CHAPTER 131: THE ATTACK OF THE AEQUOR

Across the battered defenses of Salissic Vein, the 201 Divine Constructs waged their silent, internal wars against the Hollow Aequor’s insidious illusions.

Each one, from the towering Lust Tier on the central platform to the 200 Limbo Tiers scattered like shadowy sentinels along battlements, chokepoints, and gates, endured a personalized hell crafted from the abyssal hive’s chaotic psyches.

Detached in their autonomy mode, they fought with minimal interference from the Divine Hive’s guiding hand, relying on their foundational archetypes—curious, reserved, and resilient projections of Samael’s metaphysical schema.

One Limbo Tier, positioned near a diviner on the outer wall, found itself submerged in a drowned bastion, black waters rising to its cracked chest, unseen eyes glaring from submerged ruins.

Whispers slithered upward, urging surrender to the void. The Construct’s pale flame eyes flickered, its asymmetric horns piercing the surface as it analyzed the illusion’s seams—probing for inconsistencies in the water’s ripple.

With a surge of void essence, it shattered the false reality, emerging unscathed but with faint cracks spiderwebbing its ash skin, a minor physical toll from the metaphysical strain.

Another Limbo Tier, guarding a gate, was trapped in a desolate void under a blood-red sun, the bastion reduced to crumbling islands floating in nothingness.

Mocking laughter echoed from invisible sources, eroding its semi-autonomous resolve.

It hovered weightlessly, its graceful movements sharpening into purposeful strikes—internal commands rewriting the illusion’s logic, collapsing the void into fragments.

It survived, but a jagged scar marred its broken horn, the vessel damaged in the breakout.

Not all fared perfectly.

A few Constructs bore visible wounds, one with swirling void exposed through a rent in its shoulder, another with dimmed flames from psychic backlash. Yet none fell.

Their constructed nature—projections, not souls—allowed them to endure where flesh might falter, their minds resilient echoes of Samael’s tactical instinct.

As the psychic quake’s intensity waned, the targeted mass illusions followed, dissolving like mist under a rising sun.

The glitches stabilized, colors realigned, and the malevolent whispers faded to silence.

On the raised platform overlooking the inner field, the Lust Tier turned its blindfolded helmet toward Morgina, its crimson-black hair flowing as its amalgamated wings shifted subtly, webbed and aflow with the wind.

Towering at three meters, its curvaceous form still hovered, needle-like legs not touching the ground. "The illusions recede," it reported in its radiant, piercing voice, laced with subtle psychic influence. "Have you broken free as well, leader of the Salissic Vein?"

Morgina adjusted his skull mask, his staff tapping the platform with a resonant thud.

"Yes," he replied, his voice hardening with weary conviction. "These illusions are chaotic and widespread—weaker than the ones the abyssal spawns usually wield. Spread thin, like butter over too much bread. Effective for panic, but brittle against focus."

The Lust Tier’s helmet tilted, its voice thoughtful. "Are the ones before this more intense?"

"Not quite, it’s just that, I’ve experienced a much more hellish illusion from those sea dwellers."

"To call abyssal spawns, sea dwellers, you humanized them a little bit too much for someone with a great experience with them."

"One could only empathize with their maddening nature, and their possible origins that might predate the nature of humanity itself."

"Such as?"

Before Morgina could respond, a second roar thundered from the horizon—a tsunami of impending doom, the air thickening with the stench of brine and madness.

The ground trembled anew, not with psychic quakes but the physical advance of horrors.

"As much as I wanted to answer that, I’m afraid we must converse about it another time.: Morgina’s masked gaze narrowed, his blood-rune staff glowing. "It’s here. The Hollow Aequor invasion begins."

In Vaingall’s hallowed sanctuary, far from the chaos, the group watched the unfolding horror through Yoiglah’s divine holographic screens.

The colossal tortoise deity’s crystalline shell refracted the light, his amber eyes narrowing as he cycled through POVs.

One screen, linked to a scouting Limbo Tier far from the bastion’s core, captured the nightmare in vivid detail: a massive wave of abyssal monstrosity surging from the depths, a living tsunami of twisted forms.

