Chương 145: The Black Iron Guards

The thick dust produced by Dex's meteor-like impact with the ground was still suspended in the air, forming a suffocating cloud of debris and burning rock fragments, when the first wide black sword lunged toward Dex's neck. There was no battle cry, no hesitation, just a lethal mechanical motion swift as a guillotine, aimed at ending his life before he could recover his balance. Dex moved on the pure survival instinct that prison walls had honed to a razor edge.

He did not retreat, he drove forward, raising his dagger blazing with phoenix heat to deflect the blow. The two blades collided with a force that produced a deafening metallic ring, and sparks flew in dense bursts like miniature fireworks. In that frozen instant of the clash, Dex felt the blow's weight transfer through his arms and shake his bones. It didn't add up. The weight and speed of the attacking sword were incompatible with the human frame of the soldier wielding it.

Dex understood immediately that these black-armored soldiers were no mere well-trained humans, they had been magically and alchemically enhanced with physical strength at least five times that of an ordinary man.

"Lumia, the cannons! Don't worry about me!" Dex shouted in a hoarse voice, exploiting the moment of engagement to drive his boot into the Imperial soldier's chest. It was no ordinary kick, it was a kick augmented with explosion mana, with force enough to shatter the ribcage of a wild bull. The soldier flew backward and crashed into two of his comrades.

"I'll keep this cursed guard busy, go and destroy those dark monstrosities before they fire their next charge!" Lumia grasped the situation in a fraction of a second. She separated from Dex with the agility of a wild cat and launched at a speed surpassing the wind toward the three enormous cannons roughly fifty meters away, passing the soldiers who were focusing their attention on the larger fiery threat. But the path to the heart of the cannons was not clear.

Before Lumia had covered half the distance, the air before her tore open, and three sorcerers in tattered gray robes and strange masks resembling the faces of crows stepped to block her way. They carried twisted magical staves ending in small, shrunken human skulls emanating a halo of rotting death. These were Shadow Organization mages, the elite guarding the secret weapon.

"No passage for filthy mages," one of them whispered in a voice resembling the hiss of a snake, a voice that seemed to emanate from inside Lumia's head rather than from his own throat. They struck the ground with their staves in a synchronized and frightening motion and cast a compound enchantment: [Shadow Binding: Dimensional Anchor]. It was no mere spell to restrict physical movement. Black, viscous shadows extended from the ground like the arms of a demonic octopus, attempting to seize Lumia's feet.

Worse, she felt the very fabric of space around her begin to grow heavy and harden like rapidly setting concrete. The shadow mages were reading her movements and using a counter-spatial magic that prevented her from deploying her racial ability [Dimensional Bend] for an instant jump toward the cannons. She was now forced to fight on foot in a confined arena. Behind her, Dex was waging a bloody war of an entirely different kind.

He was surrounded in a closed circle of twenty Black Guard soldiers attacking simultaneously. The heavy swords rained down from every direction, from above, from below, from blind angles, with a terrifying collective coordination devoid of any human gap.

"Let's try this, Flame Dance!" Dex whispered, spinning on his axis at cyclone speed, his dagger tracing a full and blazing circle of burning orange fire. The intensely heated blade cut through the attackers' weapons as though they were butter and melted the front plates of their armor, scorching the flesh beneath. The soldiers staggered back from the force of the blow. But the true shock to Dex was not their endurance, it was their response.

Every time a burning soldier fell, two more took his place with silent steps. They attacked without pause, without hesitation, and most critically, without fear. Like a swarm of soldier ants attacking a massive scorpion, willing to sacrifice hundreds to kill the target. In the midst of the fighting, Dex employed his habitual method as a prisoner who had mastered dirty combat: target the joints, strike the eyes, cause maximum pain to immobilize the enemy.

In one moment, with a swift motion, Dex managed to sever the right arm of one of the soldiers at the shoulder. He expected the soldier to collapse screaming in pain, or bleed to death, or stagger back in shock. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. The soldier did not blink. Not a single sound left him.

The soldier looked at his severed arm with an empty gaze, then simply transferred his heavy sword to his left hand, and continued attacking Dex with the same speed and ferocity, the thick black blood flowing from his wound without affecting his balance in the slightest. Dex grasped the terrifying problem in that instant. These soldiers possessed no souls or nervous system in the conventional sense.

