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…