Infinite Range: The Sniper Mage - Chapter 744: Endless Despair Spreads
Chapter 744: 744: Endless Despair Spreads
Chapter
“Kill!”
“Kill!”
The soldiers of Radiant Shuttle, reborn from Bellara’s memory, thundered their war cries. Within the sweep of her Divine Domain, each silhouette was charged with a god’s will. The weapons in their hands seemed to wake, shining with lethal brilliance.
“Cut.”
The supreme weapon master wore a face of frost. She lifted a hand, then brought it down. A silver edge split the firmament.
Intangible phantoms of blades slammed into the swarm. In moments, ten thousand demons fell. Any touched by those spectral blades turned to ash.
It was only the beginning.
Under Bellara’s control, the silver edge shattered into a storm of stars, each spark knifing toward stronger targets within the tide. Steel flashed. Black blood rained. Limbs and meat came down like hail. Before divine might there wasn’t a single worthy foe.
The demons knew the weapon god’s terror. They broke formation, spread wide, then rushed from every angle straight for the Sunforge World.
A hoarse roar rolled out of deep space.
In the next instant, uncountable lesser demons packed together as one, shaping a black hand that blotted the sky and slapped for Bellara. The cyan glow of Endless Armory dimmed beneath sheer numbers.
“Not good.”
Bellara’s gaze went hard. She saw the play. The swarm would bury her beneath trash mobs, then send elites to devour the adventurers and pour wholesale into the world below.
“Not good,” Orson agreed. Demons weren’t bosses from a game. They didn’t fear death. They consumed anything living. Let them break through and scatter across the globe and cleanup would turn into a nightmare.
“Forward! Break this sky and earth. We will endure as long as the heavens!”
“With the God of Chaos to lead us, we will stand in a thousand worlds and never fall!”
Along the scarlet path of starmarch, Sunforge’s adventurers charged and roared, a force impossible to ignore. But most of the tide was already angling for Bellara. Just a few questing feelers of the main mass were enough to pin a million fighters in place. Blood bloomed like flowers. Lives winked out by the breath.
“Forbidden Magic: Wellspring Draw.”
A clear cry rang. The Plume-Wing Phoenix slashed through the void and shed a single iridescent plume. Rain surged down, bright with life. Thousands of fallen Sunforge warriors climbed to their feet as if waking from a dream.
The Azure Abyss Drake swelled to a mountain and hung across the dark, a claw scything out. A wall of ocean rose and rolled, pulping a cluster of demons and peeling bodies off the embattled line.
The four guardian beasts joined the battle. Their bulk and presence matched the demon royals. Every opening cast a Forbidden-scale strike. Corpses hammered the world like a storm.
“The divine beasts are with us. Brothers and sisters, kill!”
Darulunina and the Wolf Twins advanced in Firevenom’s shadow, eyes blazing. Years of trial had boiled her hesitation away. She looked very much the empress of Sunforge.
“Forward. Keep moving forward.”
Her shout shook the ranks. Chin up, eyes locked on Orson’s back, she swore she would become the pride in that man’s heart.
But the number was too much. No one could say how long they would have to kill. Blades nicked dull from endless hacking. Still there was no hint of dawn.
Across the line, a hard truth gnawed at the gut: the more they killed, the more the swarm grew. It was faint at first. Then the living horizon of bio-ships slid up over the rim of space, and the demons doubled their pace. Worse, the average enemy rose to mid-tier.
“Kill them all.”
“Kill the heretics.”
Black aura geysered. Cain’s metal wings clanged as a hundred high-tier demons with king-level combat hemmed him in. He took three heads with one sweep and crushed another into paste with a fist, but the pack slammed into him as one and drove him down. He beat his wings and fought with the god-blade to stop the fall, yet even his metal shell came away with ten ragged holes from demon teeth.
On the Undying Lord, eight destroyers didn’t even get a swing. A whale-shaped horror swallowed them whole and digested them by the breath. Living metal could rebuild, but in that gut it turned to slag.
