Read Novel Full Chapter 714: Trounced
Chapter 714: Trounced
The two armies hit each other in the sky over Theravex, and the aether-storms turned to fire.
John Wicked’s horde fell on the imperial fleet from above, thousands of Tier-60 monsters against twelve hundred imperial powerhouses, and the math that had looked so certain to the Empire a minute ago became a slaughter in motion.
Rexion led the charge.
The colossal flyer folded his city-block wings and dove straight into the heart of the imperial fleet, and the first warship he reached did not fire fast enough.
He took it in his jaws and broke it in half, Tier-60 hull crumpling like paper, and threw the two pieces into the ships behind it.
Imperial guns swung to track him, but Pymon had already gone to work.
The space around the fleet began to fold, escape routes pinching shut, formations sliding out of alignment as the distance between ships stretched and snapped, until the proud imperial armada could not even hold a line.
And then the horde was simply everywhere.
Monsters with too many wings tore into the warships. Beasts that bent light slipped past the guns entirely. The imperial powerhouses fought hard, Tier-60 every one, but they were outnumbered three to one and surrounded on every side, and Tier-60 against Tier-60 came down to numbers.
Archon Sevrand saw his fleet coming apart and went looking for the man who had laughed.
He found John Wicked drifting in the middle of the carnage, hands in his pockets, watching his monsters work like a man enjoying a show.
"You," Sevrand snarled, and threw the full weight of a Tier-60 Archon at him, a spear of imperial light that could gut a warship.
John caught it between two fingers.
He did not strain. He did not even take his other hand out of his pocket. The Archon’s strongest strike sat pinched between his fingertips like a thrown pebble, and John looked at it with mild, friendly interest.
"That is a good one," John said. "Tier-60. Top of the middle plane. You should be proud." He flicked his fingers, and the spear shattered. "It is only a problem when you forget there are planes above this one. And people on them."
Sevrand had time to understand exactly how badly he had misjudged the day.
Then John flicked the same two fingers at him, and the Archon was simply gone, blasted out of the sky and into the broken hull of his own flagship, down and done in a single careless gesture.
"Right," John called to his horde, cheerful as ever. "Wrap it up. Try not to break anything we want to keep."
That was the Empire handled. Below it, the three kingdoms were learning their own lesson.
Rudra walked through the Caelthyr Dominion’s defenses like a man crossing an empty room.
Every wall they raised, he revoked. Every construct they sent, he unmade. He did not run, he did not rush, he simply walked toward the crystal heart of the city and let the Dominion shatter itself against him.
[Edict of Unmaking.]
A crystal bastion ceased to be a bastion. He stepped over the dust.
[Decree: Cease.]
A line of crystal-knights lost the armor that made them knights, and Rudra walked past them before they understood they were unarmored.
Behind him, the factory army poured through every gap he opened, and the Caelthyr lines folded inward toward their king.
Lily took the Morvane Kingdom, and she took it the way her master had taught her.
Queen Sythel Morvane was a blade-dancer, fast and precise, her body wreathed in shards of mirror-light that cut from a dozen angles at once. She was good. She had held twenty percent of a world for years on that speed.
She never landed a single cut.
[Veil of the Crimson Shade.]
Lily stepped into shadow, and the queen’s mirror-blades passed through empty dark, finding nothing, while Lily moved through the gaps between every reflection like she had been born in them.
When Sythel finally saw her again, Lily was already behind her, a dagger resting cold against the side of her neck.
"Your blades are beautiful," Lily said quietly. "Mine are just faster. Yield, and your people live."
Sythel went still, and dropped her mirror-light, and yielded.
Ainen took the Draveth Kingdom, and he did it with a grin.
King Harkon Draveth was old and heavy and fought like it, his power a crushing gravity that pulled the very air down, dragging Ainen’s flames toward the ground.
"Fire falls like everything else, boy," Harkon rumbled, and his gravity slammed down.
"Funny thing about my fire," Ainen said. "It does not care about your rules."
[Forge of the Living Ember.]
The ground around Harkon erupted with ember-born, troops of living flame smelted into being on the spot, rising out of the very gravity-crushed earth he stood on.
They surrounded the old king in a ring of exotic fire, and Harkon’s gravity, strong as it was, could not pull down a hundred living flames at once.
"I am too old for this," Harkon sighed, and lowered his hands. "The world is yours, cook. I yield before you set my beard on fire."
That left King Voryn Caelthyr, alone at the crystal heart of his dominion, and Almond came for him.
Voryn made his stand on a throne of raw Aetherveil Crystal, the richest in the sector, and he wrapped himself in all of it. Crystal armor. Crystal blades. Aether-beams screaming out in every direction, amplified by the Tier-68 crystal beneath him until each one could carve a mountain.
It was, genuinely, a lot of power.
Almond walked into it without slowing.
[Grim Severam.]
His Grimblades rose and met the screaming aether-beams and severed each one from the crystal that fed it, the carving light guttering out before it reached him.
Voryn snarled and poured more power through the crystal, the whole heart of the planet blazing behind him.
[Master Key: Override.]
Almond skipped the distance between them in a single step, appearing inside the king’s guard, past every beam and blade at once.
Voryn swung his crystal sword on pure reflex.
Almond caught it, and looked the king in the eye.
"You held this world because an empire stood behind you," he said. "Look up, Voryn. Your empire is falling out of the sky."
Voryn looked up.
Above the crystal heart, the imperial fleet was burning, John’s monsters tearing the last of it apart, the Aurelian banner falling end over end through the aether-storms.
The fight went out of him all at once.
"Yield," Voryn said hoarsely, and let his crystal sword dissolve. "I yield. Take the cursed world. It was never worth what it cost."
And then, because the day was not badass enough already, Kexell descended.
The colossal dragon dropped out of the burning sky over the crystal heart, vast beyond reason, and the shadow of him swallowed the whole imperial battlefield at once.
He did not need to fight. The war was already won. He simply landed across the broken plains, a mountain of iridescent scale settling over the conquered world, and let every surviving enemy on Theravex understand exactly what had been hanging above them the whole time.
On his horn, the young dragon Gopu reared up and let out a tiny, fierce roar of his own, and Kexell rumbled a laugh that shook the crystal towers.
It was over.
The three kings and queens had yielded. The Empire’s reinforcement was wreckage scattered across the storms. The crystal heart of Theravex, and every rich vein in it, belonged to Ananta Regalon now.
Almond stood at the crystal throne, his decks settling quiet, and looked out over a conquered world with three kingdoms kneeling and a frontliner’s monsters wheeling victorious through the sky above.
John drifted down to land beside him, hands still in his pockets, grinning.
"Three planets," John said. "You are getting good at this."
"We are getting good at this," Almond corrected, and almost smiled. He looked up at the falling imperial banner, at the message it sent to every watching power in the middle plane. "Let the Aurelian Empire chew on that. The next world will have heard of this one before we ever arrive."
Below them, the factory began to quiet, its work done. Above them, Kexell spread his wings over a kingdom’s new prize.
Three down. Seven to go.
And the rise of Ananta Regalon did not even slow down.