Chapter 401 : Holy War (1)

BOOM!!!

The world went white in the wake of a massive explosion.

When Il-mok's vision and hearing finally started trickling back, he drew the Ascension Sword and bellowed at the top of his lungs.

"All forces, charge!!!"

All the while, his inner thoughts were running on a completely different track.

‘Phew. Well, at least all that secret training actually paid off.’

While stationed in Lanzhou to manage the rear, he hadn't just been sitting at a desk all day long. He'd been sneaking out of the city once or twice a day to practice the World-Destroying Primordial Jade Palm out in empty lands.

Since all the grunt work had been delegated to other people anyway, he had more than enough time to squeeze in training sessions.

Thanks to that little routine, casting the technique no longer instantly ripped his insides apart.

Granted, it still took a sizeable amount of time to set up, and dumping sixty years of internal energy in a single move still hit him with a wave of exhaustion

As he charged at the very front of the formation, his eyes swept over the disarrayed enemy lines.

‘Good. At least the show of force did something.’

It was a shame that the Provincial Military Commander's attempt at negotiation had fallen flat, but it looked like they'd at least avoided the worst-case scenario.

The whole reason Il-mok and his maids had tagged along for the negotiation in the first place was that they had planned for this strategy as a backup. 

If negotiations collapsed and fighting became inevitable, he needed to open with the World-Destroying Primordial Jade Palm right from the start to seize the initiative before the chaos of battle made it completely unusable.

Since the move took forever to charge and was basically a half-baked nuke that didn't care who it hit, he wouldn't be able to use it once a messy close-quarters brawl started. So it’s better for him to detonate it as the opening move and shatter enemy morale before they have a chance to settle in.

And beyond that...

"The Heavenly Demon Descends!!!"

"Ten Thousand Demons Obey!!!"

"Annihilate the enemy!!!"

"God walks with us!!!"

He figured it was one hell of a way to fire up their own side, too.

‘With them this fired up, we might actually have a chance to win.’

Fifty thousand against eighty thousand.

On the surface, the gap wasn't so insurmountable that the battle seemed hopeless. But the reality was a lot grimmer than the numbers suggested.

The enemy's eighty thousand were seasoned veterans hardened by years of constant border warfare, while over half of Il-mok's army was just local militiamen who were farming or hammering anvils a week ago.

Without something to light a fire in their hearts, all those common folk who'd come to fight for the Cult would end up dying for nothing.

‘God walks with us, huh...’

As he closed in on the enemy front line, Il-mok let out a dry little laugh at the shouts ringing out behind him.

Playing the role of some heretical cult messiah wasn't exactly his idea of a good time.

But if it meant these people could silence the fear in their chests and push forward, if it meant winning this battle and keeping casualties on their side to a minimum, then he'd play whatever role they needed him to.

The enemy ranks were finally starting to snap back to attention. Shouts rang out across their lines, and the sharp wail of horns and the rolling thunder of war drums cut through the air.

Not that it mattered anymore. Il-mok was already right on top of them.

At this range, there was nothing but enemies as far as the eye could see.

His gaze locked onto a soldier standing directly in front of him.

The soldier's eyes were practically bulging out of his skull in pure terror.

"H-hik."

But training had a way of taking over even when the mind was screaming. Even while shaking in his boots, his muscle memory kicked in, and he threw up his shield to block Il-mok's path.

Schick!

The shield and the man holding it were split clean in two.

Right on cue, the soldier behind him followed through on instinct and thrust his spear forward.

But the spear never found its mark.

Schick!

Il-mok had already slipped inside his reach, and the sweep of his blade took the man's head clean off his shoulders.

Il-mok moved with the utmost efficiency. Every time he swung his sword, arcs of sword trajectories carved the air and the soldiers' heads flew with them.

His footwork was something else entirely.

He navigated the battlefield in almost dance-like movements as he carved a path of blood through the wall of soldiers.

Tap!

Following his lead, three women instantly plunged into the gap.

Jin Hayeon, Hyeokryeon Seon-ah, and Ju Seo-yeon.

Schick!

CRACK!

Every sweep of Hyeokryeon Seon-ah's claws and every thrust of Ju Seo-yeon's short spear punched bloody holes straight through the enemy lines.

Over on the side, a thin line of blood was dripping from the corner of Jin Hayeon's mouth.

She'd taken some internal damage as the cost of throwing up a barrier to protect the group from the shockwave of Il-mok's opening nuke. And it’s only because she'd caught the blast from the outer edges rather than the epicenter that it had stayed at internal injuries rather than something far worse.

But a little internal bleeding wasn't enough to stop her.

Every time Jin Hayeon swept her arms out in that graceful dance of hers, the soldiers caught in her reach froze solid and dropped dead.

Although the three women followed closely behind Il-mok and widened the bloody path, it was still an incredibly narrow trail compared to the sheer number of enemy troops.

Before long, the four of them had essentially let themselves get swallowed whole by the enemy formation. Had the four of them been fighting this war alone, they would have been swallowed whole.

But they weren't.

"Support the Young Master!!!"

"Hurry up and blast a path open!!"

While the four had been cutting that path open, over a thousand martial artists of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult were closing the distance fast with their lightness skills.

"Fire!!"

An officer in the enemy ranks screamed the command, and a storm of arrows poured down from the sky.

Too bad the arrow storm barely did a damn thing besides slightly slowing down their sprint.

The Divine Cult's martial artists swatted the arrows out of the air with their weapons, threw up Qi Barriers to bounce them off, or just completely dodged them using their footwork.

Out of the entire group, the ones who actually took hits could be counted on one hand.

"FIRE!!!"

By the time the third volley was falling, the martial artists had already reached the shield wall.

The tiny crack Il-mok and the women had carved open started widening fast the moment they crashed through.

And from somewhere far behind the charge, a powerful voice thundered across the field.

"Hold your formation!!!"

It was the Provincial Military Commander, still barking orders from the halfway point between the two armies.

While the Divine Cult's martial artists acted like a heavy cavalry spearhead, the army of Gansu soldiers marched right behind them, drunk on the madness of their newfound faith.

"Shield bearers! Get those shields up!!!"

The Provincial Military Commander was bellowing himself hoarse from trying to rein in their fervor just enough to keep them in formation.

Every time he barked an order, the officers scattered through the ranks echoed it back and passed it down the line.

SWOOOSH!!!

Another volley screamed down from the sky to halt their advance.

PING! PING! PING!!!

Arrows hammered against the raised shields in a sound like hail crashing on a tin roof.

Thunk!

Every now and then, a stray arrow would slip right through the cracks in the shield wall and bury itself in someone's flesh.

But even with death raining from the sky and the wet sounds of bodies getting pierced echoing through the ranks…

STOMP.

STOMP.

They didn't stop their march.

"We have to help the Envoy of God!"

"Forward!!!"

They just kept pressing forward, roaring like an army of brainwashed zealots.

And then.

BOOM!!!

A thunderous explosion tore through the enemy rear.

It wasn't another miracle from the Envoy they were all so desperate to follow. That particular technique couldn't be used twice, though none of them had any way of knowing that.

That explosive roar was just the sound of the enemy artillery opening fire.

Solid iron cannonballs the size of human torsos tore through the sky and began raining down on the charging militia. 

The shield bearers threw up their wooden shields as if they were just trying to block another volley of arrows, but…

CRACK.

The iron balls didn't care about shields.

The heavy iron spheres slammed down, effortlessly pulping the shields and the men underneath them.

There were no fiery explosions.

Just heavy iron spheres caving in everything they touched, then rolling forward on pure momentum to shatter the legs of whoever was unlucky enough to be standing behind them.

On a battlefield, watching the man right next to you get flattened like that was its own kind of horror.

"Gulp..."

Tak Ju-gang had survived by sheer luck as an iron ball had grazed past him. He stared at the crushed body beside him and felt his throat clench up on its own.

The fear he thought he'd buried was quietly growing back.

‘G-God is with us.’

The thought surfaced before he even realized it, and his mouth was already moving.

"M-Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...”

His voice came out small and trembling. But nearby, someone picked it up.

“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

The murmur spread like wildfire, leaping from person to person until it was everywhere at once.

STOMP.

STOMP.

“GLO~RY! GLORY! O ’ DIVINE CULT!!”

Before he knew it, the soldiers were all chanting the hymn in one voice, their once-frozen footsteps beginning to march forward once more.

They marched on, surrendering to the madness of belief, and somewhere along the way, they crossed the distance they needed.

Before they knew it, they had closed the gap enough to look the enemy soldiers right in the face. 

Tak Ju-gang could see it clearly.

They were terrified.

It was supposed to be a slaughter between hardened border veterans and a ragtag militia of farmers, but the entire momentum of the battlefield had been flipped completely upside down.

The enemy's front lines had already been completely blown open by Il-mok and his maids, and then crumbled further under the Divine Cult's martial artists.

