Sshk! Sshk! Sshk!
The iridescent Sword of the God of War, blazing with a towering aura, swept savagely across the third defensive line that blocked the Titan army, cutting through it like a red-hot blade through butter.
"Proclaim! I govern slaughter, and I govern life. What I wound, I also heal. None may cross beyond my palm, none may flee my gaze, none may resist the edge of my spear!
Rely on me, learn from me, obey me!
By the covenant of Heaven's mandate, I repay with forgiveness and revenge, I grant trust and betrayal; I answer hope with despair, light with darkness, and all living things with a death of blind night.
The Seventh Note sounds! With the fallen blood of the Ancient Serpent Satan, I temper an edge that shatters time and space, and bring back the apocalypse that disassembles all things!"
The god-chant poured from Samael's lips like a song, instantly stirring the Ether around them into a frenzy. A crimson-black inverted cross of light condensed at the spear tip, then toppled forward with overwhelming force.
Boom!
Power crashed into power. The violent node of the Ether torrent first compressed, collapsing into a suffocating point, then detonated with a thunderous roar. Wherever it swept, space shattered and sheared, time slowed to a halt, and starlight was snuffed out. Blinding colors smeared across the world until day and night became indistinguishable, as if everything had returned to primordial chaos.
Massive pillars of light shot in every direction. Some struck the sea, carving bottomless trenches. Others raked the land, cleaving mountains and severing rivers. Others tore across the sky, scattering clouds into tatters…
Under the blast's reach, thousands of the Titan army were reduced to ash.
But the third defensive line did not escape unscathed. Dozens of light columns swept back in. The outer barrier trembled violently for a few breaths, then burst like a soap bubble with a single poke.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
In an instant, the remaining beams, still carrying their terrifying force, ripped through the city walls engraved with dense spellwork and rampaged deep into the Peloponnese hinterlands.
Explosions thundered until the air rang. Flames spread in every direction. Melted rock turned to scalding magma, bubbling and surging as it flowed.
As far as the eye could see, the earth split into crisscrossing ravines. Forests burned in towering fires. Rivers steamed away to nothing. Mountains collapsed with deafening crashes. The screams and wails rising and falling in waves felt almost trivial in the face of such an apocalyptic calamity, quickly swallowed by the roar of everything else.
Pfft!
As the aftershock settled and smoke and dust billowed, Samael still stood upright on the walls. Having thrown everything he had into blunting the strike, his face had gone sallow as he spat a mouthful of dark, reversed blood.
"Obstacles ahead cleared. Aberrant star patterns activated. Energy-medium core overload drive engaged. Continue execution of the extermination directive!"
Above the Storm Sea, light and darkness flickered. After a brief pause, that cold declaration resonated from the chest of the Alien Vanguard.
Then the three alien giants, standing apart in a triangle, raised their Swords of the God of War. Dazzling bands of light shot outward, drawing in layered rings of radiance that lit up one after another and began to turn. In distant response, the tear-shaped celestial body surfaced from the river of stars, expanding into a vast stellar ring formed from densely packed light patterns that stretched without end.
At once, countless starlights rained down. All the aberrations under the Alien Vanguard's control—living or not—threw back their heads and shrieked. Red light surged over their bodies as they charged like mad toward every breach torn open along the third defensive line.
And as they surged forward, Titan soldiers gathered light spears in their palms and hurled them ahead. They slammed into the walls and detonated one after another, shaking the fortifications violently.
"Spears up! Shields forward! Don't let those bastards break in!"
"Roar! Sparta!"
Three well-built young men hammered their shields and bellowed at the top of their lungs. Answering the call, the Spartan soldiers surged together, bristling like a hedgehog as they formed a tight phalanx and plugged one of the gaps.
They were the sons Heracles had rescued from the Pure Land of Bliss. They carried blood much like the Spartans', possessed formidable strength, and the moment they entered the city, they were welcomed with loud acclaim.
"Woof—!"
