Chapter 80 : Chapter 80
Chapter 80. They Had Been Set Up
The day of the decisive battle, dawn.
The wind in Rime Valley carried ice and snow with it, as if countless tiny blades were scraping painfully across every face.
The two vast armies stood in grim confrontation before the canyon, a black sea of soldiers facing one another beneath an air so cold it seemed ready to freeze into shards.
Logaris, Sylvia, General Victor, and Lilith—whose face was glowing with excitement, as though she had been promised something—stood shoulder to shoulder at the very front of the Northern Legion’s formation.
Across from them, the Demi-Human Empire’s battle line had clearly been drawn much farther back than usual.
And the strangest thing of all was the group packed tightly at the very front, surrounded by the Demi-Human troops.
They were the followers of the Corruption Cult, all dressed in identical black robes, their formation dense and crowded.
They looked like a flock of lambs waiting to be slaughtered, shoved onto the butcher’s block.
The Cult Bishop, dressed in luxurious black ritual robes and holding a savage-looking white bone staff, greedily inhaled a deep breath.
The thick aura of death and fear hanging over the battlefield brought a sick, feverish fanaticism to his face.
How wonderful.
The lives of these tens of thousands of Demi-Humans and Northern Territory soldiers would all become perfect sacrifices to welcome the descent of his lord.
Only...
He narrowed his eyes and sharply noticed that the soldiers of the Demi-Human Empire legions were positioned far too far back.
That brought a flicker of displeasure into his heart.
“Hmph, a bunch of brainless barbarians.”
He quickly attributed it to the Demi-Humans’ natural wariness and contempt toward “allies” like them.
At that moment, a thunderous shout rang across the battlefield.
Ulzok, the Demi-Human legion commander, strode out from the ranks in armor as heavy as a mountain.
His voice was like a great bell as he pointed at General Victor on the opposite side and roared curses at him.
“Victor, you old dog!”
“Today your grandpa Ulzok is going to use your head as a piss pot!”
“You Northern Territory women and weaklings, are you ready to welcome your doom?!”
This long, crude, “passionate” pre-battle declaration was full of provocation.
He even turned around in a show of solemnity, dropped to one knee toward the Cult Bishop, and shouted loudly.
“Great Lord Bishop!”
“Grant divine power to your most devout believer and help me tear apart these mortals’ defensive line!”
That acting.
That expression.
It was so realistic that the Demi-Human soldiers in the rear, who knew nothing of the truth, all felt their blood boil and their fighting spirit surge.
Standing in the rear, Logaris watched Ulzok’s exaggerated performance through his newly replaced rimless glasses, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly beneath the lenses.
He silently commented to himself that this thick-browed brute was unexpectedly a veteran actor.
General Victor, standing beside him, had clearly understood the cue.
The old general rode forward and answered the challenge in an equally booming voice.
“You Demi-Human scum!”
“The land of the Northern Territory will not yield even an inch!”
“If you want to cross Rime Valley, then step over my corpse first!”
The auras of the two Sixth-Tier powerhouses clashed violently in midair.
The gusts stirred up by that collision even blew away the snow on the ground, instantly pushing the atmosphere of the decisive battle to its peak.
“Kill—!”
As soon as the declarations of the two commanders ended, Ulzok gave the order.
The Demi-Human legions immediately erupted in earth-shaking battle cries.
But anyone looking closely would notice that the charge was all thunder and no rain.
They shouted loudly, but barely advanced.
On the Northern Territory’s side, the figures of Logaris, Sylvia, and Lilith vanished from where they stood at the same moment.
In an instant, the brilliance of battle aura and magic intertwined and collided above the battlefield.
Explosions of energy rose one after another with overwhelming force, and a world-destroying decisive battle truly seemed to have erupted.
The high-level combatants rapidly paired off in the sky, and the battlefield was clearly divided into three separate sections.
General Victor, wielding a greatsword, directly confronted Ulzok, the Fist of Fury.
