Global Lords: Building the Strongest Civilization with SSS Rank Talent-Chapter 65: BATTLE OF THE SWAMP (ii)

Fifty Paladins plummeted twenty feet into the pitch-black darkness of the trench.

Their magical armor was designed to deflect glancing blows and resist elemental magic. It was not designed to stop the sheer kinetic force of a three-hundred-pound man falling onto upward-facing spikes made of hyper-dense, anti-magic Star-Iron.

SCHLICK. CRUNCH. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

The sound of metal puncturing metal echoed through the trench, followed instantly by a chorus of agonized screams.

Drusus was impaled through the thigh. His golden armor sparked as the Star-Iron violently rejected his holy wards, short-circuiting his magical defenses. He thrashed in the dark, blood pouring into the muddy water at the bottom of the pit.

"Form up!" Drusus screamed, his voice cracking with panic. "Light! Give me light!"

Several surviving Paladins raised their hands, channeling their Divine Share. Blinding solar flares illuminated the trench, revealing the absolute carnage. Half the squad was dead, pinned like insects to a board.

"Look up!" a Paladin shrieked.

Above them, the silhouettes of small, reptilian figures appeared at the edge of the pit.

SPLAT. SPLAT. SPLAT.

Dozens of clay pots rained down into the trench, shattering against the Paladins’ armor and the stone walls.

The thick, neon-green slurry of Crawler’s Kiss splashed everywhere.

"Acid!" Drusus yelled, raising his shield. "Hold your wards!"

But the acid didn’t behave like normal acid. It didn’t eat the gold. It seeped into the microscopic gaps between the plates, finding the iron chainmail and leather straps underneath.

The chemical reaction was instantaneous. The iron flash-rusted, expanding rapidly. The heat spiked to four hundred degrees in a matter of seconds.

Men began to scream, thrashing wildly as their own armor cooked them alive. They desperately clawed at their clasps, trying to strip the boiling gold off their flesh, but the rusted joints wouldn’t budge.

"By the Sun..." Drusus sobbed, his skin blistering beneath his breastplate. He aimed his palm upward, preparing to unleash a massive blast of solar fire to collapse the trench walls.

Before the spell could leave his hand, a massive, gray-skinned shadow dropped from the edge of the pit.

Warlord Gorak landed with a heavy splash. He didn’t wear armor and the acid didn’t bother his thick, subterranean hide.

His eyes glowed with pure, savage joy as he swung his massive Star-Iron maul like a golf club.

It connected with Drusus’s chest plate. The anti-magic metal shattered the golden armor like glass, caving in the Captain’s ribcage with a sickening CRUNCH. Drusus was thrown backward, instantly dead.

"The mud!" Gorak roared, his voice echoing over the screams of the dying Sun-Men. "The mud does not care about your rank!"

From the shadows of the trench, two dozen Troglodytes poured out from hidden side-tunnels, wielding Star-Iron pickaxes and heavy clubs. They fell upon the blinded, cooking, trapped Paladins like a pack of starving wolves.

There were no grand duels, nor honorable combat. It was an extermination. The heavy armor that made the Paladins invincible on an open field turned them into trapped turtles in the trench.

Up in the trees, the Kobolds didn’t even need to fire their crossbows. Sludge watched the slaughter, happily clicking his tongue. "Sun-Men make bad soup," Sludge gurgled. "Too crunchy."

Up in the Void, Red watched the blue Omni-Web map.

Fifty bright yellow dots had wandered into Sector 4 of the outer perimeter. Then, they simply blinked out of existence.

Red checked his interface.

[ ENEMY CASUALTIES: 50/50 ]

[ BASTION CASUALTIES: 0 ]

[ LOOT ACQUIRED: 50 SETS OF DAMAGED ENCHANTED ARMOR (SCRAP VALUE HIGH) ]

"Lord Ka-Lam-Tee," Gorak’s voice came through, panting heavily, the sound of wet mud squelching in the background. "The first trap is sprung. The shiny ones break easy when they fall."

[ Strip the bodies, ] Red ordered coldly. [ Take their weapons, their canteens, and their gold. Throw the corpses out of the trench so the next patrol finds them. Let Aurelius see exactly what hunting in my swamp costs. ]

"Yes, Lord." Gorak chuckled. "We found their map, too. Three more hunting parties are walking toward the eastern bogs."

Red leaned back in his throne, his violet eyes locked onto the approaching targets on the Omni-Web.

[ Send Razor-Fin to the bogs. ] Red commanded. [ Tell him to pull them under. I want Aurelius to wake up tomorrow morning realizing his army is starving to death, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. ]

Three miles away from Gorak’s slaughter, the second hunting party was drowning in their own exhaustion.

Unlike the dense mangrove forests, the eastern bogs were deceptively open. Wide expanses of still, green water stretched between islands of weeping willows. The surface was carpeted in a thick layer of duckweed, making it impossible to tell where the solid ground ended and the bottomless sinkholes began.

Lieutenant Cassius led forty Paladins across a narrow ridge of mud. Their golden armor, once the pride of the Sun Spire, was caked in foul-smelling gray slime. They had found no boars or deer. Only locusts the size of a man’s fist that bit through their undershirts.

"Water," a young Paladin wheezed, dropping to his knees at the edge of the ridge. He stared at a small, clear pool that had pooled over a bed of smooth stones, somehow free of the green algae. "It’s clear. By the Sun, it’s clear."

"Wait!" Cassius ordered, raising a hand. He scanned the tree line. The silence of the swamp was unnerving. "It could be tainted."

"I don’t care," the young knight sobbed, ripping off his golden helm. He threw it aside, plunging his bare hands into the cool water and bringing it to his cracked lips.

He took one desperate gulp.

Then, the ’smooth stones’ at the bottom of the pool opened their yellow, slitted eyes.

SPLASH.

A scaled hand, the color of muddy water, shot out from the pond. Claws dug into the young Paladin’s breastplate, and with a terrifying, violent jerk, the knight was pulled headfirst into the water.

"To arms!" Cassius roared, drawing his glowing broadsword. "Magic! Light up the water!"

The Paladins rushed the edge of the bank, thrusting their hands forward to cast Solar Flares into the pool. But the water didn’t illuminate. It churned violently, kicking up clouds of black silt and mud that swallowed the light instantly.

For three agonizing seconds, they watched the young knight thrash beneath the surface, his air bubbles racing to the top. Then, a dark, serrated blade of Star-Iron pierced up through the water, sliding cleanly through the soft leather under the knight’s armpit.

The water turned a deep, cloudy red, and... the thrashing stopped.

"Back to the trees!" Cassius yelled, realizing the bank was a death trap.