Return of the Mythic Bloodline

Chapter 441: River of Blood

"Three of the five Dukes have already fallen," Kharos muttered, his voice grim. "The Banes and Ironvale army is slowly getting exhausted, but as long as those Sect Masters are fighting, we cannot secure a certain victory."

Turning to Hector, Kharos declared, "It’s time that we enter the battlefield ourselves. The Flame Emperor Aethon must have completely exhausted himself after that last move. Take your personal knights and deal with him."

"As you wish, father," Hector replied with a slight bow before asking, "Whom will you fight, father?"

"Isn’t that obvious?" Kharos muttered, his eyes narrowing at Taranis in the distance. "I will deal with the most troublesome one and make sure that this time, he stays dead."

Hector led his personal hundred knights at the True Sage Realm, marching towards Aethon, while Kharos rushed at Taranis with an additional army of two hundred elite knights. Taranis, meanwhile, was already fighting against hundreds of thousands of awakened sages.

Midway, Kharos’s eyebrows furrowed as Taranis began doing something strange. He removed his helm, revealing his scarred face, followed by the heavy armor encasing his body.

Taking a deep breath, he murmured something that Kharos couldn’t hear due to the distance between them. The next moment, Kharos’s steps suddenly halted, his body frozen in place.

The entire battlefield fell silent. Every soldier stopped amidst their clash. Even the Eternal Sages spread across the area didn’t move an inch, all of them wearing unsettled expressions.

A strange oppressive pressure had suddenly fallen upon the battlefield. It was both ominous and horrifying, as if demanding obedience from everyone present.

"Wh-what is this ominous pressure?" Tartaglia muttered, sweat trickling down his face.

"N-no way! I-is it really happening again?" muttered a clean-shaven man with long white hair. He was clad in clean silver armor, and in his hand, he carried a rapier, which was engaged in a fierce clash with the hand fan of Tartaglia. He was Bran Silvergard.

Unlike the people of Hundred Sky Mountains, it wasn’t the first time for the Dukes, Prince, and Emperor of the Azure Sun Empire to be in the presence of this pressure.

They had experienced it before at the Sentinel Line, the day when the emperor had almost lost his life.

Taranis’s hair stirred violently without any presence of wind. The air around him began to bend, and spiderweb-like cracks spread across the land beneath him. From the roots, the color of his hair began to change, transforming from deep black into bright gold.

His dual golden pupils compressed, merging at the center to form vertical slits. The diamond-shaped mark on his forehead turned radiant gold, and numerous golden lines forming intricate patterns spread outward from the mark, reaching his arms, back, and chest.

His ears twitched, growing long and pointed, angling parallel to his head, and his fingernails extended outward, transforming into wide, terrifying claws. At the shoulder where his left arm should have been, an arm of pure golden energy formed.

"Wh-what is this bizarre transformation?" the soldiers standing before Taranis murmured, their limbs trembling merely from witnessing his appearance.

He no longer looked human. It was as though he had transcended into a deity. The Vajra in Taranis’s hands trembled uncontrollably, resonating with an eerie hum.

"Why are you being so noisy?" Taranis murmured, staring intently at the sword in his hand. "Are you pleased because of this appearance?"

He gripped the sword firmly with both hands, his slit pupils shifting toward the distance, locking onto Kharos, who had halted mid-step while approaching him.

Taranis’s gaze alone stirred something deep within Kharos, forcing him to instinctively take a step backward.

"It is time to end this," Taranis murmured in a low voice, suddenly vanishing from his position.

In the blink of an eye, his blade came crashing down upon Kharos, who was standing several kilometers away.

Kharos barely managed to block the attack at the very last moment. The violent clash of their weapons sent a massive blast of air bursting outward in all directions. The ground beneath Kharos split apart from the collision, fracturing violently as if a mountain itself had descended upon him.

Seeing their Emperor being pressed under Taranis’s overwhelming strength, the elite knights launched fierce and desperate strikes toward Taranis.

Before their attacks could even reach him, Taranis slowly opened his mouth and unleashed a deafening roar.

"ROARRRR!!!!!!!!"

The guttural, inhuman roar thundered across the battlefield, instantly nullifying the incoming attacks. Blood erupted from the ears of the elite knights, their irises rolling upward as they teetered on the edge of unconsciousness.

