Empowered by the overwhelming divine stamina still actively radiating from their captain’s blessing, the five veterans and the five terrified rookies let out a unified, deafening, highly aggressive battle cry.

"RAAHHHHHH!"

The paralyzing fear of the Unknown Zone was entirely replaced by the intoxicating thrill of overwhelming superiority.

The rookies, who only moments ago had been backing away in tears, felt the divine energy harden their muscles and sharpen their vision.

They charged violently forward as a singlE cohesive unit.

They didn’t break rank... instead they moved with the pack-hunting synchronicity Tamsin had drilled into them.

Their heavy iron blades rose and fell in a brutal, highly coordinated counter-offensive.

They ruthlessly butchered the disoriented, terrified remnants of the Acid-Crawler horde before the massive insects could burrow back into the safety of the earth.

"That’s what I like to see!"

Gunnhild led the vanguard, her heavy broadsword severing heads with singular, brutal chops, while the rookies followed closely behind, driving their shortswords into the exposed unarmored underbellies of the thrashing centipedes.

Tamsin moved through the chaos like a ghost, her daggers flawlessly severing the neural clusters of any crawler that attempted to spit acid at her girls.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

It wasn’t a fight anymore like it had been... it was a completely one-sided extermination.

...

Directly across the sprawling territory, miles away deep within the eastern thickets, the environment was entirely different.

"Bring it on you pungent beasts!"

The terrain here was relatively flat, completely lacking the treacherous vertical drops of the ravines or the deep unstable sinkholes of the north.

But the heavy monsoon rain had turned the dense overgrown brush into a highly restrictive, nearly impassable maze of petrified thorny vines and thick, sucking mud that aggressively gripped at their iron-plated boots.

Visibility was restricted to less than thirty feet, completely obscured by the gray rain and the dense, twisting gray foliage.

Brida didn’t rely on agility to navigate the thickets, and she certainly didn’t rely on stealth to avoid the local predators.

The Level 11 Shieldmaiden stood firmly at the front of an unyielding wall of solid iron.

Behind her, ten highly experienced veteran Shieldmaidens and five heavily armored infantry rookies stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their breathing synchronized and their muscles locked.

Their massive, thick iron tower shields were heavily, perfectly overlapped, the reinforced edges locking together to form a flawless turtle-shell formation that completely blocked the narrow, muddy path through the thorns.

"Anchor your boots!" Brida barked with her deep commanding voice booming easily over the relentless roar of the rain. "Drop your center of gravity! Dig your heels straight into the bedrock beneath the slop! Do not let the mud steal your balance! You are the wall!"

Charging blindly and aggressively through the dense thickets directly toward their entrenched formation was a massive, highly agitated pack of mutated, Tier 2 Iron-Boars.

The beasts were massive, heavily muscled aggressive swine that easily weighed four hundred pounds apiece.

Thick, jagged metallic tusks, forged entirely from naturally ingested iron ore found in the basin’s roots, protruded dangerously from their heavy frothing jaws.

They didn’t possess complex, highly coordinated pack tactics like the Umbral Hounds... rather they operated entirely on raw overwhelming physical momentum.

They were monstrous battering rams, specifically designed by the corruptive ecosystem to completely shatter enemy lines and trample the survivors into the dirt.

"Brace!" Brida ordered, slamming the heavy spiked bottom of her own massive shield deeply into the mud, anchoring her stance with Level 11 vitality.

The massive pack of boars slammed headfirst, entirely at full speed, directly into the Vanguard’s shield wall.

BOOOOOOOMM!!!!

The loud booming sound of dense bone and jagged metallic tusk crashing violently against solid iron echoed sharply through the eastern thicket like a series of rapid anvil strikes.

The five rookies, positioned strategically in the absolute center of the defensive line where the overlapping shields provided the most structural support, grunted heavily under the immense strain in their arms.

Their iron-plated boots slid back a dangerous terrifying inch in the slop under the massive concentrated physical pressure of the charge.

