I Awakened The Ancient Vampire System

Chapter 149: Chapter 149: The Second Wave (2)

POV: Darius Cole

The second wave hit harder than the first.

Darius Cole stood on the northern wall, Wind mana radiating from his body in visible waves of wind pressure, and watched the city’s defenses crumble.

The western wall buckled under the wolf horde within the first hour. Three breaches — massive gaps torn through reinforced stone by hundreds of mutated wolves throwing themselves at the same point until the structure simply gave way. Soldiers screamed as wolves poured through. The reserve units plugged two gaps, but the third was still open, and every report coming in was worse than the last.

Then the southern wall fell.

The insect swarm hadn’t attacked the wall directly — they’d burrowed under it. Thousands of centipede-like creatures chewing through the foundation simultaneously, destabilizing the entire structure until a two-hundred-meter section collapsed inward in a cascade of stone and dust.

Insect monsters poured into the outer districts.

Darius made the call in three seconds. "All units on the southern wall — fighting retreat to secondary defensive lines. Fall back to the inner ring. Now."

The Zephyr Eagle dominant chose that exact moment to strafe the retreating soldiers. Lightning rained down — crack-crack-crack — bolts tearing through the ranks of men and women already running for their lives. Bodies hit the ground and didn’t get up.

Casualty reports flooded in. Hundreds dead in the first two hours. The mana shield devices worked — where they were deployed, soldiers survived — but there weren’t enough of them. Gaps in coverage became killing zones. Entire squads wiped out because the shield projector for their section had been destroyed in the first wave or never arrived at all.

Darius clenched his jaw.

This wave was designed to exploit every weakness the first wave had revealed. Someone with intimate knowledge of the city’s defenses had planned this. The breaches matched the exact points where mana barriers had been thinnest during the first assault. The insect swarm had targeted the southern wall specifically because the foundation there was oldest and most vulnerable to burrowing attacks. The Zephyr Eagle’s strafing runs followed the exact retreat routes soldiers would take.

Then the B-Rank beasts arrived.

The peak B rank Zephyr Eagle descended from the clouds with four subordinate eagles flanking it — all C-Rank, all dangerous, but mere escorts compared to the dominant. Its golden eyes swept the battlefield with cold intelligence.

From the western forest, a wolf emerged that made Darius’s stomach drop.

Bloodfang Alpha. Mid B-Rank the last time the Guilds had investigated it. Now its aura pressed against the senses at Peak B-Rank — a massive beast the size of a truck, fur matted with dried blood, fangs the length of swords, eyes that burned with feral cunning.

From the southern breach, the insect swarm parted around something enormous.

Chrysalis Matriarch. The queen of the insects. Also Mid B-Rank at last investigation. Now Peak B-Rank — a centipede-like creature twenty meters long with armored chitin plates that gleamed like wet obsidian, mandibles that could shear through steel, and a bloated thorax that pulsed with the green glow of the plague.

Darius felt the other guild masters react through the communication link.

Helena Vance: "The Bloodfang and the Matriarch — they weren’t at Peak B-Rank last quarter. How—"

Rothgar Ironside: "Does it matter? They’re here now."

Kael Morrow: "Other B-Rank beasts pushing out of the forests. Early and Mid stage. Dozens of them."

Darius made the split. "Kael, you’re with me. We take the Zephyr Eagle. Helena, Rothgar — you’re on the Matriarch with the Border Integrity Force and Task Force masters. Tower Master — Bloodfang Alpha is yours."

The Tower Master — the Peak Grand Core Realm cultivator — grunted acknowledgment.

Darius turned to the sky. The Zephyr Eagle was circling, its four subordinates spreading into an attack formation. Beside him, Kael drew his blood-infused blade, crimson energy crawling along the steel.

Two Mid Grand Core Realm masters from the Border Integrity Force joined them — a wind user and a fire user. Four against the eagle and its subordinates. Not ideal, but manageable if they kept the dominant separated from the escorts.

"Move," Darius said.

They launched off the wall.

The Zephyr Eagle met them in the air.

Its first attack was lightning — a barrage of bolts that turned the sky white. Darius formed a tempest shield, Kael blurred beneath it, and the two Grand Core masters scattered. One bolt clipped the fire user’s shoulder — crack — spinning him sideways before he recovered.

Kael engaged the nearest subordinate eagle. His blood blade carved through its wing — shhhhlik — sending it spiraling. The wind user caught the second subordinate with a compressed air blade that severed its tail. The fire user engaged the third with explosions that lit the clouds orange.

That left Darius alone against the dominant.

The Zephyr Eagle’s golden eyes locked onto him. Screeeeee. Lightning gathered in its beak — not a bolt this time, but a concentrated sphere of electrical energy the size of a carriage.

Darius raised both hands. "Tempest Strike — Heaven’s Roar."

