novelraw Chapter 149 - 147: Blade Storm
Chapter 149 - 147: Blade Storm
To outsiders, Westheid might have seemed a rather complex man. He could be a contemplative sage, a rakish prodigal, or even a kind and magnanimous Lord.
But to Westheid, these were all just facets of his personality. The role he truly yearned to play had, from the very beginning, never changed.
A powerhouse. A powerhouse in the absolute sense of the word.
A powerhouse strong enough to violate and humiliate the whole damn world with his own power!
Although Westheid’s understanding of "strength" was quite broad, he had to admit... slaughter and battle suited him best.
He rarely had the chance for a truly satisfying fight in his daily life. But against Chaos, an enemy that everyone agreed should be put to the sword, Westheid could finally let himself go.
While the other members of the Guard relied on the sturdy city defenses to fend off sporadic Demon incursions, Westheid refused the protection of the walls and shields.
He was seen brandishing Shadow-Born, charging alone into the Demon Tide.
The blood-red blade in his hand swept out, unleashing a violent shockwave. Like a scythe reaping weeds, it cleaved all the surrounding Chaos Demons in two. A tremendous recoil surged back through him, jarring his bones and muscles, but this minor damage was instantly repaired by the unending power flowing from the Withered Glory Sun.
Instead, the Demons’ abundant flesh and blood were absorbed by the Dragon Soul Furnace. And because it could freely tear flesh and drink souls, the furnace burned even more intensely. A layer of crimson light appeared on Westheid’s Plate Armor, making it sharper and even more unstoppable.
This feedback, mingling with the stimulus of the Cursed Blood, made the battle lust in Westheid’s very marrow begin to surge! To soar! To erupt!
"Hahahaha, that’s more like it! Is this all you’ve got? Keep coming! I’ll cut you all down! I’ll slaughter every last one of you!!"
He tore through hard carapaces, pierced the Demons’ skulls, then blocked their gnashing teeth with his blade and shattered the claws and tentacles they swung at him.
Charge, shatter, cleave, destroy!
Crushing them flat, impaling, beheading, bisecting, tearing apart, shattering with vibrations... he slaughtered them with creative variety.
Bathed in the hot, black blood that gushed like fountains from all sides, Westheid scanned his surroundings with cold, stern eyes, a fire seeming to burn within them.
’The Knightly Hundred Arts is just too perfect!’ This Specialty contained all of Mivana’s combat experience, allowing Westheid to find the Demons’ weak spots with extreme precision and unleash a beauty of unbelievable violence.
"Your Majesty... is this powerful?"
"Yeah! The Lord is humiliating the Chaos Demons! The Lord is invincible!"
Witnessing this display, Qinghui’s Transcendents, after a moment of shock, felt their morale soar and burst into cheers.
Westheid’s demeanor was indeed a bit terrifying—he seemed even more bloodthirsty and horrifying than the Chaos Demons. However, considering the enemy was the Great Chaos Enemy, no amount of brutality was too much.
There was no room for humanitarianism with these fiends. The crueler, the better.
Inspired by their leader, they forgot all fear and hesitation, fiercely using the Shadow Fire Weapons glistening in their hands to cut down the Demons clambering up the base’s walls.
"Your Majesty has charged ahead! How can we fall behind?!"
Some younger Transcendents, inspired by Westheid’s figure, also prepared to charge past the base’s defenses.
"Don’t you come over here!"
Westheid noticed the agitated movements of the Warriors behind him and immediately roared:
"This is just the first wave! Hold the line! Hold it with your lives! Don’t you dare take a single step out!"
Even though he had crushed the attacking Demon Tide as easily as slicing melons and vegetables, it didn’t mean they had won. It would be a stretch to even call it an advantage, because to the Chaos Army, such losses were... utterly insignificant.
Sure enough, just after Westheid’s harsh reprimand, another violent tremor came from the depths of the Purity Forest as a new batch of Demons surged forth.
The Chaos Tide was just like that, always one wave after another. Even with no intelligence or strategy to speak of, it could break through a mortal’s defensive threshold with sheer numbers alone.
All Westheid could do was reduce the pressure on his fledgling troops as much as possible.
’This is how you use a Hero unit, I suppose.’
Mivana was the only one permitted to cross the defensive line. The Lady Knight came to Westheid’s side, looked at the new wave of attacking Demons, and said:
"West, I can share the burden. Let me take it from here."
"Mivana, are you confident you can maintain your sanity?"
Westheid asked, turning his head.
Mivana gripped the hilt of her Great Knight’s Silver Sword. "I’ll be fine for at least three minutes."
Under Westheid’s "special training," the Wolf-eared Maiden had already become capable of briefly unleashing her instincts and then recovering. This was no small improvement.
"No... let me handle it. Your rationality is too precious to waste on these grunts."
Westheid shook his head. Mivana’s "Full Power Form" was their trump card against the Desolate God. How could they waste it on something so meaningless?
So he took a step forward, deciding to monopolize this wave of experience points for himself.
The menacing Demon Tide seemed endless and innumerable, but after a brief observation, Westheid realized this wave wasn’t even as strong as the first. There were very few Chaos Hundred Forms of the Mad Beast Vanguard and Wind of Calamity Tiers among them.
"A bunch of clay chickens and pottery dogs. Watch me shatter them with a single blow!"
Westheid sneered, knowing exactly what was needed to deal with this.
[Knightly Hundred Arts—Blade Storm]
[An ultimate combat technique of willpower that spins the blade at high speed with the self as the origin point. The vortex formed by the blade will warp the surrounding space. The caster at the center of the storm is immune to arrow and Magic attacks.]
[Knights who have mastered this ultimate sword technique strike fear into the hearts of their enemies with the storm they stir up with their own bodies.]
Blade Storm was not unique to the Knight Path; it was actually a common Combat Technique. However, the Knightly Hundred Arts could drastically strengthen this ultimate technique, which originally had numerous flaws.
"Hooo—"
Taking a deep breath, Westheid planted his foot, bent one leg, and began to spin. He spun madly while maintaining his balance, spinning to his absolute limit!
First came the wind. The air displaced by his rotating blade began to gather, forming a gale with unimaginable speed.
With Westheid as the epicenter, a tornado began to take shape. The surging currents of air had already swept dust, rubble, severed limbs, and foul blood into the sky. Then, the storm formed a vortex that seemed almost solid.
SHINK SHINK SHINK—
The crimson blade actually threw off sparks from the friction with the air, dyeing the colorless tornado a faint red. The storm itself seemed to become an extension of the blade. The fiends caught within it blossomed into flowers of blood, and the sound of the blade tearing through flesh was strangely pleasant to the ear.
A tremendous gravitational pull tore the fiends into the vortex, where they were shredded into pieces by thousands of wind blades. Flesh, bone, and organs alike were diced by the chaotic, merciless edges into fragments too small to be seen with the naked eye, then swept up into the sky with the gale.
The crimson lightning-flames, the gory fragments of Demons, and the cold Blade Storm combined to form a tornado like a natural disaster. It rampaged across the plain before the Purity Forest, leaving only ravaged silence in its wake.
Under the enhancement of Talents like Withered Glory Sun, Dragon Soul Furnace, In Purity, and Knightly Hundred Arts, combined with Shadow-Born, a Divine Artifact specialized against Chaos, his power had long since surpassed that of the Exemplar Tier.