Chapter 79: The First Wave (3)
The battlefield had become a sea of blood and fire.
Morveth crashed into the human formation from every direction, claws screeching against shields as soldiers fought to hold the line.
At the heart of the chaos, Ronan and Kael stood back-to-back.
A Morveth lunged at Kael from behind. Ronan’s fist caught it mid-air before it ever reached him.
Golden flame erupted from his knuckles, and the creature went cartwheeling into another one, both bodies vanishing into the crush.
"You’re welcome," Ronan shouted.
Kael didn’t even turn around. "I didn’t ask."
Another Morveth charged Ronan from the flank. Kael raised his staff and the air exploded.
A blade of compressed wind tore across the field and slammed the creature sideways, a heartbeat before its claws would’ve found Ronan’s spine.
Ronan grinned without looking back. "Still got my back."
"You’d be dead without me."
"Keep telling yourself that."
"I will. Loudly. At your funeral."
A fresh wave of Morveth surged toward them, and Ronan stepped into it.
Golden flame climbed his forearm, curled around his shoulder, and he clenched his fist.
"Titan Fist."
The air around his arm bent, warped, then screamed forward in a single devastating blow.
BOOM!
The nearest Morveth folded around the punch and went crashing through three others behind it.
The ground split under Ronan’s boots from the sheer recoil of his own strength.
That flame wasn’t ordinary fire. It carried the authority of Ronan’s High-Rank Law — the Law of Golden Flame.
Ronan also possessed a rare Class called Titan — a Class few Awakened across the Empire had ever been granted.
It gave him an extraordinarily powerful body, immense raw physical strength, and Skills purpose-built to turn that strength into devastating attacks.
Unlike Laws built purely for offense, Golden Flame did double duty. Ronan could wrap it around his own body, reinforcing muscle and bone.
That gave him heavier fists, faster movement, and a body that shrugged off punishment it had no business surviving.
Release that same flame through an attack instead, and its destructive potential climbed to something else entirely — heat that could rival the surface of a sun.
He wasn’t even close to its ceiling yet. The deeper his understanding went, the hotter the flame would eventually burn.
Golden Flame let him push his Titan Skills past their normal ceiling — wrapping the enormous energy a Skill like Titan Fist already released in flame hot enough to make an already crushing blow lethal.
Another Morveth broke through and charged him head-on.
"Titan Fist."
Golden flame wrapped around the surging energy as his fist drove forward.
BOOM!
It went down with its chest burned black, and Ronan didn’t slow to admire the work.
He was already carving deeper into the enemy line.
Behind him, Kael’s staff rose. Wind spiraled around him, gathering into a vortex that swelled with every rotation.
"Tempest."
The vortex dropped.
Wind exploded outward, dragging Morveth into its currents and tearing through the formation like a scythe.
Kael poured more mana into the Skill, and the vortex grew larger, its currents twisting faster with every passing second.
Then a faint power spread through the storm, and the wind roared.
Its currents sharpened, accelerating, growing far more violent as Kael’s Low-Rank Law of Wind fused directly into the Skill.
The moment the Law merged with it, the vortex erupted with far greater force, its currents tearing through the battlefield like countless invisible blades.
Kael swept the staff down. The storm collapsed on command.
His other hand rose, and dozens of arrows condensed in the air — far smaller than ordinary arrows, almost delicate-looking.
But the air around each one had been compressed down to something close to breaking.
He released his hand. The arrows vanished.
A heartbeat later they tore through the Morveth ranks, punching clean through one body and into the one standing behind it.
This was Kael’s second Law at work — the Medium-Rank Law of Pressure.
Rather than making his Skills bigger the way Wind did, Pressure compressed that same force down, shrinking the arrows until their size became almost insignificant.
While the size shrank, the pressure packed inside them only grew. Each one struck with enough penetrating force to punch straight through a Morveth’s hardened body and keep going.
The two Laws served completely opposite purposes. Wind amplified the raw destructive force and reach of his Skills.
Pressure condensed that same force into something smaller, faster, and far more piercing.
Neither Ronan nor Kael simply owned powerful Laws — they’d spent real time learning how to make those Laws work with their Classes and Skills.
The Skill was always the foundation. The Law was the thing that pushed it past its natural limit.
Kael hadn’t yet reached the point where he could fuse his two Laws into one.
If he ever did, the result wouldn’t just be strong. Wind and Pressure combined could give birth to an entirely new Law — one standing dangerously close to High-Rank territory.
