Chapter 1140. A Bowl-Shaped Depression, a Kill Box Reinforced for Three Weeks

Chapter 1140: 1140. A Bowl-Shaped Depression, a Kill Box Reinforced for Three Weeks

Her eyes swept the battlefield, not with the panicked desperation of the dying, but with the cold assessment of a predator. But beneath that deadly focus, a poison was spreading through her mind.

She knew she knew that this massacre wasn’t a surprise. She knew the gears of this war had been turning long before the first blade was drawn.

Rex had orchestrated this. The realization didn’t make her tremble; it made her aim unnaturally steady, but it left a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth that no amount of adrenaline could wash away.

’We’re all just pieces on his board,’ she thought, her jaw tightening as she loosed another shaft that split a demon’s skull with a satisfying crunch. ’God helps us if he decides to flip the table.’

Below, in the shadow of the main engagement, Aisella Moonbloom was drowning in green light and crimson blood.

She worked the wounded line, a pale specter moving through a sea of agony. Her hands trailed soft, luminescent emerald energy, stitching together torn intestines and sealing gaping arterial sprays.

But the casualties were coming faster than the heartbeat of a dying man.

"Hold on! Stay with me!"

"Look at the light, don’t look at the wound!" Aisella screamed over the cacophony, her voice cracking.

She pressed her palms against the shattered ribcage of a young soldier, her magic burning hot as she forced bone to knit back together. The sound of grinding calcium filled her ears as she stabilized him, but the effort drained her like blood from an open vein.

Sweat glued strands of pale hair to her temples. Her hands began to betray her, developing a fine, uncontrollable tremor between patients.

’I can’t keep up.’

’There’s too much blood.’

’There’s too much death.’

But she couldn’t stop. She had given Rex her word she would be ready.

Every life she snatched back from the threshold of Hades was a shield she placed between him and the approaching darkness. Each successful healing felt like a temporary victory in a war that seemed determined to consume them all.

Meanwhile, Nerith Sylvarune had turned the corridor itself into a weapon.

She had found the damp, weeping seams where moisture seeped through the ancient stone, and she exploited them with vicious creativity.

"Rise and claim what is yours!" Nerith commanded, her voice echoing with primal authority.

She slammed her staff into the ground, and with a wet, tearing sound,schlorp thick, thorn-covered vines erupted from the stone cracks.

They coiled around demon ankles like emerald serpents, dragging entire squads off their feet with bone-snapping force. As demons fell, the vines tightened, crushing windpipes and splintering femurs with the relentless strength of growing timber.

For a fleeting second, between two devastating castings, a memory flickered through her mind: a sun-dappled Academy study room, the smell of old parchment, and the arrogant conviction she had voiced about nature always favoring the righteous.

A smile touched her lips, then vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by a hollow ache she couldn’t explain.

’Nature doesn’t favor the righteous,’ she realized grimly as she watched a vine crush a demon’s skull like an overripe melon. ’Nature only favors what survives.’

On the left flank, Mireya Snowlith was a blizzard contained in human form.

She fought with a ferocity that bordered on suicidal, her sword wreathed in frost and her magic singing a high, deadly note. She didn’t just fight the demons; she froze them.

With a precise thrust, she would flash freeze a cluster of enemies into brittle statues of ice, then follow through with a devastating horizontal slash.

CRACK SHATTER!

The sound of ice exploding was as constant as the screams. Shards of frozen flesh and bone sprayed across the corridor like deadly shrapnel.

Her usual icy composure had shattered, replaced by something raw and desperate. She fought like a woman trying to outrun a ghost, her blade carving through demon flesh with a vengeful hunger.

She needed this, needed the violence to drown out the memory of that canyon months ago, the memory of the sin she carried, a sin committed not by her own hand, but one that still stained her soul.

’More blood. More ice. More noise,’ Mireya thought frantically as she ducked under a swing, her blade severing a demon’s arm in a spray of black ichor. ’Just let me fight until there’s nothing left to kill.’

Ten minutes into the slaughter, the very bones of the Underlayer began to betray Aethelgard’s grand design. The corridor was not a battlefield; it was a digestive system, and the soldiers were being slowly chewed to pulp.

The geography was treacherous, a shifting labyrinth of widening chambers that suddenly constricted into suffocating gaps barely eight meters across.

