Chương 423: Rain of Iron

Stepping through the Spire gate into the spatial coordinates of Crystal City was like stepping headfirst into the roaring throat of a dying star. The quiet serenity of Bastion was instantly erased, replaced by a deafening, planetary-scale shriek of kinetic impacts, spatial tears, and exploding plasma batteries. The air tasted of ozone, burnt quartz, and the bitter, acrid stench of uncompiled mana. Above us, the sky of Crystal City was a chaotic, bleeding canvas of violence.

A colossal, shimmering dome of gold-and-pink crystalline light wreathed the entire metropolis — the primary defense grid of the House of Opal. But that magnificent shield was currently under continuous, relentless bombardment from orbit. Hundreds of massive, slate-black mercenary dreadnoughts and armored gunships hovered in the upper atmosphere, raining down blood-red energy lances and kinetic plasma shells that hammered the barrier with the rhythm of a thousand thunderclaps.

Every time a red beam struck the shield, the sky erupted in brilliant, blinding auroras of violet, crimson, and emerald light. The kinetic shockwaves rolled across the atmosphere, shaking the ground beneath our boots with a subterranean tremble that made the quartz spires of the city ring like cracked crystal bells. High above the fleet, floating silently in the vacuum at the absolute edge of space, were the commanders.

Through my [Omnipresence Perception], I could see two towering figures clad in pitch-black obsidian plate armor, their shoulders draped in blood-red banners that snapped violently against the atmospheric drag. They floated arms crossed, completely unbothered by the vacuum, their glowing red eyes looking down on the city with detached, predatory patience. They were two Tier 10 Ascendants of the Mercenary Arch-House of Blood-Slate.

They weren't expending a single drop of their own mana; they were simply letting their orbital fleet grind down the planetary shields until the city's defenses collapsed. Beneath them, thousands of lower-tier mercenary cultivators operated the gunships, while flying Tier 8 and Tier 9 squad leaders darted between the ships like hawks, maintaining the fleet's defensive perimeter.

"Eren!" Crys yelled over the deafening roar of the bombardment, her skin flaring with a frantic, protective light.

"The inner palace shield is holding, but the outer districts are quickly losing mana!" Before anyone else could react, my eyes locked onto a seven-hundred-foot mercenary frigate hovering just fifty miles above our landing platform. The frigate's primary cannon was currently charging a concentrated plasma lance aimed directly at a nearby medical center. I didn't utter a single word. My star-cores spun up in a fraction of a millisecond.

I summoned a high-density [Echo of the Ashen] proxy, loaded its internal core with an unstable charge of uncompiled, chaotic void-essence, and used [Void Emperor's Omnipresence] combined with my Sanctum's [Singularity] to translate the clone's coordinates directly inside the frigate's primary reactor bay. A second later, the frigate erupted. The clone's core detonated with a sudden, violent implosion of black-red entropic force that completely un-wrote the ship's internal structural integrity.

The entire three-hundred-foot iron hull folded in on itself like a crushed tin can before exploding outward in a magnificent, blinding nova of blue-pink fire and shattered metal. The shockwave tore through the sky, scattering nearby gunships like autumn leaves in a gale. Flaming wreckage rained down onto the outer shields, lighting up the overcast clouds in a brilliant, fiery crimson glow. Anna let out a low whistle, her fingers resting on her bow.

"Well, that certainly announces our arrival."

"Let's move," I commanded, my voice cutting through the noise.

"Syntheia is in the inner courtyard." We moved as a single, lethal unit. I wove my [Domain] around our group, creating a frictionless gravity-slope that accelerated our movement speed ten-fold. We blurred across the shattered quartz avenues of Crystal City, bypassing the chaotic street fights where the House of Opal's guard units were desperately holding off mercenary drop-troops. Within two minutes, we breached the inner palace perimeter and stepped onto the high terraces of the Royal Spire.

Syntheia stood on the central balcony, surrounded by her top military commanders, diviners and time-weavers. She looked regal despite the chaos, her silver-and-opal robes pristine, but her posture was rigid, her face pale as she channeled her time-affinity to maintain the palace's secondary shield-generators.

"Mother!" Crys cried out, sprinting across the terrace and throwing her arms around Syntheia. Syntheia's eyes widened in profound shock as she held her daughter, her gaze shifting to me, Anna, and the rest of my cohort stepping onto the platform.

"Crys? Eren? How... how did you get through the spatial blockade? The Blood-Slate mercenaries deployed a sector-wide space distortion and gravity ripples, teleporting should have been…"

"We came through the Spire, I know we said it's only for emergencies because of the risk they'd find out, but," I said, stepping forward as my domain settled around the terrace.

"We extracted memory-packets from a Void-specialist we captured on an asteroid base. Syntheia, the Mercenary Arch-House of Blood-Slate didn't just deploy a single fleet here. They mobilized three full legions and six Tier 10 Ascendant Warlords." Syntheia's eyes narrowed sharply, her analytical mind immediately processing the data. She looked up at the sky, counting the warships and calculating the energy signatures of the two floating commanders in orbit. Stolen story; please report.

"Six Tier 10s…" Syntheia murmured, her voice dropping into a cold, calculating tone.

"Two are in orbit above us. That means four Tier 10 Warlords and two entire legions are unaccounted for." She looked at me, a sharp, grim realization dawning on her face.

"They aren't just attacking Crystal City, Eren. The other four Warlords and their legions are heading for my father." Crys gasped, her hands tightening on her mother's sleeves.

"Grandfather? But why would they attack him? He's been in deep isolation for millennia!"

"Because my father was the one who initiated the secret alliance with the Void Star networks," Syntheia explained grimly.