The force threatened to dislocate their shoulders with their forearms burning as the iron boars wildly thrashed and continuously rammed their tusks against the metal in a frenzied attempt to break through but the iron wall did not break.

Brida had spent her entire mornings in the courtyard drilling these women until their muscles bled, their lungs burned, and their arms were completely numb.

She also taught these new recruits some stuff on their way here so they knew exactly how to physically distribute the crushing weight of a massive charge evenly across the interlocked shields.

They utilized their newly enhanced Level 3 vitality, feeding their raw stamina directly into their stances to perfectly absorb the shock.

"Hold the line!" Brida commanded, her own [ Steel Aegis] actively glowing with an unyielding blue light, easily absorbing the bone-shattering impact of the largest, heaviest lead boar without her even flinching. "Thrust on my mark! Do not break the overlap! Keep your shields locked!"

The boars squealed wildly in frenzied frustration with their heavy hooves kicking up massive sprays of muddy water as they rapidly backed up in the slop to aggressively charge the unyielding metal wall again.

"Mark!" Brida roared.

In perfect terrifying unison, the fifteen Shieldmaidens briefly, precisely angled their massive shields outward by a mere fraction of an inch.

It was just enough to create a lethal opening without compromising the structural integrity of the phalanx.

They drove their heavy, razor-sharp iron shortswords directly through the narrow carefully calculated gaps in the defensive formation.

WHOOOOOOSHHHHHH!

They didn’t swing wildly... instead they thrust with a singular intent.

They plunged the heavy blades deeply into the exposed vulnerable throats and soft unarmored underbellies of the charging beasts exactly as the boars threw their weight forward.

SHLK! SHLK! SHLK!

The synchronized lethal execution dropped half the massive pack in a single devastating heartbeat.

The heavy iron blades pierced internal organs, severed major arteries, and instantly halted the monsters’ momentum.

Thick black blood poured heavily from the fatal wounds, spilling violently into the mud and instantly washing away in the relentless rain.

The dying boars collapsed against the shields, their heavy bodies sliding down the iron faceplates and piling up in front of the Vanguard’s boots.

"Recover! Brace!" Brida shouted immediately, not allowing her squad a single second to celebrate or relax their muscles.

The Shieldmaidens violently, flawlessly reset the impenetrable iron wall, locking the edges of their shields back together before the remaining confused boars could attempt to exploit the momentary offensive openings. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

It wasn’t a flashy, highly destructive, visually spectacular display of cosmic magic like Aeliana’s beams or Rowena’s gravity wells...

It completely lacked the chaotic desperate adrenaline of Tamsin’s brawl in the north... That was because it wasn’t meant to be.

It was a slow and terrifying meat grinder.

Brida’s heavy infantry squad operated like a singular emotionless machine of war.

They flawlessly crushed the enemy’s momentum against their shields, absorbed their energy without yielding an inch of ground, and bled them entirely dry in the mud without taking a single casualty.

They repeated the brutal cycle.

Brace... Absorb... Mark... Thrust... Recover!

As the very last mutated Iron-Boar finally fell, choking heavily on its own blood in the slop with three iron shortswords buried in its chest, Brida didn’t immediately lower her massive shield.

Her highly alert eyes scanned the dense thorny thicket with her senses hyper-focused on the shadows between the petrified trees, ensuring nothing else was preparing to charge from the darkness.

Only when the heavy drum of the freezing rain hitting the mud was the only sound left echoing in the woods did she finally stand up straight, lowering the heavy iron shield to rest against her greaves.

"Clear!" Brida announced, turning her head to look at her squad.

The five rookies were panting heavily with their chests heaving against their iron breastplates.

Their arms were visibly trembling from the repeated concussive weight of the charges with the lactic acid burning in their muscles but their eyes were shining bright with immense pride.

They had stared down a massive, charging horde of monsters in the pouring rain, and they had held the Vanguard line. They had not broken.

They were officially soldiers of the Blessed Land.

