Chapter 78: Chapter 78: The Sun and the Rot
Chapter 78: The Sun and the Rot
Ten kilometers deep in the Wildlands, the sky was split perfectly in half.
To the east, the horizon was a pitch-black, suffocating void of demonic rot.
To the west, it was a blinding, incandescent ocean of golden solar fire.
Elder Martha stood at the epicenter of the darkness, her chest heaving.
Blood poured from her eyes and nose.
Through the tether of her dark magic, she felt the horrifying truth ripple across the battlefield.
Elder Briggins’s colossal aura had vanished.
Elder Mathews’s corrupted signature had been violently snuffed out.
She was the last Elder standing.
"Useless," Martha hissed, her voice trembling with a mixture of terror and absolute, unhinged fanaticism.
She looked up at the towering man slowly walking toward her through the rotting fog.
Lord Commander Helion Goldmane did not look tired.
He did not have a single scratch on his pristine, heavily medaled Vanguard coat.
He carried The Bastion’s Anchor, his colossal meteorite War Hammer, resting lazily on one shoulder.
The Valor of the Zenith Sun radiated from his skin, effortlessly burning away the toxic air before it could even touch his boots.
He was not fighting a war.
He was taking a stroll.
"Your peers have returned to the dirt," Helion’s voice boomed, calm but echoing with absolute, terrifying authority.
"And yet, you stand before me, trembling. Did you truly believe your little cult could eclipse the sun?"
Martha screamed, a sound of pure, demonic rage.
She raised her arms high.
She did not care about her own troops anymore.
She cast a wide, horrific necromantic tether, violently draining the life force of every single surviving Cultist and monster within a two-mile radius.
Hundreds of her own men collapsed, turning into dry husks as their biomass and mana funneled directly into her hands.
The air warped and screamed as she compressed the energy into a singular, hyper-dense point of pure decay.
"[Edict of the Rotting Abyss: Event Horizon]!"
A literal black hole formed above her head.
It was a sphere of absolute, inescapable gravity.
It began violently sucking in the corrupted earth, the fog, and the light itself.
The sheer gravitational pull was so catastrophic that the bedrock beneath Helion’s feet began to splinter and drag toward the void.
Helion stopped walking. He looked up at the apocalyptic black hole. He didn’t raise his guard. He didn’t brace his stance.
He just sighed.
"You slaughter your own pawns just to cast a slightly larger shadow?" Helion asked, his golden eyes narrowing in profound disappointment.
"How profoundly pathetic. A false god demands sacrifices. The true sun only gives."
"DIE, GOLDMANE!" Martha shrieked, violently hurling the black hole directly at the Lord Commander.
"Kneel! The Abyss is inevitable!"
The Event Horizon tore through the earth, a localized singularity seeking to erase Helion from existence.
The gravitational pressure threatened to crush his organs before the sphere even touched him.
Helion did not move.
He slowly lifted The Bastion’s Anchor off his shoulder.
"Inevitable?" Helion asked, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying rumble that shook the heavens.
He gripped the handle of his massive hammer with both hands.
"That word has suffered enough humiliation today."
FWOOSH!
Helion’s Valor exploded.
He funneled the entirety of his blinding, god-like solar energy directly into the meteorite head of the War Hammer.
The weapon ignited, turning into a literal, condensed miniature sun.
The heat was so absolute that the air itself turned to plasma.
"My light is absolute," Helion declared, his eyes flashing with apex supremacy.
"Apologize for bringing this filthy rot into my presence."
Helion stepped directly into the crushing gravitational pull of the black hole, raised his blazing hammer high, and brought it down with the force of a meteor strike.
"[Valor of the Zenith Sun: Solar Annihilation]."
KRA-BOOM!
The hammer struck the singularity.
For a fraction of a second, the world went completely, utterly silent.
The collision of absolute gravity and absolute solar heat broke the laws of physics.
Then, reality shattered.
CRACK!
The black hole shattered like cheap glass.
A blinding, planetary shockwave of golden fire erupted outward, instantly vaporizing the black hole, the remaining fog, and everything else in a five-mile radius.
When the blinding light faded, the Wildlands were unrecognizable.
The earth was a smooth, glowing basin of scorched glass.
