Liam heard her words, clear as daylight, yet he only shook his head.

His gaze remained fixed on the battlefield ahead, where the chaos still danced across the sky.

Explosions burst like blooming flowers of flame, arcs of light slashing through the horizon, painting streaks of brilliance across the smoky canvas above.

The scale of this battle wasn’t something that could stay hidden.

It had already drawn attention, from nearby territories, curious lords, and even a few native forces watching from a distance.

They weren’t drawn by rumor, but by sheer force.

The kind of tremors that shook the sky and echoed into the bones of distant lands.

There was no way to hide this battle, the scale was too much for anything.

Mushroom clouds pulsed up intermittently across the plains, plumes of smoke rising in spirals.

The battlefield looked like a land long forgotten by the heavens, ruined, scorched, and broken beyond recognition.

At the center of the devastation, Mize’s three true kings carved through the horde like wrathful gods, their power flattening hills, ripping through lands without mercy.

The pressure of their presence alone had turned the tide.

And with their might unleashed, the flood of stacked waves finally came to a halt.

What remained was nothing short of a wasteland: kilometers of ruined land, blackened soil riddled with dense, overlapping craters.

Hills were left crumbled, trenches carved deep, and the air was thick with the stench of scorched flesh and clotted blood.

A smell so strong it clawed into your nose and refused to leave.

Mize’s legion hadn’t escaped unscathed either.

Tens of thousands of casualties lay in their wake, bodies dragged to the rear lines for later resurrection, lifeless forms piled silently under blood-soaked tarps.

“We can’t give up now,” Liam’s voice broke the silence.

Unshaken as ever.

Mize didn’t argue.

She trusted him, at least enough not to question his words outright.

But still…

Why?

“Hidden rewards?” she ventured, eyes half narrowed.

“Yes,” Liam answered without hesitation.

He rose from the throne in one fluid motion, his clothes catching the wind as he stepped into the air.

Hands folded behind his back, he walked calmly across the battlefield sky, gaze sweeping over the temporary stillness.

“But if things tip into danger,” he added, his voice soft but certain, “I’ll pull out immediately.”

"We can forfeit at any given time"

“Good.” Mize nodded in agreement.

Down below, the shadow army moved once more.

Tattered soldiers of black mist and flickering silhouettes gathered the shattered remains of their fallen brothers.

Broken torsos, dismembered limbs, and severed heads were dragged back from the front line, their forms reassembled into misshapen mounds.

And then, with a wave of his hand, Liam cast his skill.

A massive summoning diagram unfurled in the sky, hovering high above, spinning slowly, radiant with eerie light several hundred meters in the air.

The air rippled in a strange misty hue, shadow spread like a huge ocean of ink.

And in one sweeping surge, more shadows poured out.

Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, millions.

All emerging from the shadows beneath their feet, drawn up from the very darkness of the earth.

Mostly tier 1s, yes, but the sheer number…

In one breath, Liam’s army swelled to six million.

A sea of darkness.

He retracted his hand, eyes flickering at the sight, "The stakes are high, and I hope the coming enemies isn't too troublesome"

"I hope the same too" Mize muttered back, "But let's not overdrawn ourselves, you taught me that"

She hesitated, "I hope you remember that"

And then came the wait.

The calm before the next storm.

Liam and Mize regrouped their armies, reshuffling the formations, steeling themselves for whatever the next wave had in store.

Mize hovered beside the throne, fingers dancing across the translucent interface as she checked the current wave log. “we are very close to the last ten waves,” she muttered under her breath.

“Send the True Kings closer,” Liam’s voice came from her side. “Tier 8s might show up in this one.”

“Okay.” She nodded and acted without hesitation.

With a wave of her hand, the three True Kings descended slightly, their overwhelming pressure coiling faintly through the air as they positioned themselves nearer to the frontline.

Each one like a drawn blade, waiting to strike.

But as the seconds ticked by, Mize’s skin began to crawl.

Her instincts kicked in.

Something was wrong.

Saka…

He wasn’t the last surprise of this day, she was sure of it.

