Real Mount and Blade Game

His command was like a thunderclap.

All the soldiers who were still fighting hard, whether they were soldiers with shields, archers with bows, or knights with swords, instantly felt the apocalyptic aura emanating from the blood-red phantom, which was enough to destroy everything!

Just as the blood-red light in the jackal's phantom eyes intensified to the point of resembling two miniature crimson stars, and the entire projection distorted and trembled due to extreme energy compression—

"hold head high--!!!"

A piercing scream that seemed to distort space tore through the night sky!

The enormous, distorted, blood-red projection, resembling solidified lava, collapsed inward in an instant.

Like a burst bubble, yet containing unimaginable destructive energy.

All the essence absorbed from the remains of the undead on the battlefield, along with its own remaining abyssal power, was highly condensed into a fist-sized, dark red energy core that exuded a world-destroying aura!

Then--

“BOOM Boom Boom Boom!!!”

That dark red core, compressed to its extreme and filthy and viscous like solid black blood, suddenly erupted.

There was no physical shockwave, only an infinitely spreading, absolutely silent, terrifying shadow.

Like thick ink dripped into a basin of clear water, it instantly stains everything.

The self-destruction of this concentrated power of death and the abyss had no physical roar, yet it was more deadly than any explosion.

It spread at the speed of light, swallowing up light, freezing air, and erasing sound wherever it passed!
Almost at the same time Shen Mu issued the warning, he had already pushed his spirit and will to the limit.

The immense power of faith no longer guided the holy flame, but transformed into the cornerstone supporting his manipulation of the data flow of rules.

Countless cold, precise runes resembling "0" and "1" representing absolute order flowed and extended rapidly around him, instantly weaving into an invisible and enormous data net that precisely covered the core defense system of the entire city wall!

At the heart of the fortress, the towering ancient tree, hundreds of meters tall, seemed to sense an impending doom. Under the stimulation of Shen Mu's power of rules, it burst forth with an unprecedented verdant light!
Om-! ! !
The massive wooden city wall, with ancient trees as its roots and covering the entire gnarled city wall, suddenly burst forth with a dazzling two-tone radiance!

Inside, the ancient tree's own accumulated, boundless natural life force transforms into a deep, refined turquoise halo; outside, it is a golden light curtain formed by the golden light of faith guided by Shen Mu's supreme will, flowing with cold, orderly runes!
It contains life within and is imbued with divine power without!
Two beams of light overlapped and flowed perfectly!

The silently spreading, dark red, deathly shadow slammed heavily into this incredibly tough protective barrier!

"Sizzle—!!!"

Like a scorching hot iron pressed onto ice, the sickening sound of energy annihilation echoed in the hearts of every soldier!

The ancient trees' emerald green light flickered and dimmed rapidly, and the surface of the city wall composed of huge roots groaned under the weight. In some areas, the wooden walls, thicker than steel, and the living thorns entwined on them instantly turned black and withered!

The golden light of faith flowed through the runes of order, which shone brightly, constantly being impacted, distorted, and partially broken, yet striving to sustain itself as new runes were generated behind it!
Inside the fortress, all the defenders felt a suffocating sense of oppression, as if their souls were about to be frozen and torn apart.

But under this double protection, the devastating mental impact and energy annihilation were largely blocked!

However, the power of this core self-destruction was far too concentrated and far too violent!
"Snap!!!"

In the western outer section, where the protective barrier had withstood the most intense impact and was previously the most severely damaged, the seemingly indestructible, deeply rooted city wall, with its protective layer woven from revitalized thorn roots, ultimately could not withstand the impact of this destructive force at its epicenter!
A thick layer of tree roots shattered with a mournful sound, and the huge roots broke apart inch by inch and turned to ashes!

The resilient thorny vines turned to ashes in an instant!
A huge gap, more than twenty meters in diameter, with jagged edges, was starkly exposed to the crimson crescent moon and endless darkness!

A chilling aura of death surged forth from the breach! It was as if the maw of hell had opened wide over the Elf Forest!

Shen Mu stood atop the barrier not far from the gap, the runes on his mithril heavy armor flashing intensely, and the data flow around him was like a wildly dancing silver snake.

Through the grotesque crack, his cold, iron-gray eyes were fixed on the dark core of the Western Long City.

