Novel Full Chapter 1537 Good Luck
Chapter 1537 Good Luck
General Maren Ravenshade, distant relative of Duke Tharion Ravenshade and his two sisters, Queen Morgana Ravenshade and Adamantite adventurer Lilith Ravenshade, pulled his blade out of the dwarven officer’s throat and let the body drop.
Blood covered his gauntlets up to the forearm. The elven rogue who’d tried to flank him during the kill lay three paces behind, her head separated from her shoulders by a backswing she’d never seen coming. Her body was still twitching, fingers curling around a dagger that would never find its mark.
General Maren wiped his blade on the dead dwarf’s beard and barked at his lieutenant. “Push through! Their line’s buckling on the left! Get the third company into that gap before they reinforce!”
His regiment surged forward. Six hundred Ravenshade veterans who’d been grinding through Elvardian trenches for hours, bloody and tired and winning. The dwarven position ahead was crumbling, their engineers pulling back toward a secondary line they wouldn’t finish digging in time.
Then the voice came from above.
“[Awaken].”
A single word, spoken with the ease of someone calling servants to set a table. It rolled across the battlefield and cut through the noise of ten thousand men killing each other like it belonged to a different world entirely.
The air beside his regiment split open.
Hundreds of figures materialized in the space between one heartbeat and the next, filling the trampled ground to his right in tight ranks. Blue-skinned men and women, armored and armed, their eyes carrying an unnatural, spectral glow that had nothing to do with magic enchantments and everything to do with what they were.
General Maren’s gut clenched. He’d read the intelligence briefings. Every officer in Ravenshade’s army had. The Primordial Villain’s undead were different from the Covenant’s shambling hordes – these were elite combatants who retained their skills from life, enhanced by necrotic energy, and every one of them moved with the fluid discipline of soldiers who had been dangerous long before they died.
The hostile pressure rolling off the closest rank was suffocating, the kind that made his Level 70 instincts scream at him to back away. Seven hundred of them, estimated to be close to Level 70, materialized from thin air right on top of his regiment.
“Army General Scar, lead my armies.”
The voice sounded again.
A woman at the front of the soul formation stepped forward. Blue skin, black mask covering the lower half of her face, spectral hair spilling over armored shoulders, and a pair of glowing eyes that locked onto General Maren’s regiment.
“Yes, Master.”
Her voice was cool and precise. She drew twin blades from her back in a single motion that made no sound.
General Maren looked up.
A figure floated above the battlefield in black armor, suspended against the smoke-stained sky with his arms folded across his chest. No wings, no visible spell platform – he just hung there, nothing visibly keeping him aloft.
Just as the reports suggested he would.
General Maren’s teeth ground together.
‘The Villain.’
He’d hoped the reports were exaggerated. The intelligence packets described a man who could manipulate four elements, summon an army of elite minions. General Maren had dismissed half of it as battlefield hysteria.
The figure above him didn’t look like hysteria.
“His filthy summons can be revived!” General Maren roared at his officers, shoving the fear down where it belonged. “Killing them means nothing if the summoner lives! Mages, target the man in the sky! Archers, covering fire! Infantry holds formation against the ground force! We kill the summoner and they all drop!”
His mages pivoted, staves swinging skyward. Three fire bolts and a concentrated lightning lance erupted toward the floating figure in rapid succession.
The Villain didn’t move.
The fire bolts curved away from him ten meters out, bending in mid-flight as if caught by invisible hands, and the lightning lance simply ceased to exist, its energy dispersing into the air like smoke in a breeze.
‘He took control of them?!’ General Maren realized, and his stomach dropped.
Fire manipulation. The bastard had taken his mages’ own spells and swatted them aside like a man brushing away gnats.
The curved fire bolts came back. They slammed into General Maren’s archer line from behind, detonating in a wash of heat that sent men sprawling and turned two longbowmen into screaming torches.
“Kill me?”
Then the chuckle drifted down from above.
Low, deep, and carrying a genuine amusement that made it worse.
“Good luck.”
The sky lit up.
Magma rained down in blazing chunks, each one trailing fire and molten rock as they arced across the battlefield in a shower that turned the ground into a cratered hellscape. The first impacts hit the rear of General Maren’s formation, and soldiers who had survived hours of trench warfare were crushed under burning stone before they could raise their shields.
“Defensive fields! NOW!” General Maren screamed.
His war-mages threw up arcane barriers, and three of the magma chunks shattered against them in explosions of heat and debris. A fourth punched through a weakened field and took the mage sustaining it along with everyone within five meters.
On the ground, Scar moved.
General Maren barely tracked her. One moment she was standing at the head of the soul formation, the next she was inside his front line, twin blades opening throats with a speed that made his best soldiers look like they were fighting underwater. Two veterans lunged at her simultaneously and she ended them both without breaking stride, one blade across a throat, the other punched through a breastplate, and she was already past them before the bodies started falling.
‘Hells,’ a traitorous corner of his brain observed through the chaos, ‘she’s gorgeous. A dead woman is…’
He crushed the thought and charged.
His blade met hers with a crash. Up close, her glowing eyes were steady and utterly without mercy behind that black mask.
“All units! Target the summoner!” General Maren bellowed over his shoulder as he traded blows with the soul commander, each exchange faster and harder than the last. He was stronger than her. But she wasn’t relying on Strength alone, or even Agility.
She relied on speed, yes, but her true power came from her expertise – and the reckless abandon with which she fought. “Concentrate fire on the sky! I said, ignore the ground force!” Maren shouted while deflecting.
A second volley of spells streaked skyward. Water lances, stone projectiles, a wind blade sharp enough to split steel.
The Villain caught the water lances and froze them solid, then hurled the ice shards back down like javelins. The stone projectiles he broke apart into dust before they even hit him. The wind blade he simply dissolved, pulling the air apart with a flick of his wrist.
Greater elemental mastery. Every element General Maren’s mages threw at him, the Villain controlled better than they did.
Scar pressed relentlessly. General Maren caught a slash meant for his throat on his vambrace and kicked her back, buying a half-second of space. His soldiers were dying around him. The soul army fought with coordinated brutality, each one covering the next, and the ones his men did manage to cut down simply reformed seconds later.
And the worst of it all…
The fallen soldiers joined the enemy.
Men and women these veterans knew for centuries suddenly took up arms against them with cold, emotionless eyes.
The psychological warfare of fighting the Primordial Villain was immensely crippling. As evidenced by what happened inside Whisperfield, Quinlan had reached a level where simply throwing bodies at him did no good.
It wasn’t even enough to stall him in a significant manner. All it really did was bolster the Villain’s forces while grinding his enemies’ morale into the dirt.
Above, the Villain raised one hand, and lightning fell.
Not a single bolt. A cascade, branching and splitting across a fifty-meter stretch of General Maren’s formation, and the screaming that followed was the worst sound he’d heard in six centuries of war.
“Your soldiers are brave and competent,” Scar spoke up. “But my soldiers are far better. We will never allow our Master to be harmed.”
At once, hundreds of spectral lips parted and spoke for the first time since materializing.
Or rather, screamed in a unified battle cry, echoing the words of their field general.
“NEVER!”
Lightning struck again. More magma fell. Maren’s mages were burning through their reserves trying to hold the defensive fields and failing. The soul army was grinding through his infantry.
General Maren looked up at the figure in the sky, wreathed in elemental fury, and understood with the clarity of a man who had been fighting his entire life that the rumors were brutally underselling the danger that creature posed.
Not just for the future of Ravenshade, but the whole nation itself.