A Layer 3 swing carried enough raw kinetic force to splinter Zerith’s shields and drive the warriors behind them backward through the mud like battering rams.
A Layer 2 Peak Veynar veteran could absorb a glancing spear thrust that would have dropped a weaker fighter and still return a bone-crushing, lethal blow with their counter-stroke.
The Zerith’s venom stung and burned across torn skin, but Zephyra’s earlier diffuse wave of essence had already dulled its worst, flesh-melting potency.
What little remained was steadily burned away by the roaring vitality of the Veynar warriors’ sun cores.
The shallows before the palisade turned into a grinding, brutal clash dressed in the chaos of close-quarters combat.
Those Zerith who continued to lunge with claws and weapons were cut down quickly, cleanly, and without ceremony.
Those who hesitated, dropped their shields, or simply froze under the crushing aura of the vanguard were slammed down by wooden shield bosses, disarmed, and left face-down in the murky water to be bound by the rear line.
Sol finally used the Dreadwing Blade only when a knot of more determined defenders tried to rally near the gatehouse threshold itself.
The sapphire edge whistled through the humid air twice, tracing razor-thin arcs of blue light. Two Zeriths immediately fell in clean, bloodless halves before they even finished their forward thrusts.
The rest of the group shattered instantly, scrambling backward in sheer, paralyzing horror.
Sol did not pursue them into a pointless slaughter. There was no need.
The main gate lasted only a heartbeat longer under Veylara’s restrained, but focused assault.
The thick ironwood groaned under the relentless pressure. The locking crossbeam snapped with a sound like a thunderclap, and one side of the massive gate collapsed inward into the mud with a heavy, wet crash that sprayed murky swamp water ten feet into the air.
The breach was open, and the Veynar vanguard pushed through into the settlement proper.
Yet, as the heavy doors crashed down, the archers stationed on the upper catwalks of the palisade did not break or scatter.
Earlier due to being mixed in with the Zeriths warriors, they couldn’t get a proper shot, now that the Veynar warriors were separated, perched ten paces above the churning swamp mud on an elevated platform of lashed ironwood poles, eight Zerith bowmen drew their sinew strings all the way to their ears.
Their yellow, slit-pupil eyes burned with suicidal desperation, completely fixed on the narrow bottleneck of the broken gate.
They were not aiming for individual duels; they were preparing to loose a dense, point-blank volley of broadhead venom shafts directly into the heads and necks of the Veynar ranks as they poured through the doorway.
"Loose! Drown the breach in venom!" their squad leader shrieked, his elongated throat swelling as he released his bowstring.
But of course, it was not going to be so straight forwards, Sol did not wait for the arrows to leave their nocks.
He took a single, heavy step onto the threshold, his neon-crimson eyes locking onto the structural foundation of the high catwalk.
He raised his left hand toward the wooden platform, fingers splaying wide, and channeled the essence through his core.
He fired a wide essence projectile towards the platform.
CRACK-BOOM!
The four massive ironwood load-bearing pillars supporting the catwalk were violently pulverized into splinters due to the
The eight archers shrieked in terror and confusion as the entire elevated floor collapsed beneath them in a shower of broken timber, vine ropes, and shattered planks. They plummeted straight down into the murky shallows below the gatehouse wall.
Before the dazed bowmen could even untangle themselves from the wreckage or reach for their fallen daggers, five Veynar heavy guards surged through the breach.
Shield rims slammed into skulls with wet, crunching thuds; blades pinned weapon arms into the mud; and within three breaths, all eight archers were disarmed, their jaws broken, pressed flat into the muck under the feet of the Veynar warriors.
"Breach secured!" Commander Thauren roared, stepping past the rubble with his broadsword raised. "Form wedges! Clear the thoroughfares!"
The Veynar force poured through the gatehouse into the belly of the Zerith settlement.
Unlike the outer perimeter, Sol had attacked before the war, inside, the terrain was a treacherous, suffocating labyrinth.
The settlement occupied a low, sunken basin carved from the ancient swamp.
There was very little dry ground; instead, the Zerith lived on a network of damp peat-brick mounds, narrow elevated timber boardwalks, and rope suspension bridges crisscrossing above stagnant, foul-smelling drainage canals.
The air here was heavy with the sulfurous fumes of decaying vegetation and the bitter musk of their venom-milking vats.
And unlike the Zharun, who had collapsed into internal looting, drunken brawls, and self-cannibalizing chaos the moment their chief fell, the Zerith reacted to the invasion with an ugly, vicious, and fanatical resistance.
They were an alien race born of the wetlands, with elongated joints, and venom running through their blood.
Their hatred for the human tribes was ancient, bred into their marrow over generations of territorial slaughter. To them, the Veynar were not just conquerors... they were an existential scourge.
The resistance began the instant the vanguard stepped onto the central wooden thoroughfare.
From the dark interiors of the low-roofed peat huts, the shadowy overhangs of reed-thatched roofs, and the murky waters beneath the wooden walkways, an ambush erupted from all sides.
It was not just the remaining garrison guards who fought. The entire population seemed to had taken up arms.
Wiry youths with filed fangs and venom-dripping claws sprang from the roofs. Elderly hunters clutching heavy, barbed fishing spear lunged from alleyways.
Even shrieking women and laborers, their fingers ending in elongated, naturally venomous claws, burst through woven reed doorways, hurling fire-hardened wooden javelins, crude stone throwing-axes, and jars of boiling, sulfurous bog-tar down onto the Veynar ranks!
CLATTER! CRASH!
A clay pot shattered against the shield of a Veynar front-liner, splashing sticky, burning black tar across his left bracer.
The warrior grunted in pain as the foul liquid hissed and ate into the cured leather, but before he could stumble, a crazed Zerith civilian... a middle-aged woman with yellow slit eyes and a serrated skinning blade... lunged at his throat, shrieking a guttural curse in her harsh dialect.
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