Chapter 16 #2
The Luminous Vanguard abandoned their cautious tactical sweep.
The execution mandate overrode their defensive protocols.
Twenty-eight hard-light halberds lowered, humming with a terrifying, concentrated lethality.
They surged forward as one, a tidal wave of golden armor and pure, blistering light charging onto the narrow basalt bridge.
They didn't pop their shields. They sprinted, their heavy boots shaking the bedrock, their visors locked entirely on the arrogant tyrant standing above them.
Drystan watched the golden grid funnel directly into the center of the kill-box. He waited until the lead executioners were directly beneath the massive, fractured ruby overhang.
He didn't look down at Nymeria. He didn't need to.
"Now," Drystan roared over the thunder of the charging army.
Nymeria Shade dropped the twilight magic.
She didn't dispel the relic, but she released her localized hold on the black frost encasing the mana-resin buried in the cliff.
The reaction was catastrophic and instantaneous. The blistering, four-hundred-degree ambient heat of the thermal updrafts slammed directly into the absolute-zero aether.
The calcified mana-resin detonated.
It wasn't a blast of fire. It was a massive, concussive shockwave of expanding kinetic force. The deep fault line in the ruby cliff face blew outward with a deafening, cataclysmic CRACK that dwarfed the sound of the boiling magma below.
The sky shattered.
Thousands of tons of razor-sharp, translucent red crystal sheared away from the cliff. The entire overhang collapsed, a localized avalanche of jagged glass and pulverized stone plummeting directly onto the Obsidian Narrows.
Drystan was thrown backward onto the ledge by the sheer concussive force of the blast. He hit the ground hard, throwing his right arm over his head as a shower of razor-sharp shrapnel rained over the ridge.
The deafening roar of the falling mountain echoed across the entire Caldera, drowning out the shrieks of tearing metal and crushing armor.
A massive cloud of red dust and alkaline smoke billowed up from the canyon, choking the air.
Drystan pushed himself up, coughing violently, the taste of pulverized quartz coating his tongue. He crawled to the edge of the ridge and looked down.
The basalt bridge was completely buried under a mountain of shattered ruby crystal.
The golden grid was gone. The rigid, algorithmic perfection of the Vanguard had been liquidated by the sheer, crushing weight of the environment.
Blood, thick and unnaturally bright, pooled between the massive shards of glass, hissing as it dripped off the edge of the bridge into the magma below.
Nymeria crawled up beside him. Her dusky skin was covered in a fine layer of red dust. She stared down at the massacre, her amber eyes wide with a mixture of horror and absolute awe.
They had dropped a mountain on a god's army.
But the Arch-Realm did not deal in clean victories.
A violent, blinding flash of pure white light erupted from beneath the rubble. A massive slab of ruby crystal the size of a carriage was violently thrown aside, tumbling off the bridge and splashing into the boiling river.
Three figures rose from the wreckage.
They were elite executioners. Their golden armor was heavily dented, scored, and coated in their comrades' blood.
Their featureless crystalline visors were cracked, sparking with erratic, damaged energy.
But their localized hard-light shields had held just long enough to save them from being crushed completely.
They looked up at the ridge. The synthesized rigidity of their programming was gone. The way they held their humming halberds, the heavy, aggressive tilt of their shoulders—it wasn't an automated purge anymore. It was pure, unadulterated rage.
The three surviving zealots did not retreat. They began to scale the sheer, jagged rubble of the cliff face, climbing directly toward Drystan.
"They survived," Nymeria breathed, her hands tightening around the relic. "Moros, we have to run."
"No," Drystan stated.
He stood up on the edge of the ridge. His left arm hung dead. He had absolutely no kinetic magic left. He was battered, broken, and running on fumes. But the Valedictorian did not retreat from a broken board.
He reached down to the ground beside his boots. Lying in the red dust was a massive, jagged shard of fallen ruby crystal. It was three feet long, tapered to a razor-sharp, glass-like point, and heavy enough to crack a skull.
Drystan grabbed the shard with his shredded, blood-crusted right hand. The glass cut into his open wounds, but he welcomed the pain. It was a grounding, visceral anchor.
"Keep the stealth field up," Drystan commanded without looking back at her. "Do not let the system lock onto us again."
He didn't wait for the executioners to reach the top. Drystan Harrow leaped off the ridge.
He slid down the mountain of collapsed crystal, riding a wave of shattered glass directly toward the climbing zealots.
The lead executioner saw him coming. The massive zealot braced his boots against the rubble, raising his hard-light halberd to skewer the falling anomaly. The humming blade of concentrated light thrust upward, aimed perfectly at Drystan’s chest.
Drystan didn't try to dodge. He used his dead limb.
He swung his ruined left arm forward. The heavy, warped brass plating of the dead Weave-Gauntlet slammed directly into the blade of the halberd.
The hard-light sheared through the thick metal, sinking deep into the fused, dead flesh of Drystan’s forearm.
The smell of melting brass and searing meat exploded into the air.