Chapter 86: Tempest Invasion [3]
The desert night was a quiet, suffocating shroud over the monolithic walls of Norona City.
At the grand outer gates, the air was heavy with the smell of old iron and stagnant sand.
Then, out of the darkness, a lone figure materialized.
Roy walked forward in his human form, his long, sleek golden hair fluttering softly in the biting night wind.
He wore a dark, heavy black trench coat that billowed out dramatically behind him, capturing the sharp drafts of the Hudeii Desert.
His golden-crimson eyes gleamed beneath the shadows of the gatehouse, his posture entirely relaxed, his hands tucked deep into his pockets.
He was completely silent, his boots making no sound against the hard-packed earth as he casually approached the fortified perimeter.
"Who the hell is that?" a soft growl was heard.
Up on the ramparts and at the base of the massive iron gates, a squad of elite Orc sentries immediately tensed.
"A Crimson-furred Wolf-man?"
"What is that weak thing doing here?" two Orcs discussed.
"I don’t know but he is a fool to think he can just walk in here" the first Orc grinned,
"Whatever it is, should we kill him captain?" another Orc asked.
"No" the lead Orc captain stepped forward, "Let’s figure out the bastard’s intentions first"
The lead Orc captain stepped forward.
"Stop right there, Wolf-man!" the lead Orc captain roared, his voice a deep, guttural bark that echoed off the stone.
"State your business or be executed!"
Roy didn’t pause.
He didn’t even look up.
He just kept walking, a slow, methodical pace that completely ignored their presence.
"This is your final warning!" the Orc screamed again, baring his tusks as he drew a pair of massive, heavy throwing axes.
"Halt!"
The Orc captain roared, this time....
They all sensed something was amiss.
The confidence of this stranger was something they couldn’t comprehend.
Still, the figure in the billowing black coat advanced, completely indifferent to the threat.
"This fucking bastard!" the Orc captain gnashed his teeth. He tightened his grip on his battle axe.
"Let’s kill the arrogant prick" the Orc captain declared.
Losing his patience, the Orc captain bellowed a command, and three sentries hurled their massive steel axes straight at Roy’s chest.
The heavy blades spun through the air, whistling with lethal, skull-splitting velocity.
But before Roy could even move an inch, before the axes could even breach his personal space, the natural laws of light and shadow violently buckled.
"Hmph" Roy’s lips curled faintly.
SHRIIIK—!
From the absolute darkness right beneath the Orcs’ feet, a frictionless, silent phantom emerged.
It was Martial Master Alisa.
Her newly acquired Ghost-Silk properties made her physical movements completely silent, untraceable by any mana sensory array.
In a fraction of a second, before the throwing axes could even hit the ground, Alisa’s form blurred in a dance of invisible steel.
There was no sound of a struggle—only the terrifying, precise snip of severed flesh.
The three Orc sentries who had thrown the axes gasped as thin, crimson lines appeared across their throats.
A moment later, their heads slid clean off their shoulders, their bodies collapsing into the sand in a bloody heap.
The thrown axes clattered uselessly into the dirt, yards away from Roy’s boots.
Alisa flicked the dark blood off her phantom veil daggers, instantly melting back into the perimeter shadows just a half-step behind her master, once again completely invisible.
"Good girl" Roy whispered with a gentle smile written on his lips.
Roy kept walking, his expression vacant and totally unbothered, effortlessly absorbing the absolute dread filling the remaining guards.
He was perfectly aura farming, letting the sheer weight of his silent, unstoppable presence crush the Orcs’ morale before the battle had even truly begun.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Suddenly, the desert behind Roy came alive with a dense, suffocating tidal wave of martial pressure.
One by one, the core cultivators of Tempest City stepped out of the dark, taking their positions behind the Apostle of the God of Beasts.
To his right, Lord Manuses materialized, his white-gold mane catching the moonlight, his massive feather wings unfurling slightly as his Martial Lord aura anchored the flank.
The air rippled.
To his left, High Priest Croak stood calmly, his ceremonial staff humming with defensive spiritual arrays.
Right behind them stood the three newly ascended Martial Generals.
