Hye watched the streams with a cold gaze. The warriors his shadow arms encountered were no longer the fodder of the outer rim.
These were elites. Where his technique used to subvert an enemy mind in a matter of seconds, it was now taking minutes of gruelling ntal attacks to secure a single warrior. His consumption of standard bones had spiked.
"If you want to raise the stakes, then it's ti I use a higher grade of fuel," he conceded with a mocking grin.
He was far from defeated. As long as the enemy could not breach the tight encirclent of his other-universal ships, he was effectively untouchable. He would have been perfectly content to sit back and play this ga of attrition indefinitely, were it not for the old man whose life was currently ticking away under a barrage of Toranks fire.
Even so, Hye was a man who could never turn down a grand harvest. He calculated he still had approximately five hours of travel ti before he would breach the Grand Elder's inner periter.
The enemies sent to intercept him were relentless, tagging along with his fleet and throwing themselves into his path regardless of their catastrophic losses.
These new interceptors were formidable. They were ard with advanced hull plating and high-output shield generators that mocked his standard ship fire; it now took several concentrated volleys to tear a single enemy vessel apart.
On the surface below, the disparity was even more glaring. His Soulers and Reapers were finding that the elite infantry required thousands of coordinated attacks to secure a single kill.
Instead of feeling deterred, the challenge pumped Hye up. The surge of adrenaline was the final push he needed. He reached into his inventory and brought forth his Dark Realm bones. He began consuming these, pouring their energy into the black sphere of his technique.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent.
The black sphere expanded, doubling in size in re seconds. The shadow arms it emitted grew in number and thickness, lashing out like the limbs of a horror. The ti required to dominate an enemy mind plumted back down to less than a minute.
This sudden, drastic escalation took the enemy command entirely by surprise. At first, they didn't even realise the disaster unfolding in their ranks. Hye was being subtle; he kept the newly subverted ships dormant, allowing them to maintain their positions in the enemy formation while his shadow arms silently slithered from hull to hull, claiming more and more victims.
Once he had controlled enough of them, he gave the command. He didn't order them to open fire on their comrades, not yet. He simply signalled them to defect.
The sight was breathtaking, shocking, and utterly terrifying. Thousands upon thousands of ships of varying classes suddenly veered away from the enemy line in a perfectly synchronised manoeuvre.
Below them, massive divisions of ground forces turned in unison, marching away from their posts to join the Hye. They all joined his grand army without a single word of warning or a shot fired in protest.
To Hye, this was rely the appetiser. He estimated that these warriors were at least Level 5 or higher, making them the highest in system level assets currently under his command. Yet, in his heart, he knew his truest power still lay with his Soulers, his Reapers, and the logic-defying ships from the other universe.
This sudden mass defection revealed the horrifying truth of Hye's capabilities to everyone on the field. Even after realising the scale of his true power, the enemies found themselves trapped in a paradox.
They had no way to stop his technique, yet they couldn't stop following him, and they couldn't stop attacking, despite their attacks doing nothing against him, his fleet, and his ground forces.
The situation spiralled into a state of total confusion for the Toranks and the traitor commanders. Every attempt to stop Hye only resulted in him growing more powerful, absorbing their elite forces like a black hole. The crisis reached such a fever pitch that the enemy was forced to mobilise a significant portion of their primary siege force just to contain him.
Ironically, this desperate redirection of troops achieved exactly what Hye wanted: the frequency and intensity of the attacks on the Grand Elder's position began to falter. For the first ti in long hours, the old man had a mont to breathe.
The Grand Elder was no fool. From the heart of his besieged location, he felt the subtle shift in the pressure against his force. The relentless pounding of enemy fire had suddenly lost its intensity.
He didn't know who had arrived to pull him from the brink, but a cold surge of relief washed over him. His people had finally grasped the gravity of the betrayal; the ssage he wanted to deliver by prolonging this fight had gotten through.
Yet, as a seasoned veteran of thousands of wars, his relief was tempered by a grim reality. Any conventional force mobilised from the capital would take hours to traverse the cordoned space.
Furthermore, given the insane, astronomical number of Torank and traitor forces surrounding this place, he doubted any rescue party would arrive with enough strength to actually tilt the scales. He feared they would simply be throwing more lives into the abyss.
Escaping was the last thing on the Grand Elder's mind. He hadn't co to this place to run like a coward in the night. He had co to cleanse the rot. Seeing the sheer scale of the enemy's preparation only hardened his resolve; it was no longer just about survival, it was about uprooting this evil from his holand once and for all, no matter the cost.
He was unaware, however, that his personal struggle was rely one theatre in a wider orchestrated catastrophe. Across the holand, other Elders were weathering similar storms, trapped under intense, crushing waves of attacks. Even those facing far fewer enemies found themselves pinned down, unable to extricate themselves from the well-laid traps.
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