Chapter 682: Dominating the Battlefield

Natalia answered first, without words. Her Fortune Ballistics spread across the entire arc at once, hundreds of spheres climbing into the air and locking onto the incoming Doom Army. She was not aiming at the Titans. She had read, in the half-second after the wave crested the ridge, that the Titans were the X-rank holders’ problem and the swarm was hers. Her spheres fired in cascading sequences, each shot landing where a Doom unit was about to be rather than where it was, and the front of the Doom tide collapsed before it had closed half the distance.

Kayla held the whole arc together. Her threads ran through every unit on the southeastern line, through Natalia’s spheres, through the 100,000 Regalon troops, through the Suryax soldiers, feeding the projected position of every threat to everyone at once. With Natalia’s prediction layer woven into the threads, the entire arc fought three seconds ahead of itself. A Doom siege creature lunged at a gap in the line and found the gap already closed, the soldiers there having moved before it committed.

The 100,000 troops met the Doom tide head-on.

They were not the same army that had entered the warfare event. Months of synergy refinement had turned them into something that fought like a single organism. They moved in interlocking formations, each unit covering the one beside it, their combined-deck synergies firing in chains across the line. Where the Doom Army hit them, it did not break through. It broke against them. The tide crashed into the Regalon formation and the formation held, then pushed back, advancing into the swarm rather than retreating from it.

Marcus anchored the center of that push. His shield expanded into a wall fifty meters across and he drove it forward into the densest part of the Doom advance, a siege creature the size of a house slamming into the barrier and folding around it. His sword came up and a crescent of force took the creature’s head off, then carved through the three Doom infantry behind it. He did not stop moving. Every step forward dragged the whole center line forward with him.

Silvester and Hiroshi worked the flanks where the Doom monsters tried to wrap around the formation. They moved like they always did, two cuts in the world walking side by side, and where they passed, the flanking monsters came apart in clean geometric pieces. Hiroshi’s silver fire swept across an entire wing of Doom infantry and removed it from the field in a single pass. Silvester unraveled a charging pack of wolf-things before any of them reached the line, their bodies falling out of the charge in neat sections.

Maya was already gone into the swarm. She reappeared on the back of a Doom siege creature, her exotic ice driving into the seam behind its skull, and the creature froze mid-stride and toppled. She vanished again. Reappeared on the next one. The biggest Doom monsters in the tide, the ones that could have punched through the line on their own, dropped one after another with frost spreading from their cores, never reaching the soldiers they had been charging.

The Asura Executives held their assigned sectors across the arc, and they did not hold back this time. Vael’s fabricated constructs spun out into a rotating wall of blades and cannons that shredded everything that came near his sector. Tharion’s weapon systems carved kill zones in the air that no Doom flyer crossed. Lyxara’s plant constructs swallowed monsters whole and dragged them under the plateau. Seris’s shadows erased the units that slipped past everyone else. Ten Executives, ten sectors, and the Doom tide could not find a single one to break through.

Behind the line, the support held everything upright.

Saffa ran the defensive grid across the Mega Dreadships, redirecting energy to whichever section of the line took the most pressure, balancing the whole arc’s defense in real time as the Titans’ shockwaves rolled through. Clovelle ran the Skydread squadrons overhead, clearing the Doom flyers off the army’s back so the ground line could focus forward. Fraisea stripped the falling Doom monsters for material and fed it back into the supply chain even mid-battle, keeping the army’s reserves from running dry under the sustained assault. Big D fed Rudra a constant read of the whole field, the other three alliances included, his intelligence network turning the chaos into something Rudra could command. And Gopu kept the lead Dreadship’s engines stable through every shockwave, holding the command platform steady so the whole operation had a fixed point to run from.

The army handled the war beneath the giants.

And above them, the four X-rank holders went to work on the Titans themselves.

Almond moved first, and he moved up.

He shot into the air above the nearest Titan, and behind him the sky filled with steel. His Grimblades poured out of storage and did not scatter this time. They stacked. Hundreds of them aligned edge to edge, point to point, folding into a single descending column of layered blades that drank the light and gave nothing back. The Titan, eight hundred million combat power of walking ruin, lifted its head toward him.

"Grim Convergence Slash," Almond said.

The column fell.

