Chương 1359: 1389 - Rising Brutality

The carnage that surrounded him was music to his ears. With every swing of his sword, men died—men who had stood against him, shouted at him, denied their true Storm King his proper respect. A wild grin spread across Kamran's face as he hurled himself deep into the gray, crushing the defensive lines Halbast's pathetic worms had vainly thrown together to try and stop him. A quick swing, and a wave of lightning turned a thousand men to ash. Another swing, and a fortress on a nearby hill was obliterated.

'More…' Kamran thought hatefully. He launched himself forward, leaving behind what few of his bodyguards that had managed to keep pace with him so far. He struck another of Halbast's troop agglomerations seconds later, having traveled a dozen miles in the blink of an eye. Lightning arced around and above him, the golden light lending him an almost divine air.

'More,' he silently insisted, his wrath unabated. Normally, he wouldn't consider himself the kind of man who reveled in such bloodshed, but he was always aware that there was a certain catharsis in just… letting go, in letting all of his considerable power loose upon the universe with abandon. In light of Hasahlain's, Triton's, and Antipatra's loss, it felt glorious.

'MORE!' he roared in his own mind. If he'd tried shouting it aloud, the unholy mixture of grief and wrath would've had his voice shaking in a manner deeply unbecoming of the true Storm King. Lightning flashed across the plane, and he flashed across it, too. Fortresses crumbled, thousands of men died, and what few arks he'd missed on his initial pass were shattered, sometimes by the sheer pressure of his aura alone. No one would escape this cataclysm.

All of Halbast's people, those who killed for him and those who lived for him, would die here. When Kamran arrived, it was a thriving plane of nearly a billion inhabitants, guarded by around twenty million soldiers. He was committed to ensuring that when he left, it would be a plane of ash and death, with not even the insects left behind. It was a small price to pay for Hasahlain.

One of Kamran's friends and a brilliant man by any measure, he'd been deployed to shore up planar defenses in an area that Kamran was intending to use as a staging point for raids against Halbast's supply lines. Halbast, however, had moved more quickly, striking faster than lightning deep into the cluster, and Hasahlain hadn't been able to escape in time.

Or rather, Hasahlain had been able to escape, but Basileus Kerethein, who ruled the cluster in question by Kamran's grace, had realized the true target of Halbast's raid and abandoned Hasahlain in favor of making his own escape. To say that Kamran hadn't been amused was to understate to a criminal degree. Kerethein's flayed corpse nailed to the prow of Kamran's flag ark spoke volumes about how Kamran took such self-serving behavior.

But executing Kerethein did little to numb Kamran's wrath, and over the past few months, Kamran had personally led his forces in incinerating any plane even mildly associated with Halbast that he could reach. This was already his tenth inhabited plane. As he paused, the carnage momentarily halted, Kamran took a deep breath, tasting the air polluted by the dust of annihilated buildings and the ash of charred flesh and bone.

It was one of the worst things he'd ever smelled, and it did nothing to ease the storm raging in his chest.

'More…'

Halbast moved quickly, striking fleets and fortresses at even the slightest sign that they were without support. Even now, he hovered amidst a broken strike force of nearly thirty arks, all having been obliterated by his own hand. All across the Great Strand of Andronikos, famous for having no less than five possible birth places of the Great Lord Khosrow, he knew that his other forces, and those of Anassa Auset, were also pushing hard.

But his personal force wasn't just pushing Kamran's forces back along the line, striking at opportune targets with no greater strategy in mind. He knew what he was doing, and he doubted that anyone else did. He'd led his forces on a sweep of several planar clusters, sterilizing them of anyone who swore themselves to Kamran. The sweep had not been gentle, and the planes within those clusters had suffered tremendously.

Given the devastation that Kamran left in his wake, Halbast didn't consider his own contributions to the slaughter to be dishonorable. Once past those clusters, five strands were left vulnerable—five densely inhabited strands, which should've been safe. But he'd pushed hard and quick, using a strategy that no one ever thought he'd use to great effect.

As his forces pressed against Kamran's, he split them up along a line, thinning them as they pushed forward, expanding further and further as they pushed deeper and deeper. That meant that the further they pushed, the more reports that Kamran's defenders had to parse through, and the more obscure his true direction of travel was. From the point where Halbast penetrated Kamran's lines, he could've gone in more than a dozen directions, and his spread-out fleet made it seem like he was going in all of them at once.

