novelraw Chapter 327: Using the Power of One Dragon to Defeat an Entire Undead Legion
Chapter 327: Using the Power of One Dragon to Defeat an Entire Undead Legion
“I seem to hear cries of despair, and smell the sweet mingling of fresh life and fear.”
The necromancer Phillips whispered without sound, perfectly concealing his withered form within the boundless tide of undead, sensing the lone outpost ahead with nothing but his mind.
From here.
With the deathly power he had accumulated over centuries, he would transform the vibrant Ximu Domain into a lifeless undead realm, then use that as a base to unleash an even more devastating wave of death to sweep across the Ser Wilderness.
This was the beautiful vision residing in his heart.
Yet that greedy delusion was abruptly interrupted by a tremor rising from the depths of his own soul.
A dense, inexorable gray-white mist reeking of rot was brutally torn, expelled, and in an instant evaporated by an overwhelming, savage force!
A massive shadow, wrapped in a terrifying might that warped and set the air aflame, fell like a meteor from the sky, crashing between the undead vanguard and the Third Outpost.
More precisely, it smashed with deadly accuracy into the very center of the undead army’s most concentrated front lines.
Only then did the sharp, tearing shriek—like cloth rent to shreds by extreme velocity—finally descend from the high heavens.Thud!!!
The earth gave a pained groan as a violent quake and deafening roar erupted.
A visible shockwave exploded outward in a perfect circle, instantly clearing every low-tier undead within a hundred-meter radius—frail skeletons and stiff shamblers alike—sweeping them away like dust!
Countless shards of bone, rotting flesh, and rusted armor plates were blasted out radially like toys smashed by an invisible, titanic war hammer. The raised dust mixed with lingering mist to form a brief, murky dome of airborne debris.
The lich hidden among the undead staggered under the sudden shock, soul-fire flickering in his skull.
He peered forward with grave intent.
As the dust thinned, a dragon beyond ordinary comprehension stood tall in the center of the battlefield.
Even though he had once been a legendary necromancer—well-traveled and far-seeing—Phillips still found it surreal to behold that dragon.
Its form surpassed every notion Phillips had ever held about dragons.
It was as if two red dragons stood side by side in one frame; its scales looked less like armor layered atop muscle and more like heavy plating grown directly from sinew thick as steel cables—each plate shield-like and overlapping, gleaming with an unsettling luster.
Its grotesque horns twisted through the haze like spearheads tearing the sky.
The wing tips still churned with lingering flame; their edges razor-sharp, like two colossal blades. Its thick tail bore raised scales forming blade- and spear-like ridges studded with dense, vicious spikes. The whole dragon seemed less like flesh and blood than a painstakingly forged instrument of war.
Its pupils were deep black as night, and its gaze pierced the smoke and mist with indifferent scrutiny, a pressure that was invisible yet like a tidal wave, instantly plunging the clamorous battlefield into a hush.
“A dragon from the Ximu Domain? Never seen one like this.”
“Judging by its features, it appears to be a hybrid of red dragon and iron dragon?”
“What an enormous life aura. The raw power contained in this body is beyond measure!”
Phillips’s already-withered heart contracted sharply, but almost at once a stronger, greedier desire—like a poisonous flame—flooded out and swallowed his caution.
No allied subordinate army accompanied it—just a single dragon. Does it think it can stop my tide of undead? Ridiculous!
More importantly, a dragon of such extraordinary aspect surely possessed a powerful, unique soul. If he could slay it and refine it with necromantic rites, Phillips would gain a undead draconic general capable of sweeping battlefields!
“Kill it!”
The cold command silently transmitted through the mental link instantaneously reached every undead unit.
Undead know no fear; upon receiving their master’s highest order, the soul-fires glowing in their eye sockets swung in unison, and countless empty, dead gazes locked onto the single living focus— the dragon!
The Death Knight formation responded first.
These silent machines of slaughter had been elite warriors in life and were reshaped by negative energy in death, now stronger in both offense and defense.
They wore shadowy heavy armor that covered nearly their entire bodies, exposing only two cold points of soul-fire beneath their helmets. Their nightmare steeds breathed ghostly blue flames; where their hooves struck, quiet blue-flame blossoms lingered.
“Form the lines! Charge!”
Phillips subtly shifted his will, skillfully manipulating formation changes while casting across the field; esoteric runes flashed and vanished, granting the Death Knights High Brutality and Umbral Aegis.
Immediately fifty Death Knights split into five groups.
They charged like five black spears from different, precise angles—no battle cries, only the heavy thuds of nightmare hooves striking earth forming a deathly drumbeat.
Their spacing was precise to the millimeter; their trajectories perfectly sealed the dragon’s maneuvering space. Long lances were leveled, lance tips concentrating negative energy capable of piercing walls; a ghostly blue aura connected them into a net of death covering the dragon’s torso.
