Chapter 70: Ogre General
The air inside the hidden cavern grew heavier with every step Eurenia took, thick with the suffocating stench of rotting blood and sulfurous incense.
The walls were jagged, carved out of deep obsidian that seemed to swallow the pale light of the glowing violet mana cores embedded in the ceiling.
This were mana cores harvested from sacrificed beastmen.
Then, the commotion began.
Eurenia didn’t sneak.
She didn’t look for shadows to hide her frame.
The Middle-enlightened stage Martial Master aura she had just unlocked from the Apostle’s mental transmission was burning hot inside her core, and she let it bleed into the corridor like a roaring furnace.
"Intruder! An enemy has breached the—"
A towering Troll sentry, clad in heavy runic armor, never finished his sentence.
Eurenia blurred through the dim light, a streak of slate-grey and lethal crimson mana.
Her palms slammed into his breastplate before his frost-spear could even level.
The compressed kinetic shockwave bypassed his iron armor entirely, imploding his ribcage inward and turning his vital organs to mush.
As his massive body tilted forward, Eurenia’s fingers clawed into his chest with sickening precision.
Her nails, reinforced by raw mana pressure, tore through the muscle, snapping the sternum to rip out a glowing, fist-sized blue crystalline shard—his Mana Core.
Without breaking her stride, she jammed the core into the Ogre-hide pouch at her waist and spun around to face the oncoming rush.
The cavern erupted into absolute chaos.
Alarms didn’t sound; there was no time.
The echoes of shattering bone, tearing flesh, and the heavy, wet thuds of massive bodies hitting the stone walls filled the transit tunnels.
Five more Troll cultivators rushed down the central stairs, their halberds pulsing with Warrior-tier frost arrays, throwing waves of freezing sleet to lock her down.
Eurenia gave a lopsided, vicious laugh. She dodged the first wave by leaping onto the cavern wall, her boots leaving deep cracks in the obsidian.
Springing off the stone, she descended upon them like a falling star.
Her legs, heavy with kinetic force, shattered the neck of the front runner.
Before the remaining four could adjust their parameters, her daggers flashed in a continuous, blinding spiral.
Slash. Rip. Crack.
She was ruthless.
She wasn’t just neutralizing threats; she was executing them with a systematic, cold efficiency that bordered on demonic.
One Troll lost his arms to a precise kinetic burst; a second later, Eurenia’s heel crushed his skull.
Every time a giant fell, her hand plunged into the gory cavity of their chest, ripping the pulsing mana cores from their frames with total disregard for the blood soaking her grey battle suit.
By the time she reached the heavy iron doors of the lower holding cells, a dozen elite sentries lay slaughtered behind her, their empty chests staring blankly at the ceiling.
With a brutal kick reinforced by her explosive mana, the massive iron-reinforced doors of the slave pens were blown clean off their hinges, crashing loudly into the dark room beyond.
Inside, the stench was unbearable.
Hundreds of beastman slaves—Fox-kin, Sheep-kin Deer-kin, and various lower sub-races—were huddled together in colossal, rusted iron cages.
They were emaciated, their eyes wide with hollow terror, their limbs bound by heavy, dark-iron chains that suppressed their mana pathways.
They had been waiting for the harvest, waiting to be dragged up to the altar of the God of Misfortune.
The sudden crash made them shriek, pulling away into the corners of their cages.
But instead of a towering Troll executioner, a lone beastman woman stepped through the dust.
Her slate-grey uniform was completely drenched in the dark, steaming blood of their captors, and the bag at her waist jingled with the heavy weight of stolen cores.
"The West’s reign of terror ends today," Eurenia’s voice rang out, clear and commanding in the damp room. "The God of Beasts has sent his vanguard."
"Stand up."
She moved down the rows of cages like a whirlwind.
Her daggers sliced through the heavy iron padlocks as if they were made of soft clay.
