Chương 245: 245：Forbidden-Tier: Meteor Shower

Soren shook his head, his voice dropping into a cold, calculating register.

"To make an enemy of an Imperial vassal state over thirty crippled soldiers? That would be the absolute stupidest deal imaginable."

"Then why exactly did I exhaust so many exorbitantly priced [Minor Life Recovery Potions]? Why am I sheltering them and feeding them premium meat and ale?" Soren asked rhetorically, his eyes burning with the intense, calculated ambition of a master strategist planning ten moves ahead.

"For connections!" Soren violently clenched his fist, his Warlord ambitions fully laid bare.

"I am going to weaponize this life-saving grace! I will use this incredibly extravagant, meticulous hospitality to violently pry open a direct, clandestine channel right into the high command of the Ironpeak Duchy!"

"Think about it. Isabella is a High Intelligence Officer. She holds the master keys to the entire southern defensive line's Orc movement tracking and covert spy networks."

"Carter is a commanding officer of the regular army. He personally knows every single quartermaster, supply officer, and border general in the Duchy."

"As long as I establish a profound, life-and-death private bond with them right now—as long as I plant the seeds of an unpayable debt of gratitude and heavy guilt toward Greywater Village—then in the future..."

"In the future, when Greywater Village inevitably requires cross-border intelligence sharing, who could possibly be more reliable than Isabella?"

"And in the future, when Luger's blast furnaces mass-produce a surplus of Black Steel weaponry, or when we require massive shipments of premium grain, warhorses, or even highly restricted, contraband magical materials for our war-machine... With Carter, a regular army titan, acting as our middleman to broker the deals and smuggle the shipments through customs, who would ever dare inspect our cargo?! Our logistical expansion will be hundreds, thousands of times smoother!"

Trading a few dozen vials of potions and some bowls of meat stew in exchange for hijacking a Duchy's high-tier intelligence network and establishing an airtight smuggling umbrella. This was the true, flawlessly calculating political investment Soren had meticulously concealed beneath his righteous, heroic facade! Right at that very microsecond. Ding! [Warlord System Prompt: The Host has successfully rescued key military personnel of the Ironpeak Duchy, Carter and Isabella.] [Reward Calculation Complete: Awarding [Meteor Shower Magic Scroll] x 5!] The very fabric of space directly above Soren's solid mahogany desk suddenly warped, violently rippling with bizarre, arcane fluctuations. Immediately following, five blinding streaks of crimson light tore through the void, slamming heavily onto the tabletop. Thud! Soren could clearly feel a searing, suffocating wave of heat radiating outward from the five scrolls! The temperature inside the command cabin skyrocketed instantaneously.

The sheer, overwhelming magical pressure emitted by the scrolls was so tyrannical that even the flames burning in the hearth were physically suppressed, cowering backward. Soren sucked in a sharp breath. Narrowing his eyes, he stared intently at the desk. There lay five massive scrolls. They were crafted from the expertly tanned hide of some ancient, colossal behemoth, and both ends of the scrolls were capped with dark, gleaming obsidian rollers.

The bindings holding them closed were absolutely not ordinary hempen rope, but rather dark-gold magical sealing threads that pulsed with a scorching, crimson hue. Merely lying there silently, the densely packed, incredibly complex high-tier runes etched across the leather continuously pulsed with alternating light and shadow, radiating an aura of apocalyptic, world-shattering energy ready to detonate at a moment's notice!

[Item Info: Meteor Shower Magic Scroll (Forbidden-Tier)] [Description: A strategic-class artifact inscribed with an ultra-large-scale Fire and Earth compound magic. Once the seal is torn via mana channeling, it will instantaneously drain all ambient mana within a radius of several miles to summon a dense, apocalyptic bombardment of falling meteors and hellfire covering an area of several hundred meters.] Gulp.

Even Soren—a man who could watch a mountain collapse before him without blinking—couldn't stop himself from swallowing hard as he stared at the five scrolls. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Forbidden-tier magic... covering several hundred meters..." Soren repeatedly chewed on those earth-shattering words in his mind. As a former special forces commander deeply versed in modern warfare paradigms, his brain was rapidly calculating the horrifying tactical value of this weapon on the battlefield.

"The current tactical paradigm of Greywater Village—whether it's the longbow volleys, the heavy ballista anti-air batteries, or the Black Steel heavy infantry phalanx advance—fundamentally belongs to point-target lethality and linear defense."

"But! The moment we encounter a suicidal, mountain-covering human-wave charge from Warchief Blackstone's hundred-thousand-strong main horde... even if my few hundred men fought until they died of exhaustion, even if their swords shattered from hacking, we would be physically buried by sheer numbers!"

"What we have always fundamentally lacked... is the ability to execute an absolute, decisive, wide-area carpet-bombing! We lacked an apocalyptic strategic deterrent!" And now, these five [Meteor Shower Magic Scrolls]! As strategic weapons possessing supreme destructive capabilities, they flawlessly plugged Greywater Village's fatal vulnerability of lacking ultra-large-scale destructive magic!