Commander Trojan radiated a faint, golden thermal hue that caused the night air to warp with intense heat.
Alpha Brenda bared her fangs, her newly awakened Tyrant Wild Pressure causing the shadows around the gate to violently flicker.
And Captain Eurenia stood with a cold, satisfied smile, her dense, alloyed frame humming with dark Asura sparks.
The entire Tempest vanguard had arrived at the gates of Norona City.
And at the absolute front of this terrifying assembly stood Roy, his black trench coat billowing wildly in the wind, looking down at the ruined gatehouse like a god about to rewrite history.
"Let’s begin!"
Roy stood perfectly still, his black trench coat billowing violently in the desert wind, his golden-crimson eyes locked onto the towering, reinforced iron gates of Norona City.
"Trojan," Roy commanded smoothly, his voice easily cutting through the howling night.
His simple call was enough to entail his words.
"By your will, Master Jarden," Trojan rumbled.
The newly ascended Martial General strode forward, passing Roy’s flank.
The ground beneath his heavy boots began to hiss and crack as the immense thermal energy within his body struggled to remain contained.
He stopped fifty paces from the massive, fifteen-meter-tall iron gates, where dozens of panicked Orc archers were desperately raining black-fletched arrows down upon him.
Trojan didn’t even bother to dodge.
The arrows vaporized into ash the moment they entered a three-meter radius around his glowing, heat-warped frame.
His eyes, burning like miniature suns, locked onto the iron barrier.
He drew a deep, ragged breath, and his newly expanded internal mana channels completely opened.
Overnight, his signature bloodline trait had broken its mortal shackles.
It had evolved past the volatile heat of Burning Blood, mutating into a catastrophic, high-tier divine legacy: Crimson Calamity.
BOOM—!!
The air pressure inside the gatehouse violently ruptured.
Trojan’s skin turned a deep, terrifying crimson-gold as his blood literally superheated into a roiling, weaponized magma.
Unlike the controlled, localized bursts of his past skill, Crimson Calamity possessed an entirely chaotic, apocalyptic scale of destruction.
The sheer, unbridled kinetic pressure radiating from his body began to forcibly melt the desert sand into liquid glass around his ankles.
Trojan reared back his massive, alloy-fused fist.
The roaring, volatile solar fire screaming around his arm didn’t just burn—it violently tore at the very fabric of the atmosphere, creating a high-pitched, deafening screech of ripping mana.
"Break!" Trojan roared, his voice carrying a terrifying, heavy bass that rattled the teeth of every soldier inside the city.
He punched forward, burying his fist directly into the center seam of the reinforced iron gates.
CRA-AAAAAAAACK—!!!
The impact was absolute madness.
The properties of his old bloodline—the raw thermal heat and explosive kinetic recoil—were multiplied twentyfold, completely untethered by his new Martial General status.
The fifteen-meter-tall iron gates didn’t just break; they dynamically shattered.
The localized explosion of Crimson Calamity instantly liquefied the center of the iron doors into white-hot slag, while a colossal, fan-shaped shockwave of chaotic crimson fire tore inward, completely erasing the gatehouse’s reinforced stone pillars.
The massive stone archway above collapsed in a thundering avalanche of boulders, but before the debris could even hit the ground, the stray thermal waves from Trojan’s skill vaporized the falling rocks into a cloud of glowing, red-hot dust.
The dozens of Orc sentries stationed behind the gate were caught in the immediate environmental backlash.
They didn’t even have time to scream; the chaotic, expanding wall of crimson fire simply swept over them, dissolving their armor and flesh into drifting ash within milliseconds.
When the blinding light finally settled, the impenetrable, historic outer gates of Norona City were gone.
In their place was a massive, smoking, twenty-meter-wide breach, the edges of the ruined stone walls glowing a bubbling, bright orange.
Through the thick, rising plumes of black smoke, the interior streets of Norona City lay completely exposed, thrown into a state of absolute, screaming terror.
Trojan slowly lowered his steaming fist, the dense kinetic alloys in his knuckles glowing white-hot as he stepped through the ruined threshold.
Completely clearing the path for the God of Beasts’ dedicated followers.