Novel Full Chapter 1582 Brutal Three-Way Battle
Chapter 1582 Brutal Three-Way Battle
The reinforcements kept coming.
Three more Elvardian columns crested the hills from the north-east in silver-green and black metal, divisions that had been force-marching since dawn. A second Valorian army poured onto the battlefield from the south, twice the size of the first. Ravenshade bannermen recalled from garrison duty across the duchy arrived from the west in a river of steel that had no visible end.
The ground shook beneath millions of boots, and the count was still climbing.
Half a million soldiers. Then more. The number stopped mattering because the earth couldn’t hold it, and armies had begun stacking, rear ranks pressing forward into the killing zone because the columns behind them left nowhere else to go.
…
The eastern edge of the battlefield had become its own war.
The ground around the three Undead Lords was dead. The necrotic pressure rolling off Gorthrax, the Drowned King, and Vozen killed everything organic within their radius. Grass shriveled, roots rotted in the soil, even the smoke thinned where it crossed the boundary. Nothing alive lasted in that zone.
Elisabeth struck from the north.
The Dawn Breaker’s divine radiance burned like a second sun, her weapon carving golden arcs through the horde of corpses that Vozen kept raising from the dead littering the ground. Every swing purified a dozen. Every burst of light sent the lesser undead crumbling to ash. She was purpose-built for this fight, and the Undead Lords knew it.
Gorthrax answered with something worse than corpses.
“[Grasp of the Abyss].”
Dark magic tore from the ancient undead lord’s hand, a wave of pure necrotic force that bent the light around it and drove Elisabeth’s divine barrier back three steps. The barrier held, cracks spidering across the golden surface as the dark energy clawed at it.
Gorthrax had been a sorcerer before he’d been undead, and that capability had only evolved further during his transformation, becoming significantly more deadly.
Millennia of undeath had only sharpened his craft.
The Drowned King flanked wide and a torrent of black ooze burst from the ground at Elisabeth’s feet. She leaped clear. Vozen’s spectral lance missed her by inches.
Kaede crashed into them.
The Fujimori clan’s leader struck like a siege engine, her katana carving through undead and necrotic barriers with the same contempt. She took a corpse’s head at the neck, pirouetted through the falling body, and drove her blade through Vozen’s spectral shield hard enough to crack it. The archlich recoiled. Kaede was already past him, driving for Gorthrax.
The ancient undead lord met her blade on a staff of condensed dark energy and the collision sent sparks of black and white scattering across the dead zone.
“That sword of yours…” Blue fire burned in Gorthrax’s sockets. “It’s speaking to me. I want it.”
The dead zone pulsed, corpses rushing in until Kaede was surrounded.
She carved her way out in four strokes. Each stroke serving the next, each movement building toward the one after it, devastation with a samurai’s precision. Her katana blazed and the corpses fell in pieces around her.
Black Fang had been watching.
When the signal was given by Ragnar, the undead attacked her from behind with zero hesitation or confusion, making it clear that the betrayal had been decided and coordinated with the Covenant.
They’d decided that killing Quinlan was worth the risk, and eliminating his strongest battlefield ally along the way made sense.
But Black Fang wasn’t one to rage blindly, for betrayal was something she’d been dealing with since before she learned to speak.
Making use of Elisabeth’s absolute hatred of the undead, Black Fang withdrew.
She let the Dawn Breaker’s divine fury and Kaede’s aggression crash into the Undead Lords first, and she watched from the smoke at the edges of the engagement where nobody was looking because nobody looks at the empty space between wars. She watched the factions grind each other down. Who overextended. Who left gaps. Where the necrotic zone ended and living ground began. How long Kaede’s recovery window lasted between her fourth and fifth stroke. How many seconds Elisabeth’s back stayed turned after a purge volley.
A coiling serpent doesn’t announce itself. It picks its moment with the patience of a killer that has been butchering life longer than its prey has been alive, and when the moment comes, the strike is already over before the target understands it has begun.
Kaede overextended toward Gorthrax.
