Chapter 329: The Sledgehamr and the Spark
[Tiline: Weeks After the Academy Invasion]
[Location: The Neutral Zone – The Scorched Ridge]
"Break the line?" Lord Pythios laughed, the sound carrying over the crackling embers of the incinerated forest.
The Master of the Fla Tower looked down from the ridge, his crimson robes shifting as the runes of molten lava woven into the fabric pulsed with a terrifying, ambient heat. He looked at the three teenagers covered in mud, soot, and the dried blood of their Cathedral heist.
"I don’t know how or why you survived the Pope " Pythios sneered, raising his petrified dragon bone staff.
"However, do expect such with . The Emperor wants you dead, Class F. And my fire does not leave witnesses."
The thousands of Imperial Knights standing behind him and raised their heavy tower shields, bracing themselves. They knew what was coming.
Pythios didn’t chant. A Peak 6th-Order Arch-Mage didn’t need words to command the elents.
He rely tapped the bottom of his staff against the scorched earth.
[Imperial Fla Art: Sea of Cinders]
The air in front of the ridge didn’t just ignite; it exploded.
A tidal wave of dark, crimson fire, burning hot enough to instantly lt steel, surged down the slope. It was a localized natural disaster, a wall of absolute thermal annihilation fifty feet high and a hundred yards wide, rushing toward them to consu the oxygen in their lungs before reducing their bones to ash.
"Elena! Behind !" Alaric roared.
He didn’t retreat. He stepped forward, planting his massive boots into the drying mud. The Titan’s Capacitor fused to his sternum whined, its chanical heartbeat accelerating to a frantic, grinding rhythm. He gripped the hilt of his newly forged, guntal buster sword with both hands.
The Sword of Heroes reacted. It fed on the raw, kinetic output of his iron heart, the glowing golden veins along its dark blade flaring to life.
Alaric swung.
He didn’t use an elegant sword technique. He treated the divine artifact like a baseball bat.
[Titan Art: Impact Calibration]
KRA-KOOM!
The flat of the massive blade struck the incoming wave of fire.
It was pure, unadulterated physics clashing against magic. The multi-ton kinetic shockwave generated by the swing collided with the sea of flas. The holy divinity residing within the guntal blade acted as a wedge, stripping the conceptual "heat" from the magic, while Alaric’s sheer blunt force literally parted the flas.
The crimson fire split violently down the middle, roaring past them on the left and right, lting the rocks behind them into bubbling slag.
Alaric stood in the eye of the inferno, his charred mythril chainmail smoking.
On the ridge, Pythios’s arrogant smile faltered.
"Impossible," the Arch-Mage hissed. "A brute wielding a slab of iron cannot split a 6th-Order spell! Burn them! Burn them to nothing!"
Pythios spun his staff, preparing to unleash a concentrated, armor-piercing lance of magma.
"He’s gathering it much!" Elena shouted over the roaring flas.
She stood directly behind Alaric, her pristine white uniform whipping in the thermal updrafts..
She pressed her index and middle fingers to her temples, closing her ancient green eyes as she synchronized her dual affinity of Light and Wind.
"I can’t deflect sothing like that," Elena gritted her teeth, her High Elf mana core straining as she felt the suffocating heat gathering above them.
"Lukas!!"
Lukas was slumped against a smoldering rock, his breath ragged. His heavy, matte-black Dwarven Magitech Gauntlets were flashing a frantic, critical red.
The cooling chanisms had failed during the fight at the Cathedral. The dwarven needles embedded in his forearms, which allowed him to bypass his biologically fried nerves to pull mana directly from his core, were burning his flesh.
"My circuits are lting, Elena!" Lukas yelled, his hands shaking violently.
"If I pull any more plasma, Hephaestus’s gauntlets are going to detonate!"
Elena opened her eyes, looking at Lukas through the smoke. Her gaze was sharp and unyielding.
"Then let them detonate," she said coldly. "Be a bomb, Lukas."
Lukas froze. He looked at the flashing red runes on his gauntlets. mories about the grueling lessons in the Old Gym flashed through his mind.
He rembered the Professor watching him scorch his own eyebrows off, telling him that a sniper who couldn’t handle the recoil was just a liability.
Lukas swallowed hard. A wild, desperate grin spread across his soot-stained face.
"Right. Be a bomb."
Lukas stepped out from behind Alaric. He raised both of his tallic arms toward the ridge. He didn’t limit the intake. He ntally commanded the needles in his arms to pull every single remaining drop of mana from his core and forced it into the plasma emitters in his palms.
