The newbies violently snapped out of their paralyzed trance.
"AAAAHHHHHH!"
Shouting a chaotic yet desperate battle cry, they charged forward together.
They surrounded the struggling beast, plunging their iron shortswords awkwardly but effectively into the trapped monster until it stopped moving completely.
As the beasts died in the mud, Silas’s internal interface violently roared to life.
Because three entirely different strike teams were actively engaging targets across multiple miles of the Umbral Basin, Silas’s vision beca a highly addictive waterfall of pristine blue holographic text.
[Vassal Tamsin has slain a Tier 2 Acid-Crawler. 2 UP]
[Vassal Brida has slain a Tier 1 Iron-Boar. 0.5 UP]
[Vassal Brida has slain a Tier 1 Iron-Boar. 0.5 UP]
[Vassal Aeliana has slain a Tier 1 Mud-Hound. 0.5 UP]
[Vassal Rowena has assisted in a kill. 0.5 UP]
The notifications scrolled endlessly down his peripheral vision, creating a constant pulse of energy entering his Gold Core.
He was sitting securely at the center of a rapidly expanding web of coordinated violence with his upgrade wealth inflating by the second.
The adrenaline of managing a multi-front war was truly amazing.
’I wonder how the other girls are doing...’
Miles away, deep within the jagged, highly treacherous, completely flooded northern ridges, Tamsin wiped a thick sar of mud and freezing rainwater from her sharp eyes.
The Level 10 Wilderness Huntress was crouched extrely low to the wet ground, her twin heavy iron daggers drawn and resting comfortably in her hands. Behind her, a mixed squad of five veteran Shieldmaidens and five wide-eyed newbies mirrored her stealthy stance, using the heavy rotting trunks of the massive Ironwood trees for cover against the rain.
Tamsin’s heart hamred heavily against her ribs.
’I will do it...’
She was fiercely determined.
She had seen the way Silas looked at the S-Rank Chef, and while she understood the logistical necessity of Kaelia keeping them fed, Tamsin wanted to prove that the Vanguard’s undeniable value lay in the mud and the blood.
She wanted to return to the Blessed Land with the highest, most devastating kill count of the entire deploynt as she wanted her Lord’s undivided, proud praise.
"The tracks end here..." Tamsin whispered.
She stared intently at a deep unnatural groove carved directly into the muddy earth.
It looked like sothing massive had been dragged through the slop, leaving a trail of corrosive, sizzling green sli in its wake that actively killed the weeds.
The rain hamred loudly against the dead leaves above them, completely masking any ambient noise in the forest.
Suddenly, the refined magically enhanced sensory perception Tamsin had gained from her Level 10 ascension scread a massive, undeniable warning directly into her brain.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up. The ground wasn’t just muddy... It was actively vibrating beneath their boots.
"Shields up!" Tamsin roared, spinning around and throwing her arm out. "Brace for impact!"
The earth directly beneath the squad’s boots violently erupted.
It wasn’t a small ambush.
A horrific horde of over fifty Tier 2 Acid-Crawlers exploded simultaneously from the subterranean mud, completely surrounding them in a ring of clicking mandibles.
The beasts were terrifying... eight-foot-long, heavily armored centipedes with dozens of razor-sharp legs designed to dig through bedrock.
Their massive, clacking mandibles dripped heavily with a foul, venomous, sizzling green fluid that actively lted the dead grass upon contact.
The overwhelming volu and suddenness of the horde instantly shattered the squad’s pristine formation.
"Hold the line!" Gunnhild bellowed, slamming her heavy iron shield into the mud to block a lunging crawler.
The beast’s massive mandibles clamped hard onto the tal, the dripping acid aggressively eating into the iron with a loud hiss.
Chaos descended violently upon the northern ridge.
The veterans fought fiercely, hacking at the heavily armored overlapping segnts of the crawlers since they knew the amount of force monsters in the Umbral Basin needed to cave and as for the newbies, their iron swords sparked harmlessly against the thick chitin plates.
Tamsin was a blur of motion.
