Chapter 107: The Beast Lord
The Titans crested the massive ice ramp!
The twenty-meter-tall golden giants paused for a fraction of a second at the top of the frozen barricade.
They looked down into the massive glowing white cage of Solaris’s Prison. Three hundred million trapped human soldiers stared back up at them in absolute paralyzed terror!
The Titans stepped off the ramp.
The descent was not a charge, it was a slow methodical execution!
The massive machines marched down into the packed ranks of the Royal Army. They swung their twenty-foot Star-Metal broadswords in wide horizontal arcs.
The slaughter was instantaneous and completely unblockable!
The heavy steel tower shields and enchanted breastplates of the Royal Guards were utterly useless against the sheer physical mass of Star-Metal combined with the blinding holy smite enchantments.
Hundreds of men were cleaved in half with every swing. The front lines of the King’s army did not break, they were vaporized into a fine mist of blood and shattered iron!
Lucifer walked slowly down the ice ramp behind his Titans.
He did not swing his ruby-red longsword. He did not need to. The Carnage Core on his hip pulsed frantically and greedily absorbed the massive influx of low-level death energy.
The Fate Energy tax from the thirteen million mortals waiting behind the ice wall was not active here. However, the sheer volume of kills generated by the Titans was enough to keep the Heart of Ruin fully saturated.
"They are dying too fast," Elara noted coldly.
The Twilight Sovereign walked beside him with her violet-flaming spear lowered. She watched the Paladin-Mechs effortlessly crush an entire battalion of heavy cavalry under their massive iron boots.
"The King cannot afford this rate of attrition. He must have a countermeasure."
"He does," Lucifer stated smoothly. His void-swirling eyes locked onto the center of the trapped army where the gilded command carriage sat.
Around the King’s carriage, a massive frantic ritual was taking place.
High Warlock Xoroth stood on a raised platform of swirling purple magic. The dark mage was not casting offensive spells at the Titans. He was directing hundreds of lesser warlocks and corrupted shamans!
They were dragging thousands of chained prisoners, deserters, criminals, and political dissidents, to the front of the carriage.
The shamans were executing the prisoners in rapid succession! They slit their throats and let their blood pour into a massive glowing green runic circle carved hurriedly into the dirt.
"Blood sacrifice," Lucifer observed. "A desperate summoning."
"A massive one," Sarah’s voice echoed through the comms rune.
The Oracle was watching from the Spire high above.
"The mana density in that circle is spiking exponentially. It is bypassing the standard summoning caps. They are tearing a hole directly into the Savage Wilds."
"Let them," Lucifer ordered. He stopped walking and rested his iron gauntlet on the pommel of his sword.
Down in the center of the cage, High Warlock Xoroth raised his twisted petrified staff. The amber crystal at the top flared with a blinding sickly green light.
"The blood is paid!" Xoroth screamed. His black eyes were wide with manic triumph. "Break the cage! Crush the metal! Arise, Beast Lord!"
The massive runic circle detonated!
It was not a fiery explosion. The ground simply split open and revealed a terrifying bottomless pit of raw untamed primal magic.
A massive fur-covered hand, tipped with iron-hard claws the size of broadswords, slammed onto the edge of the pit!
The ground shook violently!
The tremors knocked thousands of surrounding Royal Guards off their feet. Even the massive Titans paused their slaughter. Their blue visors tracked the sudden immense magical spike.
A creature pulled itself out of the pit.
It was a hundred meters tall! It was a colossal bipedal monstrosity composed entirely of matted brown fur, bulging corded muscle, and massive curving bone tusks.
Its head was that of a rabid mutated dire wolf and its jaws dripped with highly corrosive acidic saliva. Its eyes burned with a mindless feral red light.
[System Warning: Primal Deity Manifestation!]
[Entity: Grugni, The Beast Lord.]
[Level: 80 (Mythic Boss)]
[Status: Enraged by Summoning.]
The Beast God threw its massive head back and roared!
The sound was apocalyptic. It was not a magical shockwave, it was pure unadulterated acoustic violence!
The roar shattered the eardrums of every mortal soldier within a mile radius. Thousands of men collapsed, bled from their ears, and screamed in agony.
Grugni looked at the glowing white walls of Solaris’s Prison. It hated the holy light.
The Beast Lord raised a colossal fur-covered fist and slammed it directly into the hard-light barrier!
BOOM!
The entire dome shuddered violently! The holy magic flickered as it struggled to contain the sheer physical impact of a Level 80 Primal Deity.
High above on the Spire, Lyra cried out. She fell to her knees as the magical feedback hit her core.
"The barrier is cracking, Warlord!" Sarah warned over the comms. "The Saintess cannot absorb another hit like that!"
Grugni raised both fists and prepared to smash the barrier completely.
"He is too big for the Titans," Elara yelled over the ringing in her ears and gripped her spear. "His physical mass will crush them. I will take him."
"No," Lucifer said smoothly. A cold highly amused smirk touched his lips.
He did not activate Void Step. He did not draw his sword.
He looked up at the high battlements of the floating city of Zephyria.
"Isolde," Lucifer called out through the comms rune. His voice was perfectly calm. "There is a dog in your cage."
High on the black-stone walls, the Winter Sovereign heard the command.
Isolde did not need a second invitation! The Royal Dragon hated the primal deities of the Savage Wilds. They were mindless filthy brutes that lacked the elegant terrifying majesty of the draconic lineage.
A blinding pure white light erupted from the battlements!