And more importantly, he wasn’t even a real lord. Not according to Liam.

The real lord of that was supposed to come had been killed. By Saka.

That was the root of Mize’s wariness.

Still, so far, Saka had kept himself in check.

He fought as ordered. But if he made one wrong move, even the slightest misstep, she wouldn’t hesitate.

The True Kings would descend on him the next breath.

Floating silently in the air, eyes half-lidded, her mind drifted again.

‘Should I call out the Tier 8 monsters from the dungeon?’

A backup plan.

‘They aren’t clones. Liam wouldn’t suspect a thing,’ she reasoned, her gaze turning slightly.

After all, she had dozens, no, hundreds, of Tier 7 True Lord monsters inside her dungeon.

Beasts she’d created, but now they might be able to serve a different purpose for a period of time. And yes, they were still under her command. Still usable. Still hers.

The only question that lingered was this: What would happen if she summoned them out temporarily?

To that, she pulled up her system for a response.

[Host, do not worry. The monsters can be returned into the dungeon afterward. The system rules will remain unaffected]

[However, it is advised you avoid releasing them in their true forms. Please disguise them in human forms if possible]

[There appears to be a latent rule tied to this Territory temporarily. Any monsters drawn too close are at risk. The horde was not created here, it was summoned from another plane. Once they touch this realm, a law begins to alter them. If not disguised, your monsters will be assimilated]

“I see…” Mize nodded quickly.

She definitely wasn’t letting those monsters enter as they were.

She didn’t need to expend her own mental power either, at Tier 7, monsters could willingly shapeshift into human forms. It came naturally to them.

Their intelligence rivaled human cultivators at that level anyway.

‘I still have mental energy to spare. I could just open a portal from inside the dungeon to here...’

Or better.

‘Let the clones do the teleporting. Less costly,’ she decided.

The plan formed quickly in her head.

And then, there was no more time to ponder. For more chapters visit N0velFire.ɴet

Zoommmm!!!

A deep, ancient horn blared into the sky, like the trumpet of an oncoming apocalypse. It reverberated through the earth, into the bones of everyone present.

A massive portal burst open in the sky, just outside the dome protecting their territory.

It twisted into existence like a fractured scar on the world itself, tens of kilometers long.

A torn veil pulsing, writhing like a wound that refused to heal. Broken shards of light spun in slow motion along its rim, casting eerie glows over the land.

And from it, they came.

The horde.

An endless flood of monstrosities, each more disturbing than the last.

Millions roared out from the rift, each one screaming in voices no human throat could replicate.

Their guttural howls mixed into an unholy chorus that echoed for miles. It wasn't sound anymore, it was madness trying to manifest itself through vibration.

“Urgh…” Mize frowned sharply, her stomach twisting with nausea.

Her eyes narrowed at the sight.

Some of them had three heads, one laughing, one weeping, and one gnashing its teeth.

Some had pustules where eyes should be, leaking green ichor. Others walked on singular, sinewy limbs, their skin matted with hair, their distorted eyes bobbing like antennae above twisted skulls.

Everything about them reeked of something… wrong.

Something horribly wrong, something not from this world.

“Cthulhu-esque freaks,” she muttered under her breath with a visible shudder.

Liam, standing not far behind, caught her reaction.

A flicker of emotion passed through his face, subtle but real. A tightness in the chest. A beat skipped.

He knew that expression.

Because he knew exactly how grotesque his own true form was.

‘...She can never see it.’

That thought anchored itself in his mind briefly.

A small breath escaped him as he turned away, hiding the worry buried in the corner of his eyes.

She didn’t need to know. Not now. Not ever.

Then, like an endless tide of nightmare, the ocean of horrors surged forward.

Calling it a “run” didn’t even begin to describe it. It wasn’t running, it was a stampede of chaos, a grotesque river of bodies and mindless frenzy.

With each step they took, their shrieks and garbled roars rippled across the battlefield, echoing like the maddened cries of the damned.

Thankfully, Liam had already cleared out the nearby native villages.

If he hadn’t, who could say what kind of carnage would’ve followed in the wake of this swarm?