She didn’t rely on brute force; she relied on precision... Tasmin dove under the snapping mandibles of a massive crawler, driving her twin iron daggers directly upward into the soft, unarmored underbelly of the beast.
SKREEEEE!
The Acid-Crawler shrieked, thrashing wildly as Tamsin ripped her blades free, spilling pale green guts onto the mud.
She rolled smoothly back to her feet, ducking under a sweeping tail strike from another monster.
Tasmin planted her boot on a tree root, launching herself into the air, and brought both daggers down into the exact gap between the crawler’s armored neck plates.
STAB!
The beast collapsed instantly.
She moved like a shadow in the rain.
Left, right, parry, thrust!
Tasmin slaughtered five, then ten of the beasts, her daggers dripping with venomous blood.
She slid through the mud, evading the snapping jaws, targeting only the vulnerable joints that connected their dozens of legs to their bodies but as she ripped her dagger out of her fifteenth kill, a heavy spray of corrosive green acid rained down from a thrashing beast above her.
A splash caught her right shoulder.
The boiled leather of her armor hissed violently, lting away in an instant.
A sharp, burning pain flared across her skin as the acid bit into her flesh, trying to dissolve the muscle.
"Mmmmm..."
It hurt.
Tamsin gritted her teeth, ignoring the agonizing sting. It wasn’t a lethal wound, but it burned like hellfire.
She kicked the dead crawler away and spun to engage the next wave, but as her sharp eyes swept across the battlefield, she caught the devastating reality of the skirmish.
They were completely overwheld...
Tamsin was racking up kills, but there were simply too many of them.
For every crawler she as well as the others killed, three more erupted from the mud to take its place.
The overwhelming volu of the horde was suffocating.
The five rookies were panicking, backing up into each other, their iron swords trembling as the massive centipedes completely encircled them.
Gunnhild’s shield was rapidly lting under the continuous assault of the acid, the structural integrity failing.
Another veteran Shieldmaiden had been knocked to the ground, desperately holding off snapping mandibles with the wooden shaft of her spear, her arms shaking from the exertion.
They were going to be eaten alive in the mud if the lines completely broke...
’Not today,’ Tamsin thought, her eyes narrowing as she kicked a lunging crawler directly in its snapping jaws, sending it tumbling back into the slop. ’I will not lose a single girl on my watch... I will not bring casualties back to the Lord...’
Tamsin raised her left hand. Glowing beneath the thick layer of mud and freezing rainwater was the complex, geotric erald mark Eluned had kissed onto her skin before they departed.
With a roar of unyielding, desperate defiance, Tamsin slamd her right palm directly against the glowing rune.
She forcefully injected a massive surge of her own gathered mana directly into the divine tether.
[Aura of Genesis (Emulated) Activated.]
The response was magnificent.
A roaring tidal wave of brilliant, pure erald light erupted violently from Tamsin’s hand, violently pushing back the gray gloom of the monsoon and montarily blinding the surrounding Acid-Crawlers.
The SSS-Rank nature magic flooded the entire battlefield.
The agonizing, lting fire on Tamsin’s shoulder was instantly, completely snuffed out as the divine energy neutralized the venomous acid, weaving her burned skin back together in a fraction of a second until not even a scar remained.
But the aura didn’t just heal her minor burn. The erald light washed over the exhausted, terrified squad...
It flooded their veins with an overflowing reservoir of endless divine stamina.
The fear instantly evaporated from the rookies’ eyes, replaced by a surge of overwhelming adrenaline.
Gunnhild let out a massive, booming laugh as her muscles bulged with fresh, unyielding power, throwing her lting shield aside and gripping her broadsword with both hands.
Tamsin sucked in a massive breath of cold air, her eyes snapping open, glowing with a small erald hue from the blessing.
Her fatigue was entirely gone.
"Push them back!" Tamsin roared, her survivalist instincts sharpening into a terrifying razor’s edge.
She gripped her twin daggers, launching herself back into the horde. "Slaughter every single one of them!"
But before she could take a single step, the bruised-purple sky directly above the northern ridge violently tore open.
