Chương 425: Counter-Assault

The sky above Crystal City was no longer a one-sided firing range. With fifty of their primary dreadnoughts already burning on the horizon from my [Echo] detonations, the Mercenary Arch-House of Blood-Slate was forced to abandon their patient, long-range siege. The remaining mercenary fleet dropped lower into the atmosphere, venting thousands of armored drop-pods and gunships to initiate an immediate, full-scale ground assault before their entire armada was annihilated in orbit.

Syntheia had been waiting for this exact moment.

"Activate the Chrono-Mirrors," Syntheia commanded into her family's command-lattice, her voice ringing across the royal balcony with absolute, unyielding authority.

"Open the dilation bastions!" The House of Opal was not a fragile merchant guild; they were an ancient, pre-Shattering Arch-House that had survived eons of galactic turmoil. The moment the enemy drop-pods breached the lower clouds, the city's defensive architecture transformed. Dozens of towering quartz spires along the outer perimeter split open, revealing massive, ancient defense turrets carved from polished magnetic slate.

These were no ordinary mana cannons, using a time-dilation technique to speed the wind up, catching the dreadnoughts by surprise. When the turrets fired, they released roaring, translucent beams of gold-pink temporal energy. As the beams struck the descending mercenary drop-pods, the local time-dilation around the ships was suddenly accelerated by a factor of ten thousand.

The metallic hulls of the enemy transports aged, rusted, and structurally decayed in a fraction of a second, collapsing into clouds of inert iron dust mid-air before their soldiers could even step onto the drop-ramps. Simultaneously, the Knights of Opal — thousands of heavily armored Crystalline soldiers clad in gold-and-pink quartz plate — poured out of the city bastions.

"Forward!" Syntheia raised her hand, her time-affinity expanding across the entire front line. She wove a massive, city-wide temporal acceleration loop over her army, increasing the movement and casting speed of her knights by a hundred percent. The counter-assault was swift, organized, and terrifyingly efficient. I stepped off the balcony, my cloak snapping in the wind as I descended into the center of the battlefield alongside my cohort.

My star-cores spun in a silent, high-density tempo, my [Domain of the Ashen] super-imposing its unyielding gravity over the primary plaza. Beside me, Crys unleashed her full Ascendant power. Her Crystalline Vibration technique resonated with the surrounding quartz spires, causing her white-gold scales to glow with a brilliant, blinding irradiance. She unraveled her [Obsidian Ribbon], the long, dark silk-like spatial conduit dancing around her arms like a striking viper.

With a single gesture, she manipulated the local gravity-strings, creating dozens of frictionless gravity-slopes that threw an entire regiment of Tier 8 mercenary vanguard off balance, sending them sliding directly into the path of the Opal Knights' lance charges.

"Mother, I'll hold the eastern flank!" Crys shouted, her voice ringing with the proud, confident authority of a true noble.

"I am right beside you!" Syntheia replied, her temporal deceleration loops freezing enemy squad leaders mid-stride, rendering them completely helpless against Crys' gravity strikes. To our left, my cohort turned the western plaza into a meat grinder. Anna stood atop a collapsed quartz archway, her Mythic bow, [Final Word], glowing with a sharp, silver radiance. She released continuous, instant-hit temporal arrows that landed before her bowstring even returned to stasis.

Every arrow she released found the throat or soul gate of a Tier 9 mercenary officer, dropping them before they could activate their defensive barriers. Rexxar, fully expanded into his fifteen-foot-tall [Density Giant] form, was a mountain of gold-scaled muscle and nuclear-dense kinetic power. He swung his massive Event Horizon claymore in wide, sweeping arcs, the kinetic shockwaves from his strikes shattering the slate pavement and flattening entire squads of enemy heavy infantry in single blows.

Beside him, Nyx moved like a phantom, deploying a dozen high-density shadow-clones through her [Lattice-Clones] technique. The clones were conceptually so identical to her true body that the enemy Ascendants couldn't distinguish between them, their injuries being accumulated by her shadow-blades before they could even locate her true coordinates. The battle was a glorious, chaotic symphony of violence, but my optical arrays remained focused on the sky.

Floating two thousand feet above the central plaza was the second Tier 10 Ascendant Commander of the Blood-Slate mercenaries. The first one was caught by surprise from a powerful charged up arrow by Anna that targeted his Soul, but the second seemed a lot more calculated. He was a hulking, battle-scarred warlord clad in dark obsidian plate armor, holding a massive, double-headed war-hammer wreathed in dark-red entropic lightning.

He watched his troops being slaughtered on the ground, his face twisted into a look of absolute, rage-filled madness.

"You there!" the Tier 10 Warlord roared, his voice shaking the quartz foundations of the entire district.

"You dare interfere in the business of the Sunless Order? I will crush your soul gate into ash!" Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The Warlord descended like a falling mountain, unleashing his Inner World to overwrite reality. The world around us transformed into a jagged, apocalyptic wasteland of floating iron mountains and rivers of boiling, metallic blood.

A crushing, ten-thousand-atmosphere pressure slammed down on my coordinates, designed to flatten my physical frame and lock my mana conduits. I didn't blink. I pulled the [Crown of Pride] into reality, my star-cores flaring with absolute, starless authority. My inner continent super-imposed itself directly over his apocalyptic wasteland. Basalt pillars and gravity-wells erupted through his rivers of blood, my unyielding neutron-heavy density grinding his domain's conceptual rules to dust.

