Dragon Gods Reign

[Ilnori]

Turning her body into pure electricity as soon as she stepped off the floating platform, Serania became a bolt of lightning as she rushed toward the ground. Quickly pulling ahead of the others, she reached the ground seconds before them and before the human army had even a chance to react.

Striking down in the middle of one unit's formations, she sent the nearby soldiers flying back with only the shockwave of her landing. With a mere thought from her, this was followed by arcs of electricity latching onto them and other nearby soldiers, quickly burning holes into their armors and electrocuting and frying the men.

Discharging the pure lightning she had turned her body into through this, Serania’s form then emerged in the smoke her impact had thrown up as she deactivated the mythical rank upgrade of the elemental body ability. Instead reducing its effect to the one mages gain when they reach the peak fourth rank, she stepped out of the smoke with electricity crackling on her skin.

Calmly turning her head to scan across her gathered enemies, she abruptly doubled back to the strongest mana user in the group. Holding eye contact with him as she wordlessly raised an arm, she let the electricity crackling around her surge through it.

Exploding forward in a bundle of lightning strands, it split just before reaching the man, striking him in hundreds of places on his body simultaneously and sending hundreds of millions of volts into his body. Within the blink of an eye, the intense heat generated by this vaporized his body completely, leaving an empty, half-molten armor to clatter to the ground.

Lowering her arm after this, Serania found the other soldiers frozen. Blankly staring at the spot where their comrade had stood moments prior, they were trapped in a mix of confusion, shock, and disbelief.

Amid this heavy atmosphere, it didn’t take long for the first soldier's nerves to snap.

“CHAAARGE!” Shouting loudly, the man started sprinting toward Serania with his weapon raised.

Rattled awake by his war cry, the rest of the unit also set in motion. For many, this took a similar form as the initial soldier, with them charging at Serania with their weapons raised while loudly shouting battle cries.

Seeing them run at her, Serania started to concentrate. In doing so, time seemed to slow to a crawl for her as she stopped limiting her thoughts to a normal speed. And while her movements didn’t accelerate with it, against the approaching mass of mostly manaless humans she didn’t need gestures to focus her spells better.

As such, the only thing limiting how fast she could cast spells was her control speed. Though in her case this wasn’t much of a limit, with it being so high that even her accelerated thoughts were barely fast enough to follow her mana when she moved it at the highest speed she could.

Combined with the expanded computing capabilities that also come with advancing through the ranks as a mage, this allowed her to manifest a handful of spell circles around herself with every moment that passed for her accelerated perception of time.

For the manaless soldiers meanwhile, a hundred spells simply exploded into existence within a second.

Even the two remaining mana users among them didn't get a much better picture of what happened, with the spell circles existing for so little time before the spell activated that they only appeared as a minuscule blink on their mana senses. In fact, her casting time was so fast that if it hadn’t been for the massive number of spells she cast, the two aura users probably wouldn’t even have registered them before they activated.

But even with this forewarning, the two had no chance to dodge when the forest was lit up blue and red as fire and lightning streaked through the air.

Unfazed by the inferno she just unleashed, Serania kept guiding the few spells that still needed her attention after their casting finished even as flames swept across her personal shield. Using her mana sense to see past the raging flames, she surveyed her surroundings for survivors while also following the few soldiers that had turned tail and ran.

Sending the guided projectiles after the latter group, she mercilessly struck them down. During this, she would also occasionally send a bolt of lightning flying through the flames, striking down any survivors.

This onslaught would last only a couple of seconds before it managed to eradicate the entire unit of soldiers.

Upon sensing the life force of her last enemy fade after she had pierced his chest with a ball of lightning, Serania made the flames around her vanish with a casual flick of her hands. In doing so, she revealed a nearly completely untouched forest, though she didn’t pay this any attention.

Instead taking a look around to make sure she didn’t overlook any enemies, she soon turned around. Pushing off the ground and shooting into the sky with lightning trailing behind her, she only briefly stayed in the air before finding her next targets and diving toward them.

In those few seconds though, she overlooked the entire battlefield where Darganth and the rest of their group had just or were still in the midst of joining the fray.

Watching as the elves of Venrie’s guard easily broke through the barriers of the outlying platforms, she directly noted those as solved.

Cutting through the human ranks with fast yet precise movements, the elves quickly overwhelmed the human intruders at their entry point. While doing so, they spread out and moved toward different exists, vanishing into the hollow branches and toward the connected structures.

