Chapter 53: The Tactical Split
The evacuation of Warehouse 4 took seconds. The First Fangs didn't waste a heartbeat. They recalled their Wild Frames and sprinted up the heavy deployment ramp. Void sat in the synchronization dock of the Guardian Mech, dragging the sparking, one-armed machine into the lower hold, while the heavily damaged, purged form of Bee limped in right behind it.
"Hatch secured!" Jax's voice boomed over the external speakers of the Arc-Raiser. The eighteen-meter titan physically shoved the massive steel blast doors together, slamming the locking mechanism into place with a thunderous CLANG that echoed through the industrial district.
The ground shook as the Archangel's repulsor lifts engaged. The massive ship didn't fly into the sky; it rose just a few feet off the ground, hovering low and heavy like a mechanical god of war as it prepared to glide through the city streets.
"Listen up!" I broadcasted, the Pack Resonance making my voice echo seamlessly in everyone's minds. "We are plugging the holes. We don't have time for a council. Aria, Mistress Vael—Master Elias is getting swarmed on the North Wall. Take the Shadow Fox and Nightfall. Do not let that wall buckle."
Aria gave me a sharp, determined nod, her silver coat snapping in the wind as she vaulted onto the back of the shimmering Shadow Fox Mirage. Vael simply vanished into the shadows of the alleyways, her panther letting out a roar that chilled the blood of any Dragon-kin nearby.
"Angel," I continued, "take Jax and Fenris. Move the Archangel down the main thoroughfare toward the Eastern Gate. You have a straight line of sight to the breach. If it moves and it has scales, erase it."
"Acknowledged. Lohengrin Positron Blasters spinning up," Angel replied coldly.
"What about you?" Aria called out over the roar of the engines.
"The Southern Wall just triggered a distress beacon," I said, my hand resting on the azure plating of the Liger Zero Jager. "The local guilds are being butchered. I'm going hunting."
I. The Eastern Hellfire
The Archangel glided low and heavy right down the central avenue, its massive shadow flickering over the abandoned buildings.
As they rounded the final plaza, the Eastern Gate came into view. It was a nightmare. The ancient stone archway was a fifty-foot gap of smoking rubble, and a tidal wave of Beast-Type Dragon-kin was pouring through, trampling the remaining city guards underfoot.
The Archangel stopped dead in the air, its bow pointing straight at the breach. Beside the ship, the Arc-Raiser stood ready, and Fenris locked his heavy Metal X Form into the cobblestones. The sheer volume of monsters was staggering. Angel's secondary point-defense lasers whined, cutting glowing red lines through the horde, while Fenris's Gatling cannons spun up to a high-pitched roar, shredding the front lines.
Jax waded into the fray, the Arc-Raiser's massive blade cleaving five Drakes in half with a single swing. But for every ten they killed, twenty more poured through the rubble. They couldn't plug a hole this wide with just firepower.
"Angel! Scan the flanking structures. The customs houses," Jax ordered, his voice booming through the titan's external speakers.
"Scanning," Angel replied instantly. A second later: "Thermal signatures negative. The structures are entirely abandoned. Civilians evacuated to the inner keep."
"Fenris! Angel! Bring the house down!" Jax roared.
"Target lock confirmed," Angel announced.
The twin Lohengrin Positron Blasters discharged. Two blinding, continuous beams of anti-matter ripped down the main road, completely vaporizing the first three waves of Dragon-kin in a flash of white light. Taking the window, the Arc-Raiser and Fenris turned their heavy weapons on the massive, empty stone buildings flanking the gate. Under the sustained fire of GM-beams and Soul-Steel slugs, the ancient foundations shattered. Thousands of tons of masonry and iron cascaded downward, burying the Eastern breach under a mountain of impassable rubble. The gate was sealed.
II. The Northern Sky
On the North Wall, the sky belonged to the monsters.
A massive Elite Wyvern—a winged nightmare covered in razor-sharp scales—was diving into the ranks of the defenders, snatching men from the parapets. The Silver Hand infantry were breaking. Master Elias was the only thing holding the line, standing firm atop Basalt's runic shell, his staff glowing with turbulent mana.
"The heavens answer to the earth!" Elias roared.