Her katana was buried three inches deep in the ancient undead lord’s necrotic barrier, both hands on the hilt, weight committed forward. Her back was open. Her peripheral vision was occupied. Every sense she had was locked on the thing trying to kill her from the front.
Black Fang’s katana was at her throat before Kaede’s eyes registered the movement.
Kaede’s blade came up.
It shouldn’t have. Her weight was in the wrong direction, her eyes hadn’t even finished tracking the purple blur that had materialized at her flank. The deflection that saved her life was a motion her body made without her permission, arriving a fingernail ahead of the venom-coated edge.
The impact sang.
“You again!” Kaede growled.
“What an annoying cursed artifact…” Black Fang murmured, glancing at the weapon in the Fujimori leader’s hand.
“Huh? Cursed?”
Black Fang did not explain, instead making perfect use of every opportunity presented to her.
Elisabeth had just finished purging a wave of Vozen’s raised dead when the venomous katana came for the gap between her cracked pauldrons. The Dawn Breaker’s instincts saved her, divine light flaring to deflect the blade an inch from her neck, but the venom that sprayed from the deflection ate into the golden armor and the hiss of dissolving metal made Elisabeth’s teeth clench.
“You would attack a herald of the Goddess?!”
Black Fang’s gaze was flat. “Yes.”
She’d already attacked an Arch Priestess before, but because of the Goddess and Quinlan trying to negotiate and arriving at a peaceful deal, Black Fang was denied the tantalizing kill she’d been thinking about for hundreds of years. Now, a second preacher was here.
And Quinlan did not seem to be in a negotiating mood.
“You’re a lunatic!” The second princess of Vraven hissed.
Gorthrax raised a hand and darkness pooled between his fingers.
“[Deathmark].”
The spell was instantaneous, hitting Black Fang from the side with intent, not force. A sigil of dark energy branded itself onto her left forearm, burning through her sleeve, and wherever the mark touched, her venom retreated. Necrotic energy consuming her natural defenses the way her venom consumed metal.
Black Fang didn’t even pause.
“[Ouroboros: Shedding].”
Purple light surged along her arm. The venom in her blood rushed to the branded area and consumed the sigil from the inside, dissolving the necrotic mark in a hissing reaction that left her forearm raw and smoking.
The Drowned King charged. His dark sword came down on her, and the impact launched her sideways into Kaede’s path.
“Die already, snake…” Kaede growled, her blade already descending.
Black Fang blocked it on her katana’s edge, being presented with the force of a giant battering ram.
Kaede’s powers, while less refined than hers, were extremely deadly. And what was truly concerning was that with each exchange of theirs, the gap in refinement also lessened, the Fujimori heir learning rapidly in real time at an unnatural rate.
Elisabeth’s divine light clashed with Gorthrax’s darkness in exchanges that cracked the ground and lit the dead zone in alternating gold and black. Kaede and Black Fang traded seven exchanges in a fraction of a second, faster than the soldiers watching could follow. The Drowned King waded through the chaos swinging his sword. Vozen controlled the dead charging in from the sides, buffing them.
Black Fang bled from a gash above her eye, her thigh, arms, stomach, and back. Slowly, she was being chipped away. All of them were, in this brutal three-way engagement.
But even still, between exchanges, her gaze drifted toward the center of the carnage.
She could see him. Through the smoke, through the chaos of a continent collapsing inward.
The Primordial Villain standing on his daughter’s roots with blood running down his face and spectral soldiers rising from the dead at his feet. Two bodies fighting as one. Wind and fire from his broken hands, lightning from the puppet queen beside him. Dwarven elites dying in clusters around him while he fought on a fractured skull and failing mana reserves.
A dwarven captain rallied a wedge of twenty soldiers and charged him head-on. She watched Quinlan stop the wedge with compressed air, watched the atmosphere ignite in the trapped pocket, watched twenty men suffocate and burn in the space of a breath.
Four hundred years of measuring people by their capability for violence, and she had never seen anyone like him.
It was a sight she’d never forget.