Chapter 124: Internal Sabotage
Chapter 124: Chapter 124: Internal Sabotage
Chapter 124: Internal Sabotage
The narrow corridor of the VIP carriage was suffocatingly tight.
Twelve Church Assassins flooded the hallway. They wore stolen Vanguard uniforms, but their weapons revealed their true allegiance.
They carried serrated, matte-black shortswords dripping with concentrated, toxic Miasma. The poison was designed to instantly suppress a Hunter’s mana pathways upon contact.
Draven stood at the back of the hallway. He crossed his arms and watched.
He had his Plan B ready. If his squad failed, he would simply overclock his SS-Rank Vector Manipulation and crush the entire Cultist strike force into a localized singularity.
But he held his power back. He needed to see if Strike Team Zero could survive without him.
"Don’t let them swing those blades!" Lucien shouted.
Lucien moved first. He channeled his mana into the Thunder Element Rapier. In the confined space of the metal hallway, his speed was terrifying. He became a blur of crackling blue lightning.
ZZZAP!
Lucien darted past the first three assassins. His rapier pierced their armor with pinpoint precision, delivering thousands of volts directly into their nervous systems. They dropped to the floor, convulsing violently.
The remaining Cultists adjusted instantly. They formed a tight defensive wall, thrusting their poisoned blades forward to trap the speedster.
SHWK.
Two of the assassins suddenly stiffened. Black blood erupted from their throats.
Nyx materialized directly behind them, stepping seamlessly out of their own shadows. Her obsidian daggers moved with lethal, surgical grace. She did not waste a single motion.
She slit their throats, melted back into the floorboards, and reappeared behind another target before the first two bodies even hit the ground.
"Estella!" Draven called out sharply. "Your turn."
Estella gripped her Stardust Staff. Her natural combat instinct was to summon a massive, devastating meteor shower to eradicate everything in the room.
But inside a speeding train, her large-scale Star Magic would vaporize her own squad.
"Control the output," Draven ordered coldly. "Condense it. Pierce, do not explode."
Estella gritted her teeth. She focused her immense mana pool, forcing the chaotic cosmic energy into the glowing gem at the tip of her staff. She pointed it down the hallway like a rifle.
PCHOO!
A hyper-condensed, blinding beam of pure stardust shot forward. It was no thicker than a coin, but it carried the heat of a dying sun.
The beam cleanly pierced straight through the skulls of three lined-up assassins, leaving glowing, cauterized holes in their masks. The walls of the train remained completely untouched.
Draven nodded in approval. She was learning control.
Suddenly, a lone assassin slipped past Lucien and Nyx.
The Cultist lunged directly at Draven, raising his Miasma-coated blade to plunge it into the Warlord’s chest.
Draven did not uncross his arms. He did not even blink.
He passively engaged his SS-Rank Vector Manipulation. He targeted the kinetic vector of the assassin’s forward momentum and violently reversed it directly inside the man’s ribcage.
CRACK!
The assassin folded completely in half backward. His spine shattered into dust. He collapsed at Draven’s feet like a broken toy.
---
Above them, the roof of the Iron Leviathan was a warzone.
The freezing wind howled as Miasma clouds swirled around the speeding train. Swarms of Razor-Hounds descended from the toxic fog.
They were grotesque, bipedal monstrosities with the muscular torsos of wild dogs and thick, heavy bone-plating covering their bodies. Their vitality was low, but their natural armor was incredibly resilient against standard attacks.
Bram stood at the front of the carriage roof, holding his heavy shield.
"Come get it, you ugly mutts!" Bram roared, activating his taunt skill.
The Razor-Hounds shrieked and charged at him.
Bram channeled the Warlord Legacy he had claimed in the wild. He knew that activating his full twenty-meter Titan form would instantly crush the train cars beneath his feet.
He had spent weeks in the Vanguard training halls perfecting his control for this exact scenario.
Partial Gigantification.
