Chương 144: The Fall into the Beast's Maw

The decision Dex made in that decisive moment was not a carefully considered military decision, nor a complex tactical plan he had mapped in his mind as he had done throughout the battle. There was no time to weigh variables, calculate probabilities, or prepare chemical traps. It was a blind leap into terrifying unknown territory, a desperate, suicidal move driven by pure survival instinct and an iron will to refuse surrender to the death carried in the disintegration ray.

While the diabolical Eclipse Mana Cannons in the Imperial camp were recharging their destructive energy for the second shot, emitting that terrifying electromagnetic hum that shook the bones and made the surrounding air tremble, Dex and Lumia were plummeting from the gray sky like two divine stones dropped from the peak of Olympus directly toward the heart of the enemy army. The air around them was quite literally screaming, tearing at their eardrums with a sharp piercing whistle.

The free-fall speed from that towering height was immense, and the cold wind struck their faces with a brutality like invisible whips.

"Hold onto me with everything you have! Don't let go no matter what!" Dex shouted at the top of his lungs, but his words nearly vanished and dissolved in the deafening roar of the battle and the speed of the wind. Lumia obeyed without hesitation. She wrapped her slender yet powerful arms tightly around his neck and buried her pale face against his broad chest, sheltering from the force of the wind, entrusting him with her life and her absolute trust as her one and only partner in this world.

In that critical moment of freefall, in the midpoint between sky and earth, Dex did something mad, something that violated every known law of flight and magic. Rather than deploying the [Phoenix Wings] skill like a parachute to slow their lethal descent and soften the impact, he used them for the exact opposite purpose: to accelerate the fall. With immense concentration, Dex pumped a terrifying quantity of raw mana from his phoenix core directly into his back.

The wings did not form to fly, they erupted from his shoulders as upward-directed fire jets, driving their interlocked bodies downward with a terrifying rocket-like thrust. Their fall speed doubled in a single second, surpassing the speed of sound, and they tore through the sound barrier with a thunderous Sonic Boom that shook the entire forest. The celestial and fiery pair transformed into a living meteor, a mass of blazing orange fire dropping vertically at an impossible speed toward the earth.

Below, surrounding the position of the three black cannons at the heart of the Imperial camp, nothing had been left to chance.

There was what was known as the Death Circle, a tight, closed defensive ring comprising five hundred soldiers of the elite Imperial Black Guard, the absolute finest fighters in the entire Empire, heavily armed with thick armor resistant to most types of magic, and in addition, dozens of war mages specialized exclusively in detecting and intercepting fast-moving aerial projectiles to protect the cannons from any overhead bombardment.

"My Lord Commander! There is an unidentified fire object approaching from above at an immense speed surpassing the velocity of our artillery shells!" shouted the magical radar observer in terror, staring at his detection crystal that had nearly shattered from the strength of the approaching target's energy signature.

"Don't let it near the cannons! Bring it down now, tear it apart in the air!" the Black Guard commander ordered sharply, raising his sword as the signal to begin counter-bombardment. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. In under a second, hundreds of anti-air interception enchantments launched from the ground toward the falling meteor.

Massive ice lances the size of tree trunks, guided explosive fireballs, and crackling nets of purple lightning designed to paralyze mid-air targets. The gray sky above the camp transformed into a terrifying festival of lethal lights and destructive enchantments all converging on one path, the path of Dex and Lumia.

"Lumia, open the way! Now!" Dex screamed as he saw the wall of magical death rising toward them at speed. Lumia lifted her head from Dex's chest and opened her eyes, which were now blazing with a brilliant silver light, like two cold stars in a dark sky. She had no need to use her hands or recite any verbal incantation, her celestial will and her absolute dominion over space were sufficient. [Absolute Void Tunnel].

Directly in the path of their rocket-like descent, in the very moment that the Imperial enchantments were about to strike and melt them in midair, the air itself split open. A long, dark, cylindrical tunnel of pure void formed, stretching from before them down to the surface of the ground surrounding the cannons. This tunnel was not merely a shield, it was a small wormhole.

Any enchantment, however powerful, whether an ice lance or a lightning net, the instant it made contact with the boundary of this tunnel, was swallowed immediately and silently, dispatched to an unknown spatial dimension, and made to vanish from existence.

Dex and Lumia passed, like a blazing meteor, through the heart of the void tunnel, tearing through the torrent of impossible magical assaults without a single spark touching them, protected completely inside Lumia's spatial cylinder that had overcome every law of defensive magic. BOOM! Dex's feet struck the solid ground, deliberately landing in the precise center of the Imperial Black Guard's formation, only meters from the cannons. This was no soft or theatrical landing.

The tremendous force of the impact, amplified by the meteor-like fall speed and the weight of the dense mana enveloping his body, produced a simultaneous kinetic and fiery circular Shockwave. The ground exploded beneath him, and tons of earth and stone were hurled in every direction. Dozens of fully armored Black Guard soldiers who had been standing in the Death Circle were launched into the air like lightweight cloth dolls, smashing into camp tents and their comrades' bodies upon landing.

The ground cracked open deeply beneath Dex's feet, and thick dust and fiery smoke rose to blot out visibility around the impact center. Seconds of stunned silence passed amid the battle dust. Then, from the heart of the blazing crater, Dex rose with extreme slowness, his posture upright as an unbreakable spear, the blazing orange fire dancing on his shoulders and arms like a living cloak. With a slow, deliberate motion, he drew his dagger from its scabbard.

It was no ordinary dagger now, the blade glowed with a golden hue verging on blinding white-hot from the intensity of the heat he was channeling into it from his phoenix core.

"Gentlemen," Dex said in a quiet, cold, and terrifying voice that cut through the noise of battle and reached the stunned Imperial soldiers with perfect clarity, "I have come personally to cancel your party and smash your loud, outdated toys." But the Imperial Black Guard, despite the force of the shockwave and the psychological terror embodied in Dex's landing, were no ordinary soldiers that could be frightened easily. Not one of them fled, not one cried out in panic as the infantry had done before.

Instead, they moved with a terrifying mechanical silence and a military discipline that defied description. Those who had been knocked down rose again, and all of them drew their massive black swords, which had begun to blaze with dense dark mana, and began quietly tightening their stranglehold around the burning crater. They understood fully, from what they had witnessed, that they were facing a speaking monster, an entity that transcended the capabilities of ordinary humans.

But they, across years of brutal training in the Empire's underground chambers, had been trained specifically to hunt and kill monsters. The true battle, the desperate battle to destroy the cannons before their second charge fired, had only just begun. And it was no battle of tactics and arrows. It was a savage and bloody battle, face to face, at zero range.