With this arsenal, if the Orcs ever dared to mass thousands of elites in a dense formation outside his walls again, Soren only needed to tear open a single scroll to instantly unleash an apocalyptic catastrophe, entirely reducing them to ash! Soren forcefully suppressed the surging excitement in his chest. Professional matters required professional handling.

"Guards!" Soren barked toward the door.

"My Lord!" A Black Steel-clad guard immediately pushed the door open.

"Go to the medical ward! Invite Chief Magic Advisor Victor here immediately!" A few minutes later. The sound of hurried footsteps echoed outside before Victor pushed the door open. The Silver-tier Mage, who usually maintained the immaculate elegance of an aristocrat scholar, currently looked exceptionally exhausted. His silver-grey robes were still stained with a few drops of dark blood from the Ironpeak soldiers.

His eye sockets were deeply sunken; it was blindingly obvious that casting the wide-scale hydrotherapy spell had severely overdrawn his mana reserves.

"My Lord, summoning me so urgently at this late hour... has a new enemy threat emerged?" Victor leaned heavily on his staff, his voice slightly hoarse as he habitually wiped a sheen of cold sweat from his forehead.

"No, Sir Victor. There is no enemy." Soren took massive strides forward, directly grabbing the exhausted Mage by the arm and dragging him to the mahogany desk. His tone was incredibly spirited, dripping with absolute mystery.

"I called you here because I want to show you something." His heart filled with confusion, Victor followed Soren's gesture and looked down. At first, his vision was slightly blurred due to the severe mana drain, preventing him from clearly making out the items. But the exact microsecond his eyes locked onto the five leather scrolls—radiating a scorching crimson halo and etched with magical circuits so densely complex they made his head spin... Time seemed to completely, absolutely freeze.

This Silver-tier Mage, a man considered an exceptionally rare talent even within the Royal Capital of the Silvermoon Kingdom, was instantaneously, violently struck by world-shattering shock. He began to tremble so violently he looked like he was having a seizure. His eyes instantly flushed blood-red.

"This... this... the frequency of these fluctuations!" Entirely casting aside his dignified Mage persona, Victor lunged forward, violently slamming his body against the desk. His cheek was practically pressed against the searing-hot scrolls. He reached out with fiercely trembling hands, desperate to touch the dark-gold sealing threads, but then violently yanked his fingers back a mere half-inch away, utterly terrified of desecrating such godly artifacts.

"By the Great God of Magic... please tell me I am not dreaming..." He abruptly snapped his head up. His hands locked onto Soren's arm in a death grip, his fingernails practically digging into Soren's flesh as his voice cracked into a shrill, hysterical pitch:"My Lord! Is this... is this a long-lost Forbidden-tier sequence?! This is the physical, miraculous crystallization of the absolute, flawless fusion of Fire and Earth laws!"

Plunged into absolute ecstasy, Victor entirely entered a state of manic, academic delirium. Relying on his profound magical foundation and his supreme [Omni-Elemental Mastery] talent, it took him a single glance to pierce through the seals and deconstruct the genuinely horrifying, apocalyptic nature of the spell.

"Genius... the person who engineered this magical circuit is an absolute, once-in-a-millennium genius!" Victor began frantically pacing in circles around the desk, his mouth firing off a rapid-fire barrage of highly classified, ultra-specialized magical terminology:"Look at the multiple-overlay matrix in the casting sequence! It isn't simply conjuring raw fire!

It first utilizes Earth laws to condense solid rock in the high atmosphere, and then weaponizes highly compressed Fire mana to ignite and completely engulf them!"

"The moment it detonates, a battlefield spanning hundreds of meters will be absolutely, entirely locked down! The spatial gravity field will be temporarily violently warped! The enemy won't even possess the physical capability to run away!" The more Victor spoke, the more violently excited he became. He suddenly slapped a hand heavily against his own forehead, his face a twisted, manic mix of sheer madness and profound self-deprecation:"Compared to this...

what the hell is the garbage magic I've been so incredibly proud of my entire life?!"

"My Lord! My absolute strongest offensive spell, Explosive Fireball, can at most vaporize five or six tightly packed Orcs! Even if I entirely drain my mana pool chain-casting it, I'd merely leave a few shallow craters in the dirt!"

"But this... the architectural matrix and sheer, apocalyptic destructive yield of this spell completely and violently pulverizes my entire comprehension of magic! A standard Explosive Fireball is nothing but a pathetic spark compared to this! The disparity in their lethality is the difference between heaven and earth!" Soren stood quietly to the side, allowing Victor to vent his world-shattering shock. He understood Victor's psychological state perfectly.

In this dark era where magic was withering and high-tier lineages had been almost entirely severed, for a Silver-tier Mage deeply starved for truth to suddenly lay eyes upon a flawless, complete Forbidden-tier circuit... the sheer, unadulterated impact was more than enough to drive a man into absolute, raving madness.