When she encountered the reinforced dark-iron chains binding the tribal elders, she didn’t waste time looking for keys; she channeled her Middle-enlightened stage mana directly into her hands, grabbing the links and violently snapping them apart with raw, unadulterated strength.
"Can... can we truly leave?" an old Wolf-kin stammered, looking at his free, bleeding wrists in absolute disbelief.
"Move toward the southern exit tunnels," Eurenia ordered, her amber eyes scanning the pale faces of her people. "Alisa’s units will secure the outer perimeter. Do not look back."
"Run!"
The initial shock broke, replaced by a frantic, desperate surge of survival.
Hundreds of beastmen poured out of the cages, their bare feet slapping against the cold stone as they sprinted past the ruined doors, following her instructions toward the escape routes.
Eurenia stood by the threshold, counting the enemies, ensuring no slave was left behind in the dark.
The last of the younger Fox-kin children scrambled past her into the upper corridor.
Eurenia turned to follow them out, her breath steady, her mind already calculating the coordinates of the main ritual anchor she still needed to dismantle.
But the moment her boot touched the central junction of the transit tunnel, the ambient temperature didn’t just drop—the air grew thick, greasy, and heavy with the suffocating stench of burning fat and old copper.
A massive, lumbering shadow stepped out from the intersecting corridor, completely blocking the path to the exit.
He stood nearly ten feet tall, his skin a mottled, sickly green-grey, covered in jagged plates of black iron armor that had been bolted directly into his flesh.
A massive, jagged greatsword that looked more like a slab of raw iron rested carelessly on his boulder-like shoulder.
His face was a mask of brutal, primitive arrogance, dominated by a pair of small, yellow eyes that oozed a viscous, cruel intelligence.
The Last Ogre General.
A Peak-enlightened stage Martial Master.
Eurenia stopped dead in her tracks.
For a second, the roaring hum of her mana core went entirely silent.
Her amber pupils dilated until they were nothing but tiny, sharp pins.
The walls of the Norona transit tunnel seemed to warp, dissolving away, replaced by the vivid, terrifying memory of a burning village under a blood-red sky.
She remembered that exact silhouette. She remembered the sound of that specific, heavy iron greatsword dragging across the dirt floor of her ancestral home.
She remembered the wet, choking sound her father made as this exact monster pinned him to the earth with a single, careless foot, lifting a heavy cleaver to butcher him like livestock while laughing a low, guttural laugh that had haunted her dreams every single night since.
"Well, well," the Ogre General rumbled, his voice a deep, gravelly vibration that shook the loose dust from the ceiling.
His yellow eyes drifted down to the bloody daggers in her hands, then up to her face.
A slow, repulsive grin spread across his tusks. "I wondered what was making so much noise that the King sent me here"
"A stray cat? No... you smell familiar, little meat. Ah." his lips curled into a dark grin, "Ah, I remember..." he chuckled.
"The Great Luna Pack who had disobeyed the orders of the Coalition. The one who watched her father get turned into rations."
"I enjoyed devouring that old man"
As she heard those words, something violently snapped inside Eurenia’s brain.
The calm, calculated precision of the Mandraxx operative was instantly incinerated, replaced by a white-hot, blinding inferno of absolute madness.
The air around her didn’t just vibrate; it violently fractured. A terrifying, erratic crimson aura exploded from her frame, the sheer volume of her Middle-enlightened stage Master mana roaring out in a chaotic, uncontrolled gale that shattered the glowing crystals in the ceiling, plunging the corridor into a bloody, flickering darkness.
"AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"
"I WILLLLL FUCKING KILL YOU!!!"
A feral, non-human shriek tore from her throat, raw and agonizingly loud.
She didn’t look at her stance.
She didn’t consider her blind spots.
She didn’t care about the Apostle’s instructions or the importance of the mission.
Eurenia went completely crazy.
With a speed that defied the physics of her realm, she launched herself forward, leaving two deep, smoking craters where her boots had been.
She became a blur of pure, unadulterated malice, her daggers screaming through the air as she threw herself straight into the jaws of the monster who had broken her world.