He slammed his staff into the tortoise's shell, and a massive meteor of arcane fire plummeted out of the storm clouds, perfectly intercepting the Wyvern's flight path and smashing directly into its left wing. The beast shrieked and crashed heavily onto the wide stone ramparts.
The Shadow Fox Mirage didn't give it a chance to recover. It pounced from stealth, its sonic blades pinning the thrashing dragon's neck to the stone.
Mistress Vael moved through the remaining infantry like a phantom. Her Noctis-Reaper scythe barked with recoil-assisted shots, using the kickback of the gun-mode to accelerate the blade into a blur. She cleared the wall with terrifying, metronomic precision, leaving nothing but decapitated Dragon-kin in her wake.
Aria finished it. She launched herself off a guard tower, the War-Breaker hammer humming with gravity. She brought the hammer down with earth-shattering force directly onto the Wyvern's skull, crushing it deep into the stone.
III. The Duel of the South
The Liger Zero Jager and I hit the Southern Wall at a full sprint. We crashed onto the ramparts just as the Guildmaster of the Silver Hand was about to be executed by an Elite Humanoid Defender.
I didn't break stride. I raised the Black Moon's Breath and fired three rapid-succession sapphire plasma bolts, vaporizing the Elite's chest cavity before its halberd could drop. The Guildmaster collapsed, gasping for air.
Suddenly, the wall shuddered violently. A colossal, wingless Earth-Drake—a giant, armored lizard the size of a tank—lunged over the parapet. The Liger Zero intercepted it mid-air. The mechanical lion's claws dug deep into the lizard's scales, and the two giants tumbled off the rampart, falling into the city streets below to wage their own private war in the rubble.
That left me alone with the Drake's handler.
It was a Heavy Elite—a ten-foot walking bunker, encased in obsidian dragon-scale and wielding a massive tower shield. It looked at me with reptilian eyes and let out a guttural hiss.
"Azazel, take the sky!" I released my weapon.
The dark metal reconfigured instantly. The Storm Raven took flight, soaring into the clouds to rain sapphire blaster fire from above, keeping the Elite's attention divided. I reached behind my belt and ripped free two sleek, cylindrical hilts.
Snap-hiss. Twin GM Beam Sabers ignited in my hands, their three-foot blades of sapphire plasma humming with violent energy. My core was redlining, my hair floating in the ionized, anti-gravity field.
I fell into Denrai-Nitoryu—the Lightning-Raging Two-Sword Style. My right hand gripped the hilt in a standard, forward hold. My left hand held the second saber in a tight, reverse grip, tucked close to my body to maximize speed.
The Heavy Elite charged, raising its massive shield like a battering ram. I crossed the blazing sabers in front of me in a tight "V" shape.
"Magnum Flash."
My Storm-Caster bearings screamed. I turned my entire body into a railgun slug of pure plasma, piercing the distance instantly and sliding just past the edge of the shield. The sheer friction of my speed left a crackling trail of residual lightning in my wake, a snare of static that snapped across the Elite's armor, temporarily paralyzing its heavy nervous system.
Before the beast could turn its bulk, I unleashed the Hell-Dragon Storm.
It was a blinding, sixteen-hit combination that bridged the gap between a flurry and a hurricane. I blended the heavy, armor-cracking strikes of my right hand with the blurring, relentless speed of my reverse-grip left. With every fourth strike, the intense friction of my hyper-dense GM particles birthed an autonomous, serpentine dragon of pure lightning.
By the sixteenth strike, four lightning dragons were swirling around my body in a chaotic vortex. They stayed active, constantly biting and shocking the Elite, chewing through the structural integrity of the obsidian shield and staggering the behemoth. The tower shield groaned under the relentless pressure and finally shattered into a dozen smoking pieces. The Elite reeled backward, its chest exposed.
I dropped into a low, coiled stance, powering down the plasma blades for a fraction of a second. The air around me violently ionized, the sharp tang of ozone suffocating the ramparts.
"True Testament."
I executed a dual-draw, full-body overhead strike. The moment the twin plasma blades re-ignited and bit deep into the Elite's chest, it triggered a Grounded Lightning Strike. A towering, apocalyptic pillar of blue and crimson fire erupted from the stone beneath us. The blast completely vaporized the Heavy Elite from the inside out, unleashing a localized thunderclap that shook the entire Southern Wall.