Chapter 631: Judgement (1/2)
The darkness of the Void was completely pushed away from the skyline littered with fiery spheres and the fires that raged all around Zac. He was about to make his move, but a massive foot flashed right past Zac as an earth-shattering roar caused the ground to shudder. It was Billy who was already swinging his grotesque club like a baseball player, the knobbly skull at its top aimed straight for the descending suns.
The air itself shattered like a broken mirror as Billy unleashed some sort of earthquake-like skill, but that wasn't the end of it. Enormous spikes shot out of the ground, each of them stabbing at or blocking another sun. Billy had somehow managed to take control of the Memorysteel itself, and one sun after another exploded in specular fashion.
The explosions were earth-shattering, and Zac's eyes widened in shock when they swallowed Billy whole. However, the giant quickly shot out of the flames, golden flames licking his whole body. Burns covered his whole body, but he seemed mostly fine. His hair had been singed completely clean, including his eyebrows, and Zac's mouth quirked up when he saw that he had gained a brother monk.
Billy was ultimately just one person, and there were still a huge number of attacks threatening to blow them all to kingdom come. But the shadows of the large spikes unexpectedly detached from the Memorysteel and stabbed into the air, extinguishing one sun after another. An azure tornado swept forward out of nowhere as well, rippling through a series of the attacks that the cultists had launched toward the spatial gate.
It was obviously Ogras and Thea who had appeared, but Zac couldn’t actually pinpoint their position. He guessed they were stuck on the other side of the cultist army, which was just fine considering that it forced the enemy to constantly split their attention.
Still, even with Ogras and Thea joining the fray, it wasn’t enough. There were over a thousand elites from the Church of Everlasting Dao present, and they had spent five minutes filling the glowing orbs in the sky with immense amounts of energy. Their preparations wouldn’t be stopped with one attack or two.
However, a ghastly white spear suddenly shot past Billy’s head to pierce a close-by sun with enough force to actually cause a spatial tear. The crack in space swallowed most of the subsequent explosion before both the spear and the sun were gone in a puff. Zac's eyes lit up, realizing that the Anointed’s preparations were done, and they had made their move as well.
He didn't really want to waste his second swing of [Deforestation] on the scorching suns, especially when he wasn't even sure it would work considering Infernal Axe was partly fire-based. Seeing the Anointed helping out was a relief, but he was extremely confused as he couldn't see anything with the vision granted by [Hatchetman's Spirit]. That spear had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
He turned back to see what was going on, and his eyes widened in confusion when he saw the drastic change that had taken place right under his nose.
Who were these people?
It felt like he was looking at two realities at once. [Hatchetman’s Spirit] told him that there were only the monoliths, the small group of Anointed, and the vanguard of the elite army behind him. But his actual eyes were telling a different story as they saw one fierce warrior after another appear atop the pillars.
Each of them was at least four meters tall and radiated an appalling amount of killing intent, something that was only possible after a huge amount of bloodshed. One warrior, in particular, was just shocking. It was at least seven meters tall, dwarfing even the living Anointed. It held a small spear that looked just like [Judgement] that Zac stabbed into the ground, and the air twisted around it the warrior pointed the spear forward.
The hulking Anointed in the front was clearly the leader, and the spectral warriors behind it immediately threw out a barrage of attacks. They almost blotted out the sky as they slammed into the suns, the attacks, and even toward the standing army. Glimmering golden shields erupted in front of the whole zealot army, but even they looked a bit shellshocked by the enormous force contained in the attacks.
The whole sky rumbled for an instant, and Zac could only stare in wonder as the preparations of the Church of Everlasting Dao were ripped apart in an instant.
Each spear almost contained as much power as a swing from Zac himself, and they could easily destabilize one or two suns which quickly extinguished the remaining ones. The cultists found themselves under tremendous pressure as well as cracks kept spreading across the barriers from the powerful attacks.
The soldiers were true elites though, and they didn’t panic or break ranks, but rather kept infusing their shields with more and more power. The bishop also swung a censer in his hand, and the sun above him instantaneously doubled its luminescence. It clearly had a huge effect on the army as the faltering barriers quickly recovered, and new suns started forming in the sky.
The titanic spectral Anointed in the front seemed almost alive as it glared at the bishop with death in its eyes. It threw out the copy of [Judgement] the next moment, aiming straight for the huge sun that emboldened the cultist forces. Zac had his vision blur from the tremendous conviction stored in that attack. It felt like the spear held enough force to pierce the whole mountain, let alone a puny sun.
“Seal!” the bishop roared when he saw the incoming attack, and an enormous sigil wrought in gold suddenly appeared, held aloft by four golden giants.
The twenty-meter tall giants looked harried and tortured, and fetters bound their limbs to the sigil as they hoisted it in front of them. Zac couldn’t tell whether the giants were real or something created with Cosmic Energy. Perhaps they were even corpses that had been turned into treasures. But they radiated an immense pressure, and Zac couldn’t even look into their eye sockets where white-hot runic flames burned.
The sigil was all-too-familiar as well, a perfect copy of the one he had broken over at the cultist incursion. Where it had come from, Zac had no idea, but it was continuously being empowered by the whole cultist army judging by the energy streams he could discern with [Cosmic Gaze].
Zac froze in place as he looked at the spectacle. The Church of Everlasting Dao really had some cards up their sleeve. It was a lucky break that the Anointed managed to force this enormous thing out early-on since Zac felt that he would have been forced to use a lot of effort to break it apart by himself. He could only hope that the effect of the Anointed's ultimate strike lived up to the pressure it emitted.