Seeing this, the necromancer smiled smugly. He had fallen in cultivation, but his transformation into a lich had deepened his understanding of undead minds; his control over the army had not waned but improved—commanding them was like composing an art of death.
In his plan, whether the dragon stood firm or dodged, several lances would strike it from the weakest angles.
“Alone to pierce the formation...haha, do you think you are the Holy King? Except for a few aberrations, anyone who tries to resist the undead tide with their lone body ends only in death.”
“Foolish dragon, you will soon become my plaything.”
Phillips concentrated and directed his forces.
A bone behemoth rivaling the dragon in size began to stride forward like a moving mountain. Its gigantic bone claws hissed through the air and struck toward the dragon’s skull, sealing off its upper space.
Aerially, the wailing banshees emerged like phantoms. They opened mouths silently—a lance strike would be accompanied by an invisible soul shriek that detonated in tandem—colliding with the behemoth’s brutal blow to assault from outside and inside, intended to shatter the dragon’s resistance.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
A chorus of metallic impacts rang out across the battlefield.
But the expected scene of shattered scales and flying flesh did not appear.
Lances infused with negative energy struck precisely—neck, side of chest and abdomen, joint connections—but the moment each lance bit in, rods creaked under unbearable strain, bending and cracking, as if they had pierced not biological scales but some indestructible divine iron.
The few most powerful Death Knight commanders could barely pierce the dragon’s scales.
Yet beneath those pierced plates seemed another layer of equally hard armor; many attacks were blunted and could not continue to break through.
Crack! Crack!
With a slight movement of the dragon’s body, the lance tips twisted and shattered amid agonizing metal screeches. A tremendous recoil surged down the shafts—Death Knights’ arm-mounted gauntlets groaned under the strain; several shattered outright, and the rotten bone arms within snapped chunk by chunk!
The nightmare steeds shrieked in pain, rearing up as their blue flames flickered and nearly died.
The Death Knight legion’s cherished destructive charge had not even managed to break the dragon’s defenses!
Almost simultaneously, the bone behemoth’s ridge-crushing claw—capable of smashing granite gates—came down, whipping away the dust below with the wind it generated.
But just as that colossal claw was about to reach the dragon’s jagged horns, the red iron dragon raised a forepaw and swiped upward with lightning speed.
Boom—!!!
Claws collided in a violent impact!
No stalemate—only crushing dominance.
The behemoth’s giant claw—stitched from thick bone and reinforced with negative energy—crumbled and exploded like rotted wood upon contact with the dragon’s paw. Massive broken bone fragments shot outward, pulverizing nearby, unprepared shamblers into gore.
The behemoth’s enormous body was driven backward and forced to its knees by the unstoppable power, each step gouging deep pits into the ground.
Aerially, the banshees kept screaming, faces twisted in hatred. Yet their soul-wail, piercing as it was, hit the dragon’s spirit as if a breeze had struck an iron wall—no ripple was produced. Within that unfathomably massive body resided a resilient, tremendous soul beyond imagination.
The red iron dragon sawed with both wings, lashed with its tail, and struck with its claws in quick alternation. Undead surged forward only to be annihilated.
A single charge could carve a long blank into the throng of undead, leaving broken bones and gore strewn across the ground.
“What an incredible, incredible dragon.”
“Not just a hybrid! Could it be one of those legendary aberrant dragons? Like that twenty-four-winged Gold Dragon King?!”
Phillips wavered for an instant, but the undead army’s craving for powerful life kept his greed for the dragon’s body and soul burning.
Crack, crack.
Broken bones reassembled into grotesque shapes; rotted flesh contorted into terrible new forms; fallen undead rose again and resumed the encirclement, pressing the dragon.
Moreover, though some undead were utterly destroyed, the negative energy released from their dissolution fused into the surrounding space, forming a suppressive gray mist that weakened the living and eroded clarity of mind. The red iron dragon slowed slightly, acting as if dulled, continuing to fight on the ground rather than ascending.
“Even if we wipe out this legion, taking this dragon’s body and soul will be worth it.”
Phillips no longer hesitated and pushed the army to surround and crush the dragon, adjusting tactics.
“Exhaust it! Grind it down with endless bones!”
“Surviving Death Knights, fall back! Bone behemoths, press forward!”
“All soldiers, form bone-shield arrays! Shamblers, use your putrid corpses to fill every inch beneath its feet! Banshees, relentless soul strikes—disrupt its will! I don’t believe its power is infinite.”
Phillips’s orders rippled through the undead ranks.
The behemoth that had been pushed back let out a silent roar. Ignoring its shattered claw, it marched again like a hill, using its bulk and remaining bone arms to slam into Garoth, attempting to restrict his movement by sheer mass. Two more bone behemoths advanced simultaneously.
Three bone behemoths in total attempted to bind the red iron dragon by continuously smashing themselves to pieces.
At the same time, the countless warriors efficiently began to reshape and combine. Under Phillips’s exquisite control, their charges were not chaotic but mechanically precise.
