77. Continuing the Advance

Continuing the Advance

The next three tombs were defended relatively weakly.

All of us were wondering where the enemy’s enormous army had gone. Considering the nature of their power, the longer the war dragged on, the more magical resources they should have accumulated.

Instead, what we saw was a slow but steady decline in the number of monsters, because we were getting better and better at killing them.

Just a few days ago, a dozen fire demons could have easily broken through everything I did to stop them, wiped out our ground forces, and overwhelmed me with sheer firepower.

Now, dodging their fireballs with Time Leap was almost effortless. Spatial Leap combined with Spatial Distortion could even be used to bounce their own fireballs back at them.

Before they changed tactics, I reduced the first dozen fire demons to ten that way, and Defensive Counter meant that any melee attack from someone who could not survive the backlash of their own strike was doomed to fail.

That made the surviving demons try to close the distance to our ranged infantry and force them into melee.

I stopped them by teleporting around them and chopping them apart with my newly acquired and freshly enhanced swords the moment their backs turned to me.

It took roughly thirty seconds to deal with all of the demons, after which I returned to supporting the ground assault.

I no longer bothered with individual sword-guards, executioners, or ghouls. Instead, I pushed my flight speed to the limit and cut straight through their ranks.

Each left-to-right sweep took about a second and wiped out dozens, sometimes hundreds, of enemy infantry across a kilometer-wide lane.

Even the stronger and most heavily armored basic infantry could be dealt with at that speed by using a sword like a battering ram.

With force fields weakening their defenses at the moment of contact, and enough momentum behind the strike, their bodies flew apart like bowling pins made of rotten meat and terrible life choices.

Twenty-one people followed behind me, pouring hellfire into the broken and disordered enemy.

If the enemy did not mass charge, they could not overwhelm the soldiers. But they also could not mass charge while enormous gaps were constantly being torn through their formation.

Either side of the assault, acting alone, would not have been enough to advance. The ground troops would have been slaughtered, and once the enemy gathered enough force, I would have been forced to retreat.

Together, however, the two halves of the attack multiplied our combat effectiveness and let us advance faster than ever before.

Then the enemy tried something new.

The skeletons arrived.

These were not the skeletal archers Chi Li and the other survivors had been sent to clean up.

For one thing, they did not carry bows.

For another, their hands flickered with red, green, gray, and black light.

The difference became extremely clear when about a dozen of the new skeletons waved their arms and fire began falling from the sky across a kilometer-wide battlefield.

With considerable effort, I forced myself into time travel.

To visible sight, the sky was already filled with fist-sized fireballs, like some enormous wildfire descending from above.

I did not know whether killing the casters would stop magic that had already been launched, so I did not try.

Every second of action cost me the equivalent of minutes of effort as I used Time Leap to teleport between the soldiers, applying Force-Field Creation and Sustained Force to each of them.

Setting up a long-term barrier was too expensive.

Even during prebattle preparation, I could only provide shields for a few people that might last through the night without completely exhausting myself.

Now, with everyone about to be burned to ash, I gave each shield a three-minute duration and left it at that.

By the time those shields failed, we would either have won or turned into ash ourselves. Keeping the duration that short also meant that even after setting twenty-one force fields, I was not on the verge of fainting.

Time resumed, and hell came down.

They were not falling fireballs, but small meteors moving almost as fast as I could fly. When each one struck the ground, it combined the effects of a small explosive charge and an incendiary bomb.

Car wrecks melted into slag. The remaining buildings became rubble.

The ground shook like an earthquake. Craters several meters deep were blasted everywhere… except within the narrow bubbles of force field surrounding the soldiers.

Thankfully, I had not cut corners on shield strength to reduce the cost of creating them. If those shields had been even a little weaker, everyone except me would have died.

Looking around, the scale of destruction resembled a tactical nuclear strike more than conventional bombardment. Nearly a square kilometer had been leveled and set ablaze.

At the edge of my sight, far beyond the range of the remaining lightning towers, a certain lanky sniper kept firing.

A shell stopped one meter from a skeletal mage’s chest, unable to pierce its barrier.

The barrier’s rotation slowed, revealing a banana-sized projectile that had been flying at supersonic speed only moments before.

Before this battle began, I had personally carried him out there in case of exactly this kind of emergency. He was suspended in midair by a small transport drone made by one of the technicians.

The drone could originally carry six pounds, but because it was so small, increasing its carrying capacity by eight times took only a moment.

Reducing the lanky man’s weight had taken dozens of times more effort, but now that effort was paying back severalfold.

The moment the first tentacle-controlling caster died, I was ready.

When the second was taken down as well, leaving only three useful tentacles, I strained hard and snapped them in three seconds.

After that, before they could pull out any more tricks, I quickly eliminated every troublesome enemy I could find. That took half as long again.

The cleanup that followed was less a matter of risking our lives and more a somewhat monotonous process of dealing with a steadily shrinking number of enemy infantry. Still, we finished it with professionalism and efficiency.

Naturally, that meant I lay flat on my back in the middle of the group and refused to get up unless a major demon appeared.

Red and black power, drawn from the swelling atmosphere of violence, death, and suffering spreading through the land, was absorbed into the foundation of the underground temple.

The enormous cavern containing the structure had been hollowed out by converting stone into magic, then supported by summoned iron braces.

The temple itself had not been summoned in the same way. It had been shaped from flint, obsidian, and bronze drawn from matter called up from deep within the planet’s lithosphere, creating a direct sympathetic link with the world.

The Dark Masons had researched what the locals called the internet and discovered that although the locals’ prehistoric age was much more recent than their own, in some ways, despite the absence of magic, it had not been so different.

Of all earthy materials, flint held the oldest and strongest connection to the mastery of fire.

Obsidian held an equally powerful connection to the first weapons the locals used to slaughter one another, while bronze was the foundation of true metallurgy.

It had been the primary weapon material for half of the locals’ modern civilization and was more closely connected to firearms than any other material.

Together, these three materials were nearly perfect for drawing upon the power of violence in this new world the Mavis people had invaded.