Episode-1017
Chapter : 2033
The swords sliced through the shields, through the armor, and through the undead bodies inside. It was effortless. Vala spun through the ranks, her arms a blur of motion.
Heads rolled. Shields fell in halves. Spears were trimmed like hedges.
In her wake, twenty knights simply fell apart.
"Too slow!" Vala laughed, the sound amplified by her suit’s speakers. "You're all moving in slow motion!"
She was deep in the enemy formation now, surrounded on all sides. This was where she was most comfortable. In the chaos. In the middle of the swarm.
A demon soldier, a massive brute with four arms, lunged at her from the blind spot on her right.
But there were no blind spots in the Aegis suit.
The sensors fed a 360-degree view directly into Vala’s brain via the Soul-Circuitry. She didn't see it with her eyes; she felt the demon coming. It felt like a pressure on the back of her neck.
Without turning her head, Vala reversed the grip on her right sword and stabbed backward, under her own armpit.
The blade pierced the demon’s chest, exiting through its back.
"Gotcha," she said.
She ripped the blade free and kept moving. She was a dancer of death, a metal dervish. She ducked under axe swings, jumped over sweeping tails, and weaved through fireballs. The enemy couldn't track her. They were swinging at where she used to be.
Every movement was efficient. Every strike was a kill. She wasn't fighting with anger; she was fighting with rhythm.
While Vala turned the infantry into scrap metal, a different kind of death was raining down from the distance.
Two miles away, perched on a rocky outcropping that overlooked the plains, sat the third member of the squad.
Kaito, callsign "Ghost."
His Aegis suit was crouched low, almost flat against the ground. It was covered in a specialized camouflage cloak that shifted colors to match the rock. In his hands was a rifle so long it looked like a small cannon.
Kaito was a gambler. He knew odds. He knew that the house always wins, unless you cheat. And this rifle was the ultimate cheat.
Inside his cockpit, the world was silent. He had turned down the volume of the battle. He wasn't looking at the chaos. He was looking at a digital overlay on his screen.
Red diamonds highlighted specific targets in the distance. Not the grunts. Not the beasts. He was looking for the officers. The Dread Commanders. The mages channeling spells. The brains of the army.
"Wind speed, four knots East," Kaito mumbled, his eyes scanning the data. "Humidity, low. Coriolis effect... negligible."
He settled his crosshairs on a Dread Commander who was trying to rally the breaking troops. The Commander was shouting orders, waving a dark sword that glowed with purple fire.
"You're too loud," Kaito whispered.
He exhaled and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle coughed. It was a suppressed shot, a magnetic rail-assisted round, but quieter than Ren’s massive cannons.
Two miles away, the Dread Commander’s head simply vanished.
There was no warning. One second he was shouting; the next, he was a falling statue.
The soldiers around him froze, looking around wildly. Where did it come from? There was no flash. No sound.
Kaito didn't wait. He shifted his aim.
A mage was preparing a firestorm spell to throw at Vala. Kaito saw the mana gathering in the mage’s hands through his scope.
"Denied," Kaito said.
Click. Thwip.
The mage was thrown backward as a slug the size of a finger punched a hole through his chest. The spell fizzled out, the fire dying in his hands.
Kaito worked with the rhythm of a metronome. Locate. Calculate. Eliminate. Locate. Calculate. Eliminate.
He was the angel of death, hovering over the battlefield, picking who lived and who died. He cleared the path for Vala. He protected Ren’s flanks. He was the invisible hand that guided the battle.
But the most terrifying part of the Titan Squad wasn't their individual power. It was how they moved together.
They didn't speak. They didn't shout orders like "Watch your left!" or "I need cover!"
They didn't have to.
Lloyd Ferrum, the architect of this destruction, had installed a piece of his own genius into the suits. The "Echo-algorithm." It connected their minds.
When Vala turned left, Ren knew it instantly. He knew why she turned, and he knew where she was going. He shifted his fire to cover her new angle before she even arrived there.