They were living war dolls, pawns from whom their humanity, their emotions, and even their pain receptors had been surgically stripped by forbidden Imperial alchemy. They felt no pain, feared no death, and were immune to psychological warfare. Dirty tactics and exploiting an enemy's fear were useless against a wall of bricks.

"Damn this alchemical madness!" Dex cursed aloud as he deflected three consecutive strikes that nearly broke his wrist. If this mechanical war of attrition continued, they would drain his physical energy and his mana reserves drop by drop, before he could even approach the cannons. Dex snatched a quick glance toward Lumia and saw that she too was struggling.

The shadow mages were tightening the noose of their poisoned shadows around her, and every time she tried to open a spatial portal, it shattered before taking shape because of the Dimensional Anchor. Then, suddenly, the sonic landscape of the battle changed. The low-frequency electromagnetic hum emanating from the three enormous cannons, the hum that had been shaking the earth, shifted in rhythm. It grew sharper, closer to a continuous metallic shriek that deafened the ears.

The black crystals at the heart of the cannons began to blaze again with a deep, active darkness, pulling every particle of light from the surrounding air.

"Primary charging complete at 80%! Energy stability excellent! Prepare for guided launch!" shouted one of the Imperial magical technicians from behind a safe glass barrier near the cannons. There was no longer time for dancing with dolls. One minute at most, and the disintegration ray would fire and erase the village and the World Tree from existence. Dex decided he had no choice but to abandon individual tactics and deploy a card of mass destruction he had not wanted to expose or drain his energy on now.

He stepped back two paces, evaded a lethal thrust, then concentrated an immense quantity of compressed mana, not in his dagger or his hands, but in his right leg, down to the sole of his foot. He wasnot focusing the mana to generate surface fire, but to generate immense thermal pressure.

Dex leaped high above the heads of the soldiers surrounding him, hovering airborne for a second, then came down with his full weight, driving his blazing dagger deep into the solid earth, and channeling all the mana accumulated in his leg into the depths of the soil beneath the camp. [Phoenix Volcano: Miniature Ground Eruption]! The fire did not erupt upward as usual.

Instead, Dex pumped it as a thermal pulse exceeding thousands of degrees Celsius directly under the topsoil, superheating the forest's damp groundwater and the underlying stone in a fraction of a second, creating a physical steam and magma pressure effect beyond any possibility of control. The earth went silent for a moment. Then it shuddered with tremendous violence beneath the Black Guard's feet, as though an earthquake of magnitude nine had struck a single point.

The ground cracked open, and columns of liquid lava, scorching steam, and molten rock erupted from directly beneath the soldiers' feet. The soldiers who felt no pain found themselves swimming in magma at 2, 000 degrees Celsius. The black anti-magic armor had not been designed to withstand full immersion in molten rock, it melted onto their bodies, and the mechanically enhanced frames shattered under the force of the volcanic explosion, their limbs dissolving away.

With this catastrophic strike, Dex carved a wide passage of molten earth and blazing fire, a straight path through the annihilated ranks of the Black Guard, and ran through this hell that could not harm him, launching like a projectile directly toward Lumia and the shadow mages.

"Lumia, fall back!" Dex shouted as he closed the distance at lightning speed. Dex reached the three masked mages before they could register what was happening, or manage to level their staves at him. He used no magic in this moment, mages always possessed automatic defenses against direct magical attacks. Instead, he used raw physical speed and brutality that they could never have anticipated from a mage. In a single horizontal motion, wide and lethal, Dex swept through the middle of them like a cutting blade.

The blazing golden edge of his dagger, reinforced with the momentum of his charge, separated all three mages' heads from their slender bodies in the same fraction of a second. The masked heads rolled across the ground, and the shadows that had bound Lumia dissolved instantly. The two of them, Dex, and Lumia who was breathing slightly hard, now stood before the final objective: the central primary cannon. Up close the metal beast was enormous, the size of a full two-story building.

Its pointed black barrel was aimed at the horizon, and the immense dark crystal at its heart pulsed like the heart of a dying devil, radiating the energy of absolute death, encircled by a halo of warped space.

"Mana readings exceeding safe limits! Primary charge at 95%!" came the voice of the terrified Imperial technician booming from the loudspeakers. Only seconds remained before the end of everything.