Every time the Aethelgard advance attempted to press through these narrow throats, the tactical superiority of their numbers transformed into a death sentence.

What should have been a disciplined phalanx became a panicked mass of crushing flesh.

Ranks compressed so tightly that soldiers in the third and fourth lines couldn’t even raise their shields without striking their own comrades.

Long spears, the pride of their formation, became useless splinters of wood, jammed at awkward angles against the weeping stone walls.

"Hold the line! Don’t push so close, you fools!"

"Give them room to breathe!" an officer screamed, but his voice was drowned out by the wet thwack of demon blades finding soft bellies.

But the Underlayer defenders were not fighting a war of attrition; they were fighting a war of physics. Drilled relentlessly under Cassandra’s doctrine, they operated with the mechanical precision of a slaughterhouse.

They rotated through the choke points in ninety-second shifts, fresh, adrenaline-fueled killers replacing blood-soaked, exhausted men.

The Aethelgard front rank had no such mercy; they fought until their muscles seized, then fought until they died, their bodies becoming part of the obstacle that tripped their own retreating comrades.

Apollo, watching from a tactical vantage point, felt the sweat prickle his neck. His tactical mind screamed warnings that his pride refused to acknowledge.

’The formation is collapsing.’

’We’re feeding them corpses to slow us down.’ Realizing the slaughter at the second choke point was unsustainable, he made the desperate call. "Pull back the advance!"

"Redirect along the southern seam!"

"The fault line uses the broader shelf!"

It was a gamble that seemed to pay off. Elliot, his face twisted in a mask of divine fury, unleashed his Heroic Strike.

The air shrieked as a lance of pure energy tore through the defensive wall along the southern seam. The stone exploded in a shower of sparks and debris.

"NOW! THROUGH THE BREACH!" Elliot roared.

Three hundred Aethelgard soldiers charged through the hole, their battle cries echoing like thunder for a hundred meters down the tunnel.

But they weren’t charging into victory. They were charging into a trap designed with sadistic perfection.

The breach hadn’t been a failure of defense; it had been a gift from Gorvasha.

The moment the Aethelgard surge committed to the southern shelf, the Orcish defenders began their performance. They retreated with theatrical panic, their screams convincing the humans that the line had truly shattered.

The soldiers poured into the space, their boots pounding on the floor, unaware that they were flowing directly into a bowl-shaped depression, a kill box Gorvasha had spent three weeks reinforcing with structural enchantments and hidden supports.

Gorvasha stood at the northern rim, her eyes burning with a cold, calculating hunger.

"Now," she growled, the word barely audible over the thunder of boots. "Die in the dark."

She swung her massive warhammer in a devastating arc, bringing it down on a pre-weakened seam of rock at the depression’s edge with a sound like a mountain cracking open. KRA THOOM!

The ceiling didn’t just fall; it surrendered. A ten-ton slab of ancient granite tore free from the overhead supports and plunged downward.

The sound was a deafening, grinding, screaming avalanche of stone that sealed the entrance behind the breaching force with the finality of a tombstone.

Two hundred Aethelgard soldiers were instantly pulverized beneath the impact, their screams cut short by the wet crunch of collapsing ribcages and skulls.

The remaining soldiers were trapped in a stone coffin with no exit, while four hundred Underlayer defenders perched on the high rim above them like vultures.

"Kill them all!" the command rang out from above. "Leave nothing but bone!"

For eleven minutes, the bowl became a charnel house. The sounds echoing from the depression were primal: the rhythmic thud of hammers, the wet tearing of flesh, and the inhuman shrieks of men realizing they were already dead.

The defenders rained down magical fire and crossbow bolts from the heights, while those inside the bowl fought with the desperation of cornered rats, their blades finding only blood and stone. Bone splintered under boots; entrails slicked the floor, making every footing a deadly gamble.

When Valentina finally intervened, her magic tore through the collapsed barrier from the outside with a brilliant, searing explosion of force; the aftermath was horrific.

As the dust settled and the new opening was revealed, only sixty-one Aethelgard soldiers stumbled out. They weren’t soldiers anymore; they were hollow-eyed wraiths, their armor shattered, their minds broken by eleven minutes of contained, concentrated slaughter.

They wandered past the main engagement like ghosts, incapable of holding a sword, their spirits left behind in the crimson-soaked bowl of the Underlayer.