Wandering Knight
Chapter 496: A Clear Objective
Lightning bolts raked through the ranks of Utopia's spellcasters, the former's destructive force shattering the latter's hastily conjured shields and erasing the casters so thoroughly that not even their bones remained.
Only a scant few survived by turning incorporeal, but the black dragon hurtling toward them had no intention of sparing their lives. He smashed them mid-flight, grinding their half-formed shapes into pulp across the scorched earth.
"Lord Wang Yu's power is absurdly effective," muttered Miselyx, chief of the white dragons, a frigid gale spilling from his jaws and flash-freezing several mounted knights into brittle ice. "For these feeble magicians who rely on spells alone to shield themselves, it's nothing short of fatal. But... it seems the Utopia has no intention of letting them remain dead once their bodies collapse."
Miselyx's magical senses extended outward, probing the space around them to confirm the conjecture.
Where Utopia's casters had perished, their souls appeared.
Under ordinary circumstances, souls would dissipate swiftly once their vessels were destroyed. Unless the surroundings were unnaturally calm, even moderate surges of magic or ambient energy could tear apart a soul bereft of its flesh. Yet here, that rule no longer held.
Each fallen spellcaster's soul was wrapped in a sheath of void energy, slipping through hair-thin fractures in space back toward the void, the Utopia's domain. There, where they could be sheltered and strengthened, finding a new vessel for them would be a trivial matter.
"Caught them," Avia whispered from where she remained in the void.
In her hand hung an eerie lantern, its pale green flames licking the glass. Within danced countless tiny sparks, writhing like trapped fireflies: souls caught by necromantic chains.
These were the remnants of the Utopia's dead, attempting to slip into the void... but this region lay dangerously close to Wang Yu's own domain. Souls passing through would find themselves wandering into a tiger's maw. With the exception of a few rare escapees, they were all seized by avia's soul-binding arts.
"Can you glean anything about Utopia from them?" Wang Yu asked Avia.
To the intelligent races of the continent, the Utopia remained an enigma. Why did they act? What did they seek? And what fate awaited the world should they succeed? No one knew.
This ignorance had produced a deeply troubling consequence: it was impossible to rally the entire continent to war.
Though almost all kingdoms now offered their available resources to the Alliance and Skyborne City, the combined strength assembled here was far weaker than the armies once mustered against the abyssal creatures.
The difference did not lie merely in the absence of armies. It lay in something far greater: whether the gods themselves would intervene.
Against abyssal foes, malicious and dead-set on annihilation, every living being understood with perfect clarity that failure meant extinction. There could be no hesitation nor compromise—only total war. Thus, divine avatars descended by the dozens, called forth by the unified, desperate will of their believers.
But far too little was known about the Utopia. Even after the tragedy in the theocracy of the God of Light and the devastation wrought by their spires, few could truly grasp the consequences of defeat.
Divine descent was only possible with the unified will of the god's believers, a rare thing indeed. It had only been possible during the exceptional crisis of the abyssal invasion, in which every living being had been viscerally aware of the dangers.
But where the Utopia was concerned, a small minority even believed that the Utopia's "paradise" might be worth attempting. Absolute unity was impossible.
The Utopia's approach was more like a slow knife to the flesh. They were not invaders from beyond, but fellow mortals. Such an adversary was far too easy to underestimate.
Given the persistence of such fantasies among the populace, any effort to oppose Utopia was bound to be hindered. There was a very real danger that the Utopia might be able to complete whatever designs they pursued. Compared to the genocide once unleashed by abyssal creatures, the creation of their "nodes" seemed far more anodyne.
Ordinary citizens could hardly grasp this truth, but there were those wise enough to see it. The Alliance and Skyborne City werew orking precisely to prevent such an outcome: gathering the resources entrusted to them by all nations, concentrating power to its utmost, and bearing the responsibility of waging war in their stead.
