The battlefield fell into a momentary silence.
For a fleeting second, the air was still. Dust and blood hung in the wind, frozen as though time hesitated.
Then—chaos.
The first to react were the Emperor and Empress-ranked beasts. Their primal instincts, honed through decades of survival, screamed in warning—an apex predator had entered their domain, a force that dwarfed them all.
But fear did not halt them.
A deafening roar shattered the pause.
A colossal behemoth, its hide like a moving mountain of cracked obsidian, lunged forward. Its four tusks, each the size of a war chariot, gleamed like blackened steel. The sheer weight of its charge splintered the earth, leaving behind craters in its wake. The Grandmaster-ranked warrior it had been battling was forgotten—this was a greater threat.
Yet the Patrician did not move.
CRACK!
A flick of his wrist.
The air rippled, unseen forces converging into a single point. The behemoth's charge halted mid-motion—its body locking unnaturally as though reality had betrayed it. A fraction of a second later, the ground beneath it imploded.
Boom.
A terrible sound echoed as its titanic form crumpled inward, its weight turned against it. Flesh and stone twisted together. Bones shattered like brittle twigs. The earth yawned open, swallowing the carcass whole, leaving behind only the scent of crushed stone and blood.
The moment the beast perished, another struck.
A three-headed serpent, each maw dripping venom potent enough to melt enchanted steel, lunged from the shadows. Its scaled bodies slithered like liquid, weaving through the battlefield at inhuman speeds, moving in perfect unison.
Fangs extended, it struck.
The Patrician turned slightly, unbothered.
He lifted a hand.
CRACK!
The air warped. A crushing, formless force seized the serpent in midair, arresting its movement inches from his throat. It writhed, its scales glowing with defensive magic, but resistance was meaningless.
Then—BOOM!
The entire creature was slammed into the ground. A cloud of dust erupted as its form was flattened into the earth, scales splitting, bones snapping in a grotesque symphony of destruction.
The battlefield trembled.
For the first time, the beasts hesitated.
Their instincts no longer whispered warnings. They screamed— Run! Run! Run!
But the Patrician and his warriors allowed no such luxury.
He stepped forward.
And the world moved with him.
Wherever his gaze fell, the earth obeyed.
Tremors erupted, great chasms splitting open, devouring entire hordes into an abyss with no bottom. Jagged stone spire upward, impaling beasts mid-roar, their cries fading into silence. The ground rippled and rose like an unstoppable tidal wave, burying entire formations in an unrelenting rock and soil avalanche.
He was not fighting.
He was erasing.
Yet the Emperor and Empress-ranked beasts did not flee. They could not. Bound by instinct, by dominance, by the primal fury that had ruled them for decades—they charged.
A six-winged lion, its obsidian fur crackling with shadowed energy, lunged at his flank.
The Patrician clenched his fist.
BANG!
A force unseen exploded outward, an invisible hammer striking the beast mid-flight. Its massive frame twisted unnaturally, bones bending at impossible angles. It was flung backward, crashing through platoons of lesser beasts, its broken form finally slamming into the fortress wall.
It did not rise again.
Another—a crimson-scaled behemoth, its molten veins pulsing with liquid fire, roared in defiance. The inferno it unleashed could melt cities.
The Patrician exhaled.
He raised a hand.
The firestorm… stopped.
Suspended in midair, flames that should have turned him to ash twisted unnaturally, bending, swirling—until they imploded back toward their caster.
The beast barely had time to scream before its attack consumed it.
The carnage continued.
One after another, the mighty rulers of the beast tide fell before him. Ripped apart. Shattered. Incinerated. Buried. Their attacks never reached him. Their defenses never withstood him.
And all the while, his warriors followed.
The Grandmasters, freed from their battle against their counterpart, emboldened by their leader's wrath, surged forward, their weapons carving through flesh and bone.
The weaker beasts—King-rank and below—stood no chance.
They were cut down en masse, their bodies littering the land, turning the battlefield into a graveyard.
And then—
For the first time since the battle began…
The warriors of the Earth Clan pushed forward.
The unrelenting tide of beasts slowed.
The momentum of annihilation had shifted.
And above it all—standing amidst the wreckage of fallen titans—the Patrician remained.
His expression was unchanged.
His power was undiminished.
The war was not yet over.
But in this moment, at least—
The Earth had answered.