The safety limiters scread. The black tal of the gauntlets began to glow a terrifying, blinding white-hot.
"What is the crippled rat doing?" Pythios sneered, aiming his staff down at them.
"You cannot cast magic, boy! Die!"
[Arch-Mage Art: Magma Lance]
A beam of hyper-condensed, liquid rock shot from the tip of the dragon bone staff, aid directly at Lukas’s chest.
"Now, Elena!" Lukas scread.
He didn’t fire a needle beam. He slamd his lting gauntlets together, forcing a catastrophic hardware failure.
[Magitech Overload: Core Detonation]
BOOOOOOM.
The gauntlets exploded. But because Lukas had fed them pure, unstable fire mana, it wasn’t a shrapnel explosion. It was a localized thermal expansion. A massive, blinding cloud of superheated blue plasma erupted outward, intercepting the descending Magma Lance.
The two extre temperatures collided, creating a violent, chaotic smokescreen of steam and ash that blanketed the entire ridge.
"I can’t see them!" an Imperial Knight shouted from the line, raising his shield as the steam blinded him.
"It’s just smoke!" Pythios roared, waving his hand to conjure a gale to clear the air. "Hold the line! They are trying to run!"
"We aren’t running," a deep, rumbling voice echoed from directly inside the smoke cloud.
Elena hadn’t used her magic to attack. The mont Lukas triggered the explosion, she had cast a flawless, localized vacuum tunnel straight up the ridge, clearing a perfectly silent, frictionless path through the blinding steam.
And charging up that frictionless path at a terrifying speed was Alaric.
He burst through the smoke, bypassing the Imperial frontline entirely. He was a terrifying sight—a scarred giant wielding a massive, golden-veined buster sword, moving with the montum of a runaway freight train.
Pythios’s eyes widened in sheer horror. The Arch-Mage hastily raised his petrified dragon bone staff to cast a point-blank kinetic shield.
Alaric didn’t care about shields. He didn’t care about 6th-Order authority.
He gripped the hilt of the Sword of Heroes, his SSS-Tier willpower locking onto the arrogant Arch-Mage. The Titan’s Capacitor delivered a massive, singular thump, feeding all its stored kinetic energy into his arms.
"You talk too much," Alaric grunted.
He swung the massive slab of guntal horizontally.
CRACK!
The impact was deafening. The flat of the buster sword slamd into the petrified dragon bone staff.
For a microsecond, the ancient bone resisted. Then, physics took over. The sheer, unadulterated mass of Alaric’s swing, combined with the holy density of the blade, shattered the Arch-Mage’s staff into a thousand pieces of splintered bone.
The kinetic shockwave carried through the shattered staff and struck Pythios directly in the chest.
"Gah—!"
The Master of the Fla Tower coughed up a mouthful of blood, his ribs cracking as he was launched backward off his feet. He flew over the heads of his own Imperial Knights, crashing violently into a rock formation fifty yards away.
The Imperial Army froze. Their commander, a Peak 6th-Order Arch-Mage, had just been swatted away like a fly.
Alaric didn’t press the attack. He landed heavily on the ridge, his muscles groaning from the exertion. He looked down the slope.
Elena was already dragging the exhausted, gauntlet-less Lukas up the hill by his collar.
"The line is broken!" Alaric roared, hoisting the heavy sword onto his shoulder. "Keep moving! Into the Neutral Zone!"
The Imperial Knights hesitated, looking at their fallen commander, then at the giant standing on the ridge holding a weapon that humd with terrifying divinity.
By the ti the captains rallied their n to charge, Alaric, Elena, and Lukas had already vanished into the dense, rocky labyrinth of the Neutral Zone, leaving only the smoking crater of a shattered ambush behind them.
"We’re clear," Elena gasped, leaning against a canyon wall a mile away, dropping Lukas onto the dirt.
Lukas lay on his back, staring at his bare, blistered hands. The magitech gauntlets were gone, destroyed in the blast, but a wild, exhausted laugh escaped his lips.
"I blew him up," Lukas wheezed. "Did you see his face?"
"I saw it," Alaric said, keeping watch at the entrance of the canyon. His grey eyes were fixed on the northern horizon.
"We bought ourselves a few days. But the Empire won’t stop hunting us now. We need to reach Ironforge for King Durin and Hephaestus to repair your arms and more ti to practice with the sword."
Alaric gripped the hilt of his new sword, feeling the heavy, comforting density of it.
"It’s not going to be easy," Alaric whispered to the wind.
"But I won’t give up."
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