And yet, despite all the battles thus far, the Utopia remained shrouded in obscurity. Beyond the steadily rising assessment of their threat, little else was clear. To glean even a sliver of useful information from these souls at such a moment would be a tremendous breakthrough.
Avia focused, gathering a small wisp of necromantic power at her fingertip. She touched it to the lantern, a vessel forged from materials drawn from the undead plane, saturated with deathly magic. Within, the flickering flames stirred and brushed against the souls she had bound.
But even with all her caution, the moment her necromancy brushed their awareness, the souls detonated from within.
A chain reaction erupted. One after another, the blue-gray lantern's captives burst apart. The blast shattered the lantern in her hands, and a surge of psychic energy shot straight toward the young woman—only to be instantly swallowed and rendered utterly harmless by the cube that shielded her soul.
"No use. It failed. The Utopia must have tampered with the souls of its members to prevent any foreign necromancy from the Alliance or Skyborne City."
There was a trace of regret in her voice as she explained everything to Wang Yu. They could not extract any practical intelligence. But she had discovered something else.
"These souls seem... connected to some vast existence," Avia murmured. "Somewhere in the void. And its general location is close to where we're heading."
Her gaze pierced the boundary of Wang Yu's domain, looking down toward the depths of the void. At last, she could guess how the Utopia possessed so many members.
"There's no way these people lived openly in the material world," she said softly. "That would leave traces and evidence. We would have found something by now. So the only plausible method is that the souls of Utopia's members from ages past were preserved in the void itself."
Avia nodded faintly and shared her deduction with Wang Yu.
"So those ruins that suddenly appeared earlier were vessels prepared for these old souls lingering in the void?" Wang Yu asked. "As long as they find new bodies for them, they can return their members to the world in whatever era they choose. In this case, our era."
Wang Yu leveled the Primeval Lance Kasimir. After it charged up, he sent a beam of life force scything across the battlefield, erasing the last cluster of Utopia spellcasters suppressed beneath the Chariot's Silent Hall.
"I think that's the case," Avia replied, though she avoided absolutes.
"So all we really need to do is reach that place and destroy whatever vessel is storing the souls of the Utopia's members. Do that, and the Utopia is basically finished, right?"
Wang Yu's eyes were fixed on the distant horizon, where something vast was beginning to stir.
"Well, it's a slight deviation from the original plan, but yes. If that's what you want to do, I'm in full agreement."
Avia laughed lightly. Predicting Wang Yu's intent had become second nature to her—and she had to admit, this was perfectly reasonable. In essence, the plan hadn't changed at all. The target had merely become clearer.
"Then it's settled. But first, let's clean up the battlefield. Looks like the Utopia is finally committing to full-scale war."
Wang Yu answered with a matching smile. The two understood each other far too well.
Far off in the distance, directly above the underground entrance at the heart of the Ashen Wastes, the colossal phantom that had initially shown up on the Bloodfang Empire's battlefield made its reappearance. Raising both arms high, it unleashed a sweeping torrent of psychic energy.
Wang Yu lifted his hand. The power of the Tree of the Night flowed into him. With a backward sweep, he sent viscous darkness surging over the bodies of the dragons behind him. The Lady of the Night's power would shield their minds.
"Move out. Time to give Utopia a surprise assault."
The Sword of Darkness, a blade capable of erasing an existence, rested in Wang Yu's grip. He passed through the ranks of dragons and erased their presence one by one. Before the oncoming psychic tide reached them, Wang Yu and the dragons vanished from the Ashen Wastes.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the battlefield, Skyborne City's forces, steadily advancing and crushing Utopia's spires with legendary strength and the might of their war machines, also noticed the distant phantom rising over the horizon.
"Activate the World Anchor's defenses. Temporarily sever the link between the void and the material plane. Prevent any mental intrusion."
Icarus gave a command. Deep within Skyborne City, the World Anchor slowly projected its unique power outward. The skyborne metropolis no longer needed the aid of gods to withstand attacks like these.