< Self Soul, All Being’s Soul, and Heaven and Earth’s Soul. Each of my soul-path true inheritance encompasses a facet of my soul cultivation. For this project, I will bestow you a portion of my All Being’s Soul True Inheritance that I remember. Even if it’s only a small part, you’ll be able to save around 60-80% time and effort to accomplish the objective. >
If Astaroth possessed a physical body, she would jump around excitedly while producing primate noises without caring how others perceive her. Mordred’s estimation was more than correct. The true inheritance of a Sovereign cannot be measured in gold. It was the lifetime accumulation of said sovereign, so the only way to get them is either plundering it, or bartering it with something of equivalent value. But even then, some sovereigns would keep some portion of their true inheritance hidden even if they decided to trade them, only bestowing those secretive, most important portions to their rightful inheritor.
Since Astaroth herself is not a Sovereign, then it was simply impossible for her to get it through orthodox means no matter how hard she tried.
< Your Majesty, your All Being’s Soul True Inheritance is about the soul of all living beings and the interaction of thereof. It includes but is not limited to enslavement, corruption, and subjugation of other beings through one’s soul foundation. If you handed it over to her, she might be able to decipher the soul contract you’ve imposed on her. >
Mordred frowned after hearing Asmodeus’ warning.
He had never told anyone regarding the content of his soul-path true inheritances due to the nature of his work, but since she could narrate the outline of the true inheritance, then she must’ve used her [Sudden Inspiration] to pry.
Nevertheless, he acted contrary to Astaroth’s expectation. Mordred actually listens to Asmodeus' warning. The demon king’s words might not mean much since his encryption on soul contract is simply on a realm that Astaroth could never hope to comprehend. Even if he bestows the full version of All Being’s Soul True Inheritance to Astaroth, the archdemon will take hundreds if not a thousand years to completely digest them. Considering she lacked soul-path attainment to understand what the true inheritance is all about, it may take even more time and effort.
However, the Asmodeus who prefers to be silent on some matters is actually giving him a subtle warning. This simple fact made Mordred raise his guard since only Asmodeus knew what might happen in the near or far future.
< Hmm, you have a solid point, is it possible that Astaroth is the weakest link in the chain? > Mordred asked rhetorically, his face revealed a difficult expression.
The chain that he refers to is the chain of schemes to subjugate this world as an otherworldly invader. To some, this level of cautiousness might seem too over-the-top, but considering his enemies are heroes supported by literal gods, it is necessary.
Naturally, Mordred's question fell on deaf ears. The demon king reverted back to her silent observer mode.
< I will postpone this matter until-, no. I’ll do it myself. It’ll divert some of my time and attention, but I’ll be able to accomplish that without the risk of my true inheritance being stolen. Astaroth, I need foundational knowledge on bloodlines, so give me a portion of your blood-path true inheritance, specifically the part regarding wyvern. >
Astaroth's disappointment is immeasurable and her day is ruined. A subtle warning from Asmodeus was able to steer Mordred's action from giving her immense benefit to her losing her true inheritance without something in value being exchanged. In her heart, Astaroth wanted to protest since she is technically on Asmodeus's side. Not only does she share the same homeworld, Astaroth could be considered as Asmodeus's lackey even before being subjugated and become the Magus of Death's subject. Her territory back in Purgatory World shares a border with the Demon King of Berserk Inferno, and since she has 'tolerated' the Archdemon to live there, there was a tacit understanding that the Archdemon was her subordinate.
After all, the Purgatory World is a lawless place where demons and devils run rampant. A perpetual war for survival and dominance engulfed the whole world so using Asmodeus's name to protect herself means Astaroth consented in being Asmodeus's subordinate, much like the other Epics that lived near her territory.
Naturally, as an Archdemon, it would be a lie to say she has no selfish interest, but being Asmodeus's subordinate means she has to put Asmodeus's interest first before anything.
'Your Majesty, why would you cockblock me?' While Astaroth is still considering whether saying those words would offend Asmodeus, the demon king warns her instead.
< You are a mere Demon Great Duke. Do not overstep your boundary and meddle in affairs between kings. >
< My most sincere apology, Your Majesty. > It would be a lie if Astaroth did not suffer from intense indignance about her situation, but if she were to express them to the demon king known for her limitless wrath, being killed by the Magus of Death seemed like a long-awaited coup de grâce. Nevertheless, Mordred is not someone that she can offend either so she quickly imparted her blood-path true inheritance that revolves around wyvern bloodline.
