Novel Full Chapter 302 - 302: The Valley of Ash
The royal guard scrambled to form a defensive phalanx. They locked their shields together and leveled a wall of spears toward the descending warrior.
Kronos hit the basin floor and refused to slow down. He lowered his shoulder and crashed directly into the center of the phalanx.
The collision sounded like a collapsing iron forge. Steel shields buckled inward under the crushing force of his star-iron plating. Wooden spear shafts snapped into splinters upon impact. The frontline defenders were launched backward into the air, crashing into their own ranks to leave a gaping hole in the formation.
"Hold the line!" a captain screamed, frantically waving his sword to rally the scattered troops.
Kronos didn't give them a chance to recover. He stepped into the breach and swung his broadsword in a horizontal arc.
The blade sheared cleanly through armor and bone, dropping three guards into the ash. He ripped the weapon free and brought it down on the captain's helmet, driving the man straight into the dirt.
Without the suffocating protection of their psychic fog, the soldiers were nothing but ordinary men trying to stop a walking battering ram.
They jabbed their remaining spears at his chest. The steel tips sparked harmlessly against the star-iron plating. Kronos grabbed the nearest spear shaft with his bare hand, yanked the soldier forward, and drove his armored knee straight into the man's ribs.
He carved a bloody path through the cratered valley. He stepped over the fallen while deflecting incoming arrows with the flat of his blade.
The Vanguard infantry poured down the slopes behind him, but they barely needed to raise their weapons. Kronos left nothing but broken bodies in his wake.
The skirmish ended as quickly as it began. The surviving guards dropped their weapons and fled toward the safety of the city walls.
Kronos finally slowed his pace as he reached the towering gates of the Morval capital. He stopped exactly ten paces from the entrance. He flicked his broadsword downward to clear the blood from the edge and turned around to face the valley.
A clear corridor of slaughtered defenders stretched all the way back to the cliff base.
Krug strolled down the cleared path, his boots crunching lightly over the broken shields. He surveyed the carnage and nodded once as he stopped beside Kronos.
"Your armor holds up well," Krug noted, looking up at the sealed iron gates. "Shall we knock?"
Krug shifted his grip on his greataxe. He concentrated a localized gravity field into the weapon's socket, compounding the iron's weight until the air around the blade audibly hummed.
He stepped forward and swung the axe directly into the central seam of the towering gates.
The sheer force buckled the steel crossbeams and tore the hinges completely out of the stone archway. The twisted metal doors crashed backward into the courtyard, crushing a dozen retreating guards beneath the heavy rubble.
Krug stepped over the ruined metal and pointed his weapon down the main thoroughfare. "Leave no one standing."
The Vanguard infantry flooded through the breach, their iron boots drumming a relentless rhythm against the cobblestones. With the psychic fog digested by Glitch and the valley defenses shattered, the remaining Morval city garrison scrambled to organize a desperate resistance within the streets.
Soldiers dragged overturned wooden market carts across the roads to form makeshift barricades. They huddled behind the splintering wood, firing crossbows and raising long spears at the invaders.
The Vanguard did not break stride. The front line seamlessly raised their interlocking shields to deflect the incoming bolts, while the second rank aimed their pneumatic bolt-throwers directly over the shield wall.
A synchronized chorus of mechanical thuds echoed down the avenue. Steel spikes punched straight through the wooden carts and the men hiding behind them, dropping the defenders into the gutters.
The infantry marched over the makeshift barricades, executing any surviving guards with precise, methodical thrusts of their short swords.
Kronos walked beside Krug through the center of the carnage. He kept his broadsword drawn, deflecting a desperate spear thrust from a flanking soldier before driving his armored gauntlet into the attacker's face.
"They relied entirely on the God of Valleys to fight their battles," Kronos noted, stepping over a bleeding guardsman. "Stripped of their domain, they fight like uncoordinated militia."
"Hunger and fear are universal," Krug replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the towering structure at the end of the avenue. "The Bastion burned those flaws out of my soldiers. These men never stood a chance against us."
Alchemical fire from the initial artillery bombardment continued to spread across the outer walls, raining gray ash down onto the streets.
Krug and Kronos ignored the burning buildings and the screaming civilians fleeing into the alleyways. They marched straight up the marble steps of the royal palace, flanked by a squad of Vanguard elites.
The carved oak doors of the inner sanctum were bolted shut from the inside. Krug did not bother raising his axe. He inverted the gravity field holding the heavy wooden barricade together and delivered a swift kick to the center panel.
The doors exploded inward into a shower of splinters and sheared iron bolts. Krug and Kronos stepped through the ruined archway, their boots leaving bloody footprints on the polished marble floor as they entered the sprawling throne room.
The throne room was a cavernous hall of polished black marble and towering stained-glass windows. At the far end, raised on a dais of silver and bone, stood three empty thrones.
Before them stood the three Morval Kings.
They wore identical deep crimson robes, though the luxurious silk was now dusted with gray ash drifting in from the breached roof. Their faces, previously obscured by the terrifying illusions of their domain, were fully exposed as pale, drawn, and slick with panicked sweat.
As Krug and Kronos marched down the central aisle, the three kings raised their hands in perfect synchronization. Their eyes rolled back, glowing with a faint, sickly red light.
They chanted a layered, discordant incantation designed to flay the minds of the intruders, a localized psychic strike meant to liquefy Krug's frontal lobe.