Decaying World Chapter 265

"Roar!"

Beyond Black Cloud, along the black stone beaches outside the Clear Wind Temple, a dense, chaotic tide of pale monsters surged ashore. They crashed toward the Undying Race's Black Army, which stood waiting in disciplined formation.

Massive behemoths spearheaded the assault, smaller creatures flooding the gaps in their wake. The tiniest among them burrowed straight into the earth, lying in wait to strike from below. The natural auras bleeding off the horde collided and sared together into a suffocating miasma.

Without warning, spider-like flying aberrations dove violently from the sky, spewing wide swaths of corrosive green venom. It landed without discrimination, dissolving their own kind alongside the Black Army soldiers."Kill!" the Undying Race soldiers roared, raising shields and hurling spears. Among their ranks stood martial artists and Called Ones. Internal Force and Void Force coiled around the weapons as they left the hand, turning the volley into a dense black rain that drove upward into the airborne spiders. Scores of the creatures plumted, only to be trampled to pulp by the charging four-ard giants behind them.

These giants were the horde's largest vanguard, each towering hundreds of ters tall. Every step made the earth tremble and left deep craters in their wake. Their pale skin was hardened like stone, and each of their four arms was encased in thick gray armor that swung wildly as they charged.

The Undying Race's lines collapsed swiftly. A few High-Tier Called Ones held—their Void Force just sufficient to repel the giants—but the rest of the soldiers were hurled into the air and broken apart.

The giants that punched through quickly t the non-human Black Army. The Elephant-n roared and surged forward, over a dozen swarming a single giant to drag it down. Armored Lion-n and Python Clan warriors moved up to reinforce the crumbling front.

Monster claws raked through armor and flesh, yet no one retreated. Behind the non-human vanguard, the human Black Army watched with hard eyes. Void Force fields saturated the air, laying at least ten layered defensive barriers across the vanguard. Ten distinct Internal Force buffs from Circulation Realm martial artists reinforced them further. Weapons and armor glead with the white light of Internal Force, wreathed in the warping, near-invisible distortion of Void Force fields.

Circulation Realm experts and those above ford dedicated long-range support groups further back. High-Tier Called Ones stood further back still—sustaining the buffs while staying vigilant, ready to encircle and cut down anything that broke through. Overhead, Moth Carriages banked through the smoke, ferrying Divine Officers to intercept the colossal airborne threats.

Fiery teors filled the sky and slamd into aberrations vastly larger than themselves. Jellyfish hundreds of ters across, pallid and enormous. Colossal blue whales trailing azure light. Brilliantly colored nine-tailed birds with countless wings that blotted out the clouds. Deafening explosions tore through the upper air—the collateral of Divine Officer-level powerhouses clashing against Destructive level aerial leviathans.

…

Outside the Clear Wind Dao, the disciples had already gathered their families. Su Yaping, Xia Si, and the newly joined Mistborn Pang Jiu stood together with Wang Hongshi, Li Yuanyuan, and the others.

The distant carnage on the stone beach pressed against all their senses.

"Where is the Dao Master?" Pang Jiu asked, scanning the area.

"As a Vice City Lord, the Dao Master is supporting the array's core operations," Su Yaping said. "We serve as auxiliary forces behind the regular Black Army. We hold until the main forces are fully committed—only if sothing slips through do we step forward."

"Then it's still early," Pang Jiu said, voice low. "By convention, this is just the opening volley. The Divine Descendants haven't moved yet, which ans the Extre Desire Heaven and the Taisu Primal Disk are holding their ground. Right now, it's all probing and attrition."

"Our mission is to guard this place and the families inside," Su Yaping reminded them. "Nothing beyond that."

"What about the Lin family?" Xia Si asked.

"Already escorted to the Inner City—near the Moon Tower, under the Taisu Martial Academy's protection. No need to worry. It's far safer there than here," Su Yaping answered.

"These monsters are a chaotic mix of strong and weak, no coordination, killing their own kind as freely as ours," Wang Hongshi observed grimly. "When we do move, how do we handle them?"

"Realistically, we'll only face a handful that manage to break the line," Pang Jiu said. "These things have imnse individual strength and thick hides, but anything that reaches us will already be heavily injured. We want our most durable fighters up front and everyone else providing ranged support."

None of them had battlefield experience, but the logic was sound. They nodded.

"First, let's watch how the Taisu Martial Academy and the Hundred Seas rchant Alliance handle theirs," Su Yaping said.

Not far away, the nearest guard unit of the Hundred Seas rchant Alliance was already engaging a white-furred giant ape that had broken through the Black Army's lines. The beast stood over thirty ters tall. Its dense white fur was incredibly hard and thick, shrugging off virtually all ranged attacks.

It roared and charged the blue-and-white formation. Halfway through the charge, two Three Harmonies Grandmasters burst from the ranks to et it head-on.

Boom!