There’s no need to put up an appearance when Mordred received the true inheritance. He used his mortal shell’s full computation power to quickly digest the content of the inheritance, but it’ll take some time before he could fully digest them.
First of all, Mordred’s mortal shell has low base computation power, and secondly, Astaroth’s true inheritance is extremely massive in size. If quantified using information-path metrics, then it would be several trillion terabytes, and those are barely a small portion of the whole inheritance. Fortunately, Astaroth was considerate enough that she gave him in multiple phases. Only after he digests the first portion that she’ll give him the next portion, otherwise, his brain would collapse due to information overload.
< Hmm, let’s put this aside for now. > Mordred decided after realizing it’ll take him literal centuries if he’s going with this pace. As a soul cultivator, he could use his truesoul to share the burden of his fleshy body, but with how things are, it is simply unsustainable. < This project will be suspended until I have a rank 1 mortal shell, preferably a machine. > His priority is still achieving breakthroughs to raise his cultivation base to increase his absorption rate.
< Understood, Your Majesty. I will support you the best way I can. > Astaroth reported like a loyal dog, hiding her feelings behind a faithful facade.
…
Evening that day.
Twin Helix’s carriages are running at full speed while taking on arrow formation, almost all combatants are standing on top, ready for combat. On the front of the formation, there was Kenji and all the physical class combatants, preparing for a full on dive. In the middle, all the magical class combatants have prepared a spell to assist. As for the back of the formation, the apprentices are preparing for the worst.
< Remember what I’ve told you. Prioritize your safety over others. I don’t care if all other apprentices die as long as you survive > Sakuya’s telepathic message resounded in Mordred’s mind as he scanned the rapidly changing landscape. The rocky terrain has slowly become a hilly meadow with the occasional trees decorating it.
Mordred reassured Sakuya with a telepathic message of his own, but he was internally debating whether or not Twin Helix’s decision to include the apprentices for this operation was correct or not. Rank 0 apprentices are definitely unsuitable to participate in battles of rank 1 proportion, they couldn’t even serve as cannon fodder.
“Satoru, are you nervous?” A tanned girl, Tamiyo, whispered next to Mordred. Amongst the various features that she has, it was her freckles that stood out. She is one of Mordred’s new acquaintances during the feast last night, a typical village girl with grade-C martial talent. On her hand, there was an iron sword similar to the ones held by other apprentices, which was a gift from the kobolds.
“This is excitement, Tamiyo, not nervousness.” Mordred replied, not hiding his true feelings at all. To him, murder brings more benefit to his cultivation compared to meditating.
With his left hand clasping his trembling right hand, which in turn grasped the magic revolver, he stared out towards the distant carnage. Less than a kilometer away from their current location, death was rampant and chaos reigned. As the most murderous Magus of Holy Terra, he possessed supernatural senses attuned to the scent of death itself, and the battle's faint echoes only served to stoke his insatiable hunger for souls.
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“Calm down.” A youth put his hand on Mordred’s shaking shoulder. It was the charismatic leader of all the apprentices from Mira village, Mira Hiroshi. “If you’re like this, your aim will be off.”
Mordred politely brushes off Hiroshi’s hand, he didn’t want to kill him accidentally. “You don’t have to worry about anything. My aim will always hit its mark. In any case, does anyone know why we are prepared for battle?”
“Miss Sumire told us last night that we should be meeting another Hunter Association’s team with a similar mission with Twin Helix.” Hiroshi replied before shutting everyone up. “Let’s put idle chatters for later. The enemies are now in sight.”
As the landscape unfurled before them, a dome-shaped mud-rock fortress came into view, its rough-hewn exterior encircled by a throng of greenskins. The structure was undoubtedly the work of magic, its walls bore the scars of constant attack, with the greenskins relentlessly chipping away at the stone with their pickaxes. Yet, the fortress remained standing, for the very magic that formed its walls allowed them to regenerate over time, slowing the greenskins' advance. To make matters worse for the attackers, a small gap in the wall had been left intentionally, allowing only a few greenskins to pass through. It was a calculated risk, but a necessary one - a strategy designed to prevent the enemy from overwhelming the defenders with sheer numbers. In other words: a greenskin grinder.
