CHAPTER 191: THE MERCILESS BATTLEFIELD

A hastily swung longsword collided with a powerful hand axe. The axe slid down the blade, scraping along its length until it was caught by the sword's crossguard—but what at first glance looked like a successful block meant nothing. The second axe in the dual-wielding attacker's hands came crashing down without hesitation, embedding itself into the neck of an Aleisterre soldier who had stepped forward to halt the Selwynian raider's advance.

An intermediate knight-in-training already boasted tremendous strength. The axe cleaved through flesh with terrifying ease, lodging itself in the gap between the bones of the soldier's spine.

The raider's expression didn't change as he wrenched the axe, splitting the vertebrae at the seam. He yanked it free.

The soldier, his neck severed, didn't have the luxury of feeling any pain before his body collapsed. He collapsed into the chaos of the battlefield littered with burning embers from the mass Meteor spells.

The raider let out a furious roar. Clad in barely any armor, the Selwynian shock troops were the fiercest linebreakers of all.

Having dispatched their initial targets, they ignored the encroaching Aleisterre infantry and launched another fearless charge toward their next victim.

And when a dual-wielding berserker chose a target, that target's fate was all but sealed.

There was a standard countermeasure against these raiders: the targets were supposed to purge themselves of fear and sacrifice their lives to take the enemy down with them...

"F-For Aleisterre!" A young infantryman screamed in fear, but his voice carried unyielding resolve. He raised his longsword as he stared down the charging raider before him.

The raider raised his axe high overhead, preparing to swing it down. The young soldier instinctively wanted to block, but suppressed the impulse to do so. With a roar, he leveled his sword at his chest and thrust it forward—with no hesitation, and incredible economy of motion.

The strength of a knight-in-training allowed the sword to pierce the raider's meager armor, slice into his chest and spear his heart.

At the same time, the raider's axe cracked open the young soldier's skull. Brain matter sprayed outward.

Two squelches rang out in unison. The raider's corpse, carried by its own momentum, crashed down on top of the soldier's body. Both fell together.

This was just one brutal snapshot of the conflict on the frontlines. The ferocity of this battle far surpassed any that had occurred between the two kingdoms to date.

The shock troops' suicidal charges left them vulnerable. They weren't stronger than other soldiers—just more fearless, more overwhelming. A single slash could kill them.

But few had the guts to do what the young soldier had. Most Aleisterre infantry still tried to parry and ended up dying the next second.

Before being brought down, each dual-axe raider typically dragged a few souls to the grave with them.

Selwyn's assault was ferocious. These warriors from the frozen north had battle-hardened instincts, and their disregard for death gave them terrifying destructive power.

Aleisterre's forces faltered early in the first clash. Their Meteors had been nullified by a wall of anti-magic shields and had failed to create openings. Instead, the raiders used the chaos to breach their ranks and massacre them from within.

The last raider fell in the Aleisterre formation, but they had caused outsized destruction before their eventual defeat. The corpses surrounding them would be an everlasting legacy.

Many of the Aleisterre soldiers looked terrified. As they faced enemies who ignored pain and feared not their own deaths, even the most iron-willed men felt chills in their hearts.

"Advance!"

A raspy but resolute shout rang out from within the pile of bodies. The soldiers of Aleisterre were stunned to hear a familiar voice.

That Selwynian commander who had issued orders earlier—had he been one of the raiders himself?

"Die!" Selwyn's army roared in response to the dying command of their officer, half-buried in corpses, his right arm missing, lungs punctured, blood gushing from his mouth—clinging to life just long enough to give that final, dying order.

His suicidal resolve to shatter Aleisterre's lines and trample their lands was chilling beyond belief.

How could the Aleisterre soldiers not feel fear upon facing such a relentless, blood-soaked tide?

Some of them still hadn't adjusted to warfare in full. Their previous clashes had been smaller in scale, half-hearted skirmishes with unspoken boundaries. But now, in the face of this carnage, their will began to waver.

"Damn it! What's with these people? Are they insane?"

"What kind of enemy am I facing..."

"Don't be scared—stop shaking, damn you!"

Questioning, disbelief, self-reproach, fear of the enemy's might, despair at their own impending deaths—these emotions began to break their spirits.

