“My Lord.”
Bone Guard One turned to face Chen Xu. The Angel Priest beside him also looked over and offered a bow.
“Respected Lord of the Undead, I am Angel Priest Netherx. Welcome.”
Chen Xu glanced at the Angel Priest, nodded, and then turned his attention back to Bone Guard One.
Bone Guard One finally answered, “The battle formations have finished their drills. The new skeleton army is prepared and ready to deploy at any moment.”
“Good. Very good.”
Chen Xu looked back at Netherx and said, “Master Netherx, your Heavenly Allied Forces need only maintain a standard defense. Leave the front line to my undead army.”
“It is my honor to fight alongside your army,” Netherx replied before departing to return to the fortress built by the Heavenly Allied Forces.
A moment later, fires ignited on the altars of holy light, radiating waves of sanctity. A Radiant Sun canopy stretched across the sky, enveloping the fortress.
The Heaven's defenders took their positions, standing in grim readiness.
This world was a core world of the Heavenly Pantheon, famous for producing a strange fruit known as the Feather Fruit.
The Feather Fruit looked like an apple but was wrapped in a thick layer of feathers. It used these feathers to disguise itself as a small bird, attracting predators to swallow it and thus disperse its seeds.
The Feather Fruit possessed a unique effect: long-term consumption caused the body to mutate, growing wings from the back of the shoulders.
The number of wings was not fixed; some grew two pairs, some three, and there had even been cases of five pairs appearing.
In the culture of the Heavenly Pantheon, wings were the symbol of angels, and angels were the symbol of the divine.
The Feather Fruit, which allowed ordinary people to grow wings, became a holy relic of the Heavenly Pantheon, used specifically to reward the most devout believers.
Consequently, when the clouds of Hell spread here and demons set foot on this land, Heaven established a fortress that towered into the clouds to repel Hell and protect the Feather Fruit.
The size of the permanent garrison was staggering, consuming a massive amount of the Heavenly Pantheon's resources every second.
The priests had considered completely purging the demons from this world to free up manpower for other fronts.
However, the demons acted strangely, as if they were intentionally trying to drain Heaven's resources. Whenever Heaven launched a counteroffensive, the demons would increase their investment; at one point, five Hell Archdukes had descended upon the battlefield simultaneously.
Yet, as soon as Heaven retreated into its fortress, the demons would pull back as well, leaving only a portion of their forces to constantly harass the believers.
Thus, when Alifa heard that Chen Xu was looking for a battlefield with a high density of demons and an average strength that was above mid-tier, he immediately thought of this place.
After the coordinates were shared with Chen Xu, Bone Guard One led the skeleton heroes to descend upon this world.
Seeing that the defenses of the heavenly fortress were fully activated, Chen Xu looked at Bone Guard One.
“Begin.”
“As you command.”
Chen Xu had come this time specifically to inspect the training results of the new legion composed of skeleton heroes.
The various demon-invaded worlds he had visited previously were merely practice runs. Only the world before him was the true testing ground for their final assessment.
Chen Xu was here purely as an observer. He was not a master of micro-management, nor did he enjoy leading troops in battle; he preferred to be a hands-off manager.
Bone Guard One drew the bone sword hanging from his waist. As the blade emerged, it let out a series of heavy, rhythmic thuds.
It was not the ringing hum of a fine sword leaving its sheath, but the sound of beating war drums.
A massive phantom of a war banner gathered around Bone Guard One. The banner billowed without wind, emitting the thunderous roar of war drums.
In the next moment, the caster-type skeleton mages formed groups of three, gathering together to chant incantations.
Magical energy flowed through their bones into the ground. Magic arrays lit up one after another, connecting point to plane until they formed a giant, unified magic circle.
【War Magic: Wrath of the Thunder Titan】
“Hah!”
A golden titan appeared in the center of the magic array. It raised its head and let out a roar.
Its hands flickered with the brilliance of thunder as it raised them high and slammed them violently into the ground.
Boom! Boom!
The earth began to tremble. Gaps and fissures tore through the ground, and lightning surged from the crevices, striking every creature in the vicinity.