To brace for the impact, millions of tier 1 shadow summons surged ahead like a black wall, shifting into tight formations.

The terrain, still scorched and torn from the earlier waves, was now a battlefield of jagged craters and upturned rock.

The ground itself had become a hazard.

Especially after the relentless bombardments from the three true kings, the landscape was anything but stable.

Yet, Mize believed the ruined footing was a double-edged blade, it hindered both sides equally.

Clank!

Clank!

Clank!

The vanguard halted. In one motion, shields snapped up, layer upon layer, the shadow soldiers raised a solid wall of defense.

Behind them, nearly several hundred thousand battle mages raised their halberds high, their palms glowing with diagrams.

In the blink of an eye, a storm of dark fireballs erupted from their hands.

The sky rained flame.

Explosions cracked through the frontlines of the horde, brilliant streaks of red and orange bursting across the black wave of monsters.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

Shrieks tore through the battlefield. Severed limbs and gouts of dark blood sprayed into the air, painting the charred earth with chaos.

Yet the horde didn’t slow.

The creatures behind simply trampled the fallen, surging ahead like a possessed flood.

That was the disturbing part.

No matter their tier, they all remained mindless, pure engines of destruction.

Unlike normal demonic beasts, whose intelligence grew with power, these things remained locked in primal savagery.

Nothing but empty hunger filled their minds.

And flesh, human flesh, to be exact, was what they craved.

Mize had seen it before.

In earlier waves, some of the monsters would leap onto shadow summons and tear them to pieces, chewing through the limbs in a frenzy… only to spit them out, visibly disgusted.

Broken blade warriors, charred and mutilated, were discarded like tasteless scraps.

That confirmed it.

Human flesh was their priority.

Then, the wave hit.

Boom!

Boom!

BOOM!

The horde slammed against the wall of shields, and in the same instant, dozens of figures shot out from the rear like streaks of light. Tier 4s and 5s tore into the monster lines like sickles slicing through ripe grain.

Even tier 6 shadow summons soared into the air, locking onto larger threats and raining down attacks from above.

But the moment their blows struck, monstrous silhouettes began to rise from within the horde, twisted behemoths with chaotic forms, roaring skyward in defiance.

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

The two forces clashed directly.

Liam’s tier 6s were outnumbered four to one, but Mize’s broken legion of tier 6s surged in from the flanks, balancing the scales.

Then came the moment Mize had been waiting for.

She scanned the battlefield, arms folded across her chest, a sharp frown on her face. Her eyes flicked from one rising monster to the next.

“They’ve multiplied…” she muttered, her tone tight. “Fifty of them. At least.”

Tier 7s.

She had only ten true lords under her command. Even with Saka, that only made eleven. Not nearly enough.

Liam’s expression darkened too, his thoughts spinning.

But Mize, catching the hesitation in his eyes, floated closer. Without a word, she reached out and gently took his hand.

“I have a plan,” she whispered.

Liam turned his head toward her, reading her expression. After a moment of thought, he gave a quiet nod.

“It’s good.”

With that, Mize smiled faintly.

Then, like a feather caught in the breeze, she drifted upward and sat on his lap again, pressing her back softly against his chest.

She nestled into him, snuggling close.

She knew Liam very well, the pressure, the weight of command, and she knew he felt more comfortable like this.

His arm wrapped instinctively around her waist, holding her tighter.

She tilted her head, voice soft. “You’re aware of the massive dungeon world beneath my surface dungeon, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Liam murmured, resting his chin on the top of her head. His hold around her tightened slightly. “You’re thinking of…?”

“Yes,” she answered, her eyes fixed on the battlefield. “I’m going to bring those monsters into this fight.”

Liam’s breath caught for a second.

“How many?” he asked.

“A hundred true lords,” Mize replied with a grin. “And several true kings, too.”

A beat of silence, then Liam burst out laughing, thrilled.

“Good! Hahaha!” His grip around her waist tightened again, giddy energy rising in his chest. “You really are my lucky charm.”

And he meant every word.