Like this, they swept through large swaths of the network in only a few minutes. Clearing out any resistance they encountered during this with ruthless efficiency, they vastly reduced the pressure on the original defenders as they pushed the human soldiers back and cornered them in only a few positions.

Leaving the remaining enemy to the defenders who were already rallying again, they soon also joined the fighting on the ground.

By then, Serania had long since rejoined the fight. Having spotted Jennia, Allaire, and Darganth amid the chaos shortly after she noticed the Venrie’s guards, she had mentally noted even more directions as taken care of.

In the first of these, Allaire was annihilating human unis with a similar surgical precision as the elven elite was displaying just over a hundred meters above her.

With each shot she let loose from her bow, mana users fell practically unnoticed as an arrow cleanly shot through their chest or head.

In between shots, she easily weaved through the human units that were surrounding her. Completely ignoring the manaless individuals among them, she would only strike back against the mana users among her attackers.

Amid the chaos of the fighting, the soldiers didn’t notice this, with few bearing witness to the deaths of more than two or three mana users. As such, they didn’t notice when after only a minute or two nearly all of their supporting mana users had either fled or died under Allaire’s attacks.

Having herself kept track of this fully, Allaire soon changed her pattern when another minute later the last mana user near her fell. Before the body of the woman in question even hit the ground, she already swung her bow over her shoulder and secured it on her back before dashing upward.

Leaving thousands of confused soldiers behind her, she conjured up two wings of manifested aura on her back and rose even higher than her jump had carried her. Landing on one of the pathways connecting the network of fortified positions to the tower, she let her gaze wander across the battlefield.

By then, Serania had long since rejoined the fight and was already close to destroying her new opponents. The areas to Allaire’s left and right were meanwhile similarly taken care of by Darganth and Jennia.

As such, Allaire saw no need to rejoin the fight at that time, instead choosing to make her way along the pathway toward the tower. Once there, she jumped down into the protruding bridge that extended outward from the battlement on one of its upper floors and to which the branch connected.

Glancing down the pathway in the direction of the tower to make sure she wasn’t misidentified as an intruder, she leaned against the wall where the branch melded into the stone walkway.

Looking toward Jennia from there, she watched as the other woman tore through one unit after the other in a wild onslaught that stood in stark contrast to her own fight.

After having transformed into her true form upon landing, she had immediately searched for the highest concentration of enemy forces and charged into their direction. Drawing the surrounding air to her and dragging it along as she moved, she had formed a small tornado around herself by the time she reached her targets.

Crashing into their formation, she lashed out with her heads and tail as she plowed straight through it. In doing so, she threw hundreds of soldiers off their feet, leaving them to be swept up by the raging winds that surrounded her.

Spinning around helplessly, these soldiers could only pray not to hit one of the many trees as Jennia released her hold over the tornado and sent it flying into the forest.

Meanwhile, Jennia herself circled back around as soon as she emerged on the other side of the formation. Leaping against a tree with an agility not expected for a creature of her size, she turned around quickly and while retaining much of her momentum.

This time charging along a path that was a few degrees left of where she came from, she headed for one of the groups of soldiers that had dispersed after her first attack.

Gathering darkness around herself as she approached, she launched a volley of black spikes that were nearly invisible in the darkness of the night. Tearing into her enemies' formation, they sowed confusion and fear as tens of soldiers keeled over without apparent cause.

As such, the group didn’t manage to mount even the tiniest bit of resistance when Jennia’s heads started launching at them. Catching or dismembering around a handful of soldiers with each bite, she reduced them to only a dozen or so survivors by the time she had passed them.

Not continuing to bother with them or the rest of their unit and instead leaving that to the elves, Jennia directly searched for her next target. And unlike Serania and Allaire, she quickly found it even while darting around the forest thanks to her multiple heads.

As such, she was already charging through the forest again when a line of green light easily a hundred meters long lit up in the distance.

Turning one of her heads in that direction, she quickly noticed that it was near where Darganth had gone. And being quite confident that few other beings present besides the two of them could create such a powerful emission of time energy, she felt reassured enough to keep focusing on her part of the battlefield.

Thus continuing on her path, she soon after noticed that a second unit of the human army had grouped up with her original target, with their combined formation having hunkered down in preparation for her attack.

Undeterred, she kept charging through the hail of spell-fire that erupted from their formation a moment later with a grin. Leaving projectiles of all elements to bounce off her scales and formless spells to harmlessly dissolve in the face of her innate resistance, she soon pounced and came crashing down in the middle of their formation.

Meanwhile, in the direction she had looked moments prior, Darganth was lowering his arm after having torn open a gap into the time-stream.

