Chapter 75: March of the God-King
The Crusade stepped off the floating black rock.
Thirteen million mortal soldiers followed Lucifer into the dense, suffocating gray fog of the Umbral Plane.
The air was unnaturally cold. There was no ground, no sky, and no horizon.
They marched across a massive, invisible bridge of hardened spatial magic.
Lucifer walked at the head of the massive column. Each step required a steady, precise flow of his Void Arcanist mana.
He used Gravity Crush to compress the unstable matter beneath their feet, creating a perfectly flat, ten-mile-wide invisible path that held his army steady in the void.
It was a staggering display of Archmage-level control. The Warlord was literally paving the Abyss.
"The fog is getting thicker, Commander," High Ranger Celeste called out from her dire wolf.
She rode fifty yards behind Lucifer, surrounded by her four hundred Phantom Rangers.
The Rangers were squinting into the gloom, their hands tight on their bows, but they could barely see twenty feet ahead.
"It is the Fog of Deceit," Lucifer stated smoothly, not breaking his steady march. "It actively suppresses mortal perception. It breeds paranoia and hallucinations in weak minds."
Behind Celeste, the front ranks of the conscripted Royal Guards began to shift uneasily, tightening their grip on their halberds.
The silence of the Umbra was absolute, broken only by the deafening sound of thirteen million pairs of iron boots hitting the invisible floor.
The darkness pressed in from all sides. Men started to whisper, imagining movement in the mist.
"They are wavering, Warlord," Lyra said.
The Dawn Saintess marched in the center of the Vanguard, flanked by the two hundred massive Solaris Templars.
Her sleek silver battle armor caught the faint light.
"The psychological pressure is too heavy for standard infantry," Lyra warned, her blue eyes scanning the terrified faces of the militiamen behind her.
"Even with the contract stabilizing them, the lack of a sun is breaking their morale. They feel like they are marching into a grave."
"They aren’t," Lucifer corrected her.
He didn’t stop walking. He didn’t turn around.
Lucifer reached up to his chest. He tapped the heavy platinum medallion of the Grand Marshal. He didn’t use it to conscript; he used it to amplify his command.
He opened his system interface.
[System: Command Aura Modification.]
[Active Auras: Sovereign’s Weight (Suppressed).]
"System," Lucifer ordered, his voice a low, echoing rumble. "Activate Solaris’s Blessing. Combine it with Warlord’s Roar. Target: All Allied Units."
[Command Authorized.]
[Buff: Solaris’s Blessing (Grants holy light emission and minor health regeneration).]
[Buff: Warlord’s Roar (Grants absolute fear immunity and +200% Attack Power).]
[Applying Buffs to 13,000,000+ Contracted Entities...]
Lucifer unleashed his core.
He didn’t just cast a spell. He flooded the entire, localized magical network created by the Contracts with pure and concentrated power.
A blinding, explosive flash of white and gold light erupted from Lucifer’s dark armor.
The light did not fade. It surged backward like a tidal wave, washing over Celeste’s Phantom Rangers, Lyra’s Templars, and the endless millions of Royal Guards and mercenaries marching in the gloom.
The effect was instantaneous and staggering.
The moment the buff reached a soldier, their armor, whether worn leather, rusted chainmail, or polished plate, lit up with a steady golden glow.
The weapons in their hands vibrated with powerful, aggressive Warlord energy.
Thirteen million men and women suddenly became thirteen million blazing torches in the dark.
The thick, suffocating gray Fog of Deceit was driven back by the sheer force of the army’s holy light. The fear, paranoia, and creeping dread disappeared completely.
The soldiers gasped. They looked down at their glowing hands and their blazing swords. They felt the massive, +200% attack power surge through their veins. The exhaustion of the march disappeared, replaced by a fierce, adrenaline-fueled battle joy.
"I can see!" a Royal Guard shouted from the ranks, raising his glowing halberd high in the air.
"The fear is gone! The Light is with us!" a mercenary roared, slamming his illuminated broadsword against his shield.
The entire Crusade erupted.
The sound physically shook the dense air of the Umbral Plane. They were no longer victims fleeing a burning capital; they were a holy army marching into hell, bathed in the Warlord’s light.
"Incredible," Elara whispered.
The Valkyrie walked beside Lucifer. Her Twilight wings were folded, but her new Void-Weave armor pulsed in perfect harmony with the Warlord’s massive aura.
She looked back at the blinding, golden ocean of soldiers stretching for miles into the fog.
"You turned peasants into paladins with a single thought," Elara noted, her golden eyes wide with profound respect. "They feel like heroes. They believe they are invincible."
"They are not invincible," Lucifer said coldly. He kept his eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. "They are just very visible targets."
"You want to draw the Void Beasts out," Lyra realized, stepping up to Lucifer’s other side. Her own holy aura resonated perfectly with the army’s light, amplifying the blinding effect.
"You are using thirteen million glowing souls as bait."