Ronan surged forward again, golden flame flickering back to life around his fists.
Kael held his ground behind him, another storm already gathering in his palm. Neither of them looked back. They didn’t need to.
A Morveth tried to flank Ronan — Kael’s wind caught it before Ronan even registered the movement.
Another broke through on Kael’s blind side — Ronan’s fist was already there.
They didn’t fight like two men standing next to each other. One created the opening. The other exploited it.
Together, they carved through the Morveth ranks like they’d already learned exactly how the other would move.
Then the air went cold.
Ronan stopped mid-stride. Kael’s staff dipped.
Frost crept across the ground between the Morveth, and one by one, the creatures around it slowed, ice climbing their legs.
A massive shape stepped through the ranks — ice sheeting its arms and shoulders like frozen armor, radiating a presence the rest of the Morveth didn’t have.
It raised one hand. Frost condensed above its palm into a spear of solid ice, and it threw.
Kael’s staff snapped up. A wall of compressed wind erupted in front of them.
BOOM!
The spear cracked the wall on impact before finally shattering.
The Morveth raised its other hand, and a wave of frozen spikes tore up through the earth, forcing both of them to dive clear.
Ronan landed beside Kael, staring at the thing across the field.
"Shit."
Golden flame flickered back to life around his knuckles.
"It’s got a Law fused into its Skills," Kael said, eyes narrowing. "Just like us."
"That’s going to be a problem," Ronan muttered.
Not far off, Garrick was carving through his own crowd of Morveth.
His maul caught one across the chest and sent it sprawling; he turned into the swing’s momentum and caught a second before it could close in.
No footwork tricks, no flourishes. Just weight, and where to put it.
Three Morveth rushed him at once. Garrick tightened his grip and swung.
CRACK!
The first one’s arms buckled trying to block. The second got caught in the follow-through and thrown clear.
The third barely scrambled back before the maul crushed the ground where it had been standing.
The impact didn’t stop at the crater. A thin, ugly distortion spread out from the point of contact, crawling through the cracked earth.
It reached the Morveth nearby and tore through them from the inside.
Garrick looked down at the wreckage for a second. This was still power he only half understood.
His High-Tier Law Seed had handed him a Law far harder to grasp than the ordinary ones most Awakened settled for.
Even the small fraction he’d mastered so far was enough to make his already overwhelming physical strength considerably more destructive.
The Law of Destruction.
Garrick came from the Marquisate of Ashmoor, born into an ordinary noble house — nothing legendary, nothing feared.
His father had lived and died as exactly that: an ordinary noble, killed on some forgotten battlefield in a war whose name most people had already stopped remembering.
Nobody outside the family had mourned him. A minor noble’s death barely made it past a footnote, and the world had simply moved on without pausing.
Garrick had been young enough that it should have broken him. Instead, it had taught him something he never forgot.
Strength is the only thing that actually protects you in a world like this.
A name meant nothing without it. His father’s name certainly hadn’t. So when the moment came for Garrick to choose his Law, he didn’t reach for whatever was easiest.
He chose the one that promised the most strength, regardless of how long the road to it would be.
And for Garrick, nothing embodied that kind of strength better than the Emperor — one of the most powerful beings alive.
The Emperor was renowned across the world for mastering three devastating Laws, each one violent enough to make even the strongest warriors alive think twice.
Destruction was one of those three. Garrick had always admired its brutal simplicity — no elaborate tricks, no layered technique.
Just the purest possible expression of destructive force. Mastered deeply enough, a single strike could reduce whatever stood in front of it to ruin.
That was exactly the kind of strength Garrick wanted for himself.
He was fully aware it would take him far longer to master than any of the simpler options available to him. He didn’t care.
Laws weren’t exclusive — two people could comprehend the exact same Law and still end up worlds apart in mastery, developing completely different ways of wielding it.
What decided the outcome was never the Law’s Rank on paper. It was how deeply its user actually understood it.
Garrick had barely scratched the surface of Destruction. Even that fraction was already turning his freakish physical strength into something closer to a walking natural disaster.
He reset his grip around the maul as another wave of Morveth closed in.
He still had a long way to go before reaching the level he wanted. But the road ahead had already been decided.
****
Author’s Note: Sorry for the irregular updates. I’m still dealing with a fever, but we’ll be back to a regular posting schedule soon.
There will also be extra Chapters to make up for the irregular updates.
Love you all!