Chapter 279 Volume IV - Chapter 126: The Sword and The Ship
As I kept fighting and fighting, after a while... I heard a whisper in my mind. A sly, yet cynical voice.
"Go ahead, Aiden."
It didn't come from my head, there was no notification from AVRES. It came out of nowhere. Just like always.
"You like it, don't you?"
I swallowed, held my breath, and saw something approaching me, a... rocket.
The barriers I always kept around me shattered. I avoided serious damage and moved on to the next enemy.
I ignored the whisper in my mind, I didn't take it seriously. But... he continued.
"Come on... Admit it. I know... You're secretly enjoying it. You're only fooling yourself. You think you feel sorry for those you kill and those you see die, but you're just faking the feeling. To act like a human being. All you have inside you is an intense emptiness, isn't it? And the feeling that fills that emptiness, the one you're trying to block... Look how you're smiling."
I was dealing with a dwarf with an axe when I realized my lips were curling upward.
His axe descended on my shoulder, but I quickly stepped aside and dodged it. My sword landed on the shoulder holding the axe. It severed it from his body. Blue flames surrounded him as his scream filled my ears.
Actually... he was right.
The reason I could fight without running out of energy... maybe it was because I really enjoyed it. It was hard to find any other explanation for the fact that I could fight for hours without stopping, without getting tired. I always had the feeling that I was born for it.
And yet I ignored him, even though I knew the truth. Because I didn't want to give myself to him here, in such an important space. The last time something like this happened, bad things happened. So I didn't let myself go.
And even so... it wasn't enough. Not just me, but all of us. How could anyone be 'enough' against the ghost ship in the sky?
The enemy troops multiplied and multiplied. The gigantic slaughter ship continued to terrorize the battlefield. The explosions were especially intense on my side, and the enemy continued to press on.
The northern soldiers were hopeful about this battle, but... even though everyone had been trying for hours, there was still no progress, on the contrary, they seemed to be losing. This caused demoralization among the soldiers.
Things were worse than ever.
And that's when what everyone was waiting for happened.
Suddenly a voice came out of my headgear, Dorhud's voice.
"All troops! Fall back! We are startin'!"
The eyes of all the Northern soldiers suddenly lit up. The hope they had been slowly losing was suddenly restored.
Everyone stopped fighting and began to retreat. The soldiers of the South stared blankly after their fleeing enemies, not understanding what was happening.
There were a few laughs among them. They thought that their enemies had realized that they were going to lose and started running away, but some of them were hesitant. It would not have been so strange if a few people had been scared away, but the number of retreating men was not small...
Everyone was retreating. Literally every Northern soldier. Including me, of course.
I ran and ran, never looking back. After all, Sith would have warned me of an attack and used my mana to protect me.
"Chase them!"
"They're runnin'!"
The voices of the southern soldiers echoed in my ears. Then the sound of running footsteps suddenly doubled... our enemies were coming after us.
The chase lasted several minutes. The Southerners were relieved when they realized that nothing had happened yet, their goal was only to kill as many as they could.
The war was already over for them.
And... just at that moment, something unexpected happened.
Not far from where I was, on a hilltop... there was a flash of light.
A dwarf, taller than the other dwarves, stepped slowly up the hill. He was wearing armor unlike any I had ever seen. Aside from the nano-armor that dwarves have, this really looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It had swirling parts, lines of blue light emitting from it.
Still, the armor was not in perfect condition. This dwarf had fought just like his soldiers. It was easy to see this in the cracks, almost gouges, in his armor.
As he climbed higher up the hill, not only this was revealed, but also his short sword, the source of the glow around him.
The legendary sword, the Durandal, was completely changed from before. Its ancient and old metal was no longer even visible, surrounded by a dark purple layer made of Virgonium. It was covered in runes, fragments that looked as if they could be separated.
The dwarf, Colonel Vulnar, stood straight and raised his blue eyes. Everyone stared at him but he smiled, ignoring the stares. His brown hair fluttered in the wind as he looked up at Caleuche, the giant shadow in the sky.