Elder Martha was blasted a hundred yards backward.
Her demonic robes were burned away, her arms were shattered, and her Level 215 Edict was completely, permanently broken.
She hit the ground hard, vomiting thick, black blood.
She dragged herself across the hot glass with her elbows, wheezing, entirely broken.
Step. Step. Step.
The heavy, rhythmic sound of armored boots approached her.
Helion Goldmane walked up behind the crawling Cult Elder.
He did not swing his hammer again.
He simply lifted his right boot and placed it firmly on the center of her shattered spine, pinning her to the scorched earth like a crushed insect.
Martha gasped in agony, entirely immobilized under the crushing weight of the Sun-Crowned Commander.
"You are very quiet now, Martha," Helion stated coldly, looking down at the back of her head.
"Did my light burn away your tongue, or merely your delusions?"
Martha choked, spitting blood onto the glass.
"Curse... curse you..."
Helion leaned his weight onto his boot slightly, drawing a sharp scream from her.
He had played along with this fight for a reason.
He needed an answer.
"You are a fanatic, but you are not stupid," Helion said, his eyes narrowing.
"You knew I was here. You knew my power was the absolute pinnacle of this continent. And yet, you and your peers marched on Bastion Seven with absolute certainty. You threw away your lives and your armies just to keep me, Seraphina, and Hennessey occupied in the mud."
Helion’s voice dropped into a dangerous, icy whisper.
"What were you stalling for?"
Beneath his boot, Martha’s body began to violently tremble.
It wasn’t a tremble of fear.
She started to laugh.
It was a wet, sickly, manic sound that bubbled up from her ruined lungs.
The laughter grew louder, more hysterical, echoing eerily across the silent, glassy basin.
"You... you think you are the sun..." Martha wheezed, her head twisting around to look up at Helion with wide, bleeding, completely insane eyes.
"But the sun... the sun always sets, Goldmane."
Helion frowned, raising his hammer to finally end her.
"Speak."
"We didn’t come here to kill you!" Martha shrieked, a terrifying smile splitting her scarred face.
"We came here to make you watch your precious city die!"
With her final, dying breath, Martha bit completely through her own tongue.
She spat a mouthful of hyper-corrupted, demonic blood directly onto Helion’s armored boot.
VWOOM!
A massive, incredibly complex purple array instantly materialized on the ground beneath Helion’s feet.
It wasn’t an attack.
It was a sacrificial binding seal.
Helion tried to step back, but the spatial array locked his boots, and the boots of Hennessey and Seraphina miles away, to the earth itself.
They couldn’t move.
They were anchored to the Wildlands.
"What is this?" Helion growled, his solar fire flaring as he tried to burn through the seal.
But the array was fueled by the absolute sacrifice of a Level 215 soul.
It would hold him for exactly sixty seconds.
"You are done for..." Martha laughed, her eyes rolling back into her head as she finally died.
Before Helion could strike the ground to break the seal, the world shifted.
RUUUUMBLE.
It wasn’t an earthquake.
It was a seismic event that shook the entire Bastion.
Helion snapped his head toward the distant, towering Great Wall of Bastion Seven.
The earth directly beneath the Vanguard Knights’ frontline, exactly where millions of gallons of blood and thousands of corpses had soaked into the dirt, violently collapsed into a massive sinkhole.
A deafening, apocalyptic roar erupted from the depths of the earth.
It was a sound composed of thousands of screaming, dead voices.
A hand the size of a battleship, made entirely of stitched, rotting, bleeding flesh, violently slammed onto the edge of the sinkhole.
The Vanguard Knights on the wall dropped their weapons in sheer, paralyzing despair.
Aegon, Reina, and Estella froze, the breath leaving their lungs.
The Corpse Titan, fueled by the slaughter of a hundred thousand beings, was dragging its colossal, world-ending form out of the abyss.
If it took even a single step, the Great Wall would shatter like porcelain.
Helion’s eyes widened in absolute horror.
He was chained to the earth ten kilometers away.
He couldn’t reach it.
"THESE MEAGER CHAINS WILL NEVER HOLD ME FOREVER!" Helion roared, struggling against the binding array.
The Cult had played their hidden card.
And Bastion Seven was completely defenseless.
