Translator: AnubisTL
On the Wizard "Ship" Plane, the camp's alarms rang like death knells, echoing through the frigid void.
Jieming, Viola, and over two hundred other logistics wizards floated silently in the plane's sky, their figures dwarfed by the colossal rift that tore through the heavens.
The moment the alarms sounded, they had been recalled to the "Ship" Plane by their commanders. This was the Wizard Expeditionary Force's last refuge, their safest collective mind.
Above, through the massive spatial fissure that rent the sky, the war raging on the Flamefrost Plane was clearly visible, unfolding before the wizards' eyes.
The battle had already turned decisively against the Expeditionary Force.
The combined legions of lava giants and Snow Monsters, numbering in the billions, were relentlessly pressing the wizards' lines, leveraging their numerical superiority and home-field advantage.
Every so often, the three strategic volcanoes charged by the earth meridians erupted with crimson light, transforming vast swathes of the battlefield into thousand-degree hellscapes.
The intense heat had drastically amplified the lava giants' power, transforming them into pure liquid lava. They were now nearly immune to physical attacks and most elemental spells.
Meanwhile, the surviving Snow Monsters seized the opportunity to launch a counter-offensive from the opposite flank, using ice-type spells to complement the lava giants' assault and divide the wizards' cannon fodder units.
Unlike the lava giants and Snow Monsters, who could continuously replenish their forces from the entire plane—their reserves numbering in the hundreds of millions, virtually inexhaustible—the wizards' expeditionary force had limited "material reserves."
Their bioweapons and golem cannon fodder required aerial transport, cultivation, and alchemical production. Once these resources were depleted, they couldn't be replenished quickly, forcing them to rely on remote resupply from the Planar Workshops at the junction point.
This was a time-consuming and resource-intensive process—a distant water source that couldn't quench their immediate thirst.
By now, the second phase of the war on the Flamefrost Plane had raged for over three days. The corpses piled on the battlefield numbered in the tens of millions!
The wizards' cannon fodder legions had visibly dwindled by more than half under the relentless, tidal-wave-like assaults.
Despite the absence of elite enemy units, the sheer numerical superiority and strategic disadvantages had already resulted in casualties among the combat wizards.
The wizards' battle lines were buckling under the relentless pressure of lava giant and Snow Monster hordes, while the energy shield protecting their camp groaned under the continuous bombardment.
Patches of the shield flickered with unstable runic light, teetering on the brink of collapse, as if they could be breached at any moment.
Yet even as the wizards in the rear witnessed this dire situation, their expressions remained remarkably composed.
Jieming glanced at Viola's cool profile beside him and the calm, collected faces of the logistics wizards in the distance, and understanding dawned in his heart.
For these wizards, veterans of countless Planar Wars, such setbacks and casualties were likely already factored into the high-level commanders' calculations.
This was merely the prelude to the Planar War, a greater storm was brewing.
Jieming instinctively glanced behind him. There, on the desolate, scorched earth of the Wizard "Ship" Plane, a colossal cannon barrel had suddenly risen from the once-flat, black terrain!
"This is... truly absurd. This thing can't even be called a cannon anymore..." Jieming muttered to himself, staring at the cannon's astonishingly wide barrel.
The colossal structure, with a diameter exceeding one kilometer, completely defied his understanding of what a "cannon" could be.
Within this terrifying barrel, energy was steadily accumulating.
Looking deep into the cannon's maw, clusters of eerily glowing orbs were converging at an astonishing speed toward the center of the barrel.
This was a spectacle born from the extreme compression of pure, boundless elemental energy. With each converging strand, the surrounding space emitted a faint hum and twisted, as if even the void itself trembled before this immense power.
The energy was so vast that Jieming could clearly sense the star-shattering force contained within.
If this were a purely offensive wizard spell, it could likely shatter the Flamefrost Plane into pieces!
But such an act would utterly destroy the plane itself, which was not the Wizard Workshop's objective for this invasion.
The spell loaded into the cannon was never intended as a purely offensive spell. Instead, it was a targeted destructive spell.
While both types of spells involve "destruction," they are fundamentally different.
Offensive spells unleash raw physical or elemental power, aiming to obliterate all visible matter and energy.
Targeted destructive spells, however, are about "precision" annihilation. They don't indiscriminately strike; instead, they focus on dismantling and eradicating specific targets.
The spell currently chambered in the cannon was meticulously crafted to inflict deep-seated damage on lava giants!
This was the latest breakthrough achieved by Master Alvin of the Noren Workshop, who had been working tirelessly day and night for the past ten days.
Both Jieming and Master Alvin were researching lava giants, but their approaches differed. Jieming's research focused on identifying the giants' weaknesses and developing methods to restrain and exploit them.
