Chapter 782: A Speck of Dust
The spatial tunnel collapsed behind the armada. The massive continental warships translated back into normal space with a collective boom that physically shook the fabric of the universe.
They had arrived at the perimeter of the quarantine zone.
The void ahead was not empty. It was choked with the combined might of the five enemy factions. The Fiend Sovereign Armada formed a massive blockade of crimson floating fortresses stretching across the horizon.
The Nebula Scythe Vanguard patrolled the front lines with jagged spirit vessels radiating a sickly green light. Behind them, the Silent Oblivion Sect maintained floating array platforms designed to suppress laws and sever communication.
The Star Eater Brood swarmed in the millions, waiting for the signal to consume flesh. The Shadowfiend Coalition lurked in the dark spaces between the fleets, preparing to launch their lethal strikes.
It was a defensive line that few would dare approach. It was there in preparation that the Li clan, Zhan clan and Zhan Tielan’s forces would attack after their Ambush of Li Canghai’s forces.
It lasted exactly mere moments against the rescue force that was gathered.
There were no negotiations. There were no grand declarations of war. The fighting began the absolute second the allied armada entered the zone.
At the very front, the Leviathan Smashing Vanguard lived up to its name. The sleek, jagged ships accelerated to impossible speeds. They were acting as the tip of the spear.
A figure stepped off the bow of the leading vanguard ship. He was an unknown general with an aura that felt deep and crushing. He did not wield a sword or cast an array. He simply let out a guttural roar.
His physical vessel expanded at a terrifying, reality-bending rate. Flesh and bone morphed into dark, cosmic matter. Within a single heartbeat, the general transformed into a literal Abyssal Leviathan.
The beast was unimaginably vast. Its sheer size distorted the gravitational pull of the space around it and its dark scales devoured the ambient light that made it here. It opened a jaw wide enough to swallow everything in its path.
The Leviathan surged forward and bit a massive chunk out of the Fiend Sovereign blockade line. Hundreds of heavy crimson warships, millions of elite soldiers and dozens of enemy array formations were swallowed whole into the dark abyss of the beast's stomach.
The general chewed the metallic husks and roared again, sending a shockwave of force that shattered the remaining ships in his immediate path. The front line was instantly broken. The battle had begun.
The allied armada flooded through the breach. The various forces broke off to execute their specific roles with devastating efficiency.
To the left, the Li Clan unleashed their legendary heritage.
The elders standing on the decks of their glowing ships did not engage in close combat. They drew their swords and channeled their boundless Qi reserves. Once they were ready, they swung their blades in unison. Massive sword beams of condensed light erupted from the fleet. The beams sliced through the dark void, traveling for thousands of miles and carving through the Nebula Scythe Vanguard vessels like a hot knife through soft clay.
When the enemy tried to close the distance, the Li Clan leaders took action. They formed complex hand seals and their Qi pools linked together. Towering spiritual avatars manifested in the void above their fleet.
The avatars were forged from an ethereal energy and stood as tall as moons. The giant figures wielded colossal swords of light, sweeping them across the battlefield and erasing tens of thousands of Star Eater Brood troops with every single strike.
The Zhan Clan proved why they were masters of body refinement.
They did not use ships to fight. The warriors of the Zhan Clan leaped directly into the open void. They did not wield weapons. Their bodies were the pinnacle of destruction.
A Zhan Clan elder dropped into the center of a Silent Oblivion Sect array formation. The enemy cultivators frantically tried to suppress him with seals and law-severing chains. The elder simply laughed and flexed his muscles. The density of his physical form shattered the conceptual chains into glittering fragments. He pulled his fist back and punched the empty air.
The kinetic force cracked the fabric of reality. The shockwave propagated forward, turning the massive floating array platform and everyone on it into a fine mist of blood and dust. The Zhan warriors moved like living meteors through the enemy lines, crashing straight through the hulls of heavy warships and tearing enemy commanders apart with their bare hands.
On the right, Zhan Tielan unleashed her fury that she had been holding back moments before.
The mother of Li Yu was a demon of war. She wielded a massive blunt weapon. A grand war hammer forged from an unknown material. The weapon was impossibly heavy, yet she swung it with blinding speed.
She slammed the hammer down into the void. The impact literally bent the space around her folded inward, creating a localized singularity that crushed thousands of elite Shadowfiend assassins into a single condensed sphere of gore. She moved with ruthless and mechanical efficiency. She was paving a path of pure devastation toward the center of the zone.
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Above, the forces of Khaos also went to work.
The warriors cloaked in void energy did not roar. They did not summon flashy spiritual avatars. They descended upon the battlefield like a silent plague. They manipulated the void throughout the area. Enemy ships simply ceased to exist. They were swallowed by expanding pockets of absolute nothingness. The Star Eater Brood tried to swarm them but the beasts found themselves falling into endless black rifts, erased from history without a single sound.
At the rear of the grand formation, the Golden Shell Phalanx ensured security to all.
Whenever an enemy force managed to bypass the aggressive flanks and attempted to strike the vulnerable center of the armada, the Phalanx filled the gaps. The massive vessels shifted formation seamlessly. They projected colossal, golden turtle shells made of overlapping defensive arrays.
