Chapter 960: Chapter 170_2:
Steel and flame will tear through chaos at the most precise moment, reversing this mad feast.
This is not salvation, but a reckoning.
The power of the Evil God believers will be uprooted, their nests will collapse in explosions, and their flesh will turn to dust under the grinding of machinery.
And the survivors, those trembling and praying mortals, will witness firsthand how the creations of the Old Gods disintegrate in the roar of steam, those twisted and indescribable beings seem as fragile as dry leaves before cold steel.
Then, they will understand—the New God is their true savior.
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Under the blood moon, the ruins of the pantheon resemble the bones of a giant beast, broken colonnades casting twisted shadows.
The Priest of the Evil God stands at the center of the altar, skeletal arms raised high with an obsidian dagger, its blade coursing with dark red patterns like veins, each pulse accompanied by a teeth-grating metallic twist from afar.
Three hundred fanatical believers crawl on the ground in bizarre postures, their spines unnaturally bent, jagged joints piercing through their skin.
Their cracked lips open and close incessantly, hoarse prayers echoing through the ruins, like thousands of beetles gnawing away at the roots of this world.
The air is filled with the sweet odor of rotting fruit, mixed with the acrid scent of sulfur.
"Let blood be the guide, and soul the sacrifice!" The priest’s roar makes the ground tremble.
The first sacrifice is a teenage girl, her eyes long gouged out, hollow sockets crawling with maggots.
When the obsidian dagger slices through her ash-gray neck, the gushing blood bizarrely congeals in mid-air into symbols, writhing like living creatures upon the altar’s surface.
The runes inscribed in ancient language upon contact with the blood begin to swallow it like a hungry mouth, each gulp lighting up with a dark green glow.
As more lifeblood seeps into the altar, the entire pantheon starts emitting a dying moan.
Putrid black mist gushes up from the ground cracks, faintly revealing countless semi-transparent tendrils within, winding around the limbs of believers, extracting the souls of the offerings through their seven orifices.
A believer suddenly convulses violently, his skull crackling open like petals, gray brain matter sculpted by invisible forces into a miniature altar.
The black mist surges more violently, those stone columns collapsed for hundreds of years begin writhing like sea anemone tentacles.
The whites of the believers’ eyes are completely overtaken by ink-like darkness, torn corners of their mouths extending to their earlobes, eerily without spilling a drop of blood.
They laugh frantically, their voices mingling with metallic friction noises.
The ground begins seeping warm, viscous liquid, everyone feeling it—they are approaching, those indescribable beings squeezing their bodies through the dimensional rift.
Above their heads, the observational systems of the Floating City coldly record all this with mechanical eyes.
Precise optical arrays penetrate the thick lead-gray clouds, converting every detail happening on the ground into data streams, fed into the Floating City’s central calculation core.
Energy wave detectors flicker dangerously with crimson light, alarms blaring incessantly in the command room, yet all deliberately set to silent mode—exactly as Perfikot intends.
Alchemy runes outline the trajectory of dimensional distortion on the holographic projection, the twisted lines writhing like living beings, indicating the dimensional barriers are being torn apart.
Alchemists nervously record every anomaly reading, their fingers flying across the console, transmitting data in real-time to Perfikot standing at the command deck.
Perfikot’s plan is steadily advancing—she deliberately allows the Evil God believers to complete the blood ritual, letting despair descend first, to then crush it with her own hands.
When the last sacrifice’s bones shatter into ash on the altar, the entire ruin suddenly plunges into an eerie silence.
In the three seconds when even the sound of the wind had frozen, the detection equipment in the Floating City captured the energy surge from the breach of the dimensional barrier, emitting a piercing alarm.
The ground split open like rotten eyelids, revealing countless crimson irises; each rift’s edge oozed thick black pus that corroded the frozen soil into sizzling foam.
Hundreds of tendrils oozing rainbow-colored slime shot up to the sky, refracting a sickly halo under the moonlight. Each tendril was covered with constantly opening and closing mouth-like organs, from which corrosive saliva dripped between jagged teeth, creating a horrifying sucking sound.
The unnameable shadows slowly condensed into semi-solid forms in the real world, constantly twisting and changing shape—sometimes appearing as flesh masses pieced together from countless human limbs, with rusty chains hanging from the joints; other times transforming into flowing asphalt-like black substances, with the outlines of struggling, pained human faces emerging on the surface.
The screeching cry that the minions of the Ancient Gods emitted when they tore through the dimensional barriers caused all glassware within a radius of ten miles to shatter simultaneously. The splintering glass created a deadly silver storm in the air, shredding nearby tents and shacks into tattered cloth and wood chips.
They carried a mind-bending hum toward the survivor camp, a sound like a million bees flapping their wings within skulls or a rusty saw slicing back and forth on nerves.
Where the sound waves passed, metal objects twisted and deformed, and the shell of the Energy Tower displayed spider-web-like cracks.
Blood oozed from the ears of the survivors; a few frail individuals collapsed to the ground, clutching their heads in pain and howling. Yet, every face bore an eerie smile—their pupils dilated into pitch-black voids, and the corners of their mouths tore to their ears, revealing dense, inhuman fangs.
This was precisely the "holy moment" the believers yearned for!
By now, the air was permeated with a sweet and rotten stench, as if the entire world was being dragged into the digestive cavity of some unnameable entity.
Every breath felt like inhaling thick pus; the burning sensation of corrosion in their lungs caused the survivors to cough violently, yet nothing came out—only a metallic taste of rust and a slimy, living touch from deep within their throats.
The descending unnameables burst through the underground water system and popped open the manhole covers, flooding up to the surface of the Seven Hills City ruins as if sewage was backing up.
Their writhing bodies squeezed through the concrete pipes, twisting the rusty metal into blasphemous sculptures, as the road surface collapsed like melting wax.
The creatures composed of mucus, rotten flesh, and unnameable substances surged toward the survivor camp, leaving corrosive trails bubbling in their wake, dissolving even the frozen soil into a black smoke-emitting swamp.
The outer walls and watchtowers of the survivor camp crumbled into dust the moment the tendrils swept over them; the steel-reinforced concrete as fragile as biscuits.
The guards on the watchtower barely had time to sound the alarm before being entangled by tendrils and dragged into the mass of writhing shadow with a muffled sound of breaking bones.
An acid rain composed of flesh and blood poured from the sky, corroding the newly established prefab huts and tents within the camp. Metal frames dissolved with a sizzling sound, and the canvas tops were pierced with countless holes, revealing the blood-red sky behind them.
That sky was now filled with writhing, vein-like clouds, as if the entire world had become the organ of a massive creature.
Mothers screamed as they stuffed their children into drainage pipes, using their bodies to block the entrance.
Their backs were soon burned and bloodied by the acid rain, yet they held firmly against the iron grates until their last consciousness was consumed by agony.
The patrol team members futilely fired their rifles, the bullets passing through the bodies of the creatures as if shooting through dense fog, leaving only fleeting ballistic trails in the air.
The Steam Knights set up their recoilless cannons, the flames from the muzzles illuminating their silver helmets, but could only leave fleeting scorch marks on the writhing shadow.
The wounds were almost immediately filled with new sprouts of flesh, as if they never existed.
Everyone’s retinas were scarred with those writhing, geometrically-defying monstrous forms.
They sometimes swelled like mountains, casting shadows that covered half the camp; other times they shrank to needle points, piercing victims’ eyes from impossible angles.
The dodecagonal eyes blinked simultaneously at impossible angles, each pupil reflecting a different nightmare scene; barbed limbs stretched from nonexistent dimensions, tearing fleeing people apart like dolls.
A young soldier suddenly burst into mad laughter, dropping his weapon and walking toward the monsters with arms outstretched, muttering incomprehensible language—tones rising and falling like an incantation from some ancient ritual.
His eyeballs melted in their sockets, yet he maintained that eerie smile until a tendril, covered with mouth-like organs, emerged from the void and wrapped around his head.
Even as his skull shattered, his laughter continued to echo amid the ruins, forming a horrific harmony with the hum of the monsters.
