Chapter 124: The Continental War (12)

The systemic invulnerability tags completely shattered.

The localized tempests of divine energy dispersed, revealing four literal gods standing directly on the mud of the Continental Moat. The game engine physically warped around them, struggling to calculate the sheer density of their merged stats. They were no longer sitting safely behind their keyboards in the Void.

They were on the battlefield.

If Red could kill them here, it wouldn’t matter how many millions of Divine Points they had left in the bank, or how many mortal followers still worshipped them.

The absolute, lethal risk of the Descent Protocol swung both ways. To cancel the descent and flee back to the Void would require another ten-second channeling sequence, where the host body would be completely stripped of invulnerability and left entirely paralyzed and defenseless.

There was no instant escape. And descending into the body of a vessel costed an enormous amount of divine points, and to sustain the descent, it costed more divine points. Thus, using Absolute Descent wasn’t always a wise choice, as the risks and resources were also higher.

Down in the mud, the descended Forgecaster rolled his massive, newly forged tungsten shoulders, his voice echoing with dual mechanical distortion. He raised a molten hand, pointing directly across the boiling Aegis water toward Red’s Bastion.

“Architect!” the Forgecaster’s voice boomed across the entire eastern hemisphere, shaking the bedrock itself. “Your toys are broken. Your map tricks are done. Face us!”

The Forgecaster’s distorted challenge echoed across the boiling Aegis water, but before Red could even touch his keyboard, the vassal gods’ army reacted.

Up in his isolated Void instance, the Rank 10 War God slammed his fist onto his console, watching the four divine anomalies pulse on his tactical feed. “Do not let them take a single step!” he roared through the localized vassal channel. “They are trapped in mortal meat! Break their vessels before they synchronize!”

The Rank 10 war god and the Rank 9 elemental twins frantically typed out intercept commands, desperate to crush the descended avatars before they could establish a foothold.

Down on the physical map, the millions of armored centaurs and elemental infantry who had just finished tearing apart the Glacial Behemoth’s carcass immediately shifted their aggro.

“Trample them!” the Rank 10 war god roared over the vassal comms. “They are cut off! Break their vessels!”

A tidal wave of heavy centaur cavalry charged across the mud, their lances lowered, the ground trembling beneath millions of hooves.

The descended Forgecaster watched the stampede approach. A deep, grinding laugh rumbled from his tungsten-forged chest, venting thick black smoke from his newly formed exhaust ports.

“A cavalry charge?” the Forgecaster mocked, his voice a dual-layered mechanical boom. “Against a god of the forge?”

He planted his massive, tungsten-forged boots into the bedrock. Tapping into the Chief Iron-Priest’s heavy-artillery proficiencies and merging them with his own divine macro-mechanical blueprints, the Forgecaster’s arms violently unspooled. His forearms literally reconfigured in real-time, shifting from humanoid limbs into dual, heavy-bore siege cannons.

“Melt,” he commanded.

He fired raw, system-generated molten slag. The twin cannons roared, unleashing a blinding wave of liquid iron that swept across the charging centaur vanguard. Thousands of heavy cavalry units were instantly vaporized, their armor melting into their bones as the hyper-dense slag reduced the frontline to a lake of burning ash.

The centaurs that managed to swerve past the Forgecaster’s barrage crashed directly into the Glacial Sovereign.

“Such brittle faith,” the Sovereign whispered, his voice cutting through the chaos like a winter gale.

They expected to skewer an old man in ice armor. Instead, the moment their lances crossed the threshold of the Sovereign’s domain, the temperature plummeted to absolute zero. The centaurs froze solid mid-gallop, their kinetic momentum shattering their bodies into pieces against the Sovereign’s diamond-hard cocoon.

The Sovereign raised his hands, his eyes flared with a pale, sickly blue light as he activated the vessel’s innate cryo-necromancy, fusing it with his divine frost. “Serve the winter,” he intoned.

The shattered, frozen pieces of the centaur cavalry began to violently stitch themselves back together with jagged tendons of black ice.

In seconds, thousands of frozen, undead centaur-wights pulled themselves out of the mud, their eyes glowing blue as they silently turned their weapons around and charged into their own screaming comrades.

A mile down the line, the Rank 9 elemental twins were panicking in their shared Void instance. “Target the Blood-Mage! Overload his regeneration!” they screamed, frantically typing execution commands.

Hundreds of localized kinetic strikes rained down on the Blood-Mage. The spells slammed into the Grand Hemomancer’s body, tearing his flesh down to the bone, ripping off half his jaw and shredding his chest cavity.

The Blood-Mage just threw his head back and laughed, a wet, manic sound. “Yes! Tear it down to the marrow!”

His divine continental regeneration triggered. The system forcibly pushed the shrapnel out of his body, knitting his flesh, muscle, and skin back together in less than a second. But the blood he had spilled didn’t sink into the mud. Merging his divine healing with the vessel’s localized blood-curse aura, the spilled blood vaporized into a dense crimson mist that rapidly expanded outward.

“Let me show you how to truly bleed,” the Blood-Mage sneered.

The moment the vassal mages breathed the crimson mist in, their own veins violently ruptured. The blood-curse actively drained their HP pools to zero, ripping the blood directly from their pores to form an impenetrable, swirling red shield around the descended god. Mages collapsed by the hundreds, rendered into desiccated husks.

Above the slaughter, the Zephyr Lord commanded the sky.

The War God’s aerial beast-tamers dove toward him on armored gryphons, weapons drawn. The Zephyr Lord didn’t even cast a spell. He looked up at the falling cavalry, his storm-filled eyes narrowing with disgust.

“Too slow,” he stated.

Relying entirely on his divine agility modifiers, he simply ceased to exist to the mortal eye. He stepped through the wind itself, bypassing the laws of physics to instantly reappear directly in the center of the gryphon formation. Fusing his divine speed with his vessel’s sky-calling abilities, the Zephyr Lord snapped his fingers.

The air pressure in a hundred-yard radius violently inverted into an absolute vacuum.

The gryphons and their riders were instantly suffocated. Their lungs collapsed as the Zephyr Lord spun the vacuum into a localized, razor-sharp hurricane, shredding the falling cavalry into a rain of fine crimson mist that washed over his pristine robes.

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