Chương 424: Hade - The Weight of Blood

I huddled in the darkened basement of the Opal Crafting Guild, my fingers tightly gripping my trusty kinetic hammer. Beside me, my secondary heart hammered violently against my inner thorax, making my sensory antennae twitch with every violent shockwave that rattled the quartz foundations above. For a girl born on a rust-hued Tier 4 mining planet at the outer edge of our sector, living in Crystal City was supposed to be the absolute pinnacle of existence. I had been the pride of my family clan.

Back home, our world was a desolate wasteland of coarse slag and unrefined iron, where generations of my people lived and died inside subterranean mines. When I won the planetary crafting competition by hand-forging a self-balancing resonant relay, earning a full scholarship to the House of Opal's central academy, my mother had wept tears of joy and couldn't stop talking about it to the colony for a whole week.

I worked endlessly to climb the ranks, pushing my core from Tier 4 up to Sovereignty at Tier 5, where I finally consolidated my Domain: [Communion of Metal]. My skill was unique, a gentle and intuitive power. It allowed me to commune directly with raw, uncompiled materials, sensing their hidden structural will. I could feel which kinetic quartz crystals wanted to be fused together, and which magnetic slates resisted being forged into an array.

I could listen to the subtle harmonics of a metal's lattice, finding atomic alignments that other artisans missed. It was a peaceful art that eventually helped me reach the Sixth Tier of cultivation, securing my place as a respected journeyman artisan in the grand galleries of the Arch-House. I had always believed Crystal City was an unassailable fortress. Everyone did. For my entire adult life, the towering quartz spires and the glowing, gold-pink planetary shield were symbols of absolute, eternal security.

But over the last six hours, that beautiful illusion had been shattered into pieces. The orbital bombardment had been a nightmare of noise and color. Through the reinforced viewport of our subterranean shelter, I had watched in horror as hundreds of massive, slate-black dreadnoughts filled the upper atmosphere. When the city's primary defense grid flickered for the very first time in recorded history, a cold, suffocating terror swept through our guild hall.

The sky groaned under the weight of thousands of blood-red energy lances. We were ordered to quarantine in the subterranean shelters as the outer shields began to buckle, the quartz towers around us ringing like cracked crystal bells. I thought we were going to die, and no matter how many times our escort Knights assured us that the reinforced bunker shielding would hold out, I began to hear others whisper similar thoughts.

The whispers only grew louder and more frantic, as we watched layer after layer of shielding give out. And then, the impossible happened. Without a single warning, one of the massive enemy battle-cruisers in the upper atmosphere simply imploded. It folded in on itself like a crushed piece of scrap foil before erupting into a blinding nova of blue-pink flame. A few seconds later, another ship exploded. Then another. Then five more in rapid succession.

We watched in utter, breathless bewilderment as the terrifying black armada began falling out of the clouds one by one, crashing into the distant hills like burning meteors. The bombardment stopped entirely. Half of the remaining fleet immediately turned around, firing their rear thrusters as they desperately tried to retreat into space. But even as they fled, ships kept bursting into flames across the sky, completely annihilated by an unseen force. Cheers erupted in the shelter.

My sensory antennae relaxed, a wave of resurging confidence washing over me. How could I have ever doubted Crystal City? Our High Lords were simply playing with the invaders! The shield was holding, the enemy fleet was being systematically wiped out, and we were safe! My hope lasted for exactly two minutes. A cold, suffocating pressure suddenly descended over the entire district. It was so thick, so heavy, that the air felt like liquid lead in my lungs.

The temperature in the room dropped instantly, freezing the condensation on the quartz walls into thin sheets of ice. My secondary heart stalled in my chest, and my eyes dilated in immediate terror. A single figure stepped out of the high clouds, floating down toward a shield's outer perimeter. He was a tall, imposing man clad in pitch-black obsidian plate armor, his shoulders draped in a blood-red banner that snapped violently against the atmospheric drag.

The moment he appeared, my soul ability — [Blood-Weight Perception] — flared with a sharp, agonizing heat behind my brow. My ability allowed me to sense the hidden karmic weight of lives a cultivator had ended. To my soul-sense, a peaceful artisan carried no weight at all. A veteran city guard carried a thin, grey haze around their shoulders. But this man... the weight resting on his shoulders was a towering, sickening mountain of blood-red ash and crushed souls.

It was a dark, suffocating fog of screams that stretched for miles behind him, radiating the cold, ruthless presence of a battle-hardened killer who had slaughtered millions without a single second of hesitation. He floated just fifty yards above our neighborhood's outer shield dome, unsheathing a massive, dual-headed battleaxe carved with dark violet runes. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He began to channel his mana.

The sky around him turned pitch black as an astronomical amount of power accumulated in his weapon. The air began to warp, the kinetic pressure alone cracking the quartz streets outside our shelter. I fell to my knees, clutching my head as my sensory antennae bled from the sheer, overwhelming pressure of his wind-up. He was preparing a strike designed to obliterate our entire district in a single, catastrophic blow. Higher and higher the mana stacked, reaching a terrifying, continent-crushing peak.