I used [Void Emperor's Omnipresence] to translate my physical body directly into his guard. My [Micro-Glimpse] activated, projecting a series of amethyst silhouettes in my vision that showed his next ten seconds of movement. He was preparing to swing his war-hammer in a sweeping, red-lightning arc aimed at my midsection, followed by a localized spatial-shatter. I stepped inside his reach before his arm could even complete its wind-up.

I activated my [Primordial Shell], my muscle fibers and bone density locking into an absolute, zero-friction stasis. I brought my gauntleted right palm straight into his chest-plate, channeling a concentrated wave of my Leaden Titan's gravity. The obsidian armor caved inward with a sickening metallic crunch. The Tier 10 Warlord choked on his own blood as a planetary weight slammed directly into his central core, forcibly halting its rotation and shattering his domain.

He staggered backward, his eyes wide with horror as he realized his power was completely useless against my physical density.

"You would already be dead had I not needed you alive," I said coldly, stepping forward to clamp my gauntlet around his throat, preparing to apply [Syntropy] to deny his mana and drag him through a Void-rift back to Bir-Z's holding cells. But as my gauntlet touched his skin, my [Lattice Perception] flagged a catastrophic, sudden anomaly within his soul gate. The Warlord let out a bloody, hysterical laugh, his eyes turning a solid, milky white.

"You think you can capture me like the others? You think the High Courts permit their commanders to be interrogated by a monster?" The Warlord hadn't just used mana; he had voluntarily ignited his entire soul gate, converting his central star-core, his memories, and his physical body into a volatile, planet-cracking blood-bomb designed to erase everything within a five-mile radius on contact.

"Eren, get out of there!" Anna's voice screamed through our soul-link. The self-detonation was instantaneous. There was no wind-up, no delay, and no warning from my temporal slide. The Warlord's chest exploded outward in a blinding, crimson nova of pure, entropic destruction that threatened to vaporize the entire central plaza. I didn't have time to dodge. In a fraction of a millisecond, I wove a desperate, emergency pulse of my [Domain] within the Lattice.

I flatly denied the timeline of the explosion, forcing the crimson blast wave to delay its expansion by a fraction of a second. In that microscopic window of bought time, I activated [Void Emperor's Omnipresence], collapsing my physical coordinates and stepping straight into the uncompiled safety of the fourth Void Layer. The self-detonation erupted in the physical world. Even inside the fourth Void Layer, the sheer, violent shockwave of a Tier 10 soul-sacrifice slammed against my uncompiled shroud.

The conceptual pressure tore through my outer [Primordial Shell], sending a wave of fiery turbulence through my internal star-cores. I coughed up a mouthful of dark, Voidflame-tinged blood as the feedback rattled my soul gate. A second later, I stepped back out of the fourth Void Layer, landing on the scorched basalt of the physical world. The cleared, central plaza was a crater of smoking, melted slate.

The Tier 10 Warlord was completely gone, his body and soul gate erased down to the atomic level by his own ritual. I wiped the blood from my chin, my star-cores slowly re-stabilizing under the soothing pulse of my internal [Void-Battery].

"Eren!" Crys and Anna sprinted to my side, their faces pale with worry.

"I'm fine," I said, my voice raspy but steady.

"Just a little soul turbulence. The coward blew himself up to avoid being captured." We looked up at the sky. The battle was officially over. With both of their Tier 10 commanders dead and their primary dreadnoughts destroyed, the surviving remnants of the Blood-Slate mercenary fleet were in complete, frantic retreat. Dozens of damaged gunships were desperately firing their thrusters, fleeing into the upper atmosphere to escape the Sector.

Syntheia stepped onto the crater's edge, her silver-and-opal robes slightly dusty, but her demeanor entirely victorious. Behind her, the Knights of Opal were already clearing the plaza, securing prisoners and establishing defensive perimeters.

"The remaining ships are fleeing into space," Syntheia reported, looking up at the retreating fleet.

"My orbital frigates are already in pursuit. They will not escape this sector alive."

"Good," I nodded, adjusting my cloak as my [Syntropy] slowly repaired the minor damage to my internal conduits.

"The threat to Crystal City is neutralized for now." Syntheia let out a long, quiet breath, her eyes softening as she looked at her daughter, then at the horizon toward the deep, shimmering spires of the grand continent.

"It is time," Syntheia said softly, her tone suddenly shifting into something heavy, distant, and deeply hesitant.

"Now that our city is secure, I must go check on my father... and… talk." I looked at Syntheia, my analytical mind immediately picking up on the strange, subtle change in her demeanor. When we had discussed her father earlier, she had spoken of him with absolute, unwavering confidence in his combat power. But now that the immediate battle was over, her posture seemed guarded, almost reluctant. There was a faint, hidden anxiety in her eyes that had nothing to do with the Blood-Slate mercenaries or the High Courts.

Why would an Arch-Regent who had ruled House Opal for millennia feel so hesitant to meet her own father? What kind of man was the ancient Patriarch of Opal? I kept the thought in mind, not pushing her for answers while her people were still clearing the wounded from the plaza.

"We're coming with you," I said quietly, looking at Crys, then back at Syntheia.

"If four Tier 10 Warlords were sent after him, the fight over there might not be completely over." Syntheia looked at me, giving a slow, solemn nod. I turned toward the Spire gate, my eyes flashing with a starless black fire as we prepared to cross the threshold toward the Patriarch's ancient domain.