Chương 143: The Empire's Secret Weapon

The sun retreated slowly toward the horizon, staining the smoke-filled sky above the forest a gloomy crimson, the color of the blood that had soaked the battlefield's earth. And with that sunset, General Vargas's hopes of achieving a swift, decisive, or even "clean" military victory worthy of the Sixth Legion's reputation retreated and dissolved entirely. The situation below was catastrophic by every academic measure.

The magical reports arriving one after another at the command tent read like a continuous obituary for his army. His human and material losses had crossed the 60% threshold of the total strike force he had brought with him. The Earth Dragon riders, the giants he had counted on to crush the defenses, had quite literally melted inside their own armor and turned to roasted meat. The heavy infantry companies had burned and choked in the Bloody Fog.

And even the Shadow Organization's elite assassination unit, considered the most powerful secret weapon for field killings, had gone completely silent, their mana signatures vanishing from the monitoring map entirely, meaning they had been annihilated without managing to send so much as a single distress signal.

"Enough childish games and hiding in the shadows!" Vargas roared in a thundering, furious voice, mad with frustration, slamming the strategic planning table, built from solid oak, with his mana-reinforced iron fist in a blow so powerful the heavy table split cleanly in two and maps and chess pieces scattered across the muddy ground. The General breathed with difficulty, his bloodshot eyes boring into the remaining battalion commanders who stood trembling before him in silence.

"What we face today are not ordinary elf rebels, nor bandits relying on the forest's luck. They are savage beasts, demons possessing terrifying tactical minds. To fight beasts like these that do not fear death, we need no infantry tactics, no cavalry. We need to summon a merciless god of destruction." Vargas reached a slightly trembling hand beneath his chest armor and drew out a thick silver chain from which hung a strangely shaped black key, a key that pulsed with a suffocating negative aura.

He looked at no one, and turned with fast, heavy military strides toward the rear of his fortified camp, where a colossal transport carriage, the size of a small house, sat covered entirely in heavy tarpaulin woven with hundreds of complex sealing and concealment enchantments. This carriage stood under a completely separate and heavily reinforced guard of Imperial elite soldiers.

"My Lord General, I beg you to consider the consequences!" whispered his first aide, Colonel Bart, running behind him with a face pale as the dead, attempting to stop him with a trembling voice.

"Using this specific weapon is internationally prohibited under the Silver Moon Treaty, especially in dense forest areas and near rivers. It cannot distinguish between friend and enemy. The Emperor himself may issue an order for our execution if—""The Emperor ordered me to bring this cursed patch of forest under his control, and I will bring it to him even if I must deliver it as a pile of atomic ash!"

Vargas cut him off with a violent shout, spinning around to grab his aide by the collar and lift him off the ground.

"If we return defeated at the hands of a handful of cursed elves, we will be executed regardless. Open the seals. Now." The carriage guards obeyed the orders in fear. At the touch of the black key, the great protective seals fell away, and the heavy cover was slowly pulled back, revealing to the eyes the Empire's secret weapon: [Eclipse Mana Cannons].

These weapons were no conventional cannons with wide metal barrels that launched burning iron balls, they were something entirely different, something ancient and frightening. They were three tall, pointed black metal towers, constructed from an unknown metal that absorbed the surrounding light, and at the center of each tower sat a massive and darkened crystal, a crystal pulsing with a terrifying negative energy that made anyone who looked at it feel nausea and a deep, crushing despair.

This catastrophic weapon does not fire fire, or ice, or rock. It fires a Cosmic Disintegration Ray, a dark and forbidden magical technology extracted at tremendous cost and great sacrifice from the ruins of civilizations that predated the current age of empires. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Charge the cannons to maximum capacity! Target: the first defensive line of the elves, and everything beyond it up to the great tree!" Vargas snarled, stepping back two paces as the cannons began to activate. Hundreds of specialized dark mages began pumping raw mana into the bases of the cannons. The three black crystals began emitting a low-frequency hum, a hum felt in the bones rather than heard by the ear, that made all the surrounding soldiers' teeth ache and chatter against one another.

The light around the cannons began to be physically absorbed, as though a small black hole were forming in the heart of the camp, drawing the sunset's colors into itself and leaving a pitch darkness in their wake.

"Fire, and erase them from existence!" There was no thunderous boom as one hears from ordinary cannons, and no recoil to shake the ground. Three extremely thin black rays launched from the hearts of the crystals, parallel and straight as a geometric ruler. They were entirely silent rays, producing no sound as they split the air at the speed of light. What followed the launch of these rays exceeded the human mind's capacity to process or describe.

The black rays did not strike the ancient trees and blow them into burning wooden shards as ordinary magic would. No. The enormous trees they touched simply vanished. The solid matter of the trees, their roots, and even the stones surrounding them transformed, in a fraction of a second, into black atomic dust and dissolved into nothing. No wood splintering, no fire igniting, no smoke rising.

Simply a geometric black void advancing at the speed of light, cutting through the forest as though it were a block of soft butter. The rays struck the first and second defensive lines of the dark elves in the blink of an eye. The advanced magical defensive barriers erected by the elf mages, which had held against thousands of Imperial arrows, crumbled and evaporated the instant the rays touched them, as though they were cheap fragile glass.

The massive, interlocked tree wall that had protected the passages leading to the inner village was erased completely, leaving perfectly geometric voids empty of matter, exposing with terrifying clarity the wooden houses and terrified elf civilians who had been sheltering behind it.

The entire ground shook with tremendous violence, not from the impact of a physical explosion, but from a tremor produced by the screaming of the natural mana in the region, the screaming of the very fabric of nature as it was torn apart and disintegrated at the atomic level. Above, from his strategic position atop one of the trees that had survived by sheer miracle outside the rays' path, Dex's breathing stopped.

He felt a cold shiver, a shiver he had not felt once since being transported to this world, creep slowly through his spine. His eyes widened as he looked at the path of silent, geometric destruction advancing at a terrifying speed toward the village and the World Tree.

"Matter-level disintegration..." Dex murmured in genuine terror, his analytical mind struggling to find a rational explanation for what he was seeing.

"This is no ordinary destructive magic. This is a weapon of absolute S+ rank. This is a weapon of total annihilation that cannot be deflected by any armor." Dex turned swiftly to Lumia, who stood beside him, and for the first time since he had known her, and for the first time since they had forged their Pact of Strangers, he saw undisguised fear, childlike fear, surfacing in her cold silver eyes.

"The cannons, they are destroying the forest's breathing lung and the mana surrounding it," Lumia cried out, her voice trembling for the first time, seizing Dex's arm with force.

"If this silent bombardment continues for even one more minute, the World Tree's barriers will collapse entirely, and every one of us will die. There won't even be dust left to bury." Dex understood in a fraction of a second that the time for clever tactics, guerrilla warfare, and prison-honed traps was over, completely and without return. Now, in this very moment, the raw and absolute battle for survival had begun.

The military situation had transformed in the blink of an eye from his complete tactical dominance to an imminent annihilation catastrophe that could be stopped by nothing short of a miracle.

"We have to destroy those cursed cannons at the source. And we have to do it now, before the next charge fires!" Dex shouted, his eyes blazing with the fire of rage and desperation, as he prepared for a suicidal, direct, fully exposed leap toward the heart of the fortified Imperial camp, where an entire army, and black death, waited for him.