There, the darkness was thicker, and the surging black mist seemed to lick the wounds as if it were alive. The aftershocks of the phantom's self-destruction seemed to be brewing a deeper and more terrifying stillness.

A huge threat has been hit hard and its hand has been exposed, but its deadly fangs seem to have only just emerged from the abyss.

The real reckoning is far from over.

The night remained terrifyingly deep.

Inside the fortress, every soldier stared at the massive breach, at the black mist pouring in and the flickering, now vibrant, ghostly green soul fire within it. They all gripped their weapons tightly, their hearts heavy, devoid of any joy of victory, only a deeper sense of solemnity.

They all knew that the battle had to continue.

The enormous gaping hole, churning with the chilling aura of death, resembled the gaping maw of hell opening its fangs at the world of the living.

After a brief, suffocating silence, a new wave indeed emerged!
However, this surging tide of terror brought a sense of bewilderment...relief to the defending troops who had just experienced the impact of the phantom's self-destruction.
Just as Shen Mu had warned, the response from the core of Longcheng was an even more violent shock.

Countless undead monsters, with even more bizarre shapes and more twisted and ferocious skeletal structures, seemed to emerge from the churning black mist, emitting sharp, piercing friction sounds and hollow howls, rushing headlong into the newly formed crack!
Their numbers were far greater than the previous elite forces, surging in like a mudslide from a breached dam, with an aura of utter destruction.

Mixed among them are arthropod skeletons covered in bone spurs, resembling enlarged scorpions; aggregate monsters composed of countless tiny skulls; and hunting skeletons that move incredibly fast on all fours with jawbones like giant guillotines...

But strangely, just as the Rhodok soldiers roared and raised their tower shields, the Vaegir and Wood Elf archers reflexively unleashed a rain of arrows, and the Holy Tree Knights prepared to meet them with their mithril longswords gleaming with holy light, an unexpected event occurred.

These newly arrived, even more terrifying undead monsters are as fragile as rotten wood!
Arrows shrouded in holy flames easily pierced their seemingly hard bone armor, sending up large shards of burning bone; the Rhodok soldiers' halberds encountered far less resistance than those ordinary black iron skeletons, as if splitting dry firewood; the Holy Tree Knight swung his sword, and with a burst of power, several monsters in front of him were instantly pulverized, purified exceptionally thoroughly!

The intensity of the battle suddenly decreased by one level.

The soldiers quickly shifted from their initial solemnity and desperate fighting to a highly efficient cleanup mode.

The arrow rain became more rhythmic, no longer requiring precise aiming at vital points; the melee soldiers' lines were as solid as a mountain, each strike causing far more damage than expected. "...No!" Shen Mu's icy voice rang out from the watchtower of the ramparts, his gaze piercing through the chaotic battlefield beyond the breach, like the most sophisticated scanner.

While the soldiers relaxed, his vigilance reached its peak.

He saw it more clearly.

Despite their varied forms, these charging monsters all had a tiny, yet incredibly tenacious, dark red spark, like a brand, wrapped around the cores of their eerie green soul fires that leaped within their eye sockets, representing the power of immortality!

This spark was different from the raging dark red demonic light in the eyes of the previous abyssal phantom. It was smaller and more dispersed, yet it was like a maggot clinging to the bone, parasitizing the most fundamental soul fire of these undead.

At the same time, a faint yet incredibly clear aura of decaying sulfur, originating from the same source as the dark red sparks, mingled with the even stronger stench of the dead and the chilling black mist, was clearly detected by Shen Mu's exceptionally keen spiritual power.

"The stench of the abyss..." Shen Mu uttered cold words from his thin lips beneath his helmet.

This is definitely not the aura of the undead of Longcheng!

Rather, it comes from the bottomless abyss, which is the most distinctive characteristic of demons!
In a flash, all the clues connected in Shen Mu's mind.

The abyss projection's desperate self-destruction just now, ostensibly to kill the defenders, was more like a signal, or a... sacrificial ritual!
It unleashed its remaining power and the combined power of the defeated undead, forcibly tearing open a gap in the barrier!

The massive yet weak so-called terrorist horde that followed was not an offensive force in the conventional sense.

They are puppets directly corrupted and accelerated by the will of the abyss! The dark red sparks in their eye sockets are the marks of the abyss's power eroding and ultimately replacing the soul fire of the undead!