Dozens of half-metal demon hound aberrations, frighteningly fast, raced across the cratered, fissured ground outside the walls, howling as they slammed toward the shield wall blocking the broken breach.
But as the monsters closed in and leapt, spears shot out through the gaps in the shields, instantly skewering them like meat on a spit and flicking them away.
Even so, the demon hounds were all steel sinew and iron bone, stubbornly hard to kill. After the first storm of thrusts, only about a third were left paralyzed. Most hit the ground, rolled once, shook off the dust, bared their fangs with a hiss, and charged again.
"Boom!"
Worse still, a Titan soldier that had appeared on the front line hurled a light spear. The blast ripped open a gap in the shield wall.
The vicious demon hounds swarming nearby surged in at once, pinning down the exposed Spartan soldiers who'd lost their cover. They bit, dragged, and hauled them toward the breach.
Tooth-grinding cracks of splintering bone and tearing flesh followed in waves, and the screams of men were quickly swallowed by the seemingly endless, feral tide outside the walls.
"Trembling is for the enemy! Spartans never retreat!"
Heracles' three sons and the divine-blood heroes holding the line as its pillars roared as they stepped forward. The Spartans followed without hesitation, throwing their own bodies into the gap to rebuild the shield wall with flesh and blood, forcing the Titan-dominated, violently warped monsters back out of the breach.
For a time, the battlefield became nothing but sound: Mana-bolt explosions, shields shattering, javelins ripping through the air, monsters howling, bodies being torn apart… a brutal, blood-soaked chorus.
And it wasn't only the Spartan sector. The bays guarded by Troezen and Thessaly were ringed tight by dense waves of snakewomen and aberrant sea beasts crawling ashore.
Along the flanking mountain routes sealed by Arcadia and Calydon, humanoid combat weapons swarmed, relentlessly hunting down archers and Magical Beasts hiding in the forests.
Even Athens' elite Pegasus knights, faced with wide-area annihilation weapons that blanketed the field, could barely maneuver. They were being worn down piece by piece.
The sector built on the protruding point of the line, where the most elite divine-blood Meritorious Warriors were concentrated, took the first удар head-on. They had to face enemies several times their number.
Even the nearby gods of Olympus, despite pulling their line inward and concentrating greater strength, were hardly better off.
Because thousands of Titan soldiers, spears planted like a forest, were advancing in a vast tide—along with aberrant Atlantean soldiers and the Olympian guards, all surging forward in overwhelming numbers.
And as time dragged on, these aberrations grew more and more twisted. Their hunger to attack, and the sheer intensity of their assaults, kept spiking upward.
Under that savage pressure, the defensive lines of both humans and gods nearly snapped more than once.
With the Magecraft barrier gone and seven or eight breaks torn open, the third defensive line devolved into a hellish tug-of-war, both sides fighting like mad to seize—or seal—each breach.
The colossal millstone called "war" kept turning, grinding every aberration, every human, every god thrown into it into splattered mud and blood, flung carelessly across the field.
Pfft!
A silver streak flashed past. Riding her Pegasus, Athena drove her spear straight through a Titan soldier that was swinging at the walls.
With its core shattered, the creature—bones warped, sinew and muscle tangled into rampant growth, its swollen body grotesquely expanded—collapsed with a heavy crash. Before the dust even cleared, the corpse beneath her disintegrated, dissolving into a filthy slurry of metal fragments that sprayed in every direction.
It was obvious: the increasingly severe titanization of these aberrations was burning their potential as fuel, pushing their mutation deeper and deeper.
Even if they weren't slain, sooner or later they would collapse on their own.
But facing a horde so vast you couldn't see its end, Athena couldn't convince herself that "sooner or later" mattered. Before the monsters fell apart by themselves, the human side might be wiped out first.
Less than an hour remained until dawn.
Casualties—among humans and gods alike—had already exceeded a third, edging close to half.
And yet, compared to the slaughter she'd expected, this was still… better.
So why hadn't the Alien Vanguard in the Storm Sea moved? What were they doing?
Athena's brow tightened, and an unshakable unease coiled in her chest.