Chapter 135: The Wolf's Throat (Part 2)
While Tamsin's lethal poison melted armors until they fused with bones in the West Wing, Joren's suffocating void wind mutilated soldiers on the stairs, and Altair's entropy left corridors of static ash in the North Wing... the main assault, the bulk of the Cryon army, was crashing head-on against the citadel's gates.
Around ten thousand elite soldiers of the Black Winter Legion, commanded by a cohort of ten Saint Realm officers, had gathered in the grand esplanade in front of the colossal and beautiful main doors of solid gold and obsidian that protected the entrance to the Inner Palace, the place where the immense civilian shelters were hidden.
Blindly believing that collective brute force would break any wall, and desperate to escape the runic traps outside, the invaders deployed heavy ground artillery.
They mounted an immense, reinforced glacial ice battering ram, fifty meters long, mounted on magic rails and propelled by dozens of burning Qi rockets at the rear.
"Align the thrust array! Break that damned door open!" roared the formation's Commander, his eyes fixed on the golden barrier.
ZWOOOOSH... BOOOOOM!
The immense impact was devastating. The colossal kinetic and magical energy of the battering ram made the mountain tremble. The main doors, weighing dozens of tons, creaked agonizingly, buckled on their thick adamantite hinges, and finally fell inward with a deafening crash, kicking up a dense cloud of dust and debris at the threshold.
"IT'S OPEN!" the invaders roared triumphantly, raising their weapons and seeing the dark interior vestibule before them. "GET THEM! SLIT THE CIVILIANS' THROATS!"
The ten thousand men charged like a violent, rampant wave of blue metal, believing they would pour through empty corridors to pillage the heart of the city at their leisure.
But they didn't find empty corridors. Nor frightened defenders.
At the main entrance of the palace, blocking the immense vestibule corridor all by himself, they found a mountain.
Draven (Sequence 11).
The clan's giant stood imperturbable in the center of the vestibule. He didn't wield an elegant weapon, and his chest was scandalously bare, exposing his massive, scarred musculature. The only thing he held in his left hand was an immense, crude black steel shield the size of a double door, resting heavily on the stone.
The Cryon soldiers leading the charge paused for an instant, bewildered by the presence of a single man blocking the main entrance, but the push of the ten thousand behind them forced them to keep running toward him.
"Crush him! He's just a fucking half-naked madman!" shouted a vanguard officer.
Draven smiled. It was a slow, wide smile, devoid of pity.
He took a deep breath and activated the latent power of his ancestral bloodline.
In a second, the air around him dropped fifty degrees. The moisture in the vestibule froze and was violently sucked toward his bare body, crystallizing over his skin.
Draven executed the [Giant Bear Ice Armor].
The ice that formed over him wasn't fragile, translucent, or decorative. It was a solid, disturbing opaque white color, similar to cold marble, with a rough texture that imitated the thick fur of a prehistoric beast. He molded his Qi to create a colossal "exoskeleton" that exponentially increased his height and width. His head was hidden behind an imposing, brutal helmet of solid ice that imitated the open jaws of a cave bear, through whose sockets his own eyes shone with a fierce, intense arctic blue.
With every step Draven took forward to receive the impact of the charge, the obsidian floor cracked and sank beneath his immense, unnatural weight, emitting a dull screech, as if the stone itself were groaning under the pressure of a moving glacier.
The Cryon vanguard crashed head-on into him.
A dozen spears imbued with piercing Qi smashed simultaneously against Draven's white marble chest, propelled by the momentum of the run.
The result was a humiliation to physics. The stellar steel tips of the spears didn't penetrate a single millimeter of flesh. They simply bounced off harmlessly, or worse, got pathetically stuck in the dense "ice fat" of his armor, the wooden shafts splintering from the energy rebound.
"Is that all?" Draven's guttural voice grunted from inside the ice helm, a thick vapor escaping from the bear jaws like a blizzard.
Draven let go of the shield with his left hand, raised his immense armored arms high, and brought them down with the offensive technique [Glacier Swipe].
As he performed the downward motion, the ice armor generated solid, curved claws twenty centimeters long.
CRASH! SQUELCH!
The impact of his enormous fists against the vanguard was Dantesque. Every blow Draven threw wasn't a punch; it was the unleashing of a prehistoric avalanche.
Upon the first impact, he literally and physically crushed five heavily armored soldiers against the ground, turning the steel of their helmets and their skulls into a bloody amalgam of meat mush and red ice. The frost claws penetrated the breastplates of three others, causing instant internal freezing that burst their organs before launching them fifteen meters into the air.
Behind the ice giant, a loud, savage, deep, and hoarse laugh made the torches on the walls tremble.
It was Bren (Sequence 19).
Bren hadn't even tried to maintain decorum. His body was red-hot, blood boiling beneath his skin due to his volcanic bloodline. His muscles had swollen so much that the sleeves and breastplate of his Morningstar tunic had simply burst and hung in tatters.
In his immense, calloused hands, he didn't hold a refined sword or spear. He had uprooted one of the massive cylindrical basalt stone pillars from the entrance, weighing at least two tons and three meters long, and held it carelessly resting on his shoulder, as if it were a vulgar, light wooden baseball bat.
"Get out of my fucking way, untalented trash!" shouted a furious Saint Captain (Stage 1) of the Cryon forces, managing to shove his way through his own jammed infantry and leaping to the front line to confront the biological anomaly that was Draven.
The Saint Captain raised his gleaming two-handed sword and launched an immense, devastating crescent-shaped slash of pure energy—a compressed attack capable of cleaving a siege tank or a small mountain in half.
The slash flew toward Draven at the speed of sound, striking dead center on his immense frosted chest.
DING!