Isolde shifted instantly. Her human form dissolved into a colossal mountain-sized Crystalline White Dragon!
She let out a roar that completely dwarfed Grugni’s feral howl. It was a sound of absolute freezing ancient dominance.
The Dragon Queen launched herself off the floating city.
She did not glide down slowly. She tucked her massive diamond-scaled wings tight against her body and plummeted like a white meteor!
She aimed directly for the center of the glowing cage.
Grugni heard the roar. The Beast Lord looked up and its red eyes narrowed. It saw the colossal dragon falling toward it.
The primal god abandoned the barrier and raised its massive clawed arms to catch the incoming strike.
Isolde hit the beast!
CRASH!
The impact was cataclysmic!
Isolde did not use a breath attack. She used her sheer incomprehensible physical mass.
The colossal dragon slammed feet-first directly into the Beast Lord’s chest.
The force of the collision flattened a massive section of the Royal Army. It turned thousands of soldiers into unrecognizable paste under the sheer weight of the two battling gods!
Grugni roared in agony as Isolde’s massive diamond-hard claws dug deep into its thick fur and corded muscle and drew hot steaming red blood.
The Beast God staggered backward and crashed into the King’s gilded command carriage. It instantly crushed it into splinters!
The King and his bodyguards scrambled desperately out of the wreckage and fled into the chaotic mob.
Isolde did not let up.
She snapped her massive jaws. Her razor-sharp teeth clamped down viciously on Grugni’s thick left shoulder. She ripped a massive chunk of muscle and fur completely off the bone and tossed it aside.
The Beast Lord shrieked. It retaliated and drove a colossal clawed fist into the side of Isolde’s neck.
The blow would have instantly pulverized a mortal army, but it hit the indestructible diamond scales of the Winter Sovereign.
Sparks flew! The ice cracked slightly, but the armor held. Isolde barely flinched.
She whipped her massive spiked tail around! The tail struck Grugni across the legs like a scythe and swept the hundred-meter god completely off its feet!
Grugni crashed heavily to the ground and shook the earth.
Isolde planted her massive front claws directly onto the Beast Lord’s chest and pinned it to the dirt. She reared her head back and a blinding liquid blue light ignited deep within her throat.
"Burn, mutt," Isolde hissed, the draconic words vibrating through the air.
She unleashed a point-blank concentrated beam of absolute frostfire directly into Grugni’s face!
The primal god screamed and thrashed wildly. The extreme cold instantly froze its eyes, its corrosive saliva, and the fur on its head.
The intense magical heat burned the frozen flesh and created a horrifying localized storm of boiling blood and shattering ice.
Down on the ground, a safe distance away from the kaiju battle, Lucifer watched the execution.
"She is brutal," Elara noted. Her golden eyes were wide.
The Twilight Sovereign had fought alongside dragons in the old world. However, she had rarely seen a Royal Dragon fight with such unrestrained personal malice.
"She has something to prove," Lucifer replied smoothly. "She was asleep for a thousand years. She wants the world to remember who rules the food chain."
Grugni was a Level 80 Mythic Boss, but it was a summoned entity and lacked the deep environmental anchors of a true god.
Isolde was overcharged by the Warlord’s multiplied vitality and fighting with the absolute arrogance of an apex predator. She was tearing it apart!
The Beast Lord stopped thrashing. Its massive frozen head shattered under the sustained frostfire blast and exploded into a million pieces of bloody red ice.
The colossal body went limp.
[System: Mythic Boss Eliminated!]
[Entity: Grugni, The Beast Lord.]
[Experience Gain Suspended: Mortal Level Cap Reached.]
Isolde pulled her head back. The blue light in her throat died down. She lifted her bloody diamond-hard claws off the dead god’s chest.
She threw her head back and roared in absolute terrifying triumph!
The surviving members of the Royal Army cowered in the mud. They stared up at the colossal blood-stained white dragon in sheer mind-breaking despair.
Their ultimate desperate trump card had just been casually ripped to pieces!
Isolde turned her massive head. Her reptilian white eyes locked onto a tiny scurrying figure running through the dirt near the crushed remains of the command carriage.
It was High Warlock Xoroth!
The dark mage had survived the impact, but his spell had failed. He was desperately chanting a teleportation ward and trying to escape the slaughter.
Isolde did not bother with frostfire. She simply lowered her massive head and snapped her jaws.
She swallowed the High Warlock whole in a single fluid motion!
Isolde chewed once. A loud crunch of bone echoed across the silent battlefield and she swallowed. She snorted a small puff of blue mist and looked highly unsatisfied with the taste of the corrupted mage.
Lucifer smiled. It was a cold dark smirk.
He tapped his comms rune.
"Good girl," Lucifer said softly. The void in his voice carried a dark amusement. "Return to the wall."
Isolde did not argue. The Dragon Queen snapped her massive wings open. The downdraft flattened another regiment of Royal Guards! She launched herself effortlessly back into the sky and flew up to her roost on the black-stone battlements of Zephyria.
Lucifer turned his attention back to the battlefield.
The Beast Lord was dead. The Warlock was eaten. The King’s carriage was crushed.
The Titans had halted their advance during the dragon fight and stood perfectly still like a wall of golden statues.
"The shock and awe is complete," Lucifer announced. He raised his Gauntlet of the Void King. The black lightning crackled and was eager for destruction.
"Titans," Lucifer roared, his voice echoing across the trapped and paralyzed army. "Resume the execution."