The shield beneath him groaned, its gold-pink light turning pale under the sheer weight of his pending strike. And then, at the absolute apex of his wind-up, right as he was about to hurl the strike down... the entire mountain of accumulated mana instantly vanished. It didn't explode. It didn't release a shockwave. It simply just… ceased to exist.

One microsecond, the sky was screaming with enough destructive energy to crack a planet's crust; the very next, the air was dead quiet, completely stripped of a single drop of active mana. I blinked my optical lenses in utter confusion. Through the shield, I could see the Ascendant Warlord freeze in mid-air, his arms raised with his axe, his glowing red eyes wide with the exact same shock and bewilderment that I felt.

He stared at his weapon, completely unable to process why his ultimate technique had just been erased from reality. Before he could recover from his confusion, a figure manifested directly behind his back. I tried to look at the newcomer, but my optic nerves resisted. He was wreathed in a strange, shifting veil — an aura that seemed to blur his physical features.

Every time I tried to focus on his face, my brain instantly forgot what he looked like, leaving only the vague, imposing impression of a tall, dark-cloaked shape carrying an absolute, unbending authority. The veiled man didn't cast a flashy spell. He simply stepped inside the Warlord's reach, wrapped his arms around the Tier 10's chest from behind, and pulled him into a tight, brutal embrace.

The moment their armors touched, a localized cage of crushing, black gravity from the newcomer snapped shut around both of them. Light bent backward into a dark event horizon, trapping the Warlord in a sphere of infinite mass. The Warlord roared in panic, his muscles bulging as he tried to channel his physical authority, but the veiled man held him pinned in place like an unyielding mountain, completely locking him in place. Suddenly, a silver-robed woman holding a glowing bow appeared on a nearby roof.

She drew a brilliant, translucent arrow and released it without a second of hesitation. My throat seized in horror. She's going to hit her own ally! The silver arrow ignored flight time entirely, fired through [Final Word]. It left a glittering streak of fractured temporal sparks in its wake, shooting straight through the veiled man's back, passing directly through his chest, and plunging deep into the heart of the Warlord. A blinding, temporal implosion erupted where they stood.

The sky cracked with a loud THUM, a violent shockwave tearing through the upper air and blowing away the dark storm clouds that had shrouded our district. I screamed, expecting to see both men obliterated by the blast. But as the flash of silver light faded, the veiled man was standing completely unbothered, his body whole and undamaged. Before the stunned Warlord could even process the hit, a giant, fifteen-foot-tall lionine man covered in golden scales dropped from the sky like a falling star.

Wielding a massive claymore that glowed like a miniature sun, the golden giant swung his weapon in a horizontal arc that cleaved straight through the remnants of the explosion. The strike was pure, unadulterated physical violence. The sheer kinetic shockwave split the surrounding clouds for miles, the sound of white-gold armor splintering like fragile glass echoing across the city.

The massive claymore sheared through the Warlord's plate mail, severing his entire left shoulder and his right leg in a single, devastating blow. Blood rained down onto the shield as the heavily wounded Ascendant was thrown backward. The Warlord scrambled frantically in mid-air, clutching his bleeding torso as he used his remaining limb to desperately crawl back toward the upper atmosphere, his eyes wild with a primal, hysterical terror.

A Tier 10 Ascendant — a god among cultivators — was fleeing for his life like a beaten dog. He didn't make it. Out of nowhere, a jagged, pitch-black tear opened in the fabric of space directly in front of his fleeing path. The Warlord froze, his face twisting into a look of absolute, unholy horror as something inside the dark rift caught his gaze. He began to scream — a high-pitched, agonizing shriek of pure nightmare that chilled my very blood.

Dozens of shadowy tendrils shot out of the black tear, wrapping around his wounded torso and dragging him violently into the dark. The tear snapped shut with a soft, chime-like sound, leaving the sky completely silent and clear. The entire battle was over in less than twenty seconds. Silence washed over the district, broken only by the hum of our planetary shield.

Sunbeams broke through the scattering clouds, reflecting off the polished quartz spires of Crystal City in brilliant, dazzling displays of gold and violet light. I sat on the cold floor of the shelter, my fingers slowly unclenching from my kinetic hammer. My secondary heart was pounding, but it was no longer from suffocating fear. My sensory antennae perked up, vibrating with a wild, intoxicating rush of adrenaline.

I looked back out the viewport at the veiled man standing quietly on the high terrace, his dark cloak snapping in the warm breeze as he casually adjusted his gloves. Beside him, the silver-robed archer lowered her bow, and the golden-scaled giant let out a booming, triumphant laugh that echoed across the plaza. A sudden, electric wave of hope and exhilaration swept through my chest, chasing away every last trace of terror. The black armada in the sky had been terrifying.

The invaders were monsters who thought they could crush our home and slaughter our people without consequence. But as I looked at our defenders — at these terrifying, unyielding warriors who handled an Ascendant Warlord like a minor inconvenience — a wide, proud smile spread across my face. My mother had wept when I left our poor mining world, worrying I would be helpless in a galaxy of giants. Crystal City wasn't just a peaceful sanctuary of artisans and scholars.

We had guardians who could rewrite reality, bend gravity, and drag gods into the dark. The invaders had come expecting an easy slaughter, but they had walked directly into an ambush. I stood up, holding my kinetic hammer high, and joined the deafening cheers echoing across the city. We were going to win.