Chapter 127: The Continental War (15) | The Spiral

Up in the Void, the golden system notification faded from the eastern sky. The remaining three gods stared at the empty space where the Blood-Mage’s avatar had been. The panic vanished from the alliance channel, and absolute survival instincts took over.

Down on the physical map, the descended Glacial Sovereign raised his staff. He turned his glowing blue eyes toward his own surviving army. Hundreds of thousands of infantry still flooded the western banks.

“Your faith is required,” the Sovereign intoned.

A pulse of absolute zero light swept backward through the enemy ranks. The mortal soldiers froze instantly. The game engine violently extracted their life force to fuel the Sovereign’s core. Hundreds of thousands of health bars zeroed out in a single second.

The Sovereign slammed his staff into the edge of the Continental Moat. He unleashed the harvested energy directly into the boiling Aegis water. The temperature drop was instantaneous. The toxic sludge flash-froze into a solid block of true-ice.

The Mud-Skippers and Grey-Fins lurking beneath the surface were entombed in an instant. The ultimate defensive barrier shattered. A massive, flawless ice bridge now led directly to the Eastern walls.

Red dragged his finger across his trackpad, attempting to raise the secondary floodgates. The system returned a collision error. The ice was too dense.

“They are crossing!” Elian yelled over the local comms.

The Zephyr Lord stepped onto the newly formed ice bridge. He ceased to exist to the mortal eye. He bypassed the physical distance entirely and reappeared directly inside the human militia’s trench lines on the eastern ridge.

He abandoned spellcasting and walked through the ranks. Every step generated a localized vacuum blade. Human soldiers in scrap-iron plating fell in pieces. Star-Iron rifles were sliced cleanly in half along with the men holding them.

The Kobold line-infantry tried to pivot their massive bolt-throwers. The Zephyr Lord snapped his fingers, and the air pressure inside the weapons inverted. The volatile bio-gas canisters detonated, turning the ridge into a chain reaction of friendly fire.

Gorak lunged into the trench. His bone-plating was slick with the Blood-Mage’s gore. He swung a massive fist at the Zephyr Lord’s head. The descended god tilted his neck, allowing the punch to meet empty space.

The Zephyr Lord placed a single finger on the Troglodyte’s chest. A hyper-compressed bullet of wind punched straight through Gorak’s carapace, shattering his ribs and throwing the Warlord backward into the mud.

Iron-Scale dropped from above. His scythe ignited with violet flame aimed at the god’s neck. The Zephyr Lord raised a hand and caught the blade. The alchemical fire flared, yet the divine wind created a perfect frictionless barrier.

The Zephyr Lord twisted his wrist, and the Star-Iron shaft shattered into pieces. A backhand of compressed air struck Iron-Scale, tearing off his clockwork grappling spools and embedding the Kobold deep into the trench wall.

Apostle Krug raised his burning greataxe, rallying the surviving Kobolds around the massive legs of Old-Shell. The ancient Shell-Kin vented black smoke as its artillery cannons pivoted to track the descending gods.

The Forgecaster walked straight through the mortar fire. The alchemical explosives detonated against his tungsten-forged body and left absolutely zero marks. He reached the colossal reptile and placed his molten hands directly onto Old-Shell’s Star-Iron plating.

“Your metal belongs to me,” the Forgecaster boomed.

His divine macro-mechanical blueprints forcefully overwrote the makeshift engineering. The Star-Iron melted and fused, creeping across Old-Shell’s calcified dome like a metallic infection.

The bio-gas pipes glowed bright red as the Forgecaster hijacked the pressure valves. The massive Shell-Kin let out a terrifying mechanical shriek. Its own nervous system had been completely overridden.

The Kobold gunnery crews strapped to the shell frantically tried to disengage the weapons. The Forgecaster forced the mortar tubes to pivot inward. He fired the entire payload directly down into Red’s trenches.

A continuous barrage of alchemically enriched artillery shells rained down on the surviving human and Kobold militias. The eastern ridge erupted in a sea of green fire and shattered stone.

The eastern ridge burned. The vassal gods’ cavalry broke under the Glacial Sovereign’s resurrected centaur-wights. Millions of armored hooves trampled the fleeing elemental infantry into the freezing mud.

The Rank 10 War God screamed over the alliance channel as his remaining centaurs were boxed in by the encroaching ice and slaughtered.

The frontline completely collapsed. Old-Shell’s hijacked mortar tubes rained alchemical explosives onto the human militias. Elian dragged wounded soldiers into the flooded drainage pipes to escape the carnage.

Gorak lay pinned beneath a slab of bedrock, clutching his shattered ribs. Iron-Scale sparked wildly against the trench wall, his clockwork joints completely severed.

Up in the Void, Red stared at the primary monitor with a hollow, empty gaze. His shoulders slumped, and the corners of his mouth tightened as the green geometry of his map bled red. The telemetry displayed a complete systemic collapse.

His moat was a frozen highway. His vanguard commanders were broken. His ultimate siege weapon was currently executing his own followers. The three fully descended gods were walking up the ice bridge, completely unchecked.

He stood up from his throne and stared at the massacre unfolding on the screen one last time. He tapped a final command sequence into his terminal, opening a direct, isolated audio link to the surface.

Down in the blood-soaked mud, Apostle Krug froze. He stood amidst the burning wreckage of the eastern ridge. His dark eyes widened as Red’s voice echoed directly inside his skull.

The greataxe slipped from his scaled hands, hitting the ground with a dull thud. Krug sank to his knees, burying his claws into the corpses and ash. He ignored the hijacked artillery shells detonating fifty yards away. He simply bowed his head in the mud.

Above the eastern hemisphere, the sky violently warped. The gray clouds mutated. The heavens turned pitch black, then bled into a violent, burning violet and deep crimson. The clouds twisted into a massive, continent-spanning spiral.

The descended Forgecaster stopped melting a Star-Iron barricade. He looked up, his molten eyes tracking the unnatural weather. The Zephyr Lord paused his slaughter, wind-blades dissipating around his fingers as he stared at the bleeding sky.

“What is going on?” the Glacial Sovereign demanded, gripping his frost-staff.

A pointed funnel of violet vapor dropped from the center of the vortex, drilling straight down toward the eastern ridge. The surviving human militias stopped running, falling to their knees in the trenches as the cosmic phenomenon eclipsed the battlefield.

“The Spiral…” Gorak coughed, spitting black blood onto the ice. “The Spiral… is… here.”

Iron-Scale had crawled to the river to drink the healing water, which was freezing continuously. He saw the reflection of the sky in the river and looked up in awe.

The funnel of violent cosmic energy slammed directly into Krug. The Kobold’s small, scaled frame vanished inside a pillar of blinding alchemical fire. The bedrock instantly liquefied beneath him. The game engine locked him in absolute paralysis, stripping away his mortal limitations to make room for a god.

[ SYSTEM ALERT: ABSOLUTE DESCENT PROTOCOL INITIATED. ]

Red initiated the Absolute Descent Protocol. He authorized five million Divine Point expenditure.

[ VESSEL CONFIRMED: HIGH PRIEST KRUG (FAITH RANK 5). ]

[ ASSESSING DIVINE TRAITS… ]

[ SSS-RANK TRAIT: 100x GROWTH MULTIPLIER APPLIED TO DESCENT MERGE. ]

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