And once morale broke, there could only be disaster. It was true on Earth, as much as it would be in this fantasy world.

"Do not retreat! Behind you lies your kingdom—your wives, your children, your friends—everything you hold dear! There is no ground to give! Hold the line!"

A deafening voice rang out across Aleisterre's ranks. A towering war banner suddenly rose behind them.

On it was the crest of the kingdom of Aleisterre—and with its rise came a wave of magical energy that washed over their entire formation.

This was a coordinated fourth-tier mental spell: Command of Legions. The magic's rousing rhythm rang out in every soldier's mind.

The roaring speech tied to the spell wiped clean the fear bred by the enemy's momentum.

"Don't fall back! Our homes are behind us! Stop these damned invaders—we'll drag them down with our own corpses if we must!"

The power of the magic surged. Despite the heavy losses, morale soared. The now-fearless soldiers of Aleisterre became true warriors.

The earth stirred. Elemental energy hardened the soil, drawing compacted earth together.

Massive chunks of living, rock-hard earth assembled in a dazzling display of coordinated magic: the fifth-tier Legion of Earth Elementals.

The golems stormed into battle from both flanks, and their enormous, stony fists smashed into the enemy.

Earthen fists met heavy shields—and this time, the heavily armored Selwynian troops were the ones being thrown back.

The golems that rose up from solid ground continuously drew power from the earth.

As long as the crystal cores within them weren't destroyed, they would keep growing larger, heavier, stronger, until they became mountain giants.

And for unknown reasons, ambient mana was released from human corpses after their death. On a battlefield strewn with corpses, mana was never in short supply.

The power of the golems was overwhelming. The Selwynian heavy infantry, which had easily crushed Aleisterre's foot soldiers before, now struggled to withstand the might of the golems.

Their massive shields began to dent and warp under the blows. The bones in their arms groaned, dislocated, then snapped, armor and all.

A second strike landed. A heavily-armored warrior, barely holding his shield, was driven into the earth.

The ground cracked. His armor shattered; his organs ruptured. Blood flowed from every orifice as he died on the spot.

The fearsome earth golems, tanks and battering rams in one, shifted the tide. Their power slowed Selwyn's advance.

Even the elite Selwynian heavy infantry faltered before these hulking elemental beings, and they were pushed back for the first time.

Invigorated by the Command of Legions, Aleisterre's army surged forward. Seizing the moment, they broke into the Selwynian lines, where the golems had caused mass disarray.

They swarmed the heavy infantry, outnumbered and overwhelmed, and slipped past them to strike at weaker squires who had rushed forward to patch up gaps in the frontlines.

Aleisterre began to launch a counterattack. With its golems halting the Selwynians' advance, Aleisterre's forces mounted a fierce retaliation.

The towering golems pushed forward. Infantry swarmed at their sides, using the elemental giants as cover. When the golems smashed enemies senseless, the soldiers moved in for the kill.

"Advance, advance! Drive these invaders out of our kingdom!" the commander roared, his voice booming across the battlefield as he rallied the soldiers to push forward, forcing the Selwyn lines back beyond the kingdom's border.

"How much longer? These earth golems are too damn hard to deal with! When will those things we bought finally arrive on the battlefield?"

Within the Selwyn ranks, a well-protected man dressed like a scholar scowled as he questioned a nearby soldier, his eyes fixed on their forces.

"Soon, very soon. The transport unit already sent word—they've arrived. Those war puppets should be reaching us any moment now," the soldier answered hastily, anxiously checking his communication crystals over and over.

As if in direct response to his words, a low, resonating hum pierced through the chaos of the battlefield, reaching even the frontlines.

The Selwyn soldiers quickly parted as a massive alchemical war puppet emerged from behind their ranks.

The glowing orange-red light seeping from the seams of its metal body and the twin glowing crystal lenses on its were familiar features—this was a Destroyer.

This war machine, which had once appeared in the capital's shadow, now stood upon the battlefield where it truly belonged. It was even larger than the model that had been present underground. Every step of its massive, heavy frame left deep craters in the earth.

A Destroyer perceived the world via magical feedback—its vision was the sight of magic itself. The magical resonance of the earth golems' elemental cores was as clear as day.

