Chapter 122: The Frontline Farm
Team Soup ran through the mud.
The rain beat against their faces as they fought through the slippery mud. Red alarm lights spun overhead. Soldiers ran past them in the opposite direction. Some were bleeding and others dragged wounded comrades.
The eastern wall was total chaos.
Holden saw it the second they rounded the corner. A twenty-foot section of the steel barricade had been ripped inward, leaving behind twisted edges of metal. Beyond the gap, the dark wilderness stretched out like an open mouth.
And pouring through that gap were dozens of Siege-Boars.
They were massive. Each one was covered in thick, overlapping bone plates that worked like natural armor. Their tusks were as long as spears, curving up from jaws strong enough to bite right through steel.
The veteran soldiers were failing.
Holden counted maybe fifteen men still on their feet, half of them already wounded. They’d formed a desperate line in front of the gap, locking shields and fighting hard, but they were losing ground fast. Every time a Boar hit the shield wall, two or three soldiers went flying. The mud was streaked with blood.
"Fall back! Reform the line!" a sergeant bellowed, blood running down his face from a gash above his eye.
Captain Venus appeared from the side, his face twisted with fury.
He spotted Team Soup and pointed.
"I told you academy brats to stay in the barracks! Get out of here! Do you all even—"
Emric didn’t stop.
He ran straight past Venus, and skidded into the gap between two collapsing soldiers. His heavy shield came off his back and slammed into the ground with a thunderous impact, the edge digging into the ground.
"Lyra! Left flank! Renna, high ground!" Emric shouted.
Lyra didn’t hesitate. She slid into position beside Emric’s shield, her spear sweeping in a tight arc. Ice erupted across the ground in front of the gap, turning the mud into a slick frozen surface. The next Siege-Boar to charge through lost its footing instantly, its legs sliding out from under it.
Renna leaped onto a stack of supply crates near the wall. Her bow was up before she even landed. She drew and released in a rhythm so fast it looked like a machine.
THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.
Arrows punched through the flesh around the Boars’ eyes, the only exposed spot on their armored bodies. Three beasts went down thrashing, blinded and screaming.
The veterans stared.
Emric’s shield didn’t budge when a Boar slammed into it at full charge. His feet dug deeper into the frozen mud, his body absorbing the impact like he’d been doing it his whole life. Right behind his cover, Lyra slipped in and out, her spear snapping out to strike the boars right where their armor was weak
The 10x learning buff wasn’t just making them think faster. It was converting years of training into instinct in real time. Every technique they’d ever learned was suddenly available.
"WHAT THE H—" Venus stared, his mouth hanging open.
Holden didn’t watch.
He walked to the broken section of wall, looked down at the muddy trench below, and dropped.
He dropped down eight feet, splashing ankle-deep into the cold sludge below. The rain was pounding right down his back. Up ahead, the dark wilderness stretched on forever, crawling with monsters.
He didn’t care.
The assassin’s face flashed in his mind. The cursed blade. Lyra’s sobbing voice through the crystal shell.
He summoned his Solar-Forged Sword w.
Crimson fire erupted along the black blade.
Then he moved.
The first Siege-Boar never saw him. Holden came from the side, low and fast, and the Hellfire Cleave took its head off in a single horizontal arc. The body kept moving forward for three steps before it collapsed.
The second Boar turned toward him, its tusks lowering.
Holden stepped straight into its charge as the 10,000x multiplier slowed the world to a crawl. He watched the tusks approach, found the exact gap between them, and walked right through it. His blade drove upward under the boar’s chin, bursting out the top of its skull.
WHOOSH. SHLCK.
Two kills in four seconds.
He didn’t stop.
The third beast charged from the left.
He spun and bisected it diagonally from shoulder to hip. The fourth tried to flee. He caught it from behind with a rising slash that severed its spine. The fifth, sixth, and seventh came in a group, trying to overwhelm him with numbers.
Hellfire Cleave didn’t care about numbers.
A single wide arc caught all three, the compressed fire slicing through bone plates like they were paper. Three bodies hit the mud simultaneously.
He moved through the herd like a red blur, silent and relentless. The cold anger burning in him channeled directly into the blade.
The veterans on the wall above watched in stunned silence as a single figure tore through a herd of Siege-Boars that had been minutes away from overrunning the entire eastern defense.
Inside the gap, Emric lowered his shield slightly and stared.
"Holy..." Renna whispered from her crate.
Lyra’s eyes tracked Holden’s movement through the dark, her spear still raised, but the Boars had stopped coming. There were none left.
Five minutes was all it took.
Holden stood in the mud, surrounded by corpses, his sword still blazing. Steam rose from the black blade as the rain hit the crimson fire.
He looked up at the wall.
Then he grabbed the broken edge of the steel barricade and hauled himself up, climbing back over like it was a garden fence.
He wiped the Solar-Forged Sword clean on his sleeve and dismissed it into blue pixels.
Captain Venus stood three feet away, his men behind him, all of them frozen.
[Ding!]
[Siege-Boar Horde (32x Rank 2, 1-Star) Defeated!]
[Base Reward: 11,600 KP]
[2x KP Booster Applied!]
[Total: +23,200 KP]
[Siege-Boar Alpha (Rank 2, 3-Star) Defeated!]
[Base Reward: 3,000 KP]
[2x KP Booster Applied!]
[Total: +6,000 KP]
[Current Balance: 153,490 KP]
Holden glanced from Venus to the broken wall, then back again.
"You guys really need to fix that fence," he said.