Then, once Kamran's defending fleets tried responding to all of these perceived threats, Halbast rapidly reconstituted his forces and launched this deep raid. He chose these particular strands carefully. Andronikos was an old Great Strand, one long connected to humanity, and its total population reflected that. Some of the largest and most densely populated planes in the entire universe were located within… … along with some of its oldest and most well-developed infrastructure.

Kamran had gotten lucky many times in his life, but Halbast was going to take away all of that luck. Buerquen, one of the storied Hundred Seats, the capital plane of one of the first human Kings to side with Khosrow during his war, lay before Halbast, as did all of Buerquen's arkyards and Titanstone refineries. Jel'maran, Night-on-Water, and Praeghorai, likewise, were close enough to feel his power.

Kamran's domains were wide-ranging and wealthy, but Halbast was going to do so much damage to the infrastructure supporting his war that the conniving Anax would have to, at the very least, pull back from his current campaign. If he didn't, then Halbast would just push further as Auset supported his defenses. And when Kamran was weak, Halbast had a feeling that the other Anakes sitting this conflict out would finally start taking the right side…

The fury remained, but it had turned cold and dark in his stomach. Kamran glared at the projected maps that Nairontes, good lad that he was, had diligently updated every time a new report was relayed to him. Blue swathed much of the universe, marking territory held by Kamran directly. A lighter shade of blue marked his vassals.

Red and purple denoted Halbast and Auset, respectively, while a dozen different colors marked where Halbast's and Auset's forces were confirmed to be, where they were reportedly scouting, their projected next moves, and so much more. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Now, Kamran glared balefully at the widening wedge in Andronikos and the planes marked within it.

All were lost, and the few traumatized survivors spoke of Halbast himself leading the charge, slaughtering and destroying everything that his power could reach. None of his other thousand fleets were so destructive or so successful, not even those directly supported by Auset. The officers surrounding Kamran were silent as he studied the maps, seeing the same thing that they were. If he continued on his own raid, then Halbast would continue with his.

The destruction would be mutual, and the winner would rule a mountain of ash. But Kamran grinned wolfishly.

'I didn't know you had it in you, Halbast. Let's test your mettle, shall we? How far are you willing to go?' Aloud, he addressed his waiting officers.

"If we stop now, that only means that Halbast has free rein for however long it will take us to reach him. But if we continue, we will do more damage to his territories than he will do to ours. Our hearts are IRON, and within all of us are raging TEMPESTS! Our enemy has met our gaze, and now expects US to blink! Will you lose your nerve now?" If any of them blinked, Kamran would personally tear their eyelids off. None of them wavered. His grin widened.

'If this is how you want to play this game, Halbast, you'll find my stomach quite a bit stronger than yours…'

Justin had a hard time accepting what his eyes were telling him. Fifty years since seizing Hasahlain, the planes ruled by the Storm Lords were on fire, courtesy of Kamran and Halbast. The war had grown vicious to a degree that he'd never anticipated, and it had all started with the raid to take the architect. What Hasahlain had given Justin had been beyond helpful, and with Justin's contacts, it wasn't hard to find some people willing to help. Unfortunately, he still didn't have enough.

The defenses around Kamran's city-sized palace, not to mention that actual city surrounding it, were so robust that even finding a workable plan to get through it all was nigh on impossible. So, Justin spent years running down leads, poking the defenses to see how the garrison responded, and building up the tools and internal networks to try and make it work.

He was so close to Ariana that it hurt, but he forced himself to go slowly, to do this right, to ensure that no matter what happened, he would find his wife and liberate her from her confinement. He had no interest in the tragedy of finding her, only to die in the process. In all those years, Auset kept him apprised of the current situation in the planes, at least so long as he kept her apprised of the situation in Kamran's Nexus holdings.

And there, in the center of the universe, it almost seemed like there was no war. Food was cheap and abundant, arks were plentiful in the sky, and there were guards on every street corner of every city. But as the map in front of him showed, it was chaos out in the planes. Where it had once been dignified war—at least, as dignified as war could be—it had now devolved into brutality that Justin had never seen, and he'd seen quite a bit.

Not just entire planes wiped out, nor even entire planar clusters—entire strands had been slaughtered to a man, left wretched husks where once had been gleaming cities, mighty fortresses, and verdant fields.

'Was it this bad when Jason Keraunos fell?' he wondered idly as the black marks on the projected three-dimensional map spread.

