The Sword of the War God
The Sword of the War God
Shouts and war cries tore through the air. Where steel ground against steel, life ground against death.
"Hold the line! Maintain formation!"
"Hold the front— hold— gahk!"
"The sergeant's down! Fill the gap!"
Where one life ended, a dozen deaths took root, and in their wake, rage spread. Yet the void where terror should have been was filled not with fear but with raw duty. The soldiers moved blindly.
They stared ahead, at the immediate threat, and thrust their blades.
A Warrior Monk swung an axe. A soldier parried the lethal swing and lost an arm, but drove his spear through the Monk's eye.
The blinded Monk, thrashing in fury, sank his axe into the soldier's waist, but the soldier clamped onto the Monk's ankle. In that instant, another infantryman brought a halberd down on the Warrior Monk's nape, severing it.
That was the shape of the battle.
No one could seize control, despite the stark difference in numbers.
A single Warrior Monk was the equal of a champion of legend. To bring one down, men had to sacrifice their lives and exploit whatever numerical advantage they could scrape together, swarming the Monk like hunters cornering a wolf.
For every Warrior Monk slain, five soldiers died—a grim equation, but accepted. In truth, the calculus was considered generous. By the cold logic of war, it was a favorable attrition rate.
It was a strategy they had no choice but to cling to, even knowing it meant death.
Ordinary soldiers could achieve nothing beyond this.
The variables that could sway this battlefield were not footmen.
The world called those who possessed such power Masters.
And among those Masters, two here reaped the greatest harvest of death.
"Surround her, don't fight one by one! Everyone at once—!"
A sizzling hiss—the sound of flesh scorching inside an exoskeleton.
An axe haft whipped around her waist. The blade, blazing with lethal intent, split a Warrior Monk's throat and waist in turn. In response, the surrounding Monks tightened their grip on their weapons and lunged.
"Haaah..."
A woman exhaled a searing breath. Her rose-gold eyes, kindled by the joy of slaughter, spilled flame as she swung her axe without a shred of mercy—a saint wreathed in fire.
The Saintess of Slaughter, Ereta.
She pivoted her body, swinging her axe in relentless arcs. The weapon swept around her waist and split a skull diagonally. Crossing both arms, she brought the blade down in a devastating vertical chop. The Monk whose head had just been cleaved crumpled. She rotated her entire frame, arms already shifting back to uncross the blow.
Shhhk-schkk!
Multiple strikes in a single breath. A cascade of superheated attacks.
The Warrior Monks caught in the onslaught died without so much as a token resistance, and with each death, the heat radiating from Ereta intensified.
It was the result of the Bijo's valor fused with divinity. Her slaughter became more potent the more she killed, and her divine power surged with greater heat and regeneration.
Clumsy attacks could not touch her. Ereta, so long as her divinity held, was the Saintess of Slaughter—the fiery vanguard who could not die.
Warrior Monks dropped their weapons against the billowing flames. Weakening, burning, they died at an accelerating pace.
In contrast to Ereta and her blazing halo, Fay's slaughter was utterly unassuming.
In a chaotic melee, death comes from every direction. No matter how keen the sightlines, it's impossible to guard them all.
The moment a Warrior Monk tangled with soldiers and let its guard down, even for an instant—that dispassionate, humble killing intent would flash into existence and tear out a throat.
"Gurk—"
A Warrior Monk's head tumbled to the ground. It happened in the split second the Monk parried a soldier's spear. The body had not yet collapsed to its knees before Fay had already vanished again, melding into the spaces between soldier and Monk.
With razor-keen senses, she identified the precise spot where a single strike could subdue. With prodigious leaps, she reached that spot in an instant. She slipped into the blind spots of consciousness with a stealth so absolute it felt like she had never existed at all.
And once inside, she delivered the simplest, most lethal attack.
Fay departed the scene faster than the headless Monks could fall. Alongside Ereta, she was the second butcher shaping this battlefield.
Yet even with these slayers tearing through the enemy ranks, the front remained locked in stalemate. Soldiers were dying too quickly. The Warrior Monks still numbered too many. And the Sword of the War God remained intact.
Put simply, they lacked firepower.
They needed a variable.
And right on cue, that variable crashed into the battlefield.
"Cavalry!"
A Warrior Monk's cry rang out as horsemen slammed into their flank.
Lances, longer and thicker than any seen on Earth, punched through the Monks' flanks. Long-hafted maces crushed the skulls of those caught off guard. As the Warrior Monks scrambled back, leaving a gap in their lines, a single figure led the butchery at the very vanguard.
Rumel.
"Hyaaat!"
With a fierce kiai, she whirled and thrust her twin spears. Every time the golden spear, crackling with lightning, burrowed into a Warrior Monk's body, another soul departed for the War God's side. Every time the White Iron Spear swung, Warrior Monks lost weapons, limbs, and their nerve, retreating behind their comrades.