The abyssal demons are brutally draining the last sustenance from Long City, this land of death, in this sinister way!

“They are using death… sacrificing death!” Legolas also sensed something amiss; his keen perception, characteristic of a son of the forest, made him even more sensitive to the abyss.

He stood beside Shen Mu, his emerald eyes fixed on the corpses on the battlefield below, their eyes gleaming with dark red: "I sense... a terrifying will, beyond the wailing of the forest, is forcibly distorting the death laws of this land... it is 'extracting'!"

A knowing glint flashed in Shen Mu's cold eyes.

He understood the enemy's true purpose this time—this seemingly powerful attack was essentially a suicide mission!

The demons of the abyss need more death, they need these cannon fodder, accelerated and prematurely matured, to rush towards the blades of the barrier, and then transform into a purer power of death!

Some of this power will return to the energy field that naturally dissipates in this dead land, but the part that has been corrupted by the demon seed... the energy that dissipated after they were killed, carrying that sulfurous stench, is like a stream being drawn by an invisible force, converging towards the churning core black domain in the west!

On the battlefield, the soldiers quickly cleared out most of the monsters in this wave of attacks.

They died so easily that the great war ended very quickly.

The corpses piled up like mountains in front of the ramparts, but the soldiers' expressions were filled with confusion and vigilance, rather than the weariness of victory.

"Resolved?" A Swadian knight wiped the blackened bone ash from his mithril armor, staring incredulously at the empty gap outside. "These things... they feel like they're made of scrap paper?"

"They're just...bait! Or fuel!" An elderly wood elf ranger's voice trembled. "My lord, the sorrow of the forest is intensifying...deep within its core, something is...accelerating its incubation! These rapidly destroyed puppets are making that thing grow even faster!"

His words pierced the hearts of every soldier who heard them like ice.

The soldiers looked up at their lord.

Shen Mu remained standing on the watchtower, his mithril heavy armor reflecting a cold luster in the firelight of the burning ramparts.

He did not relax because of the brief moment of ease. Instead, he faced the direction of the western core of Longcheng, which was like a solidified dark abyss, and all the muscles in his body entered a state of extreme alert.

Yes, the feeling of being sent to my death was exceptionally strong.

All of this was just to hasten the birth of that thing!

The minions of the abyss are nourishing the city's last undead essence and the slaughter of the defenders themselves, nurturing an unimaginable monster on the fertile ground of death!

The fortress fell into a brief silence, broken only by the occasional pop of the burning remains of the undead, the suppressed warnings of the wood elves, and the low groans of the ancient tree roots in pain.

Suddenly, from the core of darkness that seemed to devour starlight, came a muffled, enormous sound, like thick leather being torn apart!
"Boom——!!!"

The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a soul-piercing impact, clearly echoing in every piece of the rampart and in the heart of every soldier.

The stench of sulfur in the air instantly intensified several times, carrying a nauseating, bloody odor that seemed to emanate from the most filthy part of life's end.

In that immense darkness, two enormous, dark red eyes, larger and deeper than before, burning with absolute chaos and primal hunger, seemed to be slowly opening.

The creation of the abyss has completed its final incubation!

"Ow—"

With a howl like a wolf, yet containing a deeper, more sinister and endlessly greedy roar, bursting forth from the deep darkness of Longcheng's core, the entire battlefield seemed to be suddenly gripped by an invisible giant hand.

A sudden change occurred!

The thick black fog that had been pervasive, carrying the stench of the abyss and the stagnation of death, suddenly surged violently as if imbued with a will by the roar. Then, it contracted rapidly toward the city's core at a speed that defied the laws of physics, like the receding tide!
In just a few dozen breaths, the viscous, almost tangible black mist outside the fortified barrier and within the entire Elf Forest's visible range suddenly decreased in concentration and rapidly became thinner and sparser.

The sticky, oppressive feeling and the pungent, putrid smell of sulfur also decreased dramatically.

Beneath the barrier, the undead army that had been relentlessly attacking the breach suddenly froze and became chaotic!
The dark red sparks in their eye sockets, like a persistent, insidious infection, flickered violently for a moment, then went out abruptly, as if a candle flame had been forcibly pulled from its flame! (End of Chapter)