"He carries the ancient, pre-Shattering authority of House Opal. The High Courts want to make a public, brutal example of him. They want to use his execution as a threat to force the other neutral Arch-Houses to fall back into line beneath the Courts' authority, proving that not even ancient nobility can survive aiding the Editor."

"Will... will Grandfather be okay?" Crys asked, her voice trembling with anxiety.

"Four, combat veteran Tier 10 cultivators…" Syntheia allowed a faint, confident smile to touch her lips, reaching up to gently pat Crys' cheek.

"They severely underestimate him if they think four Tier 10s are enough to put my father in a grave, sweet girl. He has been in stasis for so long that the Courts have forgotten who he was. Your grandfather will hold his ground. But for now, we must focus on our own siege." Syntheia turned back to face the sky, gesturing to the hundreds of mercenary dreadnoughts raining fire down on our planetary dome.

"What is their tactical objective here?" I asked, looking up at the blood-red energy beams hammering our shield.

"Why are they taking their time? Those two Tier 10 commanders joining the attack directly would triple the speed of the shield's degradation."

"They are conserving their strength," Syntheia replied coldly.

"The Blood-Slate mercenaries are using their orbital fleet to slowly grind down our mana-reserves over the next forty-eight hours. Once our planetary barrier collapses and our reserves are completely drained, those two Tier 10s and their Tier 9 vanguard will descend to crush us while we are exhausted, without spending a single drop of their own mana." I rubbed my chin, my optical arrays calculating the distance to the orbital fleet.

"Then why don't we just destroy their fleet right now?" Syntheia let out a tired sigh, shaking her head.

"It's impossible, Eren. Each of those dreadnoughts is guarded by heavy void-veils, point-defense gravity arrays, and localized stasis fields. Standard long-range spells or spatial strikes are intercepted before they can hit the hulls. To destroy those ships, you would have to send a high-tier Ascendant into orbit to manually breach every single ship's defenses... which would be extremely telegraphed due to their extensive detection arrays.

Those two Tier 10 commanders would instantly intercept anyone who tries to fly into the upper atmosphere." Just as the words left her mouth, a deafening, metallic shriek echoed from above. A second massive, six-hundred-foot mercenary battle-cruiser suddenly lost its altitude, its stern engulfed in a violent, roaring implosion of black-red entropic fire.

The ship spun out of control, trailing a massive plume of dark smoke and burning plasma as it plummeted out of orbit, crashing into an empty mountain range ten miles outside the city with a mushroom cloud of fiery debris. Syntheia blinked, her sentence cutting off mid-air. She stared at the crashing warship, then turned her head slowly to look at me. I was standing on the edge of the balcony, a faint, dry grin playing across my lips.

"You were saying about their veils being impossible to breach?" I asked softly. Syntheia stared at me in complete, unadulterated confusion.

"How... how did you just do that? You didn't even cast a spell…" I didn't answer with words. Instead, I raised my hand and summoned another high-density [Echo]. The proxy materialized beside me, loaded its internal core with an unstable charge of uncompiled void-essence, and vanished into a microscopic spatial crack using [Void Emperor's Omnipresence]. Three seconds later, a third mercenary gunship in the middle of their fleet exploded into a blinding fireball. And then I did it again. I summoned a third clone.

Then a fourth. Then a fifth. Syntheia, her military advisors, and even the surrounding House Opal guards watched in absolute, stunned silence as I stood casually on the terrace, repeatedly creating proxy after proxy. Each clone vanished into thin air, and a few seconds later, another massive mercenary dreadnought or gunship in the sky above us was torn apart by a violent, internal implosion. The sky above Crystal City became a magnificent, terrifying graveyard of falling iron.

Dreadnoughts, battle-cruisers, and troop transports began plummeting out of the clouds one after another like burning meteors, trailing fiery ribbons of plasma and shattered metal across the sky. The two Tier 10 commanders in orbit finally lost their cold, detached composure. They uncrossed their arms, their glowing red eyes flaring with sudden, frantic rage as they began shouting orders to their surviving captains, trying desperately to figure out where the invisible attacks were originating from.

Syntheia watched a fourth dreadnought crash into the distant hills, a slow, bewildered smile spreading across her face as she looked at me.

"Okay…" Syntheia admitted, her voice filled with a mix of awe and sheer disbelief.

"Your plan might actually work, Eren. By systematically destroying their fleet from the inside, you are forcing those two Tier 10 commanders and their Tier 9 officers to step in manually. They will have to expend their own mana reserves to protect their remaining ships and engage us early, completely ruining their siege strategy." She looked at me with a serious, concerned expression.

"But Eren... summoning and detonating that many high-energy Ascendant proxies requires an astronomical amount of mana and Spirit. How many of those ships can you realistically blow up before your own cores run dry?"

"I can keep doing this for a very, very long time," I told her aloud, giving her a calm, reassuring nod. In my mind, however, a deep, silent laugh echoed through my soul gate. Deep inside my soul-realm, my new [Void-Battery] skill was operating at maximum capacity. Through a microscopic, veiled spatial tether, one of my permanently docked Echoes was currently sitting directly inside the liquid core-sink of Freonim-Prime.

The proxy was continuously siphoning the infinite, volatile ocean of gold-and-violet essence gathered by the Arch-Chord, channeling the uncompiled power straight into my internal batteries like a long-range, infinite power station. Summoning and detonating a few dozen Echoes was barely a drop in the ocean. I could blow up their entire orbital fleet ten times over, and it wouldn't even consume one percent of the energy I was actively siphoning from the core-sink.

I adjusted my cloak, my eyes burning with a starless black and arterial crimson fire as I raised my hand to summon three more proxies at once.

"Let's see how long their commanders can float up there," I whispered, "before they have to come down and face me."