After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 75: Battlefield

The battlefield below was a grinding, screaming sprawl of light and blood.

The assault force had formed ragged lines across the valley under the Tear, thousands of Hunters holding against the flood, formation shields flaring where the waves hit hardest. It was holding. Barely. The word for what it was doing was surviving, not winning.

Aidan folded his wings and dropped into the middle of it like a meteor deciding to participate.

He landed in front of a collapsing line where an Epic-rank squad was seconds from being overrun by a tide of shrieking beasts, and the shockwave of his landing alone flattened the first rank of Terrors into paste.

The rest he took apart in motion.

Lightning-wrapped fists blew apart chitin and bone in every direction, each strike flowing into the next without a wasted breath, and within ten seconds the tide in front of that squad simply stopped existing.

"Wha..." The squad captain lowered his cracked shield, staring at the crimson-gold armored figure standing in a ring of dissolving Terror smoke. "Who in the realms are you?"

"Busy," Aidan said, and left.

He moved down the line like weather.

Where the fighting was thickest, he arrived, and then it wasn’t thick anymore.

He caught a Legendary-rank Terror’s descending claw one-handed above a screaming healer line, held it there like a door he was politely keeping open, and unmade the beast with a burst-loaded palm through its skull.

The healers were relieved, and excited.

"The armor guy! Support the armor guy!"

"Keep him alive!"

"Support him with WHAT? He’s fine! Support ME!"

"But that guy is crazy powerful and fast! Who is he?"

"One Digicard scan on him should tell us his name at least."

"I tried to do that, but I had a terror on my ass, and that crimson guy is too fast."

An early-Legendary Hunter got swatted out of the sky nearby, tumbling broken toward the horde below, and Aidan crossed the distance in a blink, caught her out of the air, and set her down behind the lines in the same motion he used to bisect the Terror that had hit her.

"You good?"

"I..." She stared up at the expressionless helm. "Yes?"

"Great. Drink a potion. Back in when you can."

And he was gone again, because the battlefield kept offering him better and better teachers.

That was the part none of them could see. To the assault force, the crimson armor was a calamity on their side, shredding peak Legendary-rank Terrors faster than any five of their strongest combined. To Aidan, every single kill was a rep.

He ran his new sword through its paces on a pack of blade-limbed horrors, letting Corvath Ren’s one pointer, soft elbow, blade leads, settle deeper into his hands with every exchange, and by the twentieth cut the sword stopped feeling borrowed.

He tightened his Neonoir Lethal Flow between waves, trimming the Spirit Energy bleed of the form a fraction at a time, teaching himself to hold the Spirit Form in short, surgical bursts instead of one expensive stretch.

And on a peak Legendary-rank Terror shaped like a walking cathedral of bone, he tried something new entirely, threading Flame and Pierce from the Blazing Point Rifle bond down the length of his conjured sword, and the resulting thrust went through the cathedral lengthwise and out the far side trailing a tunnel of white fire.

’Oh, that’s a keeper.’ He watched the monster collapse into smoke around the hole. ’Blazing Point Fang. Naming it later. Busy now.’

The assault force had mostly stopped fighting near him at this point, because there was nothing left near him to fight. They had started following him instead, whole squads drafting in his wake like gulls behind a ship, harvesting the contribution points of everything his passage crippled.

"Double points," a grinning Epic-ranker panted, spearing a twitching Terror the armor had left behind. "Best day of my life. Whoever that is, I’m naming my kid after him."

"You don’t know his name."

"Kid’s name is Armor now."

High above the valley, where the sky itself bent and buckled, the real war was happening.

A handful of Divine-rank Hunters, the shelter’s pillars and two Enforcers from the Alliance, held the top of the sky against the Divine-rank Terrors sliding out of the Tear, and their exchanges lit the clouds like a second sunrise every few seconds.

One of them, a silver-haired woman wreathed in orbiting rings of light, glanced down between exchanges, and her eyes narrowed.

"Veshan. The crimson one, below."

Her partner, a mountain of a man holding a Terror’s jaws apart with his bare hands, spared a half-second glance. "The armor? What about it? Legendary-rank scuffle is not our..."

He stopped.

Below them, the crimson figure hit the heart of a Legendary-rank wave, and the wave’s entire leading edge unraveled in a spiral of wind and white fire, a dozen calamity-class Terrors erased between one breath and the next.

"...That’s one person," Veshan said slowly, wrenching his Terror’s skull apart and dropping the smoking remains. "Doing that."

"That’s one person," the silver-haired woman agreed. "Whose signature I do not know. Whose style I do not know. Wearing armor I have never seen." Her orbiting rings hummed. "On our planet."

"Ask questions after the Tear’s shut."

"Obviously. But I’m remembering that armor."

They were not the only ones watching.

Deep inside the flood, something else had been keeping count. Something to whom the tide of lesser Terrors was not an army but a body, and the crimson mote carving through it a wound that refused to close.

Aidan felt it before he saw it, and what he felt was absurd.

Every Terror within a kilometer of him stopped. Mid-lunge, mid-scream, the entire flood around him went still at once, like a held breath, like a sea pulling back from the shore before something arrives.

’That’s new.’ He settled his stance slowly, sword low, every aspect he owned rising quietly to a ready hum. ’That’s the whole board reacting to one player.’

[Arthur: Master. Above the Tear. The big one that came out third. It’s looking at you.]

Aidan lifted his eyes to the top of the sky, past the dueling Divine-ranks, to a vast silhouette of folded dark wings hanging beside the Tear itself.

It was looking at him. Across kilometers of screaming battlefield, through the smoke of everything he’d killed, two pinpoints of void-white light were fixed on him with something no beast should have been able to convey at that distance.

Recognition. Offense. Intent.

Then it vanished.

No wind-up, no descent, no travel at all. The silhouette simply stopped being beside the Tear, and the sky in front of Aidan tore open with pressure as it appeared thirty meters away at full power, wings unfurling to blot out the light, Divine-rank might crashing down over the battlefield like a dropped ocean.

Around him, Hunters collapsed to their knees in waves, screaming under a pressure that wasn’t even aimed at them.

It was all aimed at Aidan.

The Terror’s void-white eyes burned down at the small crimson figure, and the intent pouring off it was as simple and total as a verdict: erase this.

Aidan stood under the full weight of it, knees unbent, sword steady, and slowly rolled his shoulders.

’Well.’ His grin pulled wide and sharp inside the helm. ’Buffet’s over. Dinner found me first.’