Chương 141: The Molten Steel Coffin

The loss of three full elite infantry companies and the annihilation of the Tempest Unit's wind mages within a matter of minutes was undeniably a crushing and humiliating blow to any military commander. Any other general would have ordered an immediate withdrawal to reassess the situation and tend to the wounds, but General Vargas was no ordinary commander. He was a man forged from the Empire's pride and its cruelty. He did not flinch, and he did not retreat.

He knew with absolute certainty that pulling back before forest ambushes meant the end of his military career, and possibly his execution on charges of treason or failure. More critically, Vargas still held a terrifying trump card in his arsenal, a heavy strategic asset not normally deployed except to bring down the walls of impregnable fortresses and shatter the gates of great cities. It was never meant for forest warfare, but arrogance and desperation drove him to reach for it.

"Release the earthquake beasts," Vargas said in a rough, cold voice resembling the roar of crumbling boulders, watching the smoke rising from the burning valley.

"Since they love hiding behind their cursed trees, let the beasts crush the forest with everyone in it. I don't want to see a single tree trunk left standing." The earth mages under his command responded immediately, pumping colossal quantities of mana into the ground before the camp. The earth cracked open slowly, producing violent localized tremors, and thick dust rose to blot out the morning sun. And from the depths of those artificially opened fissures, the terrifying Earth Dragon Battalion emerged.

These creatures were not the legendary winged dragons that breathe fire, they were crawling beasts, massive and primordial, resembling a horrifying hybrid between giant desert lizards and rhinoceroses, but scaled to the size of enormous siege tanks. They were covered entirely in thick, interlocking brown stone scales that no steel could pierce and no lance could scratch.

Their eyes were small and red, oozing pure stupidity and raw savagery, and from their wide nostrils they exhaled a hot steam that accompanied their every heavy breath. Riding these beasts were not ordinary men, they were from the bloodline of the Tamed Mountain Giants: men exceeding two and a half meters in height, with muscles wound tight as oak trunks. They carried no slender swords or breakable lances.

They carried massive war hammers, their heads cast from lead and steel, weapons designed for one purpose only: to crush and to destroy. These were the Empire's Human Bulldozers. Fifty full units of Earth Dragon riders advanced in a densely packed lateral line. They did not bother searching for paths or safe passages between the trees, they made their own.

The enormous beasts drove forward and struck the colossal, centuries-old trees with their armored heads, producing thunderous cracks of splitting wood, uprooting the trees from their deep roots as though they were nothing more than weeds. Their heavy feet trampled the charred corpses and armor remnants in the valley without stopping, grinding them into a paste of blood and metal in the mud. The real problem was not their size alone, it was their resistance.

The black arrows of the dark elves, and even the explosive Phoenix Arrows that had caused such slaughter a short while ago, snapped and scattered into fragments the instant they made contact with the stone scales of the beasts. These creatures, by virtue of their earthen nature, possessed a natural and extraordinary magical resistance against any magic of B-rank and below, making the minor phoenix detonations look like nothing more than irritating fireworks slapping against their hides.

"Damn it! They're destroying the first and second defensive lines completely!" Okonnor, the dark elf field commander, bellowed from his elevated branch position, his eyes widening in terror as he watched great trees that had lived for centuries topple like matchsticks beneath the force of this savage assault.

"Fall back to the third defensive line! Our arrows and traps have no effect on these moving mountains!" From his elevated strategic position, Dex Williams pressed his brows together in intense concentration. His analytical mind was calculating speed and distance. If these giants and their beasts continued their destruction at this rate, they would pierce through the forest and reach the outer roots of the sacred World Tree in under an hour. There was no time to lay new traps or devise complex enchantments.

"Lumia, take command of the elves from here, direct them to secure the flanks and prevent any Imperial infantry from slipping through behind these giants," Dex said in a decisive tone that brooked no argument, stripping off his black leather cloak and tossing it aside to reduce air resistance.

"These armored idiots require a very physical and very personal approach." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Without waiting for a response, Dex leaped from the tree branch, more than a hundred meters above the blazing ground below. In the middle of the free fall, the air shrieking in his ears like a cyclone, Dex roared, channeling a massive portion of his core energy: [Phoenix Wings]!

In a breathtaking explosion of light and heat, blazing orange and golden fire erupted from his back, taking rapid shape as the enormous wings of a bird, constructed from pure fire energy. These wings were not built for sustained flight. Dex used them as aerodynamic brakes. With a powerful beat of his two fiery wings, he slowed his lethal fall and redirected his trajectory in the air with precision, transforming himself into a fire meteor aimed at the ground with pinpoint accuracy.

