Chapter 131: The Warlord’s Challenge
The red cloud swallowed the sky.
It rolled over the outpost like a shroud, blocking out the gray daylight and replacing it with a deep, angry crimson.
The falling rain grew warm, then hot, biting into the skin like needles.
CRACK.
A bolt of red lightning crashed into the mud two hundred yards from the eastern wall, blasting a column of dirt thirty feet high. Where it struck, the ground split open and something climbed out.
Holden stopped mid-stride.
The beasts around him stopped too. From the lowest wolf to the massive siege-boars, every beast in the swarm froze and turned toward the arrival.
They were afraid.
The thing that crawled out of that hole was massive, easily fifteen feet tall. Its body was encased in armor had been forged from the shells of a thousand dead beasts, layered and fused together into a crude but impossibly thick shell. Dark veins pulsed beneath the armor like glowing arteries.
Its face was a nightmare. A flat, skull-like plate with four burning red eyes arranged in a diamond pattern. No nose. No mouth that Holden could see.
In its right hand, it carried a pillar.
This was no carved weapon, but a real stone column torn from ancient ruins, bound in chains and tipped with welded spikes.
Abyssal Warlord.
Rank 3, 2-Star.
Holden’s blood went cold.
A Rank 3 monster could swat aside Rank 2 fighters like flies.
And this thing was marching straight for the gate.
"Emric!" Holden’s earpiece exploded with Lyra’s voice. "Emric, the big one! It’s coming toward you!"
"I see it," Emric’s voice came back, tight but controlled. "All units, focus your fire on the big target! Cannon crews, full power, aim for a direct hit!!"
The cannons blasted a torrent of blue energy straight into the Warlord’s chest. The heavy impact burned its armor black and push the monster back a half step.
Then it kept walking.
The cannon fire wasn’t even slowing it down.
"Oh no," Renna’s voice crackled. " it’s not stopping. Seriously, why is it not stopping? That should have put down literally anything!"
The Warlord reached the gate.
It pulled the spiked pillar back over its shoulder, winding up for a brutal swing. The muscles in its arm bulged, the chains around the weapon rattled as its red eyes locked onto the gate.
"BRACE!" Emric screamed.
He slammed his shield into the ground and planted his feet. The blue runes on the shield flared to maximum brightness, forming a shimmering barrier that extended from the shield’s surface in a wide arc.
The Warlord swung.
BOOM.
The shockwave blew the rain backward in a perfect ring. The gate, which had held against thousands of beasts, splintered like wet wood.
And Emric was sent flying.
His shield smashed to pieces. The barrier popped like a soap bubble. His body was launched backward across the courtyard, tumbling end over end until he slammed into a supply crate.
"EMRIC!" Lyra screamed.
She leaped straight off the top of the gate tower, dropping thirty feet as a trail of ice followed her spear. She landed in a crouch beside Emric’s crumpled body, immediately throwing a barrier of frozen spikes around them both.
Emric’s arm was broken and twisted the wrong way. His face was pale but his eyes were open.
"Lyra... the gate..."
"I know. Stay down."
The Warlord stepped right through the broken gate. Every step it took shook the ground. It looked down at the two tiny humans standing in its path and raised the spiked pillar again.
Lyra thrust her spear forward, summoning a wall of ice between them and the monster. The pillar came down and shattered the ice wall like glass.
She raised another. The pillar came down again.
Shatter.
Lyra was on her knees, gasping, her energy draining fast. The Warlord pulled the pillar back for a third swing, this one aimed directly at both of them.
Holden saw it all from fifty yards away.
He saw Lyra on her knees and Emric broken on the ground. He saw the pillar coming down.
Something inside him snapped.
It wasn’t his logical side, but the dark, buried part of him. The part that remembered being a helpless orphan in the slums. The part that had taken a dagger to the heart because he wasn’t strong enough to stop it.
That part took the wheel.
His eyes went pitch black.
[System Override Detected.]
[User Intent: Maximum Combat Output]
[Breakthrough Acceleration Available]
[Cost: 50,000 KP]
[Accept?]
Yes.
Fifty thousand points. Gone.
The energy hit him like a freight train.
It exploded from his core and flooded every meridian in his body simultaneously. His muscles screamed. His bones vibrated. His vision whited out for a second as the refined energy punched through the 6-Star limit and slammed him into 7-Star territory.
His physical form became denser, his aura flared wildly, and sheer, terrifying power pumped through his veins like liquid fire.
[Breakthrough Complete!]
[Rank Updated: 2 (7-Star)]
[Remaining KP: 92,890]
But Holden didn’t let the aura show.
Even while he was furious, a cold, logical part of his brain forced all that energy down. He compressed it, hid it, and buried it so deep that to anyone watching, he would feel like nothing more than a slightly above-average Rank 1 fighter.
The Warlord’s pillar was falling.
Holden dropped the Void Mantle’s invisibility. The black cloak became visible, a dark shape appearing out of thin air in the rain.
He drew the Solar-Forged Sword.
His crimson sword flared with blinding light, washing out the red storm above. Every ounce of his new 7-Star power flooded into the sword, hiding his actual physical strength behind a wall of impossible fire.
He moved using his Gale-Step technique.
The world blurred.
Holden crossed fifty yards in the time it took the pillar to fall two feet. He hit the Warlord’s weapon from the side with a horizontal strike that channeled every bit of his concealed strength through the blazing edge of the Solar-Forged Sword.
BOOM.
The shockwave flattened the mud in a perfect circle for thirty feet. The rain within fifty yards evaporated into steam. The Warlord’s spiked pillar, which had just demolished a reinforced gate, was knocked sideways by the impact, its swing diverted just enough to miss Lyra and Emric by inches.
The pillar buried itself in the mud ten feet to their left.
Holden stood between his friends and the Warlord, his sword blazing, his cloak whipping in the hot wind.
The Warlord turned its four red eyes on him.
Holden stared right back.