Book 9, Chapter 55

The Third Wave

Looking at the last section of darkness on his magic map, Richard ordered all of his flying beasts to gather together and advance towards the reaper base at full speed. Hundreds of the tiny warships immediately chased after them, but they tried their best to dodge attacks and flew towards the core without hesitation. When one of the drones eventually broke through, it came upon a thin layer of mist surrounding the base that blocked even the gods from prying. The creature crossed the mist with ease, but Richard’s eyes went wide as it saw just what was on the other side.

The reapers now had a huge ship with them, over a thousand metres long!

As the drone was decimated by dozens of energy beams, Richard’s table was destroyed by a loss of control. He shivered for a moment before steadying himself, transmitting the last image to his followers, “That thing is mine, none of you are to try and interfere.”

No one retorted, but legendary auras flared up all throughout Faelor as the party prepared for what would come next. Having been found out, the reapers quickly started charging across the lands in a black tide that spelt destruction for everything in its path.

This time, even Richard didn’t try to count just how many enemies there would be. It would only be a scant few hours before both sides met, and in that time he prepared his army to function purely under Nasia’s lead. His own goal was simple; he had to keep killing the enemies until none were left, and it would be a question of which side ran out first.

……

The third battle against the reapers thus began. Richard occupied his usual spot at the head of his army, facing the enormous black silhouette that attracted the gaze of everyone below. Both the astral chrysalis and the broodmother were as big or bigger, but Norlanders were far more accustomed to enormous living beings than machines of such size. Although they had already fought in two battles, most of the Archeron warriors paled as they estimated the sheer power that this warship would possess. If a single elephant could kill a hundred of them, then what about this machine that was a hundred times its size?

“The big thing is mine,” Richard’s voice suddenly reverberated throughout the battlefield, “I’ll leave the rest to you.”

The entire battlefield went silent for a few seconds, but someone then bellowed with a hoarse voice, “NO PROBLEM, BOSS!”

“LEAVE IT TO US!” “WE’LL KILL THEM ALL!” “I WON’T FALL BACK UNTIL I DIE!” A sea of roars quickly flooded the battlefield moments later, prompting a smile from Richard as he drew his holy sword and started walking towards the enemy. Every step caused tremors in the ground, the distance covered growing larger and larger until he started zipping through like a bolt of lightning. His figure quickly started to blur as he crossed thousands of metres in a few steps.

Richard’s path left a trail of carnage behind. Everything within ten metres lost control and started shaking, the units on the ground floating up while the warships started spinning around without any way to break free. Both quickly exploded into balls of fire, blood, flesh, and metal forming the road of the Archeron King.

Moments before he was under the enormous warship, Richard suddenly jumped up and flew a kilometre into the sky to vault on top of it. He then crashed into it with a thousand tonnes of weight, leaving a cloud of fire behind as he disappeared into its interior.

A deafening cheer rang out from the Archeron army as the soldiers realised he had infiltrated successfully, many starting to celebrate with the expectation that it would crash and burn. Although they knew the enemy was powerful, they considered Richard a symbol of invincibility.

The ship slowly came to a stop, vibrating constantly in the sky, but the other reaper warships continued moving forward and reached the army in the blink of an eye. Energy beams quickly drowned out the cheers, forming a battle where one could be attacked from all sides. Even as they fought back against the flesh warriors below, the stronger soldiers started taking out any warships they could to lessen the pressure.

…

When he entered the ship, Richard was shocked to find that he had dropped into an enclosed room. There was no door nor window here, not even machinery; only holes for energy beams to be shot from every wall. He roared and swung his sword forward, tearing a ten-metre long passage in front of him, but as he blinked to the end of that corridor he was still met with a number of powerful energy beams. He immediately broke down through the metal to escape, but the first thing he met there was yet another attack. There was another enclosed room at the end of the passage he had opened up, and as he looked back he realised he had also passed through a number more in the middle.

However, this room had a few vague clicking sounds and felt slightly different from the rest. Richard immediately pointed his sword in the direction of the noise and blasted another passage through, coming upon a larger space with a strange machine within. He smiled with glee and blinked in, only to find that the thing was only about as big as six of the tiny rooms with the machine occupying most of the space.

A simple palm attack shattered the machine into a number of tubes, with dense energy surging from a central one that was transferred out through the rest. He quickly realised that this was a furnace that provided energy for the beam attacks, but a frown crawled up his face. It was simply too small to power the entire ship, and from the looks of it there had to be hundreds all over.

Blue flames started to melt through the metal as Richard chose another direction and surged forward, a loud explosion ringing out behind him as the core exploded. However, most of the impact was isolated to the vicinity of the blast, with rooms only a few dozen metres away barely damaged. This definitely wasn’t enough to affect the ship’s structure.

After finding another energy core a short distance away, he confirmed that there was no central core or control centre for this thing, and the only way to destroy it from within was to take out all of the individual energy centres. However, that meant he had to blow the entire thing apart, and its design was making that extremely difficult to accomplish from within.

In a way, this scenario reminded him of the broodmother’s methods. She didn’t care for one or even a hundred of her thought nodes, because she had spread thousands all around her body to ensure that there wasn’t a single weak point. The loss from even a full quarter of the centres would only be a minor slowdown of her thought process.

However, this meant the most effective way to do this was to attack from the outside. Richard immediately chose a direction and rushed straight through until he could exit the ship, sweeping his sword in a huge arc to destroy hundreds of energy beams chasing after him. A fireball was then shot towards the depths of the passage he had dug out, enhanced to form the Core-Melting Explosion. The explosive attack travelled into the depths of the ship before it swelled up from within, raging columns of flames exploding out from the two holes.

A huge crack was formed on the warship’s hull.