Chapter 697: Last Assault (1/2)
Chapter 697: Last Assault (1/2)
The month between the participant war and the assault on the Doom Monarch was the busiest the alliance had ever known.
The first thing Almond did was give the native kingdoms back their power.
It was a calculated gift, and it was also the right one. Suryax-Regalon held all five Tier-100 weapon systems, but three of them had been built from blueprints that belonged, by resonance, to Virexion, Thalmyr, and Celestara. So Almond returned them. Not the blueprints, which stayed in his vault, but the developed systems, tuned and complete, handed to the native kingdoms that could run them at full output through their own Genelines.
The Stormlord of Virexion received the storm-system and wept, quietly, because his kingdom had never held power like it in all its history. The Crystal Sage of Thalmyr received the precision-system and spent three days in silence studying it, and at the end of the three days she could run it better than Vorth’s team ever had. The Dawn Matriarch of Celestara received the light-system, and the radiant kingdom that had bled twice for Dravokh stood, for the first time, behind a wall of its own light that nothing could cross.
The Suryax Kingdom kept the Daybreak Judgement System, which was theirs by resonance, and Suryax-Regalon kept the Discord Bloom System, the chaos-aligned weapon from a kingdom that no longer existed to claim it.
Five Tier-100 weapon systems, distributed across five kingdoms that now fought as one.
And then the forges ran, all of them, across every island, building combined fleets. Mega Dreadships and storm-platforms and crystalline arrays and light-towers, all of it woven together, all of it carrying Tier-100 power, all of it pointed north. The four native kingdoms and the one participant built, for one month, the single most powerful force the warfare event had ever held.
When the month ended, they launched.
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The combined fleet crossed the ocean and reached the mainland, and the Doom Monarch was waiting.
His dominion had not been idle during the three months of his weakening. He could not project his armies across the ocean anymore, not while the window held him down, but he could fortify, and he had. The mainland coast was a wall of Doom defenses, layered fortifications stretching along the ridge as far as perception could carry, and behind them waited the army that had spent a year terrorizing this world.
The fleet did not slow.
Almond stood at the head of it, on the lead Mega Dreadship, the four X-rank holders around him and the entire named leadership spread across the combined force. He looked at the wall of Doom defenses, at the weakened Monarch’s dominion behind it, at the window that would not stay open forever.
"All forces," he said, and his voice carried across every kingdom’s command channel at once. "Break the coast. We are going inland."
The combined fleet opened fire, and the coast came apart.
Five Tier-100 weapon systems hit the Doom defenses at once. The storm-system’s white-gold lattices folded over the eastern fortifications and unmade them. The precision-system found ten thousand seams in the wall and cut them all in the same instant. The light-system’s dawn rolled across the western defenses and resolved them out of existence. The Daybreak blades fell across the center, reaping the Doom infantry that massed to hold the breach. And the Discord Bloom bloomed dark across the whole coast, unraveling whatever survived the other four.
The wall that had stood against a weakened Monarch’s enemies broke in minutes.
The combined force went inland.
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The Doom Monarch’s army met them, and it was worse than anything the war had sent across the ocean.
These were the armies he had held back. The ones too powerful or too strange to project across water, kept in reserve in his own dominion. They came up out of the broken coast and down from the red sky and out of the twisted land itself, and the combined force met them head-on.
The named cast fought at the front of it.
Rudra led, as he always did, crossing the broken ground in streaks that cracked the air, and where he struck, the Doom war-constructs simply stopped being. Absolute Breaker revoked them, limb by limb, core by core, the largest siege creatures coming apart under his bare hands as their structure was told it no longer applied.
Lily flooded the battlefield with Dreadlings. The Dreadgates she planted in the broken coast poured out an endless tide, and her Dreadlings had fed on a year of war and grown into something terrible, fusing and splitting and adapting as they tore through the Doom ranks. Above the tide she fought herself, the Wheel of Achromatic Shade turning beside her, stealing the abilities of every Doom elite she passed and turning them on their owners.
Ainen burned a path through the center. His flame world unfolded across the inland advance, and the Doom monsters that entered it met cold flame and corrosion flame and denial flame and a dozen others his origin flame had birthed across the entire event. And he was not only burning. He had cooked before the assault, a feast that ran through the entire combined force, and every soldier on the field fought with buffs that did not fade.
Silvester and Hiroshi cut through the Doom elites, two blades moving as one, and the Tier-100 gear they carried now let them fight things that would have killed them a month ago. Marcus anchored the advance with his shield, the Discord Bloom woven into it, and where the Doom army pushed hardest, Marcus held and pushed back. Maya hunted the Doom command structures, her exotic ice freezing the things that drove the army from the inside. Natalia’s spheres covered the entire front, reading the Doom assault three steps ahead. Kayla’s threads bound the whole combined force into one reacting body.
Saffa, Clovelle, and Fraisea ran the combined fleet’s systems, turning five kingdoms’ technology into a single coordinated weapon. Gopu broke the things too big for anyone else to break, his strength layered with Tier-100 gear. Big D fed the whole picture to every commander at once. Aryan ran the tactical line. The Asura Executives drove their sectors forward, ten of them now strong enough to hold fronts that would have needed armies before.
The Spirit Lords advanced like walking fortresses. The Dreadling Monarchs tore through the Doom ranks. The Suryax King and his generals poured solar Geneline power across the center. The Stormlord, the Crystal Sage, and the Dawn Matriarch led their kingdoms behind their own Tier-100 systems, free and fighting for the first time as themselves.
The combined force drove inland, through the worst army the world had ever produced, and it did not stop.
Then the sky split, and the Doom Monarch came down to meet them himself.
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