Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 247: Chapter 247: The Killing Ground (Bonus Chapter)

Chapter 247: The Killing Ground

The freezing wind swept across the barren plains of Bastion Six.

Thousands of Cult of the Eternal Eclipse soldiers marched toward the half-rebuilt southern wall. Heavy armored infantry and massive, corrupted beasts moved in a dense, confident formation. They expected to crush a starving, broken garrison. They did not expect to fight the Vanguard’s most lethal strike team.

Natalie Tokks stood on the high stone parapet.

She raised her Whisper-String Bow. She focused her emerald eyes, dividing the wasteland into sensory grids using the method her father had taught her. She locked onto a target eleven hundred meters away.

THWIP.

A hyper-condensed arrow of wind split the air.

A Cult outrider tumbled violently off his mutated mount.

THWIP.

THWIP.

Natalie fired in rapid succession. She systematically dropped the flanking commanders before the horde could even see the city walls. The outriders fell into the dirt. The massive column tried to spread out into a wide offensive line to minimize the sniper fire.

Natalie severed their flanks with punishing, lethal precision. She forced the massive, disorganized column to stay clustered tightly together. She drove them straight toward a rocky depression.

Aegon Logcheville watched the formation from the lower wall.

The Vanguard funnel was working flawlessly. The eastern flank of the Cult horde tried to bypass the rocky gorge to escape Natalie’s arrows. They stepped onto a flat, dry-looking expanse of dirt.

It was the old drainage run Vinicius had warned them about.

SQUELCH.

The dry crust gave way instantly. Heavy siege beasts and iron-clad infantry sank to their shoulders in the deep, soft clay. The horde panicked, compressing even tighter into the designated bottleneck to avoid the mud.

Reina Frost stepped up to the Vanguard barricade.

She did not summon a massive glacier. She remembered Gunther’s brutal lesson in the underground arena. She focused her mana on the delicate surface tension of the muddy earth. She exhaled a long, steady breath.

A frictionless layer of black ice spread gracefully across the killing ground.

The front rank of the Cult charged forward. Their heavy iron boots hit the flawless ice. They lost their footing and crashed heavily into the frozen dirt.

The thousands of soldiers marching blindly behind them piled directly into the fallen bodies. The horde became a crushed, screaming mass of tangled limbs and broken armor.

They shoved forward in a blind panic, sliding across the ice. They smashed right up against the half-rebuilt Vanguard wall.

They slammed into the heavy iron scaffolding bolted to the stone.

Lucien Vaelmont stood on the parapet directly above them. The Storm Sovereign held a single, microscopic thread of solid blue lightning between his fingertips. He had spent hours in Bastion Seven learning how to hold a current without letting it arc.

BZZT.

Lucien slammed the electric wire into the top of the iron framework.

The current raced down the metal grid. It leaped into the frozen, water-slicked ground beneath the horde. A blinding flash of solid electricity detonated across the entire bottleneck.

A thousand Cultists died in under a minute.

The heavy smell of ozone and burning flesh filled the freezing air. It was a flawless execution of the Vanguard defensive plan. Every single lesson from the training arena had just paid off in blood.

Aegon ran along the stone walkway. He watched his own plan execute perfectly. A fierce, unfamiliar pride swelled in his chest.

Reina walked up beside him. Her face was pale. She was breathing heavily.

"We killed a fifth of the column," Reina noted grimly, wiping sweat from her brow. "But we used our best trap. Lucien just burned out the scaffolding grid. I am holding the surface tension on the mud, but I cannot sustain it forever."

Aegon looked past the smoking bodies in the gorge.

Far in the back of the horde, the two Elder-tier corruption signatures had not taken a single step. They had simply watched the vanguard of their army burn.

The crowd of surviving Cultists parted.

The two Level 200 Cult Elders began to walk through the killing ground.

They moved with a slow, terrifying certainty. Their power was not just a higher numerical output. It was categorically different. They stepped onto Reina’s frozen mud. The black ice simply ceased to exist beneath their boots, returning to ordinary dirt before they even made contact.

Lucien gritted his teeth and threaded a sharp bolt of lightning at the taller Elder.

The current hit an invisible atmospheric barrier and dissolved into harmless static. Natalie fired a pristine arrow of wind directly at the second Elder’s skull. The arrow turned to gray dust ten feet before it arrived.

This was the Level 200 threshold made physical. The squad’s rules of engagement simply did not apply to them. The trap meant nothing to a Valor.

The taller Elder reached the heavy Vanguard gates. The Cultist raised a massive, spiked dark-iron mace to shatter the iron doors.

Bram Stonehelm stepped directly in front of the barricade.

He did not trigger [Titan’s Anvil]. He dropped his center of gravity and locked his boots to the stone. He remembered Lord Commander Stillbane’s lesson. He felt the heavy bedrock resting miles beneath the facility.

He did not block the blow with his own flesh. He connected his mana to the planet and let the earth absorb the kinetic force.

CLANG.

The spiked mace slammed into Bram’s crossed arms.

Bram held the line. He stopped a catastrophic impact that should have pulverized a Vanguard crawler. He argued with the ground on the Elder’s behalf, redirecting the lethal momentum downward into the bedrock.

But the raw, crushing pressure sought the path of least resistance through his own body.

His healing shoulder wound from the tower site violently ruptured. Thick, dark blood burst through his white bandages. Bram dropped to one knee, gasping in blinding agony as his collarbone gave way under the strain.

The heavy iron gates groaned and swung inward.

Lord Commander Gunther Stillbane walked out.

The ruler of Bastion Six wore dented iron armor. His face was gaunt from starvation. His massive shoulders slumped slightly from exhaustion. But his golden eyes burned with raw, heavy violence.

The hulking earth mage stepped over Bram.

"Rest, kid," Gunther rumbled gently.

Gunther looked at the Cult Elder. It was a Level 200 combatant facing another Level 200 combatant. A starving Vanguard Valor against a fed Eclipse monster.

"My city," Gunther stated softly.

CRUMBLE.

Gunther triggered [The Concrete Tomb].

The earth beneath the Cult Elder instantly turned into a violent meat grinder of jagged stone and crushing gravitational pressure. Gunther did not stand in front of the battlefield. He became the battlefield. The Cultist roared as the bedrock itself chewed into his dark armor.

The second Cult Elder did not engage Gunther.

The robed figure stepped respectfully aside. The anomaly stepped forward.

It was the erratic signature the glowing map had refused to name.

It was not a polished, finished monster. It was a human being. The man was half-changed, screaming in endless, waking agony. Jagged white bone spikes tore through his own pale skin. His flesh bubbled and shifted violently, unable to decide what biological shape to take next.

It was a transformation still happening, powerful and agonized at the exact same time. The man clawed at his own face, weeping blood as the corruption consumed him from the inside out.

Aegon stared down at the writhing horror from the wall. He felt physically sick.

He raised the silver communication crystal to his mouth.

"Draven," Aegon whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "It is a man. His bones are growing out of his chest. His mana signature feels like rotting wood and twisted roots."

Four hundred miles away, Draven stood in the dark underground bunker of Bastion Seven.

He listened to the frantic description through the live uplink.

The symptoms did not match the Cult’s standard void magic. Void magic unraveled matter. It deleted physical structures. It did not cause rampant, uncontrolled biological growth.

The symptoms matched the corrupted nature magic Draven had sensed deep inside Thaldrasil’s roots months ago.

Draven went dead silent. He stared at the blue projection map.

The Ghost Protocol had just encountered something vastly older than the Eclipse.

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