation Lightning didn't burn their skin; it judged their souls. The impact instantly blocked their Qi flow, causing a vibratory trauma that shattered their minds. Their bones crunched under the extreme spasmodic contraction of their own muscles. Their shoulders dislocated backward with a wet snap, and they fell drooling bloody foam, trapped in a shock of absolute paralysis, alive but hollow.
The Clash of Titans
Seeing their artillerymen fall, the four Saints of Group B roared, filled with fury and adrenaline. They were the Formation Breakers. Immense and brutal men, armed with spike-bristling tower shields and maces rusted with the blood of countless victims. They lowered their center of gravity and charged in a straight line like true human battering rams.
Two of them aimed directly at Magnus, the Titan of the Sequences.
Magnus saw the tons of metal and flesh coming at full speed and, instead of taking a defensive stance or hiding behind the immense tectonic shield of his Vajra-Annihilator, he threw his head back and burst into demented laughter. He opened his arms as if to receive the warm embrace of an old friend.
The clash was deafening. The two Saints impacted Magnus with an inertia capable of bringing down a castle wall.
The brutal shockwave lifted the stone slabs of the courtyard. However, Magnus's heavy boots simply sank a few centimeters into the rock; his torso was an immovable wall of gravity. The two Saints bounced off violently with the crunch of denting metal, flying backward to crash against a side wall.
Spitting out pieces of teeth and looking at their tower shields, which bore the grotesque mark of Magnus's chest sunken into the thick steel, they struggled to their feet.
"Damned monster!" spat one of the Stage 3 Saints, gripping his mace with trembling hands. "He's a fucking barbarian! What is your body made of, animal?!"
Magnus's smile faded, replaced by genuine offense. He cracked his thick neck, producing a sound similar to a mountain landslide.
"Barbarian? You call me a barbarian for being tough?" Magnus took a step forward, and the earth groaned and cracked beneath his boot. "What a pathetic insult. I am not strong, scum. I am gravity itself."
Magnus activated his Authority of the Mountain. The air around his fists curved in the face of the immense gravitational density. His bloodline dictated that his mass was conceptually superior to that of the environment. With a quick leap, he fell upon the two Saints, closing his gauntlet. The stellar compression piston on his forearm fired with a fiery blast.
The punch, loaded with the conceptual weight of a mountain range, struck the first shield. There was no dispersion of energy; the kinetic force penetrated in a perfect straight line. The tower shield pulverized into a fine rain of metallic dust, and the fist continued its inexorable advance until it impacted the Saint's chest.
CRAAAAACK!
The sound of the ribcage collapsing silenced the explosions in the courtyard. The man's sternum exploded inward, piercing his lungs, but Magnus pulled back a tiny fraction of his force in the last millisecond to obey orders. The mercenary vomited a torrent of black blood and was sent flying against the wall again, his torso reduced to soft gravel, groaning in an agony that begged for death.
The second Saint tried to crush Magnus's skull with a downward strike of his mace. Magnus didn't even raise his arms; he let the Saint-grade weapon hit him squarely on the temple. The steel head split in half upon colliding with the incomprehensible density of the Titan's head. Magnus grabbed him by the collar of his armor, lifted him in the air like a rag doll, and, with his thick fingers, squeezed both of his knees. His hands, heavy as dead stars, crushed the kneecaps and femurs into bloody pulp.
"Oops, sorry," Magnus mocked, tossing the limp body to the ground. "I didn't know you supposed tough guys had such fragile legs."
Simultaneously, the other two Formation Breakers crashed into Draven, the Bear of the North.
Draven did not wait passively. He invoked his Gigantism and Frost Skin, expanding his musculature until he reached nearly three meters in height. His skin was covered in a thick layer of bluish frost, plummeting the temperature of the boiling courtyard to a hundred degrees below zero in a blink.
The heavy maces imbued with burning orthodox Qi struck Draven's sides. At the exact instant of impact, his bloodline's Thermal Suction Aura awakened. The immense heat of the weapons and the feverish vitality of the aggressors were violently devoured by the giant's frost skin.
The maces froze, losing their temper and becoming brittle. When the horrified mercenaries tried to pull back, the black ice had already crept up the shafts, freezing their own arms up to the shoulders at a molecular level.
Draven let out a deep laugh that made the ice resonate.
"Is this it?" Draven grabbed the two frozen arms with his immense hands. "Is this the strength the Dogs of the Alliance boast about? Little bastards! Didn't your mothers feed you when you were pups?"
Crrriiiik-CRASH!
With a sharp, ruthless yank, Draven broke the stance of both warriors. The frozen flesh did not bleed; it shattered with a horrifying crystalline crunch, crumbling in the air like broken glass. The two Saints fell to the ground, staring stupidly at their hollow shoulders. Seconds later, the trauma of their exposed meridians reached their brains, and they began to howl, rolling on the frozen ground. Draven kicked them in the chest, fracturing the necessary ribs to completely immobilize them.
The Architects of Mental Torture
A few meters away, the three elite members of Group C, the Soul Reapers, swallowed hard as they watched pure physical force destroy their comrades. They were masters of fast dueling, armed with chained scythes and long wire whips lined with razor blades. Dislocating their shoulders at will with the "Broken Mirror Reflex," they created an impenetrable net of buzzing steel, ready to decapitate.