"I am," Lucifer confirmed smoothly.
He rested his iron gauntlet on the hilt of his ruby-red longsword. The Carnage Core pulsed violently, eager for the slaughter.
In his past life, clearing the Umbral Plane was a slow, agonizing process. Adventurers had to crawl through the dark, hunting hidden nests of monsters while constantly checking their flanks.
It took months to secure a single sector.
Lucifer didn’t have months.
"I am not going to hunt them," Lucifer explained to the Saintess. A cold smirk touched his lips. "I am going to make them hunt me.
The sheer magical density of this light will enrage every high-tier predator in a fifty-mile radius. They will swarm our position."
"And when they hit the line?"
"When they hit the line," Lucifer said, "the contracts ensure that twenty percent of the death energy from every single kill flows directly into my core.
We let the mortals grind the low-level swarms. We save our strength for the Leviathans."
The Warlord had built the perfect, self-sustaining meat grinder.
The bright golden Crusade marched forward. The invisible path Lucifer created held steady under the massive weight of the army.
For ten minutes, the Umbra was silent, save for the rhythmic, thunderous march of the empowered soldiers.
Then, the fog ahead began to churn.
The mist wasn’t moving randomly. The thick gray clouds were pushed aside by something large and fast.
A deep, harsh clicking sound came from the darkness, echoing again and again until it filled the air.
[System Warning: Massive Hostile Swarm Detected!]
[Entity: Umbral Stalkers (Level 45 - Elite Predators)]
[Quantity: 50,000+]
The Stalkers did not run on the ground. They leaped out of the fog from every direction; above, below, and from the flanks.
They were horrifying. They resembled massive, ten-foot-long praying mantises, forged entirely from sickly purple Void magic.
Their scythe-like forelegs glowed with dark energy that could cut through space itself. They were perfectly built for ambushes in the zero-gravity dimension.
"Contact!" Celeste roared, raising her curved dagger. "Archers, volley!"
The Phantom Rangers did not hesitate. They drew their bows, infused their arrows with the Warlord’s +200% attack buff, and fired a massive, coordinated barrage of glowing golden light directly into the leaping swarm of monsters.
The golden arrows slammed into the Stalkers.
The impact was devastating. The +200% attack power, combined with the holy light of Solaris’s Blessing, pierced the monsters effortlessly.
Hundreds of Stalkers shrieked, exploding into showers of purple blood and black shards before they even reached the vanguard.
[Hostiles Eliminated: 412]
But fifty thousand Elite Predators were not stopped by a single volley.
The surviving Stalkers crashed into the front line of the Royal Guards and the Solaris Templars.
The fight began instantly and was brutal.
A massive Stalker swung its glowing scythe-leg at a Level 30 Royal Guard. Normally, the blow would have cleaved the man in half, armor and all.
Instead, the Guard raised his glowing golden halberd.
CLANG.
The empowered halberd blocked the scythe perfectly. The Guard didn’t stagger. The Warlord’s Roar buff flooded his muscles with impossible strength.
The mortal soldier roared in battle joy, pushed the monster’s scythe aside, and drove his halberd straight through the Stalker’s black chitin chest.
The monster shrieked and dissolved into purple ash.
[Hostile Eliminated: Umbral Stalker (Level 45)]
[Fate Energy Tax Processed: +20% directed to Warlord Core.]
Lucifer felt the first microscopic surge of death energy hit his Carnage Core.
It was a tiny drop of power. But a second later, another drop hit. Then ten. Then a hundred.
The thirteen million mortal soldiers clashed with the fifty thousand Level 45 monsters.
The mercenaries fought like demons. They were heavily buffed, entirely immune to fear, and desperate for the eighty percent loot drop.
They swarmed the massive Stalkers, chopping them into pieces with glowing broadswords and blasting them with empowered low-tier spells.
Every single time a monster died, a faint, almost invisible red tether of energy snapped from the dying beast and shot directly into the Warlord’s chest.
[System: Fate Energy Tax Network functioning at maximum capacity.]
[Carnage Core charging... 100 / 100,000]
[Carnage Core charging... 5,000 / 100,000]
[Carnage Core charging... 12,000 / 100,000]
Lucifer stood behind the front line. He did not draw his sword. He didn’t need to swing a blade to win this battle.
He watched his massive, golden army slaughter the high-tier swarm with absolute, ruthless efficiency. The meat grinder was working flawlessly. The Warlord’s aura protected them, and their kills fed him.
"They are holding," Lyra breathed, her blue eyes wide as she watched a group of common militiamen tackle a ten-foot monster and beat it to death with their glowing shields. "You turned them into an army of paladins."
"I turned them into a weapon," Lucifer corrected her.
He looked deeper into the gray fog. The low-level swarm was breaking, but the dense, heavy magical pressure of the Umbra was shifting again.
The Warlord’s eyes narrowed. The real threat was finally waking up.