Kharos, who stood closest to Taranis, barely managed to save himself by coating his body in Soulforce. Even then, his limbs trembled uncontrollably, and a thin trickle of blood streamed from his ear.

Ding...

"You have learned a new skill!

Cry of the Fallen!"

"Y-you monster!" Kharos shouted, gathering his strength as he swung his sword with both hands, forcing Taranis backward with a powerful strike.

The moment distance formed between them, the elite knights swiftly surrounded Kharos, forming a tight defensive formation.

While skidding backward across the shattered ground, Taranis stabbed his sword into the earth to regain his footing, carving a deep trench in front of him.

Only a few seconds had passed since Kharos had hurled him backward, yet a massive army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers had already encircled Kharos and the elite knights at the center, forming an impenetrable wall of bodies.

High above in the sky, Barbatos had witnessed the entire exchange, his eyes filled with pure shock and disbelief. He had already wiped out most of the Thornwall soldiers and followed the ominous pressure he had sensed, only to discover that it belonged to none other than their Prince.

He was about to descend onto the battlefield when a deep, commanding voice echoed through the air.

"Stay where you are, Lord Barbatos."

"But Your Highness, there are too many of them. Allow me to assist you," Barbatos insisted, his voice laced with urgency as he hovered in the sky.

"No. This is exactly what I needed," Taranis murmured, tearing through the air with a slow, deliberate swing of his blade.

He tossed Vajra into what appeared to be another dimension, then bent his back slightly, extending both of his hands forward like claws, his posture turning feral.

"D-did he just tear apart reality?" Barbatos gasped, unable to comprehend what he was witnessing.

However, he was mistaken. What seemed like a fracture in reality was merely Taranis opening his inventory space.

For reasons unknown, Taranis had chosen to fight with his bare claws.

He slightly bent his knees before launching himself into the sky, then descended like a meteor, landing directly amidst the overwhelming army of the empire.

With nothing but his bare claws, he began slaughtering every enemy in his path. The roars of soldiers echoed across the battlefield as they unleashed relentless, all-out assaults upon him.

Yet their attacks had minimal effect on Taranis’s enhanced body. His golden irises, marked with slit pupils, darted within his sockets, scanning every movement while his claws mercilessly tore through flesh and armor alike.

His radiant body gradually turned crimson as more blood splattered across him. An ominous scent of death filled the air, and the bodies of fallen soldiers began piling across the land, forming a grotesque carpet of corpses.

Within just a couple of hours, thousands had already fallen with barely any resistance, and the number continued to rise at a terrifying pace.

Ding...

"Congratulations! The Host has successfully broken through! The Host’s level has increased.

Level Five Transcendent Realm → Level Six Transcendent Realm.

All stats +50."

Ding...

"Congratulations! The Host has successfully broken through! The Host’s level has increased.

Level Six Transcendent Realm → Level Seven Transcendent Realm.

All stats +50."

The transformation placed an immense strain on Taranis’s Soulforce reserves. However, before his energy could be completely depleted, the sheer number of enemies he faced allowed him to continuously break through into higher realms, healing his injuries and replenishing his Sea of Soulforce.

After six hours of relentless slaughter, the army of a hundred thousand soldiers had been reduced to nothing more than mangled flesh, blood, and scattered bones.

Taranis’s majestic golden hair, once a symbol of his divinity, now dripped with blood, completely drenched in crimson, making him appear no less than a terrifying monster born of war.

As Kharos watched his soldiers fall helplessly, layers of blood flowing endlessly across the land, the words Taranis had spoken earlier echoed within his mind.

’Let it be known across every kingdom, every sect, and every city. Anyone who dares to stand in our path will be shown no mercy.

A road of severed heads will be carved.

Rivers of blood will flow.

The soil of the Western Continent will be stained crimson for generations to come.’

"H-how did it come to this?" Kharos murmured, his voice trembling as the chances of victory vanished before his very eyes.

Once Taranis was finished with the lower-ranked soldiers, he punched into the air, opening the inventory space once more.

From within, he drew out Vajra again. The moment his fingers wrapped around its hilt, the blade transformed from silver into a radiant gold.

Without even the slightest hint of hesitation, Taranis charged forward toward the hundreds of trained True Sages standing before him.