Chapter 1143. A Kill Zone Where Gravity Forgot Its Purpose

Chapter 1143: 1143. A Kill Zone Where Gravity Forgot Its Purpose

The gap in the vines allowed the Aethelgard soldiers to slip through, but Gorvasha’s immediate response was a calculated distraction.

She swung her massive warhammer downward, not at Nerith, but at a section of stone inches away from the druid’s feet.

BOOM.

The impact sent sparks and debris flying, creating a cloud of dust that masked Nerith’s retreat.

Both women turned away immediately afterward, their faces hardening into masks of war.

They never looked at each other again, but the unspoken pact hung between them like the scent of blood in the air: they were fighting two different wars, but they were fighting them together.

The battle raged on with a sickening, relentless momentum. The corridor had become a charnel house, a narrow throat of stone choking on the entrails and broken steel of two civilizations.

Bodies piled up in grotesque mounds, some still twitching from nerve damage, others already cooling in pools of spreading crimson.

On either side, the carnage was absolute. The wet slap of severed limbs hitting stone, the grinding screech of swords against bone, and the wet, gurgling pleas of dying men created a cacophony of horror.

Aethelgard’s forces were undeniably faster, their disciplined formations pushing with the momentum of a landslide, but that confidence, the divine certainty that had carried four thousand soldiers through the golden gateway, was beginning to fray.

The reality of the Underlayer was asserting itself like a vice. The narrow walls prevented their superior numbers from forming proper battle lines, turning their strength into a liability as they became packed too tightly to swing their weapons.

They weren’t an army anymore; they were a panicked herd being slaughtered in a tunnel.

’We’re trapped,’ a young Aethelgard squire thought, his eyes wide as he watched a demon claw rip through his captain’s breastplate, exposing the splintered ribs beneath with a wet crack. ’We’re all going to die in this godforsaken hole.’

And through all of it, through the screaming, the blood spray that painted the walls crimson, and the thunder of clashing steel, the masked figure at the exact center of the corridor had not moved.

He stood like a monument to stillness amidst a hurricane of violence, a black hole around which the chaos swirled but could not touch.

Then, he moved.

It was not a dramatic charge. There was no war cry, no sudden burst of speed, no theatrical flourish.

That was what unnerved the soldiers nearest to him more than any explosion could have. The masked figure simply took one step forward.

Then another. His gait was measured, unhurried, almost casual.

In the middle of a slaughterhouse where every second was a desperate scramble for survival, his calm was profoundly wrong.

It was wrong enough that several men on both sides, both demon and human, actually paused for a half beat, their weapons lowering instinctively as they stared at the walking anomaly.

’Why isn’t he fighting?’ an Aethelgard sergeant wondered, his heart hammering against his ribs. ’Why is he just... walking?’

Then, the mask began to glow.

It started as a faint tremor of color, a deep, bruised violet that seemed to bleed from the seams of the metal. It was dim at first, a low pulse like a dying heartbeat, but then it steadied, spreading outward from the edges of the mask.

The light washed over his shoulders, down his arms, and across his chest in a slow, deliberate bloom. This wasn’t the bright, hungry fire of a pyromancer; this was something colder. Something heavier.

Thrummm.

A low-frequency vibration began to emanate from the figure, a sound that wasn’t heard so much as felt in the marrow of one’s bones.

As the violet light intensified, the very atmosphere began to warp. The air in a twenty-meter radius around him suddenly seemed to thicken, turning from gas to something resembling liquid mercury.

The effect was immediate and terrifying. Soldiers who had been screaming battle cries found their voices dying in their throats.

The sound didn’t fade; it was smothered. The shouts became muffled gasps, then whispers, then nothing at all.

The air became dense and pressurized, as if the oxygen itself had been replaced by something far more potent and oppressive.

’I can’t... breathe...’ A demon warrior clawed at his own throat, feeling as though an invisible hand was pressing down on his lungs.

