Chương 147: The General's Wrath

A funerary silence, heavy and terrifying, reigned over the heart of the shattered Imperial camp. This was no natural quiet. It was an absolute sonic void that followed the cosmic detonation of the Eclipse Mana Cannons: not true silence in which the environment is empty of sound, but the silence produced by the total, temporary deafness that had struck the eardrums of every living being within the explosion's radius.

The very air appeared to have been scorched, leaving behind a sharp smell of ozone, molten metal, and charred flesh. In the heart of this sweeping chaos, Dex Williams lay on his back, sunk deep inside a crater formed from boiling mud and molten volcanic glass that mere seconds ago had been nothing but ordinary soil. His chest rose and fell with tremendous difficulty, his breathing coming in ragged, painful gasps, as though his lungs had been filled with hot volcanic ash instead of oxygen.

Every breath was a losing battle against suffocation. His body shook with uncontrolled violent tremors, harsh muscular convulsions striking every inch of him. White smoke, thick and suffocating, still rose from his outstretched arms at his sides. Both arms had burned down to the deep layers of skin and muscle from his reckless use of the Solar Heart technique and his transgression of the phoenix mana's safe limits.

His arms now appeared to be two pieces of glowing charcoal, crossed by red cracks pulsing with lethal heat. The nerves in his upper limbs were screaming and sending pain signals that no human mind could absorb or process, pain pure, burning, and absolute, surpassing by light-years any brutal physical torture he had endured in the dark prison cells that had defined his youth. He had done it. He had achieved the impossible.

He had destroyed the pride of the Empire's alchemical manufacture and prevented the annihilation of the elf forest, but the price had been the complete and absolute depletion of the phoenix core at the heart of his chest. His mana reserves had dried out entirely, turning to barren desert. Not a single particle of energy remained in his body, not enough to lift his ash-weighted eyelids, let alone stand or fight. He was nothing but a body waiting for a mercy blow.

Beside him, amid the rubble, Lumia was in a physical state not much better, though the nature of her injury differed. Though she had not been struck by direct thermal burns thanks to her barriers, the immense spatial effort she had expended to open the Void Tunnel and partially absorb the destructive blast wave to prevent it from wiping them out entirely had consumed every drop of her celestial power and dimensional mana.

Lumia rose with extreme slowness, swaying like someone who had lost all balance, and collapsed to her knees beside Dex, ignoring the glass shards that cut into her legs. She quickly knelt beside him, her beautiful face smeared with soot and blood. Her trembling hands began to emit a very faint, intermittent silver light, flickering like a candle on the verge of going out. This was rudimentary healing magic, a desperate attempt to soothe the cellular erosion and worsening burns devouring Dex's arms.

"Dex... please, listen to me... don't close your eyes... stay with me," Lumia whispered, her voice visibly trembling, not from cold, but from a pure fear she had never known before. But then, abruptly, her hands stopped radiating the silver light. Her features froze completely. Her eyes widened in intense tension. The color of her skin drained until it matched the white of snow, as though the blood had been siphoned from her veins.

She looked toward the center of the wreckage from which thick black smoke still rose, and said in a voice barely audible: "Dex... that presence... the mana readings approaching us... they're impossible. He is not human. He is like a mountain on the verge of collapsing on top of us to crush us flat." From within the thick gray dust clouds, and from behind the wreckage of twisted metal that had minutes ago been invincible and terrible cannons, the outline of an immense figure began to take gradual shape.

A figure that conveyed absolute authority, cosmic weight, and death approaching on inevitable steps. What was astounding and terrifying in equal measure was that this being had not been affected in the slightest by the double energy explosion that had vaporized solid iron, not a single shard had so much as scratched his armor. General Vargas walked with slow, heavy, and precisely measured military strides.

With every deliberate step he took, the clay ground literally shuddered beneath the feet of the few survivors around him, as though the planet's gravity were concentrating itself in his boots. He wore full battle armor covering his massive frame, forged from a rare magical alloy known as Faded Gold, or Dead Dwarf Gold.

This legendary metal does not gleam, it absorbs light, and more critically, it absorbs kinetic and magical shockwaves and distributes them through a complex network of engravings, making it nearly impervious to direct assault. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

His long cloak, the crimson of clotted blood, was slightly frayed at the lower edges from the fierce winds, but it billowed behind him with an overwhelming majesty, like a flag announcing the commencement of a massacre. His harsh face, with its stone-cut features and the old, deep scar that bisected his left eye from brow to cheek, was suffused with an anger of a very particular kind.