Chapter : 2034
When Kaito saw a threat emerging from the rear, he didn't call it out. He just transmitted the target data directly to Ren’s HUD. Ren spun his rotary cannon and obliterated the threat without even looking, trusting Kaito’s eyes as if they were his own.
They were three people, but they fought as one organism. A three-headed hydra of steel and violence.
Bael, watching from his command tent on the hill, felt a cold sensation in his gut that he hadn't felt in a thousand years.
It was fear.
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 15
Time: 07:00 AM
Location: Erza Plains – Bael’s Command Tent
Bael, the Merchant Prince of Hell, stood at the entrance of his command tent. For the first time in a thousand years, his hands were shaking.
He was a devil who understood value. He understood profit, loss, and the cost of doing business. He had come to the Human Realm expecting a simple transaction: spend a few thousand expendable zombie soldiers, break the human spirit, and collect a kingdom rich in souls. It was supposed to be an easy investment with a high return.
But as he looked out over the Erza Plains, Bael realized he was bankrupt.
The battlefield was a disaster. His army, the terrifying legion of fifty thousand Curse Knights and War Beasts, was being processed. That was the only word for it. They weren't fighting a battle; they were being fed into a woodchipper.
To his left, he saw the black blur of Vala’s Aegis suit. She was moving like a spinning top made of razors. Her vibro-blades didn't clang against armor; they hummed through it. She was cutting a path through his elite infantry as if she were harvesting wheat.
To his right, the heavy thudding of Ren’s massive suit shook the ground. Every time Ren fired his railguns, another squad of Bael’s soldiers simply vanished in a red mist. The sound of the shots—KRA-KOOM—was a rhythmic hammer blow that shattered the morale of the undead.
And somewhere in the distance, hidden in the rocks, was the sniper. Every time one of Bael’s commanders tried to rally the troops or cast a spell, their head exploded. There was no warning. Just a silent death from miles away.
"This is not war," Bael whispered, his voice trembling with rage and disbelief. "This is industrial waste disposal."
He looked at his datapad, a piece of technology given to him by the Fire Fly Corporation. The screen was flashing red.
[Unit Integrity: 15% and dropping.]
[Casualty Rate: 800 per minute.]
[Projected Outcome: Total Annihilation in 4 minutes.]
"Four minutes," Bael hissed. He threw the expensive device onto the ground and crushed it with his heel. "Useless human junk."
Bael was a coward. He knew this about himself. He didn't have the pride of Lucifer or the rage of Asmodeus. He survived because he knew when to walk away from a bad deal. And right now, this was the worst deal he had ever made.
"Retreat!" Bael shouted to his personal guards. "Pack the gold! We are leaving!"
His guards, a group of four heavily armored demon knights, looked at him in confusion. "My Lord? We cannot retreat. The main force is still engaged. If we leave, the line breaks completely."
"The line is already broken, you idiots!" Bael screamed. "Do you think those metal giants care about your honor? They are machines! They will eat you alive! I am not staying here to die for Lucifer’s ego!"
Bael didn't wait for them. He turned and ran toward the rear of the tent. He didn't run like a king; he ran like a thief who heard the police sirens.
Behind the tent, his mount was waiting. It was a Black-Armored Drake named Malphas. The beast was the size of a small house, covered in scales as hard as diamond and fitted with a saddle of enchanted leather. It hissed as Bael approached, sensing its master’s panic.
"Fly, Malphas!" Bael shouted, scrambling up the side of the beast. He didn't bother with the ladder. He clawed his way into the saddle, ripping his fine silk robes. "Get us out of here! Up! Go up!"
The drake spread its massive, leathery wings. It kicked off the ground with powerful legs, launching itself into the air. The dust swirled around them as they rose.
Bael gripped the reins tight. He felt the wind rushing past his face. He looked down. The battlefield was shrinking. The metal giants looked smaller now, like toys. The screams of his dying army faded into a dull roar.