novelraw Chapter 454: Seven Wounds in the Sky (3)
Chapter 454: Seven Wounds in the Sky (3)
Jorik stood on the rooftop of a building three blocks east of the survivor district, watching the city burn.
While some parts of the city were in fact on fire due to the Demon Lords tearing through church warehouses and igniting the stored chemicals within, it wasn't the actual fire that caused the destruction.
The destruction was different from that, as it was the destruction that came from the seven portals he opened, spilling creatures from other worlds into the streets of a city that had already been on the edge of collapse before the church intervention.
From where he stood, Jorik could see three of the seven portals, and that was giving him an inexplicable sense of satisfaction.
The portals were doing what they were supposed to do. The creatures on the other side were hungry, and most importantly, they were strong enough to give both Reidar's summons and the Aegis Phalanx something to think about.
Two of his people stood behind him—Colt, who had survived the initial chaos because he had been running communications from a building the summons hadn't reached yet, and a woman named Marlene, who was a level 340 mage and one of the few senior operatives still alive inside Kingsgate.
The rest of the church's command structure in the city was either dead or scattered. Reidar's army had been thorough, which was the problem.
In the span of less than an hour, the undead, the monsters, and the demons had dismantled months of careful work, killing hundreds of church members, seizing the warehouses, and destroying the safe houses that Jorik had spent weeks setting up.
It didn't surprise Jorik, as Reidar always achieved those kinds of results whenever he intervened somewhere.
"Report," Jorik said without turning around.
Colt stepped forward. He was breathing hard, which told Jorik that he had been running.
"The tunnel network is compromised," Colt said. "Reidar's summons found an entrance near the eastern side of the area. They're flooding the tunnels with some kind of acid-spitting insects. We also lost contact with everyone in a southern junction about fifteen minutes ago."
"How many of our people are still alive?" Jorik asked.
"Inside Kingsgate? Hard to say. Most of our people in the warehouses and safe houses are dead, and the ones in the tunnels are likely gone too." Colt paused.
"I'd guess somewhere between four and six thousand, scattered across the city. Most of them are hiding in civilian areas where the summons can't distinguish them from regular survivors."
Jorik nodded. That was the only advantage they had left. Reidar's army could kill church members when it was easy for them to identify them, but in the settlements, where hundreds of thousands of survivors lived and worked, picking out a few thousand mutated humans from a crowd was not simple, even with fifty thousand summons to do the job.
Marlene spoke next. She was calmer than Colt, which was one of the reasons Jorik kept her around; she didn't waste time panicking. She also had a tendency to focus on solutions rather than problems, which made her useful in situations like this.
"The evacuation teams are preparing to move through the northern breach," she said. "The wall section near the old residential area took damage weeks ago, and the Aegis patched it, but the repair is thinner than the rest of the wall. Our people can break through it and use the chaos as cover to get out."
"How long do we need to open a breach?" Jorik asked.
"The time to reach the place, maybe less, depending on whether Reidar's summons pushes into that area. If they don't, we can start moving people within the next half an hour."
Jorik considered this. Thirty minutes was a long time in a city being torn apart by seven portals and an army of fifty thousand summons, but the alternative was to stay in Kingsgate and wait for Reidar to find them.
"Tell the teams to move as soon as they're ready," Jorik said. "No waiting for the full thirty minutes. If there's a window, they take it."
"Understood," Marlene said.
Jorik turned back to the city, his expression blank, though his eyes carried a cold satisfaction as he watched the chaos unfold below.
From there, he could see the fighting at the various portals. Reidar's Demon-Lords were bombarding the monsters coming through the rift.
Each explosion triggered shock waves that flooded the streets and collapsed buildings, which in turn sent debris flying in every direction and killed more monsters.
The shockwaves also shattered windows in the surrounding buildings, sending glass shards raining down on the streets below, and the force of the blasts created craters in the pavement that swallowed entire groups of monsters whole.
The survivors in the area were running, as expected. Some of them were heading toward the Aegis Phalanx, and many more were trying to leave the city. Though Jorik knew they were not going to end well, as the Aegis and Reidar's summons were the only things that were going to prevent they died a gruesome death. Others were running in random directions, which was less helpful, but not Jorik's problem.
Level 557. That number sat in Jorik's mind like a splinter. When Reidar had been pulled through the portal, he had been around level 440, roughly at the same level as Jorik's current 440. The fact that he had gained over a hundred levels in a few months was terrifying.
Jorik had spent those same months absorbing mana through the church's circles, pushing his level higher one point at a time while monitoring his mutation to make sure he didn't cross the threshold to ferality. He had reached 440 through discipline and control. It wasn't easy considering that mana got absorbed automatically.
Reidar had reached 557 by killing things on another planet. The difference in approach was as wide as the difference in results.