Bram’s arms suddenly expanded. His muscles swelled massively, his skin hardening into jagged, dark gray titan-stone. His arms became literal pillars of rock.
WHAM!
Bram swung his massive, stone-clad fists in a wide arc. He physically battered the heavily armored Razor-Hounds, sweeping five of them right off the edge of the speeding train.
The beasts that bypassed Bram were immediately punished.
Natalie stood near the rear coupling, drawing her bow with rapid precision. As a Sensory Archer, she could see the microscopic gaps in the bone-plating of the Miasma creatures.
THWIP. THWIP.
Her mana arrows found the weak points perfectly, piercing the creatures’ unarmored joints and crippling their legs.
"Shatter them!" Aegon yelled.
Reina leapt forward. She swung her massive Ice Core Axe, slamming the heavy blade directly into the chest plate of a crippled Razor-Hound.
Absolute zero temperatures erupted from the weapon, instantly freezing the beast’s thick armor until it became brittle glass.
Aegon followed up immediately. He lunged with his Blood Fire Spear.
BOOM!
Aegon thrust his spear into the frozen armor. The intense, boiling heat of his blood-fire clashed with the absolute zero ice, causing a violent thermal shockwave. The heavily armored Razor-Hound exploded into hundreds of frozen, burning fragments.
---
Inside the VIP Lounge, Cole and Lyra were fighting a completely different war.
Cole’s fingers flew across the holographic terminal. Lines of malicious red Cult code fought against his Vanguard override commands.
"They hacked the navigation!" Cole yelled, sweat dripping down his face. "The bridge over the Miasma Gorge is gone! The Cult blew the tracks ten miles ahead!"
"Decouple the civilian carriages!" Lyra ordered, furiously typing on her own interface. "If we hit the emergency brakes at this speed, the rear cars will derail and crush everyone inside!"
Cole bypassed the final firewall. "I have the coupling locks!"
CLUNK.
A loud, mechanical disengagement echoed from the back of the train.
The heavy blast doors slammed shut. The massive civilian carriages detached from the VIP section. Their automated brakes engaged smoothly, allowing them to slide to a safe, controlled halt miles away from the danger zone. They were secure. The Bastion Seven rescue teams would find them.
"Civilians are safe!" Lyra confirmed. "Brace for impact!"
Cole slammed his fist onto the master brake console.
SCREEEEECH!
The Iron Leviathan violently locked its mag-lev rails. A massive shower of blue sparks and blinding friction fire erupted outside the windows.
Draven shifted his stance, planting his feet firmly into the floor to anchor himself against the immense gravitational G-force.
The armored VIP carriage skidded forward uncontrollably. It tore up the metal tracks, pushing closer and closer to the edge of the destroyed bridge.
The train finally lurched to a violent, shuddering halt.
Total silence returned.
Cole gasped for air, looking out the panoramic window. The front half of their carriage was literally dangling over the edge of the Miasma Gorge. A bottomless, toxic abyss yawned directly beneath them.
"We stopped," Cole breathed out in disbelief. "We actually stopped."
---
Up on the roof, Aegon pulled his spear from the final Razor-Hound. In the corridor, Lucien wiped his rapier clean.
The internal assassins were dead. The external beasts were eradicated. The civilians were safe.
A wave of absolute victory washed over the exhausted students. They had survived a coordinated terrorist attack in the Wildlands without a single casualty.
Then, the atmosphere changed.
It did not happen slowly. It hit them like a physical wall of solid iron.
An overwhelming, suffocating aura suddenly descended on the stalled train carriage. It was a killing intent so dense and malicious that it made the oxygen in the room feel like poison.
Nyx fell to one knee, clutching her chest as her breathing constricted. Aegon dropped his spear, his hands trembling involuntarily. Even Estella’s eyes widened in genuine terror.
Draven looked out the reinforced mana-glass window.
Standing in the air above the bottomless gorge, suspended by concentrated black magic, was a man wearing the dark crimson robes of a Church Executioner.
A Level 100 monster had arrived.