The greenskins who performed the siege are merely rank 0 goblins and gretchens, while the rank 1 hobs camped, waiting for the other side to exhaust themselves.
Seemingly sensing reinforcement has arrived, the hobs began to take notice of Twin Helix’s advances. Unlike the greenskins that Twin Helix has met before, these groups are not equipped with looted magic machinery artifacts, but that doesn’t mean their military strength is any weaker. Some of the hobs carried wooden shields roughly reinforced with some pieces of metal, possibly looted from a minor civilization of semi-intelligent races. Their sheer number allowed them to naturally clumped up together, performing a phalanx shield wall to block Twin Helix’s assault.
Using Kenji as a spearhead of the assault, Twin Helix’s Katyusha used a spell to produce an icy platform in a tilted angle on the ground with the intent to capitalize his frontal charge. After all, if he were to leap from the carriage, the ironwood construct wouldn’t be able to bear the burden of his raw strength. As intended, Katyusha’s ice platform broke into icy dust as he shot off, propelling Kenji like an arrow.
Boom! An explosion of dust, blood and gore occurred amidst the hobs’ phalanx shield wall, but Kenji frowned despite his charge breaking the sound barrier. His assault was flawless, but the greenskins are simply too durable. In fact, the damage caused by his charge was less than he had expected. Less than five hobs were instantly killed, the rest managed to divert the force downwards, sacrificing the shield on their hand so that they might survive.
“Hmmph!” The man got tackled by multiple hobs, they tied him down while the rest of them repaired the phalanx shield wall to ensure no follow up spell could break their formation. The [Greenskins Mental Network] of hundreds, possibly over a thousand greenskins automatically erected a strange force field of non-magic in nature, slowly enveloped the phalanx shield wall and the greenskins behind it; its antimagic properties are obvious to mages like Katyusha or Sakuya.
To fix his mistake, Kenji tried his best, but some of the hobs possessed power equivalent to late-stage rank 1 cultivators. A few of them could best him in pure raw strength as long as he doesn’t activate martial arts. Therefore, the solution for his predicament was actually that. “Tsk, I can’t replenish my nanoms since the captain is away… Rank 1 strength-path martial art, [Power Overwhelming]!”
The martial art he activates works by forcing his body to artificially produce adrenaline. [Power Overwhelming] is, in a sense, similar to an artificially induced adrenaline rush. As the nanoms in his body are being consumed, his heartbeat increases to explosive rate, blood vessels dilate, and muscles contract and expand forcefully. His brain no longer limits the strength his body can unleash at one time, he was able to go all out. In an instant, his body volume increased by five to ten percent as his skin turned black, being covered by hexagonal scales.
Empowered by his newfound strength, he unleashed a brutal onslaught upon the greenskins, twisting, breaking, and pulverizing them with ease, shattering their phalanx shield wall as if it were made of glass. And when a fleeting gap appeared in their antimagic force field, Sakuya launched a [Napalm Artillery Strike] spell at Kenji, engulfing the battlefield in a fiery inferno with him as the center. The molten flames swept across a radius of thirty meters, scorching everything in their path and unleashing a devastating area-of-effect damage-over-time, reducing the greenskins to ash and cinders in its wake.
That was what was supposed to happen, at least.
With the heat spread over a large area and the greenskins’ antimagic force field recovering faster than expected, it is not sufficient to kill them in a short time. All it did was inflicting severe burn damage, but they are not lethal to the greenskins. Nevertheless, Sakuya has no intention to instantly kill them in the first place.
All of this was a set up for Sumire’s kobold army.
The crimson scales of the kobolds are one of the characteristics for being fire-path lifeforms, imbuing them with a natural resistance to extreme heat. As the battlefield was engulfed in a raging inferno, their bodies thrummed with newfound energy. The scorching heat of the flames fueled their boiling blood, sending their heartbeats into overdrive and unlocking their full potential. They darted and weaved amidst the chaos like flames themselves, lending their fiery prowess to Kenji's cause. Together, they fought as one unit, a searing force to be reckoned with against the hordes of greenskins.
Then, to further break the greenskin’s phalanx shield wall and its passive antimagic force field before they bolstered their forces, Twin Helix sent another ace in the card.