'When the Thunderbird Clan was reeling and everyone took a drink of their blood?' The Thunderbird Clan of old had been so much larger and more prosperous than either Kamran or Halbast's territories could have ever boasted of being, but the violence that took their territories in the wake of their fall had been so devastating that even now, eighty thousand years later, the Great Strands of Atreus and Rhea were still underpopulated and underbuilt.

Some powers were based there, of course, but so few of note that it was almost a boon to Leon that it was these wretched places he had to conquer, for within them he would find no great rival, no insurmountable challenge to his rule.

Or so Justin assumed, at any rate, for if anyone great enough to rival Leon as he was now had risen in those Great Strands, then they were surely someone he knew of in the Nexus, or who would've already worked to unify much of those broken, disparate Thunderbird holdings long before Leon ever showed up on the scene. As things stood, Rhea and Atreus were so devastated, depopulated, and poor compared to what they had once been that the great men and women of the Nexus largely hadn't bothered conquering them.

It would simply take too much effort and too many resources to rebuild to an acceptable degree—not to mention the resource drain that these places would wind up being would only weaken them in the eyes of their rival Nexus Lords. As things were, only a mere handful of places were worth anything, and they were constantly fought over. Kypros was the standout example and was likely the plane in Atreus that most resembled what Halbast and Kamran were doing.

Kypros, the plane of the ancient Thunderbird Clan that was richest in natural resources, had passed through many Lords' hands over the past eighty thousand years. Challengers always came, looking to claim the plane's still-enormous wealth for themselves, but they would never be permanent. Kamran held it now, at least nominally, but the plane was so fought over that few people lived there now, and the resource extraction infrastructure was no longer there.

Such vast riches lay beneath that plane's surface that it appealed to everyone, but the plane was swept clean of life, left a barren rock from countless wars. That sheer lifelessness now stood as the greatest barrier to unlocking the plane's riches, as it required that infrastructure and local population to extract. Without either, it was an unfulfilled promise, a weight about the neck that no one could shake off.

After all, even if Kypros was worthless, there was too much unextractable worth beneath its surface that it simply couldn't be given up. Justin could only sigh as the more he examined the map, the more devastation was revealed. Kamran and Halbast had both decided that holding back was for the war's loser, and were burning entire clusters as easily as they breathed. Billions were dead, billions more were displaced, and some of the most productive planes controlled by the Storm Lords were completely ruined.

Justin's blue eyes drifted from the map to the nearby window, from which he could see the spires, walls, and shining windows of Kamran's palace. Clouds encircled the highest towers, while the entire city-sized palace was built into an enormous floating landmass, held aloft by a great sea of clouds that ended at the edges of the landmass. Lightning flashed within, terrible in its power, and Justin had to force himself not to look away.

The city that surrounded the palace began at the edge of that perpetual storm, and the enchantments protecting the city were so powerful that even those who lived at the very edge of that storm never felt more than a stiff breeze coming from it. Yet, if Justin tried to make his way through, he'd find himself turned into little more than flakes of charred bone before he'd taken ten steps.

He'd have to find a way through the storm to reach any of the pillars leading up to the palace, for attempting to get up any other way was foolhardy at best—he'd be seen by the patrolling arks or the guards on the tall, thick walls. There were heavy enchantments preventing unauthorized flight, and even more that would interrupt any attempt to turn invisible.

'No, the storm is the only way,' Justin repeated for the thousandth time. He put the projected map away. It didn't matter what else was happening within the universe. He could devote his attention to that once Ariana was safe and they had made up for all their missed time. A wistful look crossed his face as he stared at the palace, lost in memory of the time when he'd walked through its halls, belonging as much to it as the foundation stones.

He remembered the parties thrown in its thousand ballrooms, the executions carried out in its grand central courtyard, the million bureaucrats that called the palace home. He'd been so awed by its sight when he first arrived in this city hundreds of years ago, but now he felt only grim determination. A hundred years, a thousand, a million; it didn't matter how long it took, but he would find a way into the palace.

He would take his wife from this place and, together with Valeria—and any children she and Leon would eventually have—be the family that he'd longed for. He could even see the tower where Ariana was being kept, the second tallest in the entire palace. He imagined his wife at the enormous window of actual stained glass at the top, staring through the vibrant colors back at him.

'As long as it takes,' he vowed.

'I will find a way…'