Dex did not land on the muddy earth. He landed with a thunderous impact directly on top of the head of the lead Earth Dragon, which occupied the center of the formation. The massive beast shuddered from the force of the direct collision. The giant rider seated in his armored saddle behind the beast's head noticed Dex's presence, snarled with bestial fury, and attempted to raise his enormous hammer to swat this small intruder and crush him like an insect.

But Dex, with the agility of a prisoner accustomed to close-quarters combat in narrow cells, was far faster. Dex wasted no energy attacking the stone beast itself. The beast, despite its immensity, was nothing but a tool, a mindless animal driven by its rider's enchanted whip. The true and logical target was the driver.

Dex deployed an entirely new skill, one he had not learned from any spell-book in this world, but had developed by fusing his deep understanding of the properties of metals and thermal physics from his previous earthly world with the power of the phoenix bloodline: [Molten Touch]. Rather than launching a wide-area fire enchantment that might dissipate in the air or be deflected by the armor, Dex concentrated every unit of fire mana available to him into the palm of his right hand alone.

He compressed the mana with extreme intensity, not to generate an external explosion, but to generate a concentrated, sealed thermal focal point exceeding 3, 000 degrees Celsius at a single contact area no larger than the palm of a hand.

"Let's see how your thick steel armor protects you from the laws of thermodynamics now," Dex whispered with lethal calm, slipping beneath the arc of the enormous hammer and pressing his right palm, blazing with a blue-white incandescence, directly onto the chest plate of the giant rider's armor. Dex made no attempt to pierce the armor or shatter it by brute force. The steel plate was thick and enchanted to repel powerful physical strikes, but in the end, beneath all that magic, it remained metal.

And steel, under the fundamental laws of physics that no magic can repeal, is an excellent and rapid conductor of heat. The moment Dex's palm made contact with the armor's surface, the superhuman heat, exceeding the boiling point of metals, transferred instantly and at lightning speed through the steel's very molecules. In less than a single second, the rider's thick chest plate, designed to protect him from sword thrusts, transformed from a tool of protection into a sealed, airtight cooking oven.

"AAAAAAH! Gods! AAAAAAH!" The giant rider let out a horrifying scream, a sound that did not belong to any human being, tearing the eardrums of everyone nearby. The man felt his skin boil instantly, the layers of fat and muscle dissolving to fuse with the burning metal of his armor from the inside. His magnificent plate transformed in the blink of an eye into a liquid coffin that cooked him alive in his own juices.

He could not even finish his scream, the giant rider fell dead from the force of the excruciating pain and the neurological thermal shock that stopped his heart, before his huge, roasted body even had a chance to topple from the beast's saddle. With no rider to guide it or restrain it with the enchanted whip, the lead Earth Dragon went berserk.

The beast panicked at the stench of burning human flesh and the sudden heat, and began slamming into the neighboring beasts with its head and armored tail in a fit of pure animal madness. Dex did not stop for a single moment to savor the sight. He used the Phoenix Wings to leap and transfer with the speed of burning lightning from one raging beast to the next. He did not draw his dagger from its scabbard even once. His combat was silent, physical, and terrifying in its simplicity. He only touched the riders.

One swift touch to the steel helmet, and their brains boiled inside their skulls. A heavy touch to the chest plate, and the fluids of their bodies evaporated and their hearts stopped. A flashing touch to the back, and the spine melted. The Earth Dragon riders' commanders, those unstoppable giants, fell like helpless flies, one after another. They did not fall with bloody wounds or severed limbs.

They fell with bodies cooked through and burnt from within, locked inside their gleaming armor that had become their personal cremation furnaces. In under five minutes, the terrifying formation collapsed entirely. The fifty stone beasts stood raging, attacking one another, spinning in blind circles, trampling the Imperial infantry who had tried to follow behind them. And amid this hell of blood, molten metal, and battle dust, Dex Williams stood alone atop the carcass of one of the fallen beasts.

His slender body radiated immense heat that made the air around him waver and bend like a desert mirage, and his eyes blazed with an unquenchable fire. The surviving Imperial soldiers looked at him from a distance through the lenses of their scopes, and the hearts and knees of every one of them trembled. In that moment, they did not see a young human man or a guardian of a forest. They saw a true fire demon that had just crawled up from the deepest layers of hell itself, to punish them for their arrogance.