novelraw Chapter 475: River of Light
Chapter 475: River of Light
The instant the command fell.
Jie Ming’s consciousness completed its final connection with the control cores of the twelve giant cannons.
He “felt” himself suddenly possessing twelve additional “bodies.” Each one was a thirty-meter-long, three-meter-diameter metal pillar, inscribed with over seven million precise runes, now greedily drawing massive reserves of energy from the temporary elemental pool at the fortress base.
Then he directed the “gaze” of these bodies toward the densest cluster of red light points beyond that boundary line on the sandbox.
Lock-on.
No need for precise targeting of individual entities.
Area coverage was sufficient.
“Fire.”
Jie Ming said softly within his mind.
Outside Fortress No. 7. The twelve turrets positioned at different points around the fortress simultaneously emitted a low, beast-like awakening hum.
Multi-layered armor plates at the turret tops slid aside, revealing bottomless launch shafts below.
Within the shafts, blinding white light began to converge.
This was no ordinary light—it was high-concentration elemental matter forcibly stripped of all “energy attributes,” reduced to the most primal “fire element.”
Wherever the radiance touched, the inner walls of the metal turrets showed signs of melting; the air ionized into vast webs of electric arcs.
Charging.
Then…
Twelve pure-white beams, each over five meters in diameter, erupted from the muzzles.
The beams did not shoot skyward but angled slightly downward, roaring toward that “boundary line” one hundred and twenty kilometers ahead.
At the same time, the other turrets on the metal fortress—and even those on distant fortresses—fired in unison.
During flight, the beams began to spread and merge.
By the time they reached the target airspace, countless beams had fused into a single river of destruction more than three kilometers wide, composed purely of the laws of “disintegration” and “purification.”
Wherever the river of light swept, everything was “simplified.”
Whether the curse ripples of the Chaos Secret Cult or the annihilation beams of the Tower of Annihilation, all lost their special properties before the more fundamental law of decomposition and turned into free-floating elemental energy.
Even space itself was momentarily “ironed flat,” its every fold and fluctuation smoothed away.
And those unlucky pursuers caught directly within the river of light’s coverage…
Third- to fifth-ring wizards didn’t even have time to scream—their bodies vaporized instantly in the white light, soul fragments shredded in the elemental turbulence.
Sixth-ring wizards saw their raised shields melt like thin ice under sunlight; their flesh began disintegrating at the molecular level.
Only the quickest reactors—who immediately activated life-saving trump cards—managed to barely escape the river’s range, though all were gravely wounded and on the verge of death.
Even among the nearly one hundred seventh-ring wizards charging at the forefront, more than a dozen failed to dodge in time and were grazed by the river’s edge.
One Chaos Secret Cult seventh-ring wizard had half his body engulfed by the white light.
He roared madly as thick blood-colored mist erupted from within him in resistance, but the mist was “purified” into harmless steam the instant it touched the light.
His right arm, right shoulder, and nearly half his chest vanished silently, as though erased by a rubber from a pencil sketch.
He staggered backward. The remaining eye in his left socket was filled with shock, fury, and lingering terror.
Had he not decisively severed that portion of his body and used a “pain transfer” curse to distribute the damage to his cannon fodder units, he might have fallen in that single instant.
The river of light persisted for three seconds.
Three seconds later, energy depleted, the white light dissipated.
What remained was a “blank zone” three kilometers wide, over one thousand five hundred kilometers long, and of immeasurable height.
Within the zone’s edges, the sky was an unnaturally pure azure—every cloud, dust particle, and energy residue had been cleansed away.
And at the highest reaches of that sky, one could faintly glimpse scenes from “another layer” of space.
That was the chaotic void exposed when the plane barrier had been momentarily erased by the overwhelming attack.
On the ground lay a molten trench hundreds of meters deep, its edges mirror-smooth.
This single volley had forcibly severed the pursuit.
The wizards of the Chaos Secret Cult and Tower of Annihilation halted simultaneously before the trench.
They hovered in midair, staring at the line ahead—like a giant brushstroke carved across the earth—and their expressions grew exceptionally grave.
Farther beyond the trench, through the still-lingering afterglow of energy, they finally saw clearly the Noren workshops’ deployment.
Across the barren land, every few dozen kilometers stood pitch-black metal fortresses.
Rune light flowed across their surfaces; the turrets atop them slowly adjusted their angles.
And in the vast airspace between these fortresses stretched cannon fodder legions so dense they nearly blocked the entire field of view.
At the very forefront of those cannon fodder legions hovered an army radiating heart-palpitating pressure…
The shadow legion.
From the Chaos Secret Cult side, Rotten Throat Mordekian slowly advanced to the front line.
His bloodshot eyes locked onto the distant fortress cluster. Countless streams of data-like calculation light flashed rapidly through his pupils.
Soon, he reached his conclusion.
“Super-gigantic composite defensive array… using those metal fortresses as nodes. Energy circuits have already achieved preliminary interconnection.”
His voice was low and hoarse, laced with suppressed rage.
“Though still incomplete—defense strength likely only thirty percent of design capacity… it’s already a troublesome turtle shell.”
Mordekian spat viciously. Several drops of pus-blood sprayed from his rotting lips.
“The alchemy wizards of Noren workshops… their numbers are simply too many!”
This was precisely the scenario he had feared most.
With the fate lines polluted and unable to predict the enemy’s exact movements, their only option had been to press the entire army forward immediately after the curse attack, hoping to overwhelm and crush the enemy with absolute numerical superiority before a complete defensive system could be established.
Yet they had been delayed by the vanguard legions for less than ten minutes…
And in that time, the enemy had already completed the main construction of over a hundred fortresses and preliminarily linked the array network between them!
“But since we’ve come this far…”
Mordekian drew a deep breath. The motion caused his chest cavity to wheeze like a bellows.
He slowly raised his rotting right hand and swept it forward.
“…we cannot simply withdraw like this.”
The command transmitted through the mental network and instantly spread across the entire army.
“All units…”
“Cannon fodder legions, release!”
“First wave assault—begin!”
The moment the order fell.
From the direction of the Chaos Secret Cult and Tower of Annihilation coalition, that boundless black tide began to boil.
Hundreds of millions of cannon fodder units were unleashed by the wizards. Like swarms pouring from a hive, they roared and howled, transforming into torrents that surged toward the trench plowed by the light cannons—toward the waiting defensive line of the Noren workshops beyond it.
The sky was completely blotted out.
The earth groaned beneath the weight of billions of tons of trampling mass.
The war had entered its bloodiest phase.