Chapter 125: The Continental War (13)

Up in the Void, Red watched the telemetry on his secondary monitor flash with critical warnings. The localized vassal channel was devolving into absolute chaos.

“Our vanguard is gone!” the Rank 10 War God shouted, his digital avatar gripped by sheer terror. “They’re walking right through us! Our magic isn’t scratching them!”

Red rested his chin on his knuckles, his calculating eyes tracking the four descended gods on his primary screen. In less than sixty seconds, they had completely halted the momentum of a multi-million-unit army.

The numerical advantage meant absolutely nothing when faced with the concentrated, localized density of four system-breaking anomalies. Their inherited traits and divine stats were simply too high for mortal units to overcome.

They were carving a path straight through the vassal army, walking directly toward the retracted steel bridges of the Continental Moat.

“They’re bypassing the heavy armor! The Vanguard is breaking!” the Rank 10 War God yelled, his digital avatar glitching violently as his mortal armies were slaughtered by the thousands. “Rubedo! We cannot hold them! Their merged stats are tearing through our physical defenses!”

“Stop throwing bodies at them,” Red transmitted, his voice coldly cutting through the chaos of the alliance channel. He didn’t sound panicked; he sounded like a man doing accounting. “Pull your forces back and establish a perimeter. You don’t have the density to fight physical divinities. Keep their surviving mortal army off my flanks. My heavy hitters are almost there.”

“Almost there?!” the Rank 9 Elemental Twins shrieked. “The Zephyr Lord just vaporized our entire aerial division! They are walking straight toward your territory!”

“Then I’ll make the walk a little harder,” Red muttered.

Red’s fingers blurred across his keyboard. He activated [Modular Geography], his eyes locked on the tactical grid.

He highlighted a massive, three-mile stretch of solid bedrock directly in front of the advancing Forgecaster. With a drag of his finger, Red inverted the elevation. The flat ground violently buckled, shooting upward at a ninety-degree angle to form a two-hundred-foot-tall, sheer cliff face of compressed granite directly in the Forgecaster’s path.

Before the system could even finish rendering the cliff, Red panned to the Blood-Mage. The descended god was walking across a relatively dry stretch of the eastern banks, surrounded by his swirling shield of vaporized blood.

Red grabbed a deep, subterranean pocket of pressurized bio-gas and corrosive Omni-Biomass sludge, dragging the coordinates straight up to the surface. The ground beneath the Blood-Mage instantly liquified into a hyper-toxic, boiling sinkhole.

It wouldn’t kill the descended gods, but as the Forgecaster was forced to melt his way through a literal mountain and the Blood-Mage sank up to his chest in industrial sewage, it bought Red’s army the precious seconds they needed.

Down on the physical map, away from the four localized divine tempests, the rest of the enemy’s mortal vanguard was being systematically fed into an industrial meat-grinder.

Gorak and Iron-Scale weren’t rushing the descended gods yet. They were carving through the remaining enemy paladins and heavy infantry, building their momentum.

Gorak did not bother with weapons. The Troglodyte Warlord waded directly into a phalanx of enemy spearmen, letting the steel tips snap against his thick carapace. He grabbed two armored paladins by their throats, hoisted them off the mud, and slammed them together. The sickening crunch of collapsing plate mail and shattering bone echoed over the roaring fires.

A deep, violent crimson light pulsed across Gorak’s bone-plating, drinking the carnage. With every enemy he broke, his frame seemed to swell, his shadow growing longer and heavier across the ash.

“More!” Gorak roared, tossing the broken bodies aside and lunging for the next rank. “Bring me more!”

Beside him, Iron-Scale moved with terrifying, mechanical precision. The Kobold Inquisitor fired his clockwork grappling spools into the chest of a retreating centaur, yanking himself forward.

His scythe ignited with violet flame, carving through armor and flesh in a single, flawless arc. He hit the ground and immediately pivoted, gutting three more infantrymen before their bodies even registered the wound.

“Sixty-two,” Iron-Scale hissed through his pneumatic respirator. “Seventy. Eighty-one. The harvest is efficient.”

The more blood he spilled, the faster his clockwork joints seemed to snap into the next execution, leaving a trail of cauterized corpses in his wake.

A mile away, the bedrock shook beneath the massive, thundering footsteps of Old-Shell.

The ancient Shell-Kin lumbered forward, his colossal, calcified dome heavily plated in thick slabs of Star-Iron. Heavy exhaust pipes vented black smoke into the sky from the makeshift foundries built directly onto his back.

As the mobile reptile-fortress advanced, crushing enemy infantry beneath his massive, scaly claws, the Kobold gunnery crews strapped to his shell unleashed deafening volleys from their bio-gas mortars, raining alchemical explosives down on the enemy’s retreating lines.

Walking in the protective shadow of the massive beast was Krug.

A desperate squad of enemy swordsmen rushed him through the smoke. Krug swung the burning axe in a wide, sweeping arc. The alchemical fire violently immolated them, turning their steel to slag and their bodies to ash in a heartbeat.

“You bring false idols to the Crucible!” Krug bellowed, his snout pulled back in a vicious snarl. “The Ka-Lam-Tee demands fuel! Burn for the foundries!”

Further down the line, the faction’s Treants pushed through the toxic fog.

They were towering monstrosities of petrified iron-wood, their massive trunks stained black with soot and bolted with rusted iron bands. Their roots tore up the bedrock as they marched, acting as living siege engines.

When a surviving enemy phalanx raised their shields to hold the line, the Treants simply brought their massive, metal-reinforced branches crashing down. They crushed the soldiers straight into the mud, weeping thick, highly flammable bio-sap over the wreckage to feed the surrounding fires.

The rest of the faction’s diverse ecosystem operated with the same synchronized lethality.

From the boiling depths of the Continental Moat, the Mud-Skippers struck. The amphibious mutants erupted from the toxic, Aegis-infused sludge, their muscular limbs dragging heavily armored enemy knights screaming into the boiling water to be drowned and dissolved.

In the flooded trenches, the Grey-Fins ambushed the enemy’s elemental mages, bursting through the mud to sever legs and drag the spellcasters down into the subterranean drainage pipes.

On the elevated ridges, the sheer discipline of the faction was absolute. The Kobold line-infantry reloaded and fired their heavy bolt-throwers in perfect volleys. Beside them, Elian’s human militias leveled their Star-Iron rifles.

The sharp, mechanical CRACK of their synchronized gunfire echoed across the canyon as they executed the fleeing enemy forces with cold, industrial efficiency.

Up in the Void, Red watched his army chew through the enemy vanguard.

There were still over three hundred thousand hostile troops swarming the western banks. But they were contained, boxed in by the geography Red had altered and systematically picked apart by his artillery.

The fodder was handled. It was time to deal with the real problem.

“The warm up is over.”

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