Tentacled behemoths with sucker-teeth mouths and glowing eyes writhed alongside skeletal leviathans, their bodies fused with coral and shadow. Powerful beings made out of fish-like vessel the size of an airship, floats amongst their kin below, all while screaming curses to everything it saw, including their own.

Smaller horrors—swarms of eyeless fish with human-like screams, jellyfish entities pulsing with psychic venom—rode the crest, the whole horde undulating like a single, chaotic organism.

Kivas leaned forward, her halo pulsing with concern, silver-yellow hair framing her face. "How nasty and terrifying the Hollow Aequor can be," she commented, her voice steady but laced with empathy for the bastion’s defenders. "Makes any civilization near the sea an anxious-inducing gamble. One wrong tide, and everything drowns in madness."

Samael, arms crossed as she paced, nodded with a faint smirk. "They rarely venture to shore or leave their domain unless provoked. Civilizations by the sea are usually safe—barring anomalies.

"But the Umaska Alliance’s manipulation proves anything can trigger them, and hostile factions will exploit it. A knife in the dark, turning the abyss against you."

Oizys rustled her black feather wings, her violet halo flickering as she grinned slyly. "Glad our Vaingall can be manipulated to avoid that mess.

"With Kivas’s growing faith and influence—her religion spreading like wildfire—and Yoiglah’s amplified miracles, we can reposition scattered pieces tactically. No sea horrors for us."

Azulus, her ledger open, mouse ears twitching as she cross-referenced notes, glanced up. "Is the Sovoreign’s divine portfolio that powerful now? To shift a portion of your own domain like an advanced Covenant Crystal?"

Kivas shook her head modestly. "It is possible because Yoiglah enhances the portfolio beyond my original prowess."

Samael snorted, leaning against a pillar. "It’s thanks to Yoiglah’s unique skills, to put it simply."

"I could only bathe in pride and honor as my name is mentioned alongside compliments," Yoiglah uttered.

Azulus’s quill paused, her deadpan expression cracking with surprise as she fiddled with her ledger, pages glowing as text scrolled. "Yoiglah... that name rings a bell." She queried deeper, her ears perking. "Ah, how could I only realize this—a legendary figure in old Vaingall history. A massive walking mountain, documented in numerous wars and conflicts. Speculated to be divine due to insane assimilation power.

"That is certainly a great biography for someone to have."

Yoiglah’s massive claw shifted subtly, his amber eyes narrowing. "My past is no longer applicable to the current me. The gale shifted, and so did the land and its river."

Azulus flipped a page, undeterred. "Records say you absorbed everything—armies, landscapes, even concepts. I feel bad for not showing more respect from the start."

Samael teased, "Yoiglah’s a bum now, unfortunately?

Yoiglah rumbled back, not jesting lightly. "Aren’t you in the same case, Endless One."

"Doesn’t change the words I said," Samael shrugged.

Karen, adjusting her decorative glasses, pointed at the screen where the horde surged. "Is our force in Salissic Vein enough to fend this unholy horde? I mean,lLook at that—"

Her words cut off as a massive nuclear-like explosion erupted on the screen, a cataclysmic bloom of violet-tinged fire and shadow that swallowed a vast swath of the abyssal horde in its voracious maw.

The detonation’s shockwave rippled outward, visible even through the holographic feed—distorting the air into visible heat hazes, vaporizing clusters of tentacled horrors mid-surge, their sucker-teeth mouths dissolving into ash and ichor that rained down like blackened confetti.

Limbs and shadows alike were torn asunder, the blast’s core a roiling vortex of eldritch energy that pulled in nearby phantoms, compressing them into nothingness before erupting in secondary bursts of crackling void-light.

The Lust Tier, visible on another feed beside Morgina, had chucked an Eldritch Bolt from its elevated position with casual indifference, as if tossing a mere rock into a pond.

The towering Construct’s amalgamated wings flared briefly for balance, its needle-like legs hovering steady, while its crimson-black hair flowed like a banner in the wind of its own throw.

Morgina’s skull-masked face whipped toward it, his rigid posture betraying shock beneath the bone-white facade. "What... was that?" he demanded, voice hoarse with awe and a hint of fear. "How powerful are you, truly?"