"Harvest the iron tusks for now," Brida ordered smoothly, highly satisfied with their flawless performance. "Our Lord needs his points to build our home, and we need to get more of it. We keep moving until the absolute quota is met. Leave the meat for now; it is entirely too tough to transport in this weather."

As her squad quickly moved to butcher the fallen boars, leveraging their shortswords to pry the valuable iron tusks from the heavy jaws, Brida looked up at the bruising gray sky.

A deeply satisfied smirk touched her scarred lips with the heavy rain washing the sweat from her brow.

’What an amazing day... Should I ask my Lord to reward me?’

She liked it... The multi-front war was aggressively pushing the Vanguard to its absolute physical limits, forcing them to operate independently without Silas actively holding their hands but they were not breaking under the immense pressure.

They were violently and rapidly evolving into a self-sustaining military force.

Every single drop of monster blood spilled in the freezing mud was a solid brick laid perfectly in the foundation of the empire Silas was building and they would gladly drag this entire necrotic rotting basin to its knees if he ordered it.

...

The flooded western quarry was a treacherous claustrophobic nightmare of jagged black stone and rapidly rising murky brown water.

The heavy monsoon rain continued to hammer down relentlessly against the Umbral Basin, rapidly filling the massive uneven crater.

The highly efficient slaughter of the initial Tier 1 Mud-Hound pack had painted the flooded basin in thick, swirling ribbons of corrosive black blood but the heavy downpour was already aggressively washing the evidence of the Vanguard’s efficiency away, heavily diluting the gore and dragging it down into the churning mud at the bottom of the sinkhole.

Silas stood near the highly precarious edge of a submerged steep drop-off.

His boots were anchored firmly and flawlessly against a slick uneven slab of solid bedrock that jutted out just slightly above the rising waterline.

’I’ve gotten quite a lot of UP but we need more...’

He slowly lowered his Umbral-Forged Mythril Blade, allowing the freezing rain to wash the remaining sizzling gore from the dark-purple metal.

A steady trickle of foundational energy from his Mythic Gold Core continued to radiate steadily across his skin.

The thermal pocket violently vaporized the freezing raindrops the moment they touched his black combat robes, completely nullifying the environmental hazard and enveloping his broad shoulders in an intimidating hissing shroud of steam.

He looked over his shoulder with his blue eyes assessing the physical and mental condition of his squad.

Rowena stood a few feet away on a neighboring rock outcropping.

Her breathing was perfectly steady, her blue eyes actively scanning the dark rain-soaked horizon as her heavy wooden staff pulsed softly with residual gravity magic.

Aeliana stood firmly beside her.

The Royal Elven Arcanist was displaying a terrifyingly cold composure that completely erased the embarrassing memory of her frantic breakdown in the bat cavern.

She held her ground perfectly on the slippery rocks, her green eyes scanning the murky water for any signs of movement and her mana pathways primed and ready to unleash another devastating volley of starlight at a moment’s notice.

Behind the two elite spellcasters, the five newly summoned recruits were in medium shape.

The rookies were leaning heavily against their iron shortswords, their chests heaving violently as they desperately tried to pull oxygen into their burning lungs.

They were utterly soaked to the bone, their thin leather armor entirely caked in freezing mud.

The massive rush of adrenaline from surviving their first true chaotic brawl in the Unknown Zone was rapidly wearing off, leaving their muscles weak and their bodies shivering violently in the biting wind.

"Form up to keep yourselves warm!" Silas commanded with a small smile. "You girls did very well but do not let the cold settle into your joints... Keep your blood moving! Check your gear, confirm your blades are secure, and prepare to advance!"

Silas then sighed as he rubbed the back of his head.

"I’m sorry for dragging you new girls out here." He said, he had wanted them to see the front lines and so far they had gained quite some levels.

"My Lord! We are your soldiers!" One of them puffed up with a blush on her cheeks. "It’s our duty and you’re really amazing!"

The girls agreed with her immediately, including Rowena and Aeliana.