The deafening relentless howl of the monsoon rain was montarily overpowered by the terrifying high-pitched shriek of hyper-compressed mana tearing through the atmosphere.
The sheer volu of the sound was agonizing... a pressure that vibrated through the teeth and bones of every living creature on the ridge.
Miles away, standing safely atop the towering, rune-carved observation deck of the Blood-Iron Watchtower, Eluned and Fenna had not been idle.
They had been ticulously tracking the Vanguard’s localized mana signatures through the highly advanced, magically-assisted scopes mounted on the heavy ballistae.
The scopes, fueled by the S-Rank Goddess’s nature mana and Fenna’s peerless archery calculations, allowed them to pierce through the heavy rain and the dense canopy of the dead forest.
When they saw Tamsin’s distinct erald signature... the beacon of the Genesis Rune beca completely enveloped by a massive swarm of hostile crawler signatures, they didn’t wait for a desperate distress signal.
They didn’t ask for permission to engage, knowing that a delay of even three seconds would result in casualties.
KRA-THOOM! KRA-THOOM! KRA-THOOM!
Three massive, devastating bolts of pure, concentrated blue artillery scread down from the heavens like catastrophic orbital strikes.
The sheer friction of the heavy projectiles moving through the atmosphere violently vaporized the freezing rain in their path, leaving three massive, perfectly straight trails of blinding white steam hanging in the gray sky.
The heavy, mythril-tipped ballista bolts slamd directly into the absolute densest clusters of the Acid-Crawler horde surrounding Tamsin’s squad.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The impacts were utterly apocalyptic.
The saturated, highly unstable mud violently cratered under the massive force, sending massive, rippling shockwaves tearing through the forest floor.
The concussive blasts were so overwhelmingly powerful that several nearby petrified Ironwood trees were instantly uprooted, their massive rotting trunks snapping like dry twigs and crashing heavily into the slop.
Dozens of the heavy, armored centipedes were instantly vaporized at the epicenter of the strikes.
The incredibly dense, magically forged artillery simply erased their biology from existence.
Those caught in the outer blast radius were violently blown into highly fragnted chunks of burning chitin, severed razor-legs, and sizzling green fluid that rained down harmlessly across the ridge.
Fenna’s peerless calculation was absolute.
The massive explosions completely bypassed the Vanguard’s defensive periter... Not a single piece of shrapnel or drop of highly corrosive acid touched the cowering rookies or the battered veterans as the destruction was entirely restricted to the enemy lines.
’Like I said... they can operate the Watchtower much better than I can.’ Tasmin thought.
The overwhelming ambush was instantly broken.
The horde’s terrifying numbers, previously suffocating the squad from all sides, were violently reduced to a fraction of their strength in less than three seconds of overwhelming artillery fire.
Tamsin stood completely unhard in the exact center of the smoking, steaming, highly acidic craters.
The extre heat of the ballista strikes had temporarily boiled the mud around her boots, baking the earth into hard, cracked clay.
She was bathed in the warm erald light of the Genesis Rune radiating from her fist as her twin daggers gripped tightly in her calloused hands.
Tasmin looked up at the bruising gray sky, tracing the lingering trails of steam leading back to the Blessed Land.
A fierce unhinged grin spread across her mud-splattered face.
’Yes that was from our Territory...’
The overwhelming dominance of their territory’s firepower sent an intoxicating rush of adrenaline straight into her brain.
They were not fighting a desperate battle at all... they were the executioners of the Umbral Basin.
Tasmin turned rapidly to her squad.
The five veteran Shieldmaidens and the five newly summoned rookies were staring at her, staring at the massive smoking craters, and staring at the raining bug parts in reverence.
Their iron swords were trembling, but not from fear of the monsters... rather from the incomprehensible awe of the firepower their Sovereign commanded.
"The Watchtower has our backs!" Tamsin roared.
The erald light from her hand flared, washing over her squad and purging the last remnants of their terror. "Do not let a single one of these surviving beasts escape into the mud! We clear this ridge! Charge!"
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