“Rank 1 ice-path magic spell, [Chronophagous Cavalry]!” Katyusha threw ten crystalized spell catalysts on top of the moving carriage. As the crystals struck the ground, they exploded with a blinding flash of light. Out of the shimmering debris rose ten towering golems, their bodies fashioned from the purest ice. They resembled heavily armored centaur knights, with muscular torsos and powerful hooves, and they moved with a grace and speed that belied their massive size. Katyusha smiled grimly as she took control of each of the three-meter-tall golems, directing them towards the enemy horde that threatened to overrun the kobolds. With the [Chronophagous Cavalry] at her command, she was an effective killing machine.
Nobody noticed it, but Mordred, who was sensitive to death and souls, was able to see that some dark lifeforms that hid themselves within Katyusha’s shadows went towards the golems and possessed them. As a result, the icy golem cavalry not only possessed intelligence rivaling a human, but they could also work together to form a lance formation. Acting as the second wave of the assault, the centaur golems actually jumped towards the sea of molten flames assisting Kenji and the kobolds.
‘Aren’t those Spectral Souls?’ Mordred concealed his shock with a blank expression.
At present, his Soul Quality could only be described as that of a Spectral Soul - a rare, ethereal lifeform capable of possessing both the living and the lifeless. One of their most infamous incarnations is that of 'living armor'; suits of armor, animated by a mysterious pale purple aura that seeps through the cracks in their plated exterior. Legend holds that they are composed of the tormented souls of the departed, united by their shared grievances and unfulfilled desires, melded into a single entity of agony and fury. But in truth, the living armor is merely a physical vessel, possessed by the Spectral Soul itself.
As an ice-path cultivator, she has no business in rearing ten Spectral Souls. This was extremely suspicious behavior, but after briefly considering the logic behind her action, amongst the elemental paths, ice-path has the best compatibility with undead lifeforms. Mordred understood that the Hunter known as Katyusha is not as simple as she seemed.
Each of the centaur ice golems towered above the battlefield, their crystalline bodies pulsating with a cold, otherworldly energy. Katyusha's mastery of ice-path magic in addition to her undead minion allowed each golem to move with a fluid grace that belied their immense power and size. With the Spectral Souls ‘piloting’ these golems, they were far more than mere constructs; they were absolute behemoths, a unit of unstoppable force ready to unleash icy devastation upon any who dared to oppose them.
The golems were astonishing to watch, with the ability to morph their arms into a variety of weapons to suit any situation. They were impervious to the molten inferno that raged around them, their bodies seemingly immune to the searing heat. The flames licked hungrily at their feet, but they remained steadfast and resolute, it simply did not melt.
The [Greenskin Mental Network]’s antimagic field should be disrupting Katyusha’s control over her golems, but it is rendered irrelevant after the Spectral Souls piloting each individual golems.
The relentless barrage of Twin Helix's assault continued with the brother-and-sister pair, Kurogane and Shirogane taking the field. At this moment, the top section of the mud-rock fortress suddenly gave way, revealing a platinum-blonde man who emerged from within. Dressed in a pristine white martial robe adorned with golden lining and brandishing a white-gold spear, his oriental facial features exuded a playful air of confidence. It was clear that the intensity of the battle had affected him, yet he seemed unperturbed as he addressed Sumire with a teasing remark, "Sumire, your reinforcement is two hours late!"
"Li Xiaobai, your team missed the mark by 200 kilometers." Sumire's voice carried a subtle yet piercing wisdom-path method, rendering her words audible to everyone in the vicinity, despite her seemingly hushed tone.
“Small details…” Li Xiaobai's platinum-blonde hair glistened under the red evening sky as he appraised Twin Helix's carriages with a sharp eye. "Your captain is absent, I see," he remarked, his tone tinged with curiosity. His gaze quickly fell upon Katyusha, the sole ice-path mage in the group. "Lady Katyusha, with your permission, may I borrow Kenji’s strength for a moment? The greenskin horde is led by an Ork, and we must strike him down swiftly before they can regroup and plot their next move!"
Katyusha scoffed disdainfully, her frosty breath visible in the cold air. As the only authorized person to mobilize Kenji in the captain's absence, she was well aware of the tremendous energy expenditure required for him to engage in combat. Thus, she was hesitant to send him into unnecessary battles. However, the presence of the Ork leading the greenskin horde changed everything - this was a critical situation that demanded swift action. "You'll have to compensate for the nanoms he consumes."
“Deal!” Li Xiaobai’s platinum eyes shimmering in white light as he prepares a big move.