Sword energy and fist winds crisscrossed wildly as they fought with such violence that heaven and earth themselves seemed ready to collapse.
Logaris and Sylvia joined forces against the stronger Sixth-Tier expert, Kane, the Storm Knight.
Under Kane’s relentless storm-like assault, the two of them worked together flawlessly, yet seemed to be in constant peril, as though they could be defeated at any second.
As for Lilith, she became a streak of golden lightning loosed from its reins.
According to the plan, she charged straight at the most crucial target—the Cult Bishop, who was in the middle of preparing a large-scale blessing spell.
The fight between Victor and Ulzok was the fiercest of all.
The two collided again and again in the air, each clash erupting with terrifying waves of force.
Then, in the middle of one savage aerial charge, Ulzok twisted his body in an extremely awkward posture and, with perfect timing, “barely” avoided one of Victor’s heavy battle aura slashes.
That enormous golden slash lost its target, but its force remained undiminished.
With terrifying precision, it blasted straight into the completely unprepared cultist formation behind them.
Boom!
With a deafening explosion, the ground was torn open into a trench dozens of meters long.
Several dozen fanatics along its path were instantly vaporized by the violent battle aura before they could even scream.
The bishop frowned when he saw that scene, but treated it as nothing more than a battlefield accident.
Elsewhere, Logaris and Sylvia were “struggling” to hold on beneath Kane’s “fierce assault.”
Kane roared and unleashed several razor-sharp wind blades, sealing off every route of retreat for the pair.
“You despicable humans, die!”
Facing the deadly attack, Logaris merely raised a hand calmly.
Under his control, a spatial portal opened and closed in an instant directly along the path the wind blades were about to strike.
Several wind blades vanished into it without a trace.
In the next second, those very same wind blades suddenly appeared above the densest cluster of cultists, descending like the scythe of death and harvesting yet more lives.
“Logaris!”
“How dare you play tricks!”
Seeing that, Kane let out an enraged roar, his eyes bloodshot as if he were condemning Logaris’s cunning.
The repeated accidents threw the cultists’ formation into obvious chaos.
Helena, who had been lingering at the edge of the battlefield the entire time, seized that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
She cast a look of disgust toward Logaris’s figure in the distance.
But the evil aura radiating from these heretics, wicked in every imaginable way, was even more intolerable to her.
Purifying them was an inescapable duty of hers as a Holy Knight.
That was precisely why she had appeared here.
She raised her holy sword high, her red hair dancing in the wind, and issued an order to the dozen or so Holy Knights behind her.
“The heretics are right before us!”
“Purge them, for the glory of the Lord!”
Holy light flared.
More than a dozen Holy Knights became like a red-hot dagger, savagely cutting into the cultists’ chaotic flank.
At the same time, on the other side, Reynard had already drawn his great bow in the distance.
Arrow after arrow of lightning tore through the sky, striking with perfect precision at the minor cult leaders who were trying to reorganize the shattered formation.
One “friendly fire” incident after another, combined with their allies’ almost absurdly “accurate” attacks, finally made the Cult Bishop realize that something was terribly wrong.
This was no chaotic melee at all.
This was clearly a slaughter aimed directly at him and his followers—a massacre in which everyone was acting, and everyone understood it without a word.
“You... you actually dared to collude with each other!”
He was both shocked and furious as he finally realized the truth.
The bishop wanted to break away from the fight and take command of the troops, who had already collapsed completely.
But Lilith clung to him like a parasite attached to the bone, refusing to let him go.
“Get lost!”
“You annoying little fly!”
The bishop roared in fury.
The white bone staff in his hand burst with light as he tried to force Lilith back with a powerful spell.
Yet Lilith merely stuck close to him like chewing gum.
An invisible Anti-Magic field expanded in an instant, throwing the magic elements around the bishop into total chaos.
The spell he had spent so long preparing died in his throat like a duck with its neck seized shut.
“You—!”
The bishop was so furious he nearly coughed up blood.
He could only desperately use his bone staff to parry Lilith’s unpredictable daggers.