But Lyra, Darius, and Tamsin were not melee warriors. They were architects of mental torture.
Lyra stepped in the path of the Stage 4 Saint. The veteran whipped his wire at the girl's neck. Lyra flickered like the moon's reflection on a lake, and the weapon passed cleanly through her without touching anything solid.
"What a crude weapon," Lyra's voice whispered in the Saint's mind. "Let's see how you handle a little heat in this cold bastion."
She chimed her Phantom Requiem Bell, weakening the cohesion of reality, while striking the stone with her Staff of Eternal Mist. Invoking the Materialization of Delirium, the basalt floor at the mercenary's feet disappeared.
In the Saint's mind, an immense ocean of bubbling green sulfuric acid surrounded him. He fell to his knees, watching in absolute horror as his boots and armor melted. In the outside world, the acid did not exist. But Lyra's bloodline was absolute; by making him believe he was immersed in acid, his own nervous system ordered the body to destroy itself.
His physical skin began to fill with grotesque blisters, boiling and peeling away from his bones. Third-degree burns bloomed on his flesh by the sheer will of his deceived brain. He howled in agony.
"Fire! I'm melting! AHHHHHH!" howled the Stage 4 Saint, tearing at his face with his own fingernails in an attempt to scrape off the illusory acid.
Beside her, Darius faced the second Reaper. He walked slowly with his hands behind his back, casually blocking the fierce storm of scythe slashes with minuscule shields of dark Qi at his fingertips.
"Your stance is rigid," Darius mocked, penetrating the man's psyche. "You twist your left torso too much. Compensating for an old pain? No... compensating for the fear of not being enough."
Darius unleashed the Soul Scar Reading, fixing his gaze on the man's aura. He extracted the dark stain of his worst trauma: the suffocating memory of having been buried alive under a mountain of burning corpses as a child. With a slight flick of his fingers, he projected a Qi virus through the Execution of the Inverted Board.
The Saint stopped his scythes dead, his eyes turning completely white. He felt the crushing weight of a thousand burning bodies falling on him, the toxic smoke suffocating his lungs. The psychosomatic pain was so immense that he fell to his knees, desperately clawing at the stone slabs until he tore his fingernails off, suffocating in the clean air and slowly dying of a terror-induced cardiac arrest. Darius crossed his arms, watching the collapse with supreme boredom.
Finally, Tamsin walked flirtatiously toward the last Stage 3 Saint. The Reaper, bathed in cold sweat upon seeing his comrades crumble before intangible demons, whipped his lethal wire toward the girl's face.
"Oh, darling, that whip looks so heavy for an old man like you," purred Tamsin, raising one of her hollow, black nails.
She invoked the Infection of the Fabric of Reality. When the whip, brimming with fierce orthodox Qi, crossed the air, her conceptual poison infected the technique itself. The fierce red glow of the weapon turned a sickly green; the steel lost its spirit and began to melt mid-flight. The corrupt Qi traveled back up the chain like a reverse forest fire, striking the mercenary's hand.
Before he could drop the weapon, Tamsin appeared centimeters from his face. With an almost affectionate brush, she slid her black nails across the man's exposed chest, injecting her lethal Void Neurotoxin.
The Saint's veins turned a dense black. The toxin didn't attack his blood; it attacked and transmuted his cultivation base. The man felt his spiritual energy turn into pure acid. His kidneys, his liver, and his stomach began to dissolve from the inside.
"Shhh, don't fight it," whispered Tamsin, her voice dripping with sarcastic venom. "Feel that little warmth in your stomach? That's your intestines perforating. You're going to be a very, very sick mortal. Enjoy the digestion."
The warrior fell onto his back, vomiting spurts of bile and black sludge, convulsing hysterically as his own energy devoured him alive, with the muffled screams in his throat closing the macabre theatrical play.
The Unbreakable Wall
In less than three minutes, eleven of the twelve Captains of the Iron Blood Alliance lay on the ground, destroyed, mutilated, and irredeemably broken both physically and mentally.
The Sequences irritably flicked the blood splatters from their dark robes and turned their gazes toward the only figure left standing beneath the immense iron arch of the main gate.
Vorg the Unbreakable, the Grand Captain and a Stage 7 True Saint, watched the Dantean scene from the shadows. He was a mountain of muscle carved from stone, with thick plates of raw iron surgically embedded in his forearms. Upon seeing the veterans with whom he had shared a century of massacres reduced to masses of flesh begging for death, a primordial and uncontrollable fury erupted in his chest.
The red, suffocating aura of his power deeply cracked the basalt beneath his boots.
"Damned demons from the pit!" roared Vorg, his voice shattering the broken glass scattered on the ground. "I will flay you all with my own hands!"
Knowing that his lethal flaw, The Exhausted Heart, would kill him if he forced his body for more than ten minutes, Vorg did not seek an honorable duel. He was going to use his own life as fuel. He activated his Internal Collapse Fist, massively distorting the air pressure around him. With a leap that shattered the fortress's architecture, he launched himself like a comet toward the center of the forty Sequences, his killing intent eclipsing the volcanic light.
He had decided to drag as many as he could to hell with him. And the Morningstar Blood Vanguard, seeing him charge, simply smiled broadly, raising their weapons, eager to discover exactly how many blows it would take to break the unbreakable man.