Frontline skeleton warriors slammed massive bone shields into the ground; backline fighters trod on their shoulders, stacking second and third layers of shields, reinforcing and bonding them with negative energy.
After only a few breaths, directly behind and on both sides of the red iron dragon rose several walls composed of layered, pale bone shields.
The undead mass, strengthened by negative energy, became a unified whole, more solid than steel.
Between bone shields protruded lance tips from Death Knights and weapons of skeleton warriors like a porcupine of iron. These mobile fortresses advanced step by step to squeeze toward the central dragon.
Rotting shambler hordes served as the cheapest cannon fodder. They ignored comrades crushed beneath them, howling and lunging with decayed bodies toward the dragon’s limbs and belly. When they died they exploded, releasing corpse toxins and raw rotting flesh to corrupt and slow the thick scales. Countless shamblers piled atop one another to form a nauseating mountain of putrefaction.
The banshees in the sky abandoned physical attacks entirely. They darted through the air, leaving phantom after image as their soul-shrieks—audible enough to instantly fry a living brain—assaulted the dragon’s head wave after wave without pause.
The entire battlefield was overwhelmed by the undead. From above, one could only see a frenzied, heaving gray-white sea engulfing the red iron dragon completely.
“Steady, steady.”
Phillips tugged at his lip and smiled.
Alone, each undead unit was not strong, but under his control, when distinct troop types coordinated and were enhanced by spells, they could surround and annihilate any foe below legendary rank.
This unique red iron dragon before him would be no exception... Phillips’s soul-fire trembled and his gaze hardened.
Crackle! Crackle!
Under Phillips’s solemn watch, streaks of golden lightning leaped through gaps among the undead, and the grinding of bone could not drown out the rising, exultant sound.
Boom boom boom boom!
The undead-formed cage bulged outward as if struck by four monstrous arms; negative energy dispersed, and cracks appeared in the once-impenetrable prison.
Rip!
A pair of wings, as if blotting out the sky, sliced through the toughest bone walls, rotating and slashing. Amid clouds of shattered bone and rotting flesh, the dragon shot skyward.
Garoth circled midair, much of his scales already flaked away.
Phillips felt no joy—he clearly saw that beneath the damaged scales lay another layer of black-red scales, crisscrossed with rough, intersecting fissures.
Battle-Hardened Patterns?!
Ordinary people might not recognize them, but the former-legend Phillips understood the meaning of those markings.
The dragon inflated in size, electricity wrapping its body in golden lightning. It soared, then viciously slammed down, crushing swathes of undead beneath it.
At the same time, the dragon straightened up. It inhaled deeply; lightning danced across its chest armored in heavy scales, which swelled as it opened its maw. Golden lightning and crimson flame interlaced between its teeth.
With Garoth’s growth and development of the Frenzied State, his spherical Flame Thunder breath in this form could now become a rolling torrent. Though not as thermally enhanced as Destruction Breath, it far outstripped a normal dragon’s breath.
Whoosh!
The dragon dipped its head and exhaled. The flame-lightning mingled into a huge fan-shaped torrent that spewed forth and instantly swallowed everything in front of it.
Sizzle—!!!
A scalp-tingling, boiling-like vaporization sound became the battlefield’s dominant chorus.
First to bear the brunt were the bone behemoths—huge bodies assembled of countless sturdy bones—fragile as wax effigies thrown into a steel furnace before the flood of lightning and flame.
At contact, the bones composing the behemoth liquefied and vaporized like snow under a blazing sun. The beast that had resisted Garoth’s attacks, fragmenting and reassembling, simply vanished.
Next came the bone-shield walls constructed from countless skeletons and reinforced with negative energy, supposedly indestructible.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Like inferior cardboard impaled by a red-hot iron, layered bone shields could not withstand the Flame Thunder torrent; they were melted and vaporized, and the warriors hiding behind them were instantly gasified.
The breath showed no sign of weakening, clearing a vast ring of undead and carving a bottomless chasm into the earth that billowed white smoke and dark red embers.
Within that trench, every undead—skeletons and shamblers alike—turned to gray ash and vanished.
The ground was scorched into a crystalline, glazed sheen.
For these undead, elemental fire attacks were more effective than physical damage.
Realizing this, the red iron dragon did not cease. It tilted its massive head; the destructive torrent swept like a divine light-whip, moving with its gaze to begin scouring horizontally.
Wherever it swept, purification was absolute.
The nauseating, contorted pile of shamblers? Reduced to ash.
The banshees circling above? When the Flame Thunder swept the sky, their translucent bodies vaporized like thin ice dropped into boiling water—no time even for a final shriek.
Countless skeleton warriors and shambler clusters vanished piece by piece beneath the dragon’s breath, like pencil sketches erased by a rubber.
In mere seconds, the entire undead left flank was wiped out by Garoth’s single exhalation, leaving a vast, steaming crystalline area on the battlefield.
Those undead that had massed together to encircle the dragon suffered grievously for their crowded formation.