This was the product of the warhorse Aslan had once ridden and enhanced, two spears, an innate survival instinct, and spearmanship that bordered on the divine.
Warrior Monks who tried to catch Rumel with a sudden ambush suffered Anton's precise retribution.
Twang. Twang. Twang. The snap of crossbow strings heralded the short, sharp incantations that followed. Bolts exploded, ignited, and swelled within the punctured flesh before detonating. The Warrior Monks could not push Rumel and the cavalry back.
Yet even as dead cavalrymen cartwheeled across the ground, the Sword of the War God attempted again and again to reverse the tide.
One lash of its tail. One sweep of its sword. The sheer mass of its body was enough. If it could leverage that colossal form, the battlefield would become a slaughterhouse.
But it couldn't.
Because the very instant it tried, a sniper's bolt would seek it out.
Someone stood naked atop the ramparts, planting arrows into the stone at their feet, raining down merciless sniper fire—a being focused solely on the Sword of the War God, denying it any room to maneuver.
The Sword of the War God's only means of battlefield intervention was its centipede-like lower half. It twisted its body, preparing to unleash the same attack that had shattered the fortress walls once before.
"Angie!"
But Aslan and Angie were already there.
A short name called out. A flicker of a glance. A body launching forward.
With that single clue, Angie grasped Aslan's intent. She snatched a hammer from the corpse of a fallen Monk and closed the distance.
Rumble-crack-crack!
The tail curled as the massive body turned, the appendages at its tip writhing as they readied an attack. Following the unique tremor of the massive body, Aslan threw himself into the path of the tail's arc.
He accelerated. The human eye could not track him. The moment he engaged his speed, Aslan shut his eyes and raised Purity before him.
The tail lashed in. A trajectory he felt only through Luck. He angled his body, blocking the path with Purity.
And just before impact, Aslan brought Purity to a halt and parried.
The appendages of the Myth Killer—organs that were both arms and legs—collided with Purity. The weapons they grasped were sliced through. The appendages were sliced through. The tail itself slammed against Purity.
As bodily fluids sprayed into the air, Angie, her high agility allowing her to track the blast, swung her hammer with all her might.
KRAK-A-BOOOOM!
Like a slugger putting her hips into a swing, the impact buckled the tail upward. The Sword of the War God shrieked, its body contorting. In that contortion came a downward slash. A reckless strike from a humanoid shape that cast a shadow of death.
A stroke bordering on the absolute end.
Aslan met that shadow with Purity.
—!
A shockwave erupted from the clash, shoving aside soldiers and Monks alike, as the two edges screamed against each other with a metallic shriek—skrrrch, skrrrk.
——!
A tearing scream. The Sword of the War God twisted its entire frame, trying to smother Aslan under its centipede lower half.
Dozens of trajectories cut through the air, trailing sonic booms.
Aslan refused to move, keeping his blade locked against the enemy's. He trusted his companions.
Twip-twip-twannng!
As if answering that trust, Anton leveled his crossbow and fired.
Two bolts embedded in the ground. A third bolt struck their shafts, bounced, and soared toward the heavens. Anton murmured the incantation.
"INCENDENT."
Mana drained out. Three magics unfurled simultaneously.
Expansion. Explosion. Repulsion.
As the spells activated in sequence, the third quarrel swelled to an enormous size, was forcibly propelled forward, and exploded into motion.
The target was the Sword of the War God. Specifically, the punctured section of its centipede form. Where its vocal cords had been.
Crunch-crack-crunch!
The gigantic bolt punched straight through the exact spot. The Sword of the War God twisted and reeled back. The dozens of killing arcs descending upon Aslan vanished.
"Damn."
The immediate crisis was averted.
But Aslan's expression was grim.
The soldiers were still burning through their numbers at a catastrophic rate. Men caught in the tail, men killed by the shockwave, men who stumbled and were cut down by Warrior Monks in that fleeting moment of vulnerability.
If the infantry's role was to occupy the Warrior Monks, then the role of Aslan and the Masters accompanying him was to kill the Sword of the War God.
As the lynchpin of that effort, Aslan could see the writing on the wall: at this rate, defeat was certain.
They had to use the fortress and the combined strength of the Masters to bring the Sword of the War God down—faster. If they failed, the soldiers would be massacred. Then the party would be picked off, one by one.
It was a moment that demanded a drastic choice.
Aslan raised his head and stared at the Myth Killer, which was in the midst of swatting magic and ballista bolts from the fortress out of the air with its sword.
That thing was wary of Purity right now.
It would have recognized the impossible cutting power and the divinity of the Ancient God.
Even if it was merely a Lesser Deity, it had personally buried many Ancient Gods. It had no choice but to know.
That was precisely what Aslan was counting on.