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BAB3 -Chapter 39
🕑 Added 2025-08-07 04:59:01 +0000 UTC# Chapter 39: The Herald
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The battle became less about individuals and more about synchronized strength as a whole, each fighter bolstered by the power of the Territories surrounding them.
The final wave dragged on, stretching into the late afternoon before the spawn rate finally began to slow.
But with that lull came the most powerful monstrosities of the day—the final wave bosses.
A heavy, immobilizing pressure settled over the entire battlefield.
Stillness thick enough to silence even the wind crept across each quadrant, wrapping around every Awakened like a hand at their throats.
The weