The tide of the battle took a drastic, chaotic turn as the Zharun warriors also force opened their cores, desperately pushing their spectral spirits to materialize in a last-ditch attempt to turn the scales.
Yet, the moment those spectral forms took shape in the air, the glaring, painful difference in power and heritage was painfully glaring.
While the Veynar spirits were vicious, terrifyingly predator beasts... majestic golden lions with blazing manes, spectral wolves dripping ethereal blood from their fangs, and razor-winged massive eagles that tore through the sky like falling blades... the Zharun’s spirit manifestations were pitifully weak by comparison.
Most of the Zharun possessed only fragile Layer 2 spirit beasts. Their spectral forms flickered unstably in the wind, their outlines thin, pale, and diluted like dying smoke.
To make matters worse, several of the Zharun line warriors even summoned herbivore spirits,,, timid mountain deer with trembling antlers, plodding oxen, and soft-furred rabbits that looked almost absurd floating uselessly beside their armed masters in the middle of a blood-soaked meat grinder.
In fact, this deep glaring weakness in spirit quality was the exact reason why the Zharun tribe had long abandoned sole reliance on pure spirit manifestation.
At first it wasn’t that big of a deal as the power balance in this region was almost identical. But since the arrival of Veynar, another human tribe.
Their elders realized that if they fought standard spirit wars against dominant lineages like the Veynar, they would be ruthlessly slaughtered. So, they had been forced to adapt, developing an entirely new, brutal method of warfare to survive.
...
Just then, while the Veynar loyalists remained locked in a bloody, spirit-flaring civil war against Thorne’s traitors, the surrounding Coalition warriors and Zharun’s spirits, a massive, rhythmic thudding shook the edge of the battlefield.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
A thick, dark cloud of heavy dust billowed from afar, obscuring the horizon.
The thunderous, rhythmic galloping of hundreds of heavy limbs rattled the limestone slate beneath everyone’s feet.
Looking closely, it was a detachment of eighty Zharun Hound Riders... the elite heavy cavalry of the Zharun tribe.... was charging at breakneck speed straight toward the main battlefield.
And this was exactly the result of Zharun ancestors’ countless experimentations and sacrifices.
The Blood Hound Cavalry.
Earlier, fearing the Zharun’s betrayal, they had been ordered by Sol to lie in wait hidden deep within the tall river reeds to avoid enemy detection.
But the blinding explosions of raw essence, the clashing of giant spirits, and the chaotic, echoing roars of battle had drawn them rushing back to the battlefield.
Eighty heavily armored Zharun warriors sat atop massive, six-legged Blood Hounds.
These were vicious, unnatural beast mounts... patchy tufts of coarse, dirty-red fur clung to their otherwise bare, crimson-skinned bodies.
Their signature hairless hides revealed rippling muscle tissue beneath, their elongated snouts bristled with multiple rows of needle-sharp teeth beneath glowing, crimson eyes, and their six muscular limbs tore into the limestone bedrock, leaving deep, pulverized tracks in the stone.
These mounts were not mere transport; they were trained from birth solely to tear through enemy formations and devour them.
"Reinforcements! The Hound Riders are here!" a Zharun warrior shouted from the front lines, his bloodied face lighting up with newfound, frantic hope. "Trample the Veynar! Crush them underfoot!"
The eighty Blood Hounds let out a collective, blood-curdling howl that reverberated off the surrounding canyon walls like the cries of the damned. Their six powerful, clawed limbs dug deep into the white limestone, building up a terrifying, momentum-filled cavalry charge directed squarely at the center of the field towards the Veynar.
...
The origin of this terrifying cavalry was rooted deeply in Zharun history.
It was said that centuries ago, during their tribe’s quest to create a new war method, an ambitious ancestor of their tribe had stumbled by chance upon the dying corpse of a Layer 3 Lord-blood beast... a primal alpha of the Blood hounds.
The ancestor harvested its powerful spirit, and by somehow utilizing the absolute dominance inherent in that Lord-blood spirit, he gained the power to command and subdue lower-blood red hounds that roamed the wild sectors of the Great Orrath.
Through countless trials, deadly errors, and generations of sacrifices,, the Zharun eventually succeeded in controlling and refining these essence-born Blood Hounds, eventually forging an elite cavalry force that became the indisputable cornerstone of Zharun warfare.
Zharun riders were chosen in early childhood, selected from the strongest and most resilient of the tribe’s young. Each child was bonded directly with a newborn hound pup.
From that moment on, the boy and the beast grew together... trained side by side through years of brutal conditioning until they moved and fought as a single, lethal entity.
And with their six powerful limbs, thick armored hides, and bone-crushing jaw pressure, the hounds were explicitly used to break heavy infantry formations, trample through the battlefield and assist in closed combat.
It was through these living weapons that the Zharun compensated for their inferior spiritual manifestations, trading weak spirit quality for raw physical dominance, terrifying shock-value, and overwhelming mobility.
...
Soon, the first wave of eighty Zharun Hound Riders finally slammed onto the outer edge of the battlefield, their massive six-legged mounts kicking up blinding storms of white dust as they thundered forward.
Seeing a full-scale spirit war already raging across the Veynar lines, the arriving Hound Riders instinctively released their own spectral spirits in an attempt to join the fray and bolster their charge.
But the result, however, was still the same and almost comical.
Weak, flickering spirits materialized above the riders’ heads... thin, unstable phantoms that barely held their shape.
Some took the form of scrawny desert lizards, others manifested as small horned goats or fluttering moths with translucent wings.
A few even summoned sluggish river toads or timid prairie hares that floated awkwardly above the riders, their presence so faint they seemed ready to dissipate at the slightest breeze.
Compared to the roaring and vicious spirits of the Veynar, these spirits looked pathetic, even more pathetic than the ones released by other Zharun warriors, because the focus of their training was entirely on Blood hounds so they got the worst but easiest to level up, still these pale, diluted imitations only highlighted the vast gulf between the two tribes’ strength.
Yet, as the charge hit the Veynar’s outer defense line with the force of a landslide, no one was laughing.
The true strength of the newly arrived force did not lie in their fragile, flickering spirits. It lay entirely in the massive, snarling, six-legged Blood Hounds beneath them... and the hundreds of bone-crushing teeth driving straight toward the weary Veynar line.
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