Blazing energy began to concentrate in the two crystal plates on its head. In the next instant, a searing beam of annihilation sliced across the battlefield, vaporizing everything in its path.

Even Selwyn's own soldiers were caught in the beam. Their armor, pierced instantly, offered no more resistance than paper. The earth golems, the intended target, had their cores vaporized in a heartbeat.

Faced with this ultimate weapon of war, the thick, resilient bodies of the golems, nearly indestructible to ordinary soldiers, were swiftly cracked, shattered, and reduced to rubble.

With their cores destroyed, the massive golems collapsed in what felt like a landslide. The beam of annihilation that had torn through them also swept through a nearby group of advancing Aleisterre infantry, cutting them all in half.

The tide of battle shifted in an instant. The advantage that Aleisterre had just gained moments ago had now been reclaimed by Selwyn's Destroyer.

The powerful earth golems suddenly looked fragile—far too fragile—before such terrifying machinery.

Then, without warning, all the earth golems halted for a brief moment. As if hearing some silent command, they surged forward, all of them charging straight at the Destroyer.

The golems weren't fast, but their sheer mass made them unstoppable. The Selwynian soldiers who tried to block their path were trampled underfoot, unable to stop the golems from barreling toward their target.

"This isn't good!" the Selwyn operative controlling the Destroyer shouted. "Stop those earth golems!"

Dozens of Selwyn infantry swarmed forward to try and halt the golems' advance, but they were only knights-in-training, without the strength to counter the golems. They could avoid the golems' clumsy attacks easily enough, but hurting them was a different matter entirely. The golems' bodies were just too tough.

Another beam of annihilation was fired from the Destroyer, its searing light sweeping across the battlefield to strike at the charging golems—but something went wrong.

The beam first tore through a crowd of Selwyn soldiers. The infantry blocking the golems were cleaved in half en masse, their burning corpses dropping to the ground.

Only after killing their own men did the beam finally strike the golem at the front, destroying its core.

"Damn it! The golems' cores were relocated to their lower extremities! If we want to destroy the cores, we'll have to shoot through our own infantry!"

Sweat poured down the operator's face. The situation was quickly slipping out of his control. For a moment, he froze, unable to advance or retreat.

That brief moment of hesitation was all it took. The earth golems suddenly accelerated, charging through the open space created by the slain infantry.

By the time the Destroyer's operator snapped back to action and began firing beams of annihilation indiscriminately to stop them, it was too late.

Some of the golems were destroyed by the beams, but nearly half reached the Destroyer. They swiftly merged together, their earthen bodies fusing into a massive mound that enveloped the much slower puppet.

Inside the mound, their elemental cores began to move, all of them converging into one unstable, colossal earth-elemental core.

The magic within exceeded the structural limits of containment—and erupted.

The explosion shook the battlefield. The magical shockwave pierced through the Destroyer's thick metal body, penetrating all the way to its inner magical core.

The resulting magical resonance tore the Destroyer's internal circuits apart in an explosive chain reaction that also obliterated the golems surrounding it.

A pillar of fire erupted within the Selwyn army, instantly turning the nearby infantry into bloody scraps. Shrapnel and flame rained down, igniting the battlefield in a blazing inferno.

"Leave it! Even if the Destroyer is gone, their earth golems can't be summoned again for a while. Take this chance—charge!"

Despite the explosion right in their ranks, the Selwyn commander remained calm, directing the troops to seize the moment and counterattack Aleisterre.

But just then, a soldier among the Aleisterre infantry who had moved alongside the golems removed a special glove that had masked his fighting spirit.

All around him, the scattered flames from the explosion were drawn together by his potential, spinning into a wide vortex of fire—a flame tornado.

As time passed, it only kept growing. The fire burned hotter and wilder, consuming everything flammable nearby. A knight with such immense destructive power—he had to be a grand knight, at the very least.

"Tch. Guess it's up to me to seize the moment."

The Flame Marshal Black Benn sneered coldly, a bloodthirsty grin on his lips. He thrust his hand forward, and the flame tornado bloomed in full force under his command.

Inner Potential: Blazing Raze.