The Lust Tier’s valkyrie-like helmet tilted, its blindfolded visage conveying amusement through the subtle shift of its armored shoulders.

"Enough to make the abyss flinch., apparently,"

Without pause, the Lust Tier reached into the connected spatial storage—a Divine Hive repository shared among Samael and all Constructs, a metaphysical vault brimming with prepared armaments—and pulled forth a second Eldritch Bolt.

The massive arrow-like warhead hummed with contained catastrophe, its surface swirling with dark matter essence that warped light around it like a miniature singularity.

"However, don’t make a mistake by attributing this power to me," Cocking its arm with exaggerated poise, the Lust Tier swept its amalgamated wings in a dramatic arc, building momentum before hurling the bolt toward the impending horde. "Jus thank our adorable and inquisitive leader who made this possible."

The projectile streaked like a comet of doom, trailing ethereal flames, and struck true amid the tsunami-like wave.

The resulting mushroom cloud ascended in a pillar of devastation—roaring flames laced with void-flickers that incinerated eyeless swarms in mid-flight, their psychic screeches silenced in an instant.

Tentacled leviathans at the blast’s edge recoiled, their sucker-teeth maws charred and bubbling, while smaller horrors were flung skyward in arcs of disintegrating flesh, raining down as smoldering debris that ignited secondary fires on the churning ground below.

Shockwaves propagated through the horde, crumpling formations like paper in a gale, sending ripples that disrupted the chaotic hive’s unity and scattered illusions mid-manifestation.

Undeterred, the Lust Tier delved into the spatial storage again, its gauntleted hand emerging with a third Eldritch Bolt.

It cocked and threw with superhuman precision, the explosion this time blooming closer to the horde’s core—a nuclear inferno that engulfed a phalanx of skeletal leviathans, their coral-fused bones shattering like glass under the pressure wave, fragments exploding outward to impale nearby kin.

The mayhem escalated: abyssal plants uprooted from the wave’s underbelly withered in the heat, psychic venom evaporating into toxic vapors that choked stragglers, while glowing eyes popped like overripe fruit in the blinding flash.

The air thrummed with aftershocks, the ground quaking as craters formed in the horde’s path, swallowing dozens of writhing forms into pits of molten shadow.

"... Such a fearsome display of power." Morgina could only laugh.

Again and again, the Lust Tier repeated the ritual—four, five, six times in total—exhausting the prepared stock of Eldritch Bolts allocated for this occasion.

Each throw was a symphony of destruction, the fourth bolt detonated amid a swarm of jellyfish entities alongside their curse-screaming giant above, their pulsing bodies bursting in cascades of luminescent gel that ignited on contact with the flames, creating chain reactions of fiery pops that lit up the night like perverse fireworks.

The fifth targeted a knot of tentacled behemoths, the blast’s core compressing them into a singularity before unleashing a radial burst that flayed skin from bone, leaving skeletal husks to crumble under their own weight.

The sixth and final strike hit the horde’s trailing edge, a parting shot that erupted in a dome of void-energy, sucking in and annihilating stragglers while sending seismic tremors back toward the bastion’s wards.

The once-overwhelming tsunami dwindled to 56% of its original might, a rather powerful testament to the Eldritch Bolts’ raw power—each equivalent to a nuclear warhead, unleashing gigatons of force in concentrated bursts.

Yet the surviving horde remained terrifying: unscathed remnants reformed with eerie resilience, tentacled leviathans regenerating limbs from shadowy essence, eyeless swarms multiplying in defiance of annihilation.

Their chaotic hive adapted mid-assault, illusions weaving protective veils that absorbed peripheral blasts, while the core horrors pressed on, undeterred by the mushroom clouds scarring the horizon.

The air reeked of ozone and charred abyss, the ground a pockmarked battlefield of craters and ichor, but the Aequorian advance surged forward, a diminished but unrelenting tide of nightmare.

"To think that they survived all of those," Kivas chuckled. "I might need to upgrade the Eldritch Bolts again."

The screens flickered as the horde closed, the bastion’s wards flaring.

Diviners chanted louder, Void Hunters rallied, Constructs positioned.

The air thickened with doom, the second roar crescendoing into a symphony of madness.