The Fiend Sovereign Armada redirected the Grand Annihilation Arrays mounted on their flagships to fire upon the rear guard in a desperate attempt to break the formation. Pillars of destructive Qi slammed into the golden shells. The shells did not crack. They absorbed the catastrophic damage and reflected it outward, turning the surrounding void into a chaotic storm of deflected Qi that tore the enemy's own lines apart.
In the center of this apocalypse, Li Yu stood safely on the observation deck of the flagship. Lian's ten Veiled Lotus fleets had also gone out to fight but they maintained a tight and impenetrable perimeter around him. They worked to neutralize any stray attacks that slipped through the outer warzone.
Li Yu was completely frozen by what he was seeing and experiencing. The sheer might and power in this single place was erasing everything he thought he knew about the cultivation world. He was trying to comprehend what he was seeing but everything was a blur and levels beyond his understanding.
He could barely see the attacks at all. Something there was one moment and the next it was gone. The battlefield moved so quickly and chaotically that he couldn’t even pick anything up from this battle. It was so far ahead of him that it was useless to try to take anything away from here. The only thing he understood was that he was truly a speck of dust.
Across the battlefield, the sheer absurdity of the gathered force was sending shockwaves through the veteran commanders of both sides. This battle group was a gathering that no one had ever seen in a single place. It was a terrifying testament to the hidden depths of the universe.
On one of the glowing Li Clan warships, a white-haired veteran lowered his sword after cleaving a Nebula vessel in half. He looked out across the void, his eyes wide with disbelief as he watched the Leviathan swallow another fleet.
"This is complete madness," the veteran transmitted to the general standing beside him. "We came to rescue Canghai. I expected a brutal, bloody campaign against this coalition. But look at this gathering! I have never seen such a powerful force gather together and fight in my entire life!"
The general wiped a splatter of green enemy blood from his face and nodded slowly. "We are saving Li Canghai, so it makes sense that our clan and his wife's clan are here. But look at the rest of this formation! Canghai is incredibly strong and well connected. But even he could not command a force like this. He simply does not have the political pull to summon these monsters!"
The veteran pointed up toward the silent executioners dropping from the north, their void energy eating the light and enemies alike. "Look above us. Even VoidClaw's personal forces are here! Why is he participating in a rescue operation? He never helps anyone."
"It gets crazier," the general replied, his gaze sweeping over the chaotic battlefield. "Look at the vanguard. Look at the rearguard. Then look at the fleets protecting the center. Those are three completely unknown forces right in the middle of it all and they are insanely strong. They radiate auras just as strong as any of our forces fighting today but they are completely unknown until today!"
"They must be tied to VoidClaw somehow," the veteran deduced as he watched the Golden Shell Phalanx reflect another volley of annihilation beams. "The unknown beast vanguard, that shield phalanx and the central fleets... they are all anchoring VoidClaw’s position. Only an ancient monster like VoidClaw could hide legions of such terrifying caliber in the shadows."
The conversations were mirrored among the Zhan Clan body refiners.
"Did you see that giant fish eat the array platform?!" A hulking Zhan warrior laughed while crushing a Star Eater beast beneath his boot. "I thought we were the brute force of this operation! Who the hell are those guys?"
"I don't know but their general hits like a collapsing galaxy!" Another Zhan elder replied. He was wiping gore from his knuckles. "I heard rumors that VoidClaw had hidden forces but to field an entire army of undiscovered elites?"
The confusion and awe of the allied forces were nothing compared to the total collapse of morale and logic among the enemy commanders.
Deep within the remaining command ships of the Fiend Sovereign Armada, a supreme leader stared at his tactical projection arrays in horror. The allied forces were slicing their way through the zone because their combined might was complete overkill for the defenses that they had set up.
"Our blockade is gone!" The enemy leader roared at his subordinates. He slammed his fists onto the glowing array table. "How is this possible?!"
"We expected the Li Clan and the Zhan Clan to attempt a rescue!" An array master yelled back, his hands flying across the control nodes as red warning runes flooded the projection crystals. "We calculated their numbers! We expected Zhan Tielan’s personal legion! We had enough to hold them off! We were ready for a war of attrition! It’s the other forces!"
"Why the hell is VoidClaw here?!" The enemy leader yelled with his voice cracking with panic. "He never intervenes in these wars! And what are those three other unknown forces?! They are just as strong! They are tearing our elite warships apart like wet paper!"
"The density of their combined laws is shattering the spatial boundary!" Another elder screamed as his monitoring crystals exploded one by one. "The body refiners are punching through our shields! The giant Qi avatars are sweeping the field! And that monster in the front just ate our entire third division!"
"Hold the line!" heT leader commanded desperately. "We just need to hold them here. Those were the orders!"
But holding the line was impossible. It was an unstoppable slaughter. Legendary names were all over the place whether people knew of them or not. They were performing feats of reality-bending destruction.
Zhan Tielan's hammer warped the space with every strike. The Li Clan elders summoned swords of light that spanned the horizon. The Zhan Clan elders shattered flesh and steel with raw muscle.
And the unknown hidden forces matched them blow for blow. The Leviathan leader swam through the void and was turning the Fiend Sovereign Armada into a buffet. The leader of the Golden Shell Phalanx casually walked along the invisible barriers of his arrays, his mere presence a fortifying shield against apocalyptic damage.
Those two and their legions were completely nameless to the cosmos but today they fought like gods of war.
Back on the central flagship Khaos kept a close eye on everything that was going on. He could have taken action as well but he remained where he was and would only take action if absolutely needed.