It was not a strike. It was a guillotine the size of a tower, and every blade in it released its effect at the same instant, ten times over. The Titan threw up one massive arm to block. The convergence sheared straight through the forearm without slowing, the limb tumbling away in a spray of crimson light, and kept going, biting down into the Titan’s shoulder and burying itself to the depth of a building.

Grim Severam bloomed out from the wound.

The Titan tried to seal the cut. It could not. The sever denied it. The wound stayed open, crimson light hemorrhaging out of it, and the Titan’s whole right side went still as its connection to whatever sustained it was cut clean. It staggered, off-balance, one arm gone, the other clawing at the blade buried in its shoulder.

It was hurt. Visibly, badly hurt.

Every observer on the Mountain felt the kill that had not happened yet, and understood, all at once, what Suryax-Regalon had become.

Then Lily came over the top of it.

She did not strike the Titan. She gave it to her Dreadlings. They came off the ground in a black tide, thousands of them, swarming up the Titan’s legs and across its torso and into the open wound Almond had carved, and each one carried a different curse. The Titan tried to shake them off. It could not move fast enough. Its steps grew heavy. Its remaining arm slowed. The crimson veins beneath its plating dimmed as the Dreadlings drank from them, and where they crawled, they marked the armor with thin black lines, branching across the Titan’s surface like cracks spreading through ice.

Lily lifted one hand and closed it into a fist.

Every debuff detonated at once.

The Titan’s marked armor shattered along every black line at the same instant, peeling away in plates the size of ships, and the soft crimson core beneath stood exposed.

Almond’s Grimblades were already falling.

The second convergence came down through the exposed core, and the first Titan came apart from shoulder to hip, both halves crashing to the plateau hard enough to throw a wall of dust across the arc.

One down. Under a minute. Two of them, working as one.

Below them, the dust wall rolled over the army’s line, and Kayla’s threads carried the warning a heartbeat ahead of it. The 100,000 troops braced, Marcus turned his shield to break the worst of the debris, and the line did not lose a single soldier to the falling Titan. Natalia’s spheres never stopped firing through the dust, picking off the Doom units that tried to use the chaos to push forward.

The second Titan did not get the chance to reach the line.

Ainen met it.

He raised both arms and the world around the Titan changed. A domain unfolded outward from him, and inside it there was no plateau, no red sky, no Doom Army. There was only flame, layer upon layer of it, an entire world of fire in a dozen colors that had no business burning together. The Titan took one step into Ainen’s domain and the domain closed around it.

The cold flame went first, sweeping up the Titan’s legs and freezing its joints mid-stride, locking it in place. The corrosion flame followed, settling over its armor and eating into it from a hundred points at once, plating sloughing away in molten runnels. The Titan gathered its crimson power for a retaliation, channeling it through its chest to fire, and the denial flame swallowed the energy before it could leave the Titan’s body, the attack dying in its own core.

The Titan stood frozen, corroding, unable to strike back.

Ainen exhaled, and released the origin flame.

It was a small flame. It looked almost gentle, a single thread of pale fire drifting from his palm. But it was the flame that burned anything, and he sent it into the hole the corrosion had opened in the Titan’s chest, straight into the core.

The Titan lit up from the inside.

For one second it stood there, glowing, every seam in its body shining white. Then it went up in a column of exotic fire that climbed higher than the Mountain’s lower slopes, roaring, and when the column finally guttered out, there was nothing standing where the Titan had been. Only ash, drifting down across the cracked plateau.

Two down.

Rudra took the third with his hands.

He had never needed anything else. He crossed the gap to the third Titan in a single surge, a streak of motion that cracked the air behind him, and he hit its knee.

He did not punch through it. He revoked it.

Absolute Breaker spread out from his fist, and the law that held the Titan’s leg together simply stopped applying. The knee did not break. It ceased to be a knee. The entire joint came apart into its component nothing, and eight hundred million combat power of Titan pitched forward, its own weight dragging it down onto the plateau with a crash that rolled across the whole arc.

Rudra was already above it before it landed.

He came down on the back of its skull with a single descending strike, and Absolute Breaker tunneled through the Titan from the crown of its head all the way to its core, a straight line of revoked structure punched clean through eight hundred million combat power. The Titan’s head caved inward. The shockwave erupted out of its back in a fountain of crimson light.

The third Titan did not get up.

Three down.