Chapter 70: BATTLE OF THE SWAMP (7)

Aurelius sat on his throne, but the tent was dead silent.

For three hours, his DP Meter had been hemorrhaging. He had felt the desperate, frantic pulls from his three thousand men in the south, begging for healing miracles, begging for fire. He had watched his divine bank account drain to critically low levels, keeping them alive second by second, until… Nothing.

The connection was severed.

Then, hours later, another wave of faint, dying connections severed in the West.

“Valerius,” Aurelius whispered, his voice completely devoid of its usual arrogant boom. It sounded hollow and broken.

[ TOTAL ACTIVE FOLLOWERS: ~3,800 ]

Aurelius stared at the number.

Just two weeks ago, he had marched out of the Sun Spire with sixteen thousand invincible soldiers. He had fought other gods and conquered their lands. He was going to conquer the Sector, and mount the Suit-God’s head on a spike.

Now, his southern flank was annihilated. His retreating sick army was dead. And his DP was severely depleted from the mass healing attempts.

He was left with roughly four thousand men. They were sitting in a mud pit, freezing, their golden armor tarnished, and they hadn’t eaten a full meal in two days.

“He didn’t even send his army,” Aurelius whispered, his hands shaking as he stared at the mud on his boots. “He only sent the bugs. He sent… logistics.”

Red floated in the Void, his fingers steepled beneath his shadowy chin. He looked down at the Omni-Web map. The single, clustered golden dot of Aurelius’s camp was glowing faintly on the edge of the Black Swamp.

“Three thousand eight hundred,” Red murmured. “Against six hundred. Still terrible odds in a straight fight. And if my men cross into his Shrine territory, he’ll just vaporize them himself.”

Red tapped his cane against the invisible floor of the Void.

“If you can’t go into the tiger’s cage,” Red said, his violet eyes narrowing, “you make the tiger want to come out.”

Night fell over the Golden Camp, but sleep did not come.

The surviving Paladins were huddled around meager campfires. Their golden armor was caked in mud, their stomachs gnawing with hunger. They just wanted to close their eyes and the nightmare to end.

Then, the swamp began to sing.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Massive, hollowed-out Cypress logs, beaten by the heavy Star-Iron mauls of the Troglodytes, echoed from the darkness. It shook the muddy ground beneath the Paladins’ boots.

“Stand to!” Sir Valerius shouted, drawing his glowing sword, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “They’re attacking!”

The Paladins scrambled into formation, raising their shields, burning precious DP to light up the tree line with Solar Flares.

But there was nothing there. Just mud and fog.

The moment the Paladins lowered their shields to rest, a volley of Kobold arrows arced out of the darkness. They didn’t hit anyone as they weren’t aimed to kill. They were rigged with carved hollow bone tips that produced a high-pitched, shrieking whistle as they flew through the air.

REEEEEEEEEEE!

The arrows embedded themselves in the mud around the camp. The Paladins panicked again, swinging blindly at the shadows.

This went on for forty-eight hours.

Every time a Paladin closed his eyes, a drum beat. Every time they sat down, a whistling arrow shrieked over their heads. Sludge and the Mud-Skippers threw rocks into the puddles just to make splashing sounds.

By the dawn of the third day, the Golden Army was broken. Men were hallucinating, swinging their swords at empty mist. They were starved, shivering, and their minds were fraying at the edges.

Aurelius sat on his throne of light. His aura was flickering. And the constant drain of maintaining his physical descent and the sheer psychological stress of the drums had cracked his pristine facade.

“My King,” Valerius rasped, leaning heavily on his sword. “The men… they cannot take another night. We must retreat to the Sun Spire. We are beaten.”

“WE ARE NOT BEATEN!” Aurelius roared, his voice cracking. “I am Rank 9! I am the Sun! I will not be chased away by frogs and mud-rats!”

“Hey, Golden Boy!”

A voice echoed from the edge of the fog bank, just outside the perimeter of the Sun Shrines.

Aurelius snapped his head up.

Standing on a rotting log, completely exposed, was Iron-Scale. The Kobold Inquisitor adjusted his quartz monocle and leaned casually on his silver-skulled cane.

He was matching his look from the Conclave event so that Aurelius could recognize him.

Behind him stood fifty Grey-Fin pikemen, their scales coated in algae, casually picking their teeth with bone daggers.

“Is there any food there?” Iron-Scale yelled, cupping a scaly hand around his mouth. “You guys look terrible! My Lord wanted to know if you’re going to offer food for camping on his lawn, or if you’re just going to sit there crying all day!”

Aurelius’s eyes went completely white with rage. A Kobold. A dirty, knee-high reptile was mocking him in front of his starving army.

To add insult to injury, Iron-Scale reached into his pouch, pulled out a glob of foul-smelling, green swamp muck, and threw it. It splattered directly against the nearest golden Sun Shrine, hissing as it dirtied the holy stone.

“Oops,” Iron-Scale grinned, showing a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. “Slipped.”

Aurelius snapped. The last shred of his tactical restraint evaporated in the heat of his bruised ego. He needed to kill and show his men that he was still a God, and that these monsters were just vermin.

“KILL THEM!” Aurelius shrieked, pointing his golden baton at the Kobold. “WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF HIS REPTILE FACE! BRING ME HIS HEAD!”

Valerius hesitated. “Sire, they are outside the Shrine’s perimeter! If we cross the border, your aura—”

“CHARGE!” Aurelius roared, unleashing a wave of heat that practically pushed his own men forward.

The starving, sleep-deprived, half-mad Paladins didn’t think. The command triggered their ingrained discipline and their desperate desire to end the torment. With a collective battle cry, all 3,800 Paladins surged forward, abandoning their defensive formation.

Iron-Scale let out a mock gasp of terror.

“Oh no! The shiny cans are angry! Run away!” Iron-Scale yelled, turning and diving off the log into the dense, churning fog of the deep swamp. The Grey-Fins vanished into the muck right behind him.

The Paladins chased them. They crossed the invisible line where the Sun Shrines’ light faded into the gloom. They stepped out of Aurelius’s territory and into Red’s.

Aurelius took a step forward to follow them, but hit an invisible wall. He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t leave the Shrine network without his physical avatar dissolving back to the Void.

“Slay them all!” Aurelius yelled from the border. “Burn the fog!”

But as the 3,800 Paladins rushed headlong into the thick mist, the whistling arrows and the drums suddenly stopped.

The silence that followed was far more terrifying.

Deep in the fog, the ground began to shift. The Paladins realized too late that the solid ground they were charging across wasn’t ground at all. It was a massive, shallow basin filled with knee-deep, sticky black tar-mud.

From the shadows of the canopy above, hundreds of clay pots rained down.

“Hold fast!” Valerius screamed, raising his shield.

However, it wasn’t acid this time.

The pots shattered, covering the Paladins in the highly flammable, synthesized Bio-Reactor runoff Red had ordered Moss-Eye to prepare with the help of the secondary tank of the reactor. It coated their armor, soaked into their tabards, and floated on the surface of the tar-mud.

Then, a single, glowing Kobold stepped out of the shadows. Krug, the High Priest, held a torch blazing with the Violet Flame. He looked at the screaming, panicked mass of starving Sun-Men with absolute, serene pity.

“The Spiral remakes,” Krug whispered reverently.

He dropped the torch into the mud.

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