I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 813: Soul Bound Troops

“Soul Bound troops,” Ren whispered to himself, a faint, clinical note in his voice. “No fear of death. No preservation instinct. Just absolute madness.”

Because every creature bound to Jack Kaiser, from Pho to the Dark Elf Commander, down to the lowest foot soldier, was tied directly to Jack’s eternal soul-bond network.

They couldn’t die. If a Disaster-class sentinel drove a halberd through the commander’s chest or obliterated Pho’s skull, their physical forms would simply dissolve into dark mana and regenerate back into existence seconds later, fully healed and ready to kill again.

———-

They weren’t an army; they were an immortal, regenerating nightmare.

A living nightmare for any person to deal with, let alone a whole country.

Yet the scariest thing about Jack isn’t his ability. It was his mindset.

An individual who had gone through hardship after hardship. Every moment Jack had to endure hardship hardened his soul further for this cruel world and for those who lived in it.

Whether it was human or god, it did not matter. Jack Kaiser was a ruthless individual who cared for no one but family.

And the machinations above the subterranean citadel were beginning to unfold in his reform of this world and the other within Tartarus Spire.

————

Ren turned away from the edge, his silver-blue armor catching the crimson glow of the reservoir conduits as he led the remaining three hundred dark elves toward the captives to gather the evidence Jack needed.

Two hundred feet below, the grand obsidian causeway leading to the ancient citadel did not experience a tactical breach; it experienced an absolute kinetic catastrophe.

BOOM!

Pho slammed into the center of the causeway like an artillery shell. The sheer kinetic impact shattered the ancient, light-absorbing stone, blowing a fifty-foot crater into the causeway and sending a shockwave of absolute-zero deathfrost roaring outward in all directions.

Four Disaster-class Abyssal Sentinels at the front line were caught completely off-guard.

The flash-freeze encased their massive, blue-armored legs in mountains of core-ice before they could even raise their triple-pronged halberds.

“WHO WANTS TO DIE FIRST?!” Pho roared, rising from the crater like a demon unleashed.

He didn’t wait for a response. Pho lunged forward, swinging his massive titan-steel ice axe in a sweeping, two-handed horizontal arc.

The blade, glowing with jagged, absolute-zero mana, struck the chest plate of the nearest Disaster-class sentinel.

CRACK-BOOM!

The impact was sickening. The brute’s thick, abyssal plate armor shattered like cheap glass under the combination of titan-steel momentum and instant thermal shock.

The Disaster-class sentinel was blasted backward, its chest cavity completely caved in, its blue blood frozen into glittering dust before it even hit the ground.

Before the other three frozen sentinels could shatter their ice bindings, a chorus of unhinged, shrill cackling echoed from the sky above.

CRASH!

CRASH!

Two hundred white-armored dark elves rained down directly onto the heads and shoulders of the Disaster-class sentinels. They didn’t land in a shield wall. They landed like rabid animals.

The Dark Elf Commander landed directly on the neck of a fourteen-foot sentinel, his pristine white helmet thrown back as he laughed hysterically.

He didn’t use a tactical spear thrust; he drove his white pike directly down through the eye slot of the sentinel’s helmet, channeling raw, volatile inverse light magic straight into the creature’s brainpan.

BANG!

The sentinel’s head detonated from the inside out in a burst of blinding white energy.

As the giant corpse collapsed forward, the commander leaped off the falling neck, spinning in mid-air with a manic grin, his spear cackling with unstable mana as he drove the butt of the shaft into the jaw of another sentinel.

“Look at them! Look at these big blue ugly bastards!” the commander shrieked with joyful, terrifying glee, his white armor already splattered with blue abyssal gore. “Rip their armor off! Puncture their throats! Master wants the big one, but these ones are ours to play with!”

The two hundred dark elves swarmed the Disaster-class sentinels like a wave of ravenous white locusts.

They used their gravity spells to vault onto the giants’ backs, stabbing repeatedly into joints, severing armor straps with short-blades, and cackling maniacally as blue blood sprayed across the ancient causeway.

A Disaster-class sentinel, raging against the swarming dark elves, swept its massive halberd in a wide circle.

The triple-pronged blade caught three dark elves directly across their waists, cleaving their white-armored torsos completely in two.

Under normal circumstances, a unit would break at such horrific casualty rates.

Instead, the severed upper halves of the three dark elves landed on the stone, looked down at their spilled guts, and started laughing.

“Ha! Good hit, you giant blue freak!” one of the severed dark elves cackled, his lightless black eyes glowing with insane amusement as his lower body dissolved into black mana.

A fraction of a second later, three dark purple portals fractured the air twenty feet behind the sentinel line.

Three dark elves stepped out of the portals completely whole, their white armor pristine, their spears glowing, and their unhinged laughter ringing out as they dived right back onto the sentinel’s neck.

Pho watched the severed dark elves regenerate and burst out into a booming, savage laugh of his own.

“I love these crazy white-armored freaks!” Pho roared, pivoting on his heel as two Disaster-class sentinels brought their halberds down in a coordinated overhead strike aimed at his skull.

Pho didn’t dodge. He raised his left arm, letting his forearm armor take the full, crushing impact of both halberds.

CLANG!

The kinetic force drove Pho’s feet three inches deep into the obsidian stone, the dark blue mana from the weapons surging across his pale blue skin.

Pho didn’t even wince. He grinned, his teeth coated in frost, and grabbed the shafts of both halberds with his bare, ice-encrusted left hand, locking the two Disaster-class giants in place.

“My turn,” Pho growled.

He channeled his Deathfrost Domain directly through the metal shafts of their weapons.

Absolute-zero cold raced up the halberds in a fraction of a millisecond, engulfing both Disaster-class sentinels. Their massive, fourteen-foot frames turned translucent blue as their internal organs and blood supplies were instantly frozen solid.

Pho let go of the shafts, stepped forward, and brought his heavy ice axe around in a crushing, 360-degree whirlwind sweep.

SHATTER!

Both frozen Disaster-class generals exploded into millions of tiny, glittering blue shards that rained across the causeway.

“PUSH THE GATE!” Pho bellowed, his voice echoing through the vast subterranean canyon like a war horn. “CLEAR THE CAUSEWAY!”

The battle on the causeway turned into an absolute slaughterhouse of immortal violence.

Pho acted as the unstoppable, ice-forged battering ram, freezing the Disaster-class sentinels’ movements and shattering their heavy armor. At the same time, the two hundred manic dark elves swarmed the openings, laughing hysterically as they impaled, stabbed, and detonated the remaining guards.

Within ten minutes of relentless, unhinged aggression, the causeway was cleared. All fourteen Disaster-class sentinels had been reduced to piles of crushed armor, blue blood, and glittering ice shards.

Pho stood before the colossal, multi-tiered obsidian doors of the main citadel, his broad chest heaving, his ice axe resting on his shoulder.

The General of the Dark Elves began licking the blood off of his pike as he sneered in Pho’s direction.