A wall of compressed wind collided with the lightning sphere midair. BOOOOM. The shockwave flattened clouds in a five-hundred-meter radius. Darius was pushed back twenty meters, ears ringing. The eagle was pushed back thirty — its lightning sphere disrupted, scattered into harmless sparks.

Darius pressed forward before it could recover. Wind blades — dozens of them — sliced toward the eagle from every angle. The eagle banked hard, taking three cuts across its flank, and returned fire with a physical charge. Its talons gleamed with lightning as it dove at Darius like a missile.

He caught one talon with a wind-reinforced forearm — crack — and deflected the other with his blade. The impact sent him tumbling through the air. He stabilized and launched a counter — a concentrated spear of wind that pierced through the eagle’s left wing membrane.

Screeee.

On the ground, the Tower Master engaged the Bloodfang Alpha.

The wolf was fast — terrifyingly fast for something its size. It dodged the Tower Master’s first strike, a palm imbued with enough force to level a city block, and countered with a lunge that would have taken his head off if he’d been half a second slower.

The Tower Master sidestepped and drove his knee into the wolf’s jaw. CRACK. The beast’s head snapped sideways, but it recovered almost instantly and circled for another attack. Its pack — hundreds of smaller wolves — harried the soldiers nearby, preventing any organized support.

The Tower Master moved with the efficiency of a man who had been fighting for centuries. Each strike was measured, each dodge minimal, each counter designed to accumulate damage rather than deliver a single killing blow. He was wearing the Bloodfang down.

But it would take time.

At the southern breach, Helena and Rothgar led a group of eight early Grand Core Realm masters against the Chrysalis Matriarch.

The creature was a nightmare. Its chitin plates deflected Helena’s ice lances and Rothgar’s earth spikes. Its mandibles sheared through a Task Force master’s barrier in a single bite, taking the man’s arm at the shoulder. The insect swarm around it acted as a living shield, absorbing attacks meant for the Matriarch and counter-attacking with venomous spit and corrosive acid.

Helena froze a section of the swarm — crack-crack-crack — shattering dozens of insects into frozen fragments. Rothgar raised a wall of reinforced earth to block a spray of acid. The Matriarch burrowed into the ground and erupted beneath them, catching two masters off guard. One was impaled on a mandible. The other barely escaped with a deep gash across his chest.

The fight was brutal and grinding. The Matriath wouldn’t die. Its armor was too thick, its swarm too numerous, its regeneration too fast. And every second it survived, more infected insects poured into the city.

Meanwhile, in the Starveil Tower’s medical lab, Ryan, Iris, and Liang Feng worked alongside the senior researchers the World Government had sent into the city.

They could mostly only watch and learn. The senior researchers had decades of experience — their methodologies were precise, their analytical frameworks sophisticated, their ability to process data far beyond what three academy students could match.

But the cure remained elusive.

In his training space, Lucian trained.

Twenty hours had passed inside the space. Four hours in the outside world. His body moved through Elipse Sword Art forms — first form, second form, transitions between them — while the system’s simulated targets attacked from varying angles. Sword Intent burned steadily along Aethon’s blade now holding its form for extended periods.

After twenty hours of continuous training, his vampire stamina was nowhere near depleted. The problem with the space was that he couldn’t bring anyone here. If not, he would have brought Clara and Rose too.

The white figure appeared beside him, floating lazily.

"You know," it said, "the people fighting outside will likely lose."

Lucian didn’t stop his practice swings. "Not like I care."

"The Grand Core masters can maintain that level of combat for six to eight hours maximum. After that, mana depletion, accumulated injuries, and physical exhaustion will force them to withdraw. When they do, there’s nothing between the beasts and the civilians inside the city. Everyone dies."

Lucian’s sword paused mid-swing. "What should we do then?"

The system’s eye-dots gleamed. It floated in a slow circle, entering what Lucian had come to think of as lecturer mode.

"The rain. It’s what’s luring the beasts into the city. They’ve already established that much in their research — the scent of the Green Plague is exactly what attracts the beasts. It’s a chemical signal that triggers predatory instincts in mutated creatures."

It paused, letting Lucian process.

"But here’s what they haven’t figured out. The Green Plague has to be constantly manufactured for the water mage to maintain the rain over the city. A single batch wouldn’t last this long. There’s a creature somewhere — likely a plant-type or insect-type beast — that generates the plague compound as a biological byproduct. The water mage collects it and distributes it through rain clouds."

"Where?"

"The Black Forest or the border forest. Those are the only two zones where the green rain isn’t falling — which means they’re too close to the source. The creature can’t generate plague compounds directly beneath itself without contaminating the immediate area, which would drive away the very beasts the plague is meant to lure."

The system’s eye-dots narrowed.

"Based on my analysis of the rain distribution patterns, wind currents, and the direction the insect swarm originated from, I’m seventy percent sure the water mage and the plague-generating creature are located in the Black Forest."

Lucian lowered Aethon and stared at the floating figure.

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