Every swing of the blade left a lingering trail of sapphire light in the air. He was a at grinder operating at maximum capacity. He spun, ducked, and cleaved, turning the imdiate area around the southern gates into a literal lake of blood.
The unranked beasts, driven by mindless hunger, kept pouring over the corpses of their kin, only to be instantly cut by the sheer, unadulterated sharpness of his blade.
He effortlessly contained the initial surge, piling up so many carcasses that the beast tide actually had to slow down to climb over the carcasses of their own dead to reach him.
From the gates, Veylara and the tribesn watched in stunned, breathless silence, before letting out a deafening, unified roar of absolute euphoria.
Their Divine One was a god of slaughter.
"Advance!" Veylara roared, her voice finally breaking the spell of shock holding her warriors. "Form the shield wall around his flanks! Do not let him be surrounded!"
With a synchronized, earth-shaking battle cry, the Veynar tribe surged forward, crashing into the disorganized remnants of the first wave. The battle was joined, but the center of the at grinder belonged entirely to the Divine One.
For the first hour, it was a simple matter of endurance. The unranked beasts were weak, relying entirely on numbers. Sol carved through them effortlessly, his breathing barely elevated. But the Great Orrath was never simple for long.
As the minutes dragged on and the piles of unranked corpses grew, the nature of the tide began to shift. The mindless fodder was violently shoved aside as the second batch breached the tree line.
These were mostly Essence Born beasts, seasoned predators of the jungle, interspersed with the deadly, highly specialized On Blood variants. They were larger, smarter, and infinitely more lethal. Unlike the unranked beasts that charged completely blindly, these predators possessed intelligence, malice, and specialized essence traits.
They used the chaos of the remaining fodder as cover, slipping through the shadows, preparing to strike the Veynar Vanguard lines that had now deployed outside the gates to support Sol.
The battlefield dynamics shifted violently. The Veynar shield wall, which had held strong against the mindless charge, suddenly found itself under sophisticated assault.
These bastards had begun to bypass the heavy frontline fighters, slipping through the gaps to target the weaker, younger tribesn and the support hunters in the second rank. The air was suddenly filled with panicked shouts as unseen claws tore through leather armor.
Sol instantly recognized the shift in the enemy’s tactics. He knew that, he couldn’t just stand in one place and swing anymore. He engaged the passive agility of the Dreadwing, his boots kicking up plus of bloody mud as he blurred across the battlefield.
He darted through the ranks, his silver-crimson eyes scanning the chaotic fray.
A young Veynar spearman, barely out of his sixteenth cycle, was desperately trying to fend off a pair of Essence Born wolves. He didn’t see the massive, translucent silhouette of a Mantis dropping from the petrified branches above him, its scythe-like arms raised to decapitate him.
A streak of sapphire light intercepted the fall.
Sol appeared beside the boy, his blade flashing upward. The Mantis was cleaved cleanly in two before it even registered the threat. Sol didn’t stop to accept the boy’s terrified, awe-struck gratitude, he had already kicked off a pile of corpses, launching himself toward the left flank.
A seasoned Vanguard warrior was desperately holding back a massive, armored Ape, his spear splintering under the beast’s imnse fists. From the shadows behind the warrior, a sleek, shadow panther aid for his exposed neck.
Before the panther could even leave the ground, Sol materialized, driving the butt of his Void-Oak spear through the panther’s skull, while simultaneously flicking the blade to sever the Ape’s arms at the elbows.
"Keep your eyes on the shadows!" Sol barked at the stunned warrior, before instantly blurring away to the next crisis.
He was everywhere at once. He parried venomous bone-spikes, shattered the carapaces of subterranean ambush predators, and dragged wounded tribesn behind the safety of the shield wall with his free hand.
He saved a dozen tribesn in the span of three minutes, racking up a kill count of high-tier beasts that would have taken a veteran hunting team weeks to achieve.
He was entirely in his elent, the adrenaline pumping, and was expending energy at a terrifying rate, but his Sun Core refining the ambient, chaotic blood-soaked essence into pure, burning stamina.
As he carved his way toward the eastern flank of the battle, his heightened senses caught a sudden, violent flare of heat.
Through the swirling dust and spraying blood, Sol spotted a girl fighting with a ferocious, almost suicidal intensity. She was surrounded by the corpses of three unranked razor-boars, her chest heaving, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. Her hands were wreathed in vibrant, red blood.
It was Zeyra.
Sol raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t seen the voluptuous, ambitious girl since the night she had tried to seduce and trap him in his quarters. Kira had ntioned she joined an advance hunting team, and looking at her now, the results of her desperate grinding were glaringly evident.
She was no longer wearing the sheer, translucent silks of a midnight seductress. She was clad in tight, functional beast-leather, heavily stained with mud and black gore.
Her voluptuous figure moved with a lethal, serpentine grace that spoke of relentless, agonizing training. She wielded twin curved bone-daggers, her hands a blur of motion.
Zeyra was fighting like a demon. She wasn’t relying on cheap seduction or political maneuvering here, she was relying on pure, unadulterated combat prowess. She was currently locked in combat with a massive, unranked Razor-Boar.
She moved with a serpentine grace, effortlessly dodging the lunging beast before driving a dagger directly into its ribcage. The boar squealed in pain, but she didn’t give it a chance to struggle and drove the second dagger directly into its eyes, killing it imdiately.
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