For some reason, everyone in the area stopped moving. Everyone, North or South, looked at Colonel Vulnar without moving a muscle.
The smile on Colonel Vulnar's face widened. He gripped the sword even more tightly in his hand, then slowly raised it upward.
As he did so, the glow emanating from the sword suddenly intensified, almost to the point of blinding, but I watched him without caring.
First, the countless runes on the sword were activated, and then the pieces of Virgonium began to detach from the sword. Yet they floated and grew as if their connection to the sword had not been severed. They exploited the glow, the energy the sword radiated. They kept it under control and... directed it.
Mana in quantities more intense than I had ever felt before, even more powerful than that in the phoenix's cave, spread like a tsunami across the huge battlefield.
Then the sword was raised fully into the air. There was a momentary gleam in Colonel Vulnar's eyes, he squinted and looked at his target, the slaughter machine.
The eyes of the Southern soldiers finally widened as the sword shone brighter and brighter, almost like a new sun. They trembled with fear as if they had received a notification, as if they all understood what had happened. Fear filled their eyes.
They tensed, ready to pounce on the man who threatened their absolute victory.
"All troops, protect Colonel Vulnar!"
The voice echoed in my skull and everyone sprang into action. The Northerners rushed to protect the colonel while the Southerners rushed to kill him at any cost.
Some tried to fight, and some threw themselves in front of the guns aimed at the colonel, not caring what happened.
The sacrifice was the battle itself, after all.
The fragments of the sword the Colonel held aloft finally began to take shape from the energy emanating from it. They began to embody perhaps the most concentrated point of mana in the world.
The figure of the sword grew and grew, becoming gigantic with the energy it absorbed. It grew so much that it seemed to reach almost to the sky, never stopping growing like a skyscraper.
Some people fainted because of the mana intensity in the area, others barely held on through gritted teeth. Even the colonel's nose oozed blood and his eyes turned red. Yet the smile never left his face.
While not a single person could move because of the mana density, this time the whole ground trembled... Rather than the Colonel's sword, something else began to emit an extremely dense amount of mana.
A glow also appeared in front of the ghost ship Caleuche in the sky. Like the sword, which grew larger and longer with each passing second, as if reaching for the clouds, it too was preparing for a massive attack.
Again, everyone stopped moving, both because of the mana density in the area and because of the grandeur of the scene before them. No one tried to kill each other anymore.
It was no longer a question of who was dead and who was left, after all... it was a question of which side would be faster.
I was just like these people, standing where I was, watching with clenched fists what was going to happen. With the look on everyone's faces, with hope.
*******
The Colonel's sword, Durandal, was still growing, and Caleuche was still preparing his final attack when a powerful shockwave suddenly spread across the field.
The mana concentrated in the area had reached such proportions that it could no longer stay in the same spot, inevitably spreading its fragments around like a heartbeat.
Normally, there were some people who could barely withstand the intensity of the mana, but with these shock waves, the last of them collapsed one by one.
Even I was beginning to struggle, my legs were shaking, but with the Sith supporting my body by directing my mana appropriately, I resisted. As someone who practiced the Ambiguous Flow, who had two ascension skills, and who had stepped into a phoenix's nest, I was used to concentrated mana. So I gritted my teeth and stared unblinkingly at the Colonel and then at Caleuche.
For a moment the Colonel seemed to tremble, for a moment his legs gave way and he almost fell. As the person at the center of this intense mana, he was the one most affected by it. The armor he was wearing was simply not enough, even if it was specifically designed to protect him from it.
I saw the Colonel bite his tongue, I saw his feet press hard into the ground, still gathering energy, preparing to finally swing his sword, he was going to make his attack before Caleuche.
The hope on the faces of the Northerners, who could only watch from far away, slowly turned into smiles. The eyes of the Southerners widened as never before.
The outcome of the battle was decided the moment the Colonel decided to swing Durandal. The winner of this battle was the North.
At least... that was what was supposed to happen.
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