The collision was devastating. The physical might of the Grandmasters, amplified by their shrouds of Internal Force and Void Force, pulverized the ape's iron-like fur on impact. Bone and flesh caved and buckled; Void Force annihilated chunks of the creature outright. Even so, the ape's strength was terrifying. Two massive swipes sent both n flying, even as its wounds began to knit. More Grandmasters and High-Tier Called Ones rushed out in succession to intercept the beasts still pressing through.

Along the stone beach and harbor, the skirmishes multiplied. Massive impacts, shockwaves, and furious roars layered into a deafening, continuous din.

The Clear Wind Dao group watched the carnage and quietly worked out their approach. They settled on a roaming hunting strategy—using their collective speed to support surrounding combat groups, stabilize the line, and keep threats away from the Temple.

The decision made, the disciples activated their movent techniques and vanished in blurs of motion. Only Su Yaping, Xia Si, Pang Jiu, and a few of their strongest fighters remained.

"We hold the final line here," Su Yaping said calmly.

Xia Si said nothing. Her gaze drifted upward to the third floating mountain peak, high above the battlefield. That was where her master was stationed.

…

On the summit of the third floating peak, Lin Hui, Li Hanzhang, and Hong Lingxiao looked down at the defensive zones below, now consud by brutal warfare. They waited.

The Moon Tower's battlefield supervisors would notify them the instant a Divine Descendant or low-tier Mist God appeared. As long as this suspended peak held, the array would keep operating—feeding continuous amplification to the three City Lords. That was their only purpose here.

"Look sharp. They're here," Hong Lingxiao said suddenly.

The Moon Tower's prompt arrived in their ears a split second later. Hong Lingxiao vanished instantly, blurring toward a distant blue teor that had breached the outer defensive line.

Before Lin Hui could track her trajectory, his own prompt arrived.

"Excellency, please intercept Minglan's Divine Descendant, Bomila. Target is male, long white hair, clad in blue-and-gold full-body bone armor. Primary weapon: a giant white bone spiked club." A rapid stream of intelligence followed—the Divine Descendant's combat profile, proficiencies, strengths, and tactical tendencies.

The entire transmission took one second. For a powerhouse of Lin Hui's caliber, a second was an eternity. Receive, comprehend, cross-reference, locate, strike. The whole sequence took him no more than two.

He and Li Hanzhang blurred into motion almost simultaneously. Lin Hui materialized directly in front of Bomila and thrust a lightning-fast sword strike.

The blow was parried. A strange sky-blue power arrested the corrosive spread of his Disaster Energy completely. A flicker of surprise. But the foundation of his reputation wasn't his Disaster Energy—it was speed.

Swish. In the next instant, his speed erupted. In the fraction of a second his blade ground against the sky-blue barrier, he mapped nearly every facet of its properties. The next instant, he was past it entirely.

Pfft. The layers of sky-blue energy shielding Bomila shattered like glass. His bone helt split cleanly in two. His severed head flew high into the air and detonated into a blinding fireball of blue light.

In less than a breath, this Blood Ancestor-level Divine Descendant—a being stronger than Han Sanmian—had perished beneath Lin Hui's sword.

Before he could draw a steady breath, the next prompt chid. He pivoted. Then the third target. The ninth. The tenth.

The Divine Descendants vastly outnumbered the Federation's Blood Ancestors. This was the terrifying advantage a pantheon of gods held. Mist Gods were utterly indiscriminate—with a particular fondness for coupling with highly prolific species—and their descendants flooded the world in staggering numbers across wildly varying power levels.

Lin Hui killed twenty in succession, yet more poured through the breach without pause. At first he suspected the other Blood Ancestors were slacking. A quick sweep of the battlefield erased that notion: nearly every Blood Ancestor was locked in a brutal lee against at least two Divine Descendants simultaneously.

Even so, the demigods continued their mad charge. Their numbers were simply too vast. The slaughter had yielded sothing useful, at least—seven distinct types of pulsation of destruction, indicating seven separate species represented in the assault.

His efficiency drew attention. Two four-winged Divine Descendants with exceptional agility combined to pin him down. Both moved at speeds rivaling a Mistborn's Super Divine Speed, and for a stretch, even Lin Hui couldn't end the fight quickly. After ten minutes of trading—without revealing his major trump cards or using the Typhoon Star Breath—he finally cut both of them down. Four more winged Divine Descendants sward him the instant the bodies hit the ground.

He understood now. The better he perford, the more concentrated fire he attracted. The battlefield's pressure was naturally gravitating toward him.

He shifted tactics—using his speed to entangle rather than eliminate, preserving the balance of the line. As long as the floating peak held, nothing else mattered. And once he had killed a given species of Divine Descendant, further kills of that type no longer contributed to his pulsation of destruction. More kills of the sa species yielded nothing; stalling was the more efficient play.

What Lin Hui hadn't anticipated was how long it would drag on. Six full hours. Only when the sky began to darken with the approaching Night Mist did the battlefield's intensity finally ease.

The lull was brief. A second apocalyptic wave of monsters crashed against the shores. The pantheon of gods cared nothing for the Night Mist. The siege continued, unabated.