This terrifying war magic originated from the heavenly fortress and gradually radiated toward the demon-occupied territories.
As long as these caster-type skeleton heroes did not exhaust their mana, the towering Thunder Titan would continue to pour its fury into the earth beneath its feet.
Amidst the endless lightning, groups of fully armed undead bone dragons wove through the air.
These bone dragons wore magic armor specially crafted for them by Heavenly Crafts. It effectively reduced magical damage, ensuring the bone dragons would not be caught in the friendly fire of the wide-scale AOE magic.
The heavy armor was equipped with protruding handles on all sides.
The archer-type skeleton heroes hooked their ribs onto these handles to secure themselves to the bone dragons.
The warrior-type skeleton heroes, meanwhile, used their eye sockets to hook onto the handles. Once they spotted a ground target, they only needed to lean back slightly to drop rapidly and launch a lethal strike on the enemy.
The first wave of seismic shocks from the war magic had already reached the demon territory.
Most of the demons on the periphery were low-tier fallen demons. They were sent flying by the violent tremors.
When they fell back down, they either plummeted into bottomless fissures or were swallowed by the flickering lightning, charred into husks.
The bone dragon swarm did not slow down, continuing their rapid advance.
Their targets were never these peripheral cannon fodder, but the mid-to-high-tier demons located in the heart of the demon territory.
The core strength, primarily composed of greater demons, was the true objective of the skeleton heroes.
Soon, the bone dragon swarm surpassed the range of the spreading war magic and entered the demons' central zone.
One skeleton warrior tilted its head back and complained.
“Those mages are really useless. They consume so many resources every day, yet they can't even keep up with a bone dragon when casting a spell—and that's a bone dragon loaded with skeletons! If those resources were given to us Vanguards, I would have taken off and been slicing through lesser demons by now.”
“Keke, you said it. If we had those resources, we would have already slaughtered the demons...”
Before it could finish, the thunder from behind suddenly accelerated and caught up.
Lightning splashed everywhere, growing increasingly intense. This was the terrifying nature of war magic.
With every expansion of the seismic wave, the power of 【War Magic: Wrath of the Thunder Titan】 would increase layer by layer. If the power of the first wave was 1, the second was 1.1, and the third was 1.2, stacking infinitely until the spell ended.
Normal magic had to account for targets dodging, making such stacking impossible.
War magic, however, was born to destroy fixed targets or slow-moving, large-scale armies. It only needed to consider range and power, ignoring all else.
The lightning from behind shot higher and higher. The bone dragons could no longer maintain stable flight and began to bank and sway to dodge the bolts erupting from below.
This thrilling aerial maneuver naturally drew shouts from the skeleton heroes.
They hurriedly tightened their grip on the handles to reduce the shaking.
“Big guy, can't you use a bit of your ice crystal power to help stabilize us?”
“Woooh...”
“What? You're saying you have other tasks and need to save your strength?”
“Damn it, I told you the network would be the death of us skeletons. Where did Lord Bone Guard One learn about Plan A and Plan B? There are no turncoats among us skeletons who serve the Overlord.”
“Stop talking. The greater demon territory is right ahead. Prepare to drop!”
After the skeleton warrior spoke, it leaned back, detached itself from the bone dragon's armor, and plummeted toward the ground.
The other skeleton warriors followed suit, dropping one by one.
“Yee-hah!”
Skeleton warriors let out strange cries as they descended from the sky and landed on the ground.
They did not rush to kill the demons immediately. Instead, they first gathered together, their necrotic auras intertwining into a single entity. A small Darkgold Shield manifested above their heads.
This was the phantasmal form of a small battle array. This Darkgold Shield had only one purpose: to make the skeleton warriors immune to the lightning spreading from behind.
Once the battle array was condensed, the skeleton warriors launched a charge toward the distant greater demons.
Now, the thunder served as their protection. Carrying the momentum of the lightning, they began their purge of the demons.
Suddenly, a cold, contemptuous voice rang out.
A massive scarlet eye manifested in the sky.
“Hmph. The undead have arrived as well.”
Rate on N.U.