The space around the masked figure had ceased to be ordinary space. Gravity felt wrong; the light bent unnaturally around his silhouette.

The violet glow wasn’t just illuminating the corridor; it was claiming it. Every soldier within the radius felt the sudden, crushing realization that they weren’t standing in a battlefield anymore.

They were standing inside something else entirely. Something that had just woken up.

Cassandra Vexmoor saw it first. Through the spray of arterial blood and the haze of sulfurous smoke, that violet pulse cut through the chaos like a blade through silk.

Her pupils dilated as her instincts, the primal, ancient instincts of a Demon Queen who had survived countless eons, screamed a single warning: Get out.

Without breaking her stride, she disengaged from two Aethelgard knights she had been systematically dismantling.

One moment she was twisting a blade through a ribcage with a wet squelch; the next, she was executing six long, measured strides backward, her boots skidding on the gore-slicked stone.

"Fall back! Clear the center!" she commanded, her voice cracking like a whip over the din of slaughter.

Gorvasha caught the shift simultaneously. The Orc chieftain didn’t need to see the mask to know what it meant; she felt the change in atmospheric pressure before her eyes even registered the glow.

The hair on her neck stood on end. She bellowed a single, guttural roar to her warband, a sound that carried more authority than any tactical order.

"SHIFT! OPEN THE LANE! MOVE, YOU FOOLS!"

The entire northern flank of the demon forces pivoted in unison, their massive bodies shifting their advance angle by twenty degrees.

They tore open a clear, empty lane through the center of the corridor, leaving a vacuum of space that seemed obscene amidst the crowding carnage.

Both women knew that glow. Both had witnessed the aftermath of that violet light on separate battlefields, each lesson paid for in screams and shattered bones.

Then, Xerollion walked into the Aethelgard formation.

The first man to challenge him was an elite household soldier, a veteran with eleven years of scarred experience who had earned a reputation for closing distance with lethal efficiency.

He saw the masked figure approaching and roared a battle cry, lunging forward with a blessed longsword aimed straight for the gap in the mask.

He never completed the swing.

CLANG BOOM!

Xerollion’s palm struck the soldier’s breastplate. The sound wasn’t the metallic ring of steel; it was the bone-deep reverberation of a sledgehammer hitting a cathedral bell.

The soldier’s momentum didn’t just stop; it reversed violently. His body launched backward with a speed the human mind couldn’t process, a blur of steel and screaming flesh.

He tore through three ranks of his own formation like a cannonball, his armored body crushing ribs with audible cracks and sending six soldiers tumbling like broken dolls.

Finally, he slammed into the corridor wall with such devastating force that the stone cratered inward, sending a cascade of dust and pebbles down. He slumped to the floor in a twisted heap, his armor crumpled inward where his chest cavity had been. He would never move again.

Then, the world began to break.

Vrrrrrrrrr...!

A low-frequency hum, almost subsonic, began to vibrate through the stone floor, shaking the teeth in every soldier’s skull.

In the same heartbeat that the soldier fell, Xerollion’s passive telekinetic field ignited. It wasn’t a targeted attack; it was an environmental takeover.

"What in the gods’ names—" an Aethelgard mage began, but his words were cut off by the sound of grinding stone.

Across a forty-meter stretch of the corridor floor, everything began to rise. Fallen swords, shattered spear shafts stained with blood, fist-sized chunks of broken masonry, and severed pieces of armor—everything lifted off the ground as if gravity had simply forgotten its purpose.

The debris rose slowly at first, then stabilized at chest height.

They did not fly at the enemy immediately. Instead, they hung there, suspended in a state of impossible stillness.

The weapons rotated slowly in the violet air, a suspended storm of jagged metal and razor-sharp rock. The ground around the masked figure was no longer a battlefield; it was a kill zone. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

It was a cloud of suspended death that turned the corridor into a labyrinth where approaching from any direction meant navigating through a swirling vortex of debris that would decide, at Xerollion’s whim, whether to part like water or shred you like parchment.