Master Alvin's research, however, delved deeper. He concentrated on targeting the fundamental elemental structure of lava giants, aiming to disrupt their very essence!
In simple terms, this was a targeted attack that deconstructed the lava giant's fundamental particle structure.
It could penetrate the microscopic layers of the lava giant's living rock and lava plasma, disrupting its molecular structure and essentially annihilating it from its very essence.
According to Jieming's intelligence, in addition to Master Alvin's lava giant-specific destruction technique, another fifth-tier wizard participating in the expedition had also developed a targeted destruction technique against Snow Monsters.
However, due to Lava Giant Karamos's machinations, the Snow Monsters who had come to join the attack suffered heavy losses, so there was no immediate need to target them.
Boom...
Before long, the swirling orbs of light within the cannon barrel coalesced to their maximum density, abruptly transforming into a terrifying beam of energy radiating with iridescent light!
The beam tore through the void with a deafening roar, instantly bridging the gap across the spatial rift and striking the battlefield on the Flamefrost Plane.
As the beam left the cannon's muzzle, it rapidly expanded, reaching a diameter of tens of kilometers as it traversed the spatial rift!
The beam instantly enveloped most of the battlefield, bathing all living beings present in an eerie, pure radiance.
A deathly silence fell...
Faced with the sudden attack, the battlefield's cacophony froze mid-roar.
Yet an inexplicable phenomenon occurred!
Within the vast, multicolored beam, neither the wizard cannon fodder legions nor the Snow Monsters of the Frostdark Realm, nor even the fragile flowers and sturdy rocks, suffered any damage.
They remained standing, neither melting nor freezing, as if the light were merely a particularly vibrant form of natural sunlight.
But the lava giants, who had moments before been towering figures of molten might, their lava bodies sweeping across the battlefield, underwent a catastrophic transformation.
The instant the beam touched them, their bodies began to convulse violently, and they instinctively emitted agonizing howls filled with despair and an indescribable terror!
Their molten bodies crumbled like sandcastles, their flowing lava blood boiling and disintegrating, vanishing completely within the beam's embrace.
They were neither shattered nor burned away. Instead, they were disintegrated at the material level, reduced to their most fundamental particles, and ultimately returned to nothingness!
The lava giant army, which had swelled to nearly ten million strong, vanished completely from the battlefield in a matter of seconds!
This sudden, precise strike stunned all the indigenous forces of the Flamefrost Plane. They had never witnessed such a bizarre and efficient method of annihilation.
But the wizards didn't hesitate!
"All Battle Wizards, advance! Cannon Fodder Unit, press forward! Annihilate the remaining enemies!" Augustine's command, transmitted clearly through the magic network, reached every Battle Wizard's ears even before the aftershocks of the beam attack had subsided.
The Battle Wizards were prepared. Like predatory hawks seizing their moment, they launched a full-scale assault while the lava giants were being "vaporized," the battlefield was in chaos, and the Snow Monsters were frozen in shock.
The wizard cannon fodder legions roared thunderously as they mercilessly trampled over the scorched earth left by the vanished lava giants, their sights set on the Snow Monster army, which was still reeling from the shock.
Spells rained down like a torrential downpour, while Iron Golems and flesh colossi charged forward without restraint.
The wizards' assault surged forward like an unstoppable flood, sweeping away all remaining lava giants and Snow Monster forces in a single, devastating wave!
Soon, the indigenous armies were in full retreat.
The once-imposing and battle-ready legions had completely lost their will to fight.
Whether remnants of the lava giants or the Snow Monster army, they abandoned all thoughts of battle and fled in panic toward the directions from which they had come.
Their original formations had dissolved into a chaotic rout, leaving behind only a disorganized and humiliating retreat.
Outside the battlefield, the two notoriously volatile monster kings—Karamos and Agron—watched their forces crumble. Yet even as they witnessed their subordinates' utter defeat, they felt no urge to punish them.
They were both stunned by the terrifying destructive power of the beam they had just witnessed.
It was neither fire nor ice, yet it had instantly annihilated millions of lava giants!
This surpassed their understanding of the Flamefrost Plane's fundamental laws, a force beyond comprehension.
Their gazes were filled with solemnity and dread, and they dared not make another rash move.
On the "Ship" Plane, Viola observed the scene unfolding on the Flamefrost Plane through a rift in the sky. She watched as millions of lava giants vanished in an instant and as the Snow Monster army crumbled beneath the wizards' iron hooves. A faint smile played on her lips.
Turning to Jieming, whose eyes also gleamed with awe, she murmured:
"Now, the war enters its second phase."
(End of the Chapter)
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