The sound was not an explosion. It was a pathetic, high-pitched metallic clink.
The massive Saint-Level energy slash bounced off and scattered into harmless sparks of light, without leaving even a miserable notch, scratch, or scrape on Draven's bear-ice exoskeleton. The passive attribute of physical damage reduced by sixty percent was an impregnable wall.
Draven slowly lowered his enormous, helm-hidden head and looked at the stunned Captain, whose eyes were bulging upon seeing that his strongest strike had done absolutely nothing.
"You're tickling my armpits," Draven mocked, his voice echoing in the ice.
Draven lifted his heavy boot and violently kicked his own giant shield, driving it into the base of the floor.
He immediately executed the [Wall of the North].
With a deafening roar that vibrated the air, immense, thick hexagonal columns of opaque, bluish ice suddenly emerged from the depths of the obsidian floor. They intertwined and welded together at breakneck speed, forming in less than a second a massive, indestructible defensive wall five meters wide and four meters high, completely jagged as if it were the jagged peaks of a glacial mountain range.
The tactical block was instantaneous. The frontal charge of the ten thousand men collapsed on itself as it violently crashed into the unexpected indestructible barrier. The vanguard was crushed against the ice wall by the physical pressure of thousands of their own comrades behind them who continued pushing blindly.
Without losing a millisecond of the enemy's tactical confusion, Bren's boiling figure leaped into the air, using Draven's broad shoulders as a springboard to propel himself over the immense ice wall, landing directly in the middle of the ocean of squeezed soldiers on the other side.
SQUASH!
Bren landed with the destructive power of a volcanic meteorite and an uncontainable seismic fury.
His feet touched the ground executing the [World-Devastating Stomp].
The entirety of Bren's colossal, monstrous muscle mass, added to his concentrated Earth Law Qi, surged down his leg. At the moment of impact, Bren's bare foot was covered in a layer of heavy igneous rock.
The rumble was dull, deep, and lethal. The immense shockwave didn't travel through the air to be blocked by the Cryons' magic shields; it traveled violently through the molecules of the earth's crust itself.
In an instant fifteen-meter radius around Bren, the solid, polished obsidian fractured and rose in sharp waves of debris a meter high. The Cryons' immense turtle formation was undone like toys. Hundreds of soldiers catastrophically lost their balance; dozens of them made the immense, unfortunate mistake of falling into the sudden, deep, glowing orange fissures that opened in the floor, which snapped shut milliseconds later, burying, cutting in half, and crushing human feet, legs, and waists between tons of living rock. From the center of the crater Bren had formed, intense, boiling jets of ultra-high-pressure steam shot upward, burning alive the infantrymen standing over them and melting their blue crystal armors.
"SMASH!" Bren roared, maddened by adrenaline, his veins bulging like thick red cables beneath his skin and his pores beginning to sweat fine drops of blood from the extreme, absurd effort of the immense internal pressure.
He gripped the colossal basalt pillar he held with both hands and, spinning like a hurricane of uncontrolled brute force, used it to bat the bunched-up, defenseless crowd of shock infantry that couldn't flee due to the crevices.
SPLAT! CRASH! CRUNCH!
The impacts of the two-ton pillar, swung at the speed of sound by Bren's arms, didn't cause clean cuts or discreet bleeding. They turned cultivators into paste.
Every blow the pillar delivered directly burst and crushed entire torsos, transforming groups of five or six men at a time into projectiles of flesh, broken bone, and dented steel that shot out and violently crashed against the entrance walls.
Blood and viscera exploded and splattered with such force that they began to paint the impeccable obsidian red.
The Saint Captain who had attacked Draven moments before, having vaulted the ice wall, landed right behind Bren. Taking advantage of the fact that the red-haired giant was busy massacring the cannon fodder with his pillar, the Captain charged his light sword with all his vital energy in a desperate, heroic attempt to stab him in the back and save his troops.
But Bren, operating with a savage instinct bordering on animal precognition, didn't turn around. Instead, he used the [Internal Shockwave].
He clenched his free fist, and his entire immense, muscular arm turned a glowing, incandescent red beneath the burnt skin. With a sharp motion, he threw a brutal, sudden backward elbow strike, landing dead center on the gleaming High Earth-level shield the Captain wore hanging on his chest for extra defense.
The Saint Captain expected the shield to absorb the blunt force and cushion the impact, but Bren's attack didn't seek to break armor. Utilizing the unfathomable properties of Earth to transmit tectonic vibrations, the force and immense magmatic heat of the blow simply "traveled" through the captain's dense, solid defensive plate without breaking it.
The Saint Captain felt a strange tingling in his armor, and moments later, a high-pitched, metallic sound rang out. The lethal, compressed shockwave detonated violently inside the man's ribcage.
The Captain's eyes dilated with absolute horror and agony as his own lungs and heart burst from the overpressure and were instantly roasted alive by the internal steam. From his open mouth came not a cry of pain, but a dense, suffocating, boiling mist of vaporized blood, followed by a huge mouthful of black clots. His armored chest glowed with a sinister, lethal dark crimson hue for a brief instant before he fell to the floor like a scorched ragdoll, completely inert.
The scene in the vestibule had ceased to be a heroic siege battle, rapidly becoming a unilateral, biological extermination. The monumental, grotesque, pure, primitive brute physical force of the Semi-Dragons, cornered in narrow, enclosed spaces against conventional infantry, was simply unstoppable, suffocating, and absurdly lethal.
However, outside, in the wide, open corridors of the citadel's center, the war was beginning to take on an infinitely darker and more lethal scale, escalating to realms of power where Bren's muscular strength and Draven's massive ice would lose their spotlight.
The sky, which minutes before had been bluish, tore open.