Reincarnation Of The Strongest Spirit Master-Chapter 1426: The Layout of the Fortress!

The silence that followed was suffocating. The remaining three masters, pinned by wounds and the overwhelming presence of William's monster guard, felt the weight of his words.

They were casual, almost conversational, yet they carried a domineering gravity that felt heavier than the spiritual pressure of the scariest masters they had ever encountered in the heavens.

They were trapped in a state of profound shock and total confusion. Nothing made sense. The intelligence they had been provided—the meticulously gathered reports from the organisation that had hired them—was wrong.

It wasn't just slightly off; it was a catastrophic failure of information. They had studied William.

The reports described a capable, resourceful master who had managed to rise within the constraints of this "lower world." But as they watched him now, they realised the fundamental error of their mission.

There was no way this man belonged to the lower realm. His eyes held the cold, ancient wisdom of a being who had seen the rise and fall of aeons.

William knew the secret formation they had deployed—the very same formation that had secured their organisation countless victories across the stars.

It was a complex, multi-layered trap designed to be nearly impossible to dismantle from the outside.

To the three masters, it felt as though they were being interrogated by the very person who had invented the formation.

He knew the ins and outs, the hidden nodes, and the structural weaknesses they had spent years perfecting.

Laying out this formation was a labour of hours, a troublesome task that required absolute precision.

The payoff was supposed to be a defence that would take days of concentrated effort to breach, yet William had crippled the entire system in a mere half-hour.

If they had heard this story from a peer, they would have laughed and accused the teller of playing a joke.

If they had been told a master from a lower realm had accomplished it, they would have likely chopped that person's head off for such an insulting lie.

Yet the facts were undeniable, laid out in the blood and broken stone around them.

They had watched him climb the fortress, assuming he possessed some high-tier treasure capable of crushing formations. But the reality was far more terrifying: it wasn't a tool. It was him.

William finished collecting the loot. He hurriedly inspected the spatial rings, his spirit sense easily shattering the defensive protections around each one with a flick of his mind. Finally, his eyes sparked as he found the object of his search.

"This is the layout of this fortress… Impressive," he murmured, unfurling a large, ancient scroll. He began to examine the topographical and spiritual maps with a slow, predatory focus.

While he read, his fifty monsters began to move like clockwork. They were an extension of his will, silent and lethal.

Twenty of them formed an inner circle, their snarls keeping the three wounded enemies pinned to the cold tiles of the plaza.

The remaining thirty fanned out like a black tide, hunting down the remaining Dark Masters who were still trying to reorganise in the peripheral shadows of the palace.

The massacre was swift. Much like the lethal efficiency of the Black Serpents, William's monsters didn't give the enemies a chance to breathe.

In less than an hour, the once-bustling plaza—a place that had been teeming with the elite of the dark organisation—was transformed into a graveyard.

The only living beings left in the open air were the three trembling captives, the fifty monsters, and William.

The monsters did not stop at the killing. They began to systematically destroy the spatial portals, ensuring no reinforcements could arrive and no survivors could flee.

They surged into the heart of the palace, identifying and ruining the hidden weak spots in the grand formation. As the nodes were crushed, the thick, unnatural mist that had shrouded the fortress for years began to scatter.

The heavy spiritual restrictions that had acted as a shackle on the surrounding land finally lifted, the air turning crisp and clear for the first time in memory.

William remained unperturbed by the carnage, his eyes never leaving the scroll. However, his spirit sense began to stretch outward, expanding far beyond the stone walls of the fortress.

He reached toward the valley below, his mind's eye capturing the movements of his two girls. He grasped the gravity of the situation at the base of the mountain, feeling the ebb and flow of the battle they were leading.

"Lara has grown," William whispered to himself, a small, genuine smile touching his lips. He was deeply pleased by what Lara and Becky were accomplishing, but it was Lara's growth that truly caught his attention.

He could see the spark of a true master in her—a capable leader who could hold her own in the fires of war. He hoped, in time, that others would rise to her level, forming a vanguard that could finally keep pace with his own strides.

With the portals at the plaza reduced to twisted metal and shattered stone, the tactical landscape of the entire region shifted in a heartbeat.

The fortress, which had functioned as a relentless heart pumping an endless stream of enemies into the valley below, finally went silent.

The lifeline of the dark forces was severed; without the portals to funnel reinforcements from the Upper Realm, the army besieging the base of the mountain was suddenly an orphan of war.

Down below, the tide turned decisively in favour of Lara and Becky. William's spirit sense tracked the shift with cold satisfaction. The enemies, deprived of their means to replenish their mounting losses, began to falter.

Their aggression turned to desperation, and their desperation was rapidly curdling into a rout.

William knew that it was only a matter of time—perhaps hours—before his two disciples and the fifty monsters he had stationed with them would exterminate every last remnant of the opposing force.

This was more than just a successful defence; it was the birth of a grand victory that would serve as the cornerstone for the unification of the entire continent.