“GLO~RY! GLORY! O ’ DIVINE CULT!!”

Fanatics with fire in their eyes and fury in their voices, screaming hymns while they charged through arrows and cannon fire without slowing down.

The enemies were the ones who looked like a rabble now, wide-eyed and falling apart at the seams.

"Strike!!!"

"RAAAAH!!!"

These soldiers had been chosen by God for a sacred purpose.

Thus, they have no fear left within them.

***

Deep inside the Western Military Command’s camp.

A grating voice of an old man cut through the air.

"What the hell is everyone doing?! The enemy has fifty thousand men, FIFTY THOUSAND! And more than half of them are nothing but a ragtag bunch of conscripts!!"

He was a eunuch official surnamed Gong sent by the Supreme Eunuch as his personal envoy to the Western Military Command.

His outburst pushed the Vice Commander past his limit.

"Shut your mouth!!!"

"Excuse me?!"

Never mind that the Vice Commander outranked him as a Junior Rank 1 official. Eunuch Gong glared at him like he was ready to draw a blade.

But before the screaming match could get any worse, the Western Military Commander himself cut in with a roar directed squarely at Eunuch Gong.

"If you've got enough free time to stand around flapping your gums, then take your Eastern Depot goons out there and stop them yourself!"

The Western Military Commander pointed straight to where Il-mok and the women were running rampant.

Il-mok's group had already broken through the curtain of shield bearers and spearmen and was now tearing through the area where the archers had set up their formations. To make it worse, the chaos they'd caused had allowed the thousand-strong wave of Cult martial artists to close in on the archers' position as well.

"I will make sure every single one of you pays for this later!"

Eunuch Gong threw that warning with venomous glares at the high officers here and then turned on his heel and walked out.

"Eastern Depot operatives, on me!!"

The Western Military Commander glared at the back of the Eunuch Gong's head as the old man launched himself toward the melee. 

He didn't like eunuchs. It wasn't just because they served as Eastern Depot agents who watched over officials and waited to catch them in mistakes. It was because the Supreme Eunuch had his grip on the Forbidden City and was playing puppet master with the entire government.

But the Western Military Commander was a soldier.

One who swore to protect the Empire and the Imperial family.

No matter how much he despised the Supreme Eunuch, he would not go so far as to collude with outside forces and commit treason.

Forcing his rage down, the Western Military Commander snapped his focus back and scanned the massive battlefield. 

Although they had lost the early momentum thanks to the jaw-dropping martial arts from that young man from earlier and were now taking a beating, the Western Military Commander wasn't worried.

The troops he commanded were hardened border veterans with anywhere from a few years to several decades of real combat experience.

And he had eighty thousand of them.

Even with the Divine Cult's martial artists running wild out there, a force of a thousand men was basically just a drop in the bucket.

"Pull the archers back and throw the reserve shield bearers and spearmen into the gap alongside the Eastern Depot operatives to buy us some time! Order the left and right flanks to envelop and crush the enemy's main army completely!!"

Just like the disorganized rabble they were, the enemy was displaying incredibly simple movements. 

All they were doing was blindly sprinting forward in a straight line in a single column.

Even if their numbers reached fifty thousand, it wasn't as if all fifty thousand could arrive at the enemy lines at the exact same moment just by running together.

Since the enemy was just brainlessly funneling themselves straight at his center, all the Western Military Commander had to do was swing his flanks around and crush their idiotic little parade.

‘I just have to wipe out their peasant army first. Once they're gone, cleaning up those Demonic Cult freaks running around our center will be a breeze.’

No matter how powerful they are, their internal energy and stamina aren’t infinite.

As his officers barked out the new orders, the Imperial Army moved like a well-oiled machine.

The forty thousand men making up the center quickly shifted, forming a massive anvil designed purely to catch and hold the enemy's charge. At the same time, the twenty thousand troops on both the left and right wings pushed forward, sweeping out to the sides to surround the brainless zealots and crush them in a massive pincer.

Just as everyone in the command tent was thinking that the trumpet of victory would soon sound—

"Commander!!!"

An officer screamed in panic, pointing frantically at their rear.

"The northern barbarians are attacking!!"

A wall of cavalry was bearing down on them through a rising cloud of dust.

Leading the pack on a massive black warhorse, an old man pumped his voice full of Qi and roared across the battlefield.

"BWAHAHAHA! If any of you bastards think you're actually strong, step up right now!!! Come prove yourself against me!!!"

It was none other than Dokgo Ryong.