The flagship itself writhed under a layer of crawling demons. They used nothing but mass and weight, jamming themselves into the gun-ports to choke the batteries, pinning the ship from the sky.
Light stitched the dark. The Saint of Roland carved lanes through the press, buying his people one more gasp.
Bellara’s domain burned at full span. She held the bulk of the tide alone, a wall of blades turning wave after wave to shreds. Still the pressure grew. The average demon was stronger by the minute. She had nothing left to spare for anyone below.
And the Queen of Plagues was nowhere in sight.
“Are you done watching?” Bellara snapped.
“My turn, then,” Orson said, voice even. His eyes swept the deep, searching. The queen hid deep, wary of the pair of them. She emptied sacks of small fry to grind them down.
“Enough. If you let these people die, I will not forgive you,” Bellara bit out.
“No hurry,” Orson laughed.
“Damn you,” she hissed.
He blurred, a dark-red streak, and broke above the shell of the sky. He turned and looked back on Sunforge. The sight hit him in the chest. Twice-born, and never once had he imagined the day he would walk the void and see a whole world in a heartbeat. There were no words for that feeling.
Overhead, the swarm hung like an avalanche of army ants, rushing straight down. No losses counted. No price too high. They wanted the mountain as a landing pad, to wear the gods thin and then spread.
War of attrition. He could play that now. His super-god soul-seal had ripened into Divinity. The last thing he feared was a grind. He feared only letting the queen escape.
He watched Bellara’s Endless Armory flicker and dim. Her line would not hold much longer. She had reaped tens of millions. It did not matter. If the queen lived, the swarm would not end.
As her tempo slipped, the four guardian beasts began to bleed. Wind of black blades brushed the planet. More than ten thousand Sunforge adventurers turned to white bone within the blink, even as the phoenix kept pouring resurrection into the cracks. The numbers didn’t balance. The dead piled faster than he could count. Half the line was gone. The Undying Lord shrank under a gnawing tide. Endless faces across the hull distorted into masks of pain.
“Orson. You animal,” Bellara shouted, losing her poise and spitting the words. She already regretted opening the barrier. Watching them die, her heart tore and bled.
He felt nothing. War was not theater. War had a price.
“Cleric. Cleric, heal my brother.”
He turned toward the two thousand priests on the ridge. A sick green shone across their skin. He froze, then lunged to catch the broken body of a friend and dragged him back, eyes wide.
A chain of wet pops answered him. One by one the priests melted into black sludge.
“Lowly life of the galaxy. You always die of ignorance. Hahaha.”
The laugh crawled along their bones. A mountain-sized worm with a man’s face writhed into view.
[ Plague Gu Sovereign: Lv.120 ]
[ Abyssal Royal ]
[ Infinite Dimensions Combat Tier: Lower God ]
[ HP: 3.1B ]
[ ATK: 220,000 ]
[ Skills: Pestilent Gu, Corpseburst Calamity, Miasmic Doom ]
They stared. A lower god, born from the Abyss.
“Feed.”
The word drifted up from a grave. A black fog coalesced, sketching a leering face, smiling with rot. Gray light fell. The adventurers in the foremost ranks went rigid and turned to stare at the nearest breathing thing. Fangs punched through their gums. They fell on their brothers and sisters and ate.
“Cannibals. Why— what—”
[ Night-Voided Devourer: Lv.120 ]
[ Abyssal Royal ]
[ Infinite Dimensions Combat Tier: Lower God ]
[ HP: 2.5B ]
[ ATK: 270,000 ]
[ Skills: Endless Consumption, Night-Stalker’s Cull, Hunger’s Hex ]
Darulunina’s face went wooden as she looked up into the fog. Another lower god.
And that was only the opening act. Four more rose, each worse than the last, every one swollen beyond reason, pressure falling from them like planets.
Despair.
Endless despair crept through every heart.
Six lower gods stood in the deep, six starving beasts staring down at a banquet named Sunforge.