Not blind fury or screaming, but a cold, quiet, measured, and terrible anger, the kind that freezes the blood of anyone who meets it. In his right hand, reinforced by a thick metal gauntlet, he carried an enormous double-headed war axe. The blade of this axe alone was the size of an adult man's torso, forged from heavy black steel fused with concentrated earth mana.

The axe was a legend recounted in the Empire's barracks, known as "The Continent Breaker", a demonic S-rank weapon that interacted symbiotically with the earth element, capable of altering the terrain with a single blow. To General Vargas, Dex was not merely an enemy on the battlefield.

He was the embodiment of humiliation, the person who had trampled on the pride of the great Empire, arrogantly destroyed a strategic weapon whose cost rivaled the budgets of several vassal states, and turned Vargas's guaranteed military victory, one that was to have been inscribed in letters of gold, into a thunderous military scandal that would be recorded in history as his greatest failure.

"You cursed human rat," Vargas finally spoke, shattering the silence with his voice. It was a voice deep and rough, resonating in the chest, resembling the sound of massive rocks being ground inside an ancient underground quarry.

"I don't know how a vermin like you survived that inferno, and I don't know what a human is doing among the dregs of the elves. I have lived long across these blood-soaked fields, and I have seen many rebels, rogue mages, and foolish heroes, but I have never once seen a human being with this suicidal audacity to stand beside lesser races against his own Imperial kind." Vargas stopped at close range, barely twenty meters from Dex and Lumia's crater.

He adopted no complex fighting stance; he simply raised his enormous axe in one hand with intense coldness. The moment he lifted the weapon, Dex and Lumia felt an immense, invisible atmospheric pressure bear down on their chests, as though a column of air weighing tons had been laid on top of them. Vargas had not earned a general's rank by name alone or through political favor.

He was a military monster, an absolute elite warrior of the advanced A+ rank that approached the threshold of the demi-gods, and his combat specialty was terrifying in its capacity for mass annihilation: [Great Earth Shattering].

"I thought you at first nothing more than a troublesome rebel, a vagrant who had mastered a few acrobatic fire tricks," Vargas continued, narrowing his hard eyes, which had begun to blaze with a murky brown light.

"But you have proven you are not merely a nuisance. You are a walking catastrophe, a critical flaw in the order of this world that must be cut out at the root and burned to ash so it never repeats itself. And since you are so fond of destroying the earth and playing with explosions... I am going to make you a part of this earth forever."

Without any further warning, without so much as a blink, and at a speed terrifyingly disproportionate to the bulk of his armored frame, Vargas brought the black blade of his axe down on the earth with every ounce of his brute force. This blow was not aimed at reaching them physically to cut them down, it was aimed at awakening and unleashing the latent energy of the earth beneath the layers of the ground's crust. [Guided Seismic Strike: Rift Serpent]!

The moment the blade made contact with the soil, the earth cracked open instantly with a deafening, terrifying tearing sound. From beneath the point of impact, a deep and extremely swift seismic fissure erupted, splitting the earth, grinding the subterranean rock, and carving its path in a jagged line directly toward Dex and Lumia, like a colossal serpent that lived beneath the ground surging toward its prey with its maw wide open to swallow them whole.

The entire world around them shuddered, and large boulders flew like artillery rounds in every direction, transforming the scene into a hell of billowing dust and projectile rock.

"Move! Lumia, jump clear!" Dex screamed with everything left of the air and strength in his scorched throat, ignoring the agony of his shredded body. And with a desperate, instinctive motion, he shoved Lumia away from the path of the catastrophic seismic fissure with his relatively less-damaged shoulder, and used what little physical momentum remained in his exhausted muscles to hurl himself in the opposite direction from the rift.

In the moment they vacated their positions, the earth split open at their previous location to a depth exceeding ten meters and a terrifying width resembling the mouth of a bottomless abyss. The force and effect of the blow was not confined to tearing the ground alone, it also unleashed a violently compressed kinetic shockwave from the edges of the rift.

This atmospheric wave struck Dex's body mid-jump and hurled him like a ragdoll several additional meters through the air, slamming him with savage force against the trunk of a colossal, charred oak. Dex heard the crack of his ribs shattering on impact, and fell to the ground motionless, darkness creeping across the edges of his vision, as the final act of this catastrophe began.