After he had landed together with the others, he hadn’t immediately joined the fight like the others. Instead, he had unleashed the full might of his dragon's fear and calmly walked into a direction that wasn’t covered yet.

Keeping the spear that he had recently created as a temporary substitute for his original weapon at the ready, he made his way toward the main body of the human army. In contrast to those who had been assaulting the elven fortress, the soldiers that were still stationed there also included third, fourth, and likely even mythic ranks.

And while the last one wasn’t confirmed as they hadn’t managed to locate the duke nor the elite under his command, until they managed to draw him out onto the battlefield he would settle with fighting fourth ranks.

On his path, Darganth barely encountered any soldiers, with most having fled as soon as his dragon's fear had washed over them. What little resistance he encountered were mostly lone mana users.

Raising his left arm when the first of them came into his view, he immediately dispatched off him with a searing beam of flames that tore through the aura user's armor and chest.

Turning out of the trajectory of the ice shard that flew at him in response, Darganth swirled around and pointed his hand at the mage who had fired it. Making an upward swiping motion with two fingers, he formed a visible mana circle beneath the man’s feet.

Erupting into a largely transparent pillar of shimmering red energy that stretched upward for dozens of meters, the spell completely incinerated the man when it activated a moment later.

Already having turned back into the direction he was walking, Darganth had a few seconds of pause before the next enemy came into view.

Easily dispatching of him and the four others that arrived over the following minute with a single spell each, he was surprised when he noticed an entire unit approaching him while dealing with the last one.

Not interested in letting them slow him down, Darganth turned his free hand into a claw and let time-attuned mana flow into it. Simultaneously pointing his outstretched arm in the direction of the approaching formation of soldiers, he slashed downward and cut through the air with his claws.

In doing so, he tore open a hole in reality.

Immediately, a tiny fraction of the time stream’s energy came pouring out from it. Coalescing into a tiny copy of its source as it rushed through the forest, this stream of time energy washed over the group of soldiers approaching Darganth.

During this, most of its power was kept focused in the stream itself, with a small film of the mana barrier separating reality from the elemental energies having stuck to the stream as it was breached.

But while it kept the highly destructive nature of the time energies mostly in check, it couldn’t do so fully. As such, wisps of energy would occasionally manage to break past it, destroying reality itself wherever they came into contact until they were fully depleted.

The result of this were areas that were reminiscent of the astral realm, consisting of an emptiness even greater than the vacuum of space. Even new matter entering them wouldn’t change this and instead be destroyed itself as the physical realm onto which the elemental energies would normally imprint to create matter didn’t exist there.

And while this created an extremely hazardous environment, it didn’t last long. Only moments after any given spot in reality was torn apart, the universe started to repair itself. Ikrus didn’t even need to consciously start this, nor did it notice if it wasn’t paying attention to it.

As such, when the large stream of time energy faded a few seconds later after the initial tear that Darganth had caused shot itself, it didn’t take long for the traces of what happened to vanish.

What remained was a stretch of forest multiple hundred meters long in which dozens of years had passed in only a few seconds.

In it, the bodies of the human soldiers, or what remained of them, lay scattered in between traces of withered and rotting trees. Having had tens of years of time rush through their entire being, not just their physical body as most common age-related spells do it, their life force had rapidly depleted as the rate at which it was expended to fuel their bodies also rose.

And with their bodies lacking the intake of nourishment that they need as fuel to keep producing life force, this rapidly led to starvation even among the mana user. Unlike the manaless soldiers that had been the first to die due to thirst, the more efficient life-force usage of their bodies had initially allowed them to ward this off.

Though once their reserves had been depleted, their death was near instantaneous. Not only did their physical body start to fail due to the lack of nourishment, but the total depletion of their life force also meant that the tether binding their soul to their physical form broke.

A similar fate also befell the trees and other plants in the area.

Rapidly expending all water, sunlight, and other nutrients to fuel the phase of rapid growth they experienced at first, they quickly ran out of their stored reserves. And with their intake of the same not keeping up with the accelerated passage of time, they soon started to wither and die.

As such, the entire stretch of forest where Darganth’s spell had passed was turned into a desolate wasteland where even the smallest grasses had died.

Unconcerned by this, Darganth also ignored the handful of nervous soldiers that were encircling him by then and instead looked into the sky. Watching as a small group of three soldiers descended from there toward him, he quickly confirmed all three of them to be fourth ranks.

Readying his weapon in response, he waited for them with an excited smirk.