Chapter 713: Reinforcements
The first wave hit the united line of three kingdoms, and Theravex shook.
The Caelthyr Dominion had thrown everything onto its outer wall, Morvane and Draveth flanking it left and right, a single defensive front holding the approach to the crystal heart. It was a strong line. It had never had to face an army grown from a factory.
The Dread-Reavers reached it first, fast and bladed, pouring over the broken ground in a black wave that crashed against the Caelthyr shields and did not stop.
Behind them came the Dread-Bulwarks, slow and heavy, walking battering rams that leaned into the wall and simply pushed.
The defenders held, barely, and then the Ember-born arrived.
Corrosion-flame breachers walked up to the Caelthyr shields and laid their burning hands on them, and the crystal barriers that had held this world for years began to eat themselves from the point of contact outward.
The cold-flame skirmishers darted through the gaps, freezing defenders mid-swing, and the line that had never broken began, for the first time, to crack.
Then the walking Dread-Spires arrived, living siege-engines birthing smaller Dreadlings as they came, and the cracks became breaches.
On the wall, Queen Sythel Morvane watched an entire section of the Caelthyr defense come apart under a kind of war she had never seen, and her cold composure thinned.
"They are not raiding," she said. "They are processing us. Like materials."
"Hold the line," King Voryn snarled, but his own crystal-knights were falling, and he knew the word for what it was. A prayer.
High above, on the throne-platform riding Kexell’s spine, the four X-rankers watched the line break, and only then did they move.
They did not all move. They did not need to. Almond simply pointed, and Rudra dropped out of the sky like a falling law.
He landed in the heart of the Caelthyr defense, and he played a single card.
[Edict of Unmaking.]
The Dominion’s proudest fortification, a crystal bastion that had stood for a generation, was told it was no longer allowed to be a fortification, and it came apart into glittering dust around him.
The defenders panicked. The breach became a rout. And the first wave poured through into the Caelthyr lines like a flood finding a broken dam.
It was, by every measure, already over.
And then the upper plane answered.
The aether-storms above Theravex split, not with one of Pymon’s roads but with something heavier, a controlled imperial gate carved open with the patience of a power that did everything by procedure.
Through it came the Aurelian Empire.
Ships came first, vast crystalline warships bristling with weaponry, and the moment they cleared the gate, the whole battlefield felt the weight of them. Tier-60. Every hull, every gun. The ceiling of what the middle plane could even hold, brought down all at once.
The lead warship fired before it had fully cleared the gate.
A Tier-60 lance of light fell from the sky and struck the advancing first wave, and a whole swath of Dread-Reavers and Ember-born and spirit-constructs simply ceased, erased in a single imperial volley.
The factory could make troops. It could not make them Tier-60.
More ships poured through, a fleet of them, raining Tier-60 fire across the plains, and the unstoppable first wave staggered for the first time, whole ranks vanishing under weaponry from a plane above this one.
And then the powerhouses came.
They descended from the warships on wings of imperial light, not a dozen but twelve hundred, a host of them, each one a Tier-60 lifeform, each one carrying more raw weight than any single fighter Ananta Regalon had on the field.
Twelve hundred Tier-60 powerhouses spread across the Theravex sky like a second storm, and the air itself groaned under them.
At their head came their commander, armored in white and gold, his presence pressing down on the whole battlefield like a hand.
"I am Archon Sevrand of the Aurelian Empire," he called, his voice carrying across the plains with imperial calm. "This world is under the Empire’s protection. You have grown bold, little kingdom. You forgot that the middle plane has a ceiling, and that the ceiling answers to us."
On Kexell’s spine, the four X-rankers felt the shift. Tier-60. Twelve hundred of them, and a fleet behind them.
It was, for the first time in this campaign, a real problem.
Almond’s eyes narrowed. The factory could not match Tier-60. His own decks were deadly, but his raw existence was not Tier-60, and neither were the others’. Twelve hundred imperial powerhouses and a fleet of Tier-60 guns would bury even them under sheer weight of numbers, and bury the whole army with them.
"That," Lily said quietly, "is a great deal more than we brought."
"It is," Almond agreed. "Good thing we did not come alone."
Archon Sevrand raised his hand to give the order that would scatter the Ananta Regalon army across the Theravex plains.
He never gave it.
Because the sky tore open again, in a dozen places at once, and over the whole battlefield rolled a sound that did not belong to a battle at all.
It was laughter.
Easy, unhurried, delighted laughter, the laughter of a man who had been waiting for exactly this moment, and every Ananta Regalon soldier on the field knew it instantly and felt their hearts lift.
John Wicked.
The portals bloomed across the sky above the imperial fleet, dark and vast, and out of them came his Exotic Monsters.
They were Tier-60. Every one of them.
They poured out of the portals in a tide of impossible beasts, things with too many wings and burning eyes and bodies that bent light, monsters John had gathered and bound across a lifetime of climbing, and every single one of them carried the same Tier-60 weight as the imperial powerhouses.
And there were more of them. Far more. The Empire had brought twelve hundred Tier-60 fighters and a fleet.
John Wicked had brought thousands, a sky-swallowing horde that poured out of a dozen portals and just kept coming, until the imperial host that had looked overwhelming a moment ago was suddenly the smaller army on the field.
He came through the last portal himself, hands in his pockets, drifting down through the aether-storms above his own monstrous tide with that easy grin, and he looked across the sky at Archon Sevrand like a man greeting a neighbor.
"Sorry I am late," John called cheerfully. "I heard there was a ceiling. Thought I would bring a few things that live above it."
Sevrand’s imperial calm cracked, and this time it cracked wide. His scans raked across the monster-tide, reading tier after tier after tier, all of them matching his own and outnumbering his twelve hundred several times over, and the certain math he had walked in with came apart in front of him.
"Who," the Archon said slowly, "are you."
"A frontliner," John said, and the word landed on the battlefield like a stone. "I spend my days a great deal higher than this little ceiling of yours. These are my friends." He gestured lazily at the Tier-60 horde filling the sky. "Say hello."
The Exotic Monsters roared as one, and the sound of it shook the aether-storms.
Above the imperial fleet, Rexion unfolded his city-block wings and bared his teeth at warships that suddenly did not look so large. Pymon’s distance coiled through the sky, ready to fold the imperial fleet’s escape routes shut. And a dozen more sovereign-tier horrors spread across the high air, hemming the Empire’s reinforcement in from above.
The Empire had come to remind the middle plane of its ceiling.
John Wicked had come to remind the Empire that he lived above it.
On Kexell’s spine, Almond felt the whole weight of the battle tilt back and keep tilting, past even, into their favor, and a slow, sharp smile crossed his face.
"There it is," he said. "Now the Empire is the one outnumbered."
He looked down at the Theravex plains, at the factory still churning out its tide, at the three kingdoms reeling, at the imperial powerhouses suddenly facing a sky full of monsters that matched them.
The X-rankers would take the kingdoms and their leaders. John’s monsters would hold the Empire’s Tier-60 line. And the factory would grind everything between them into dust.
"Lily, Ainen, with me," Almond said, rising from the throne. "Rudra is already down there having fun. We take the three kingdoms while John keeps the Empire busy." His golden eyes burned. "By the time the Aurelian Empire decides whether this world was worth the trouble, it will already belong to us."
Below, the factory roared. Above, the monsters roared louder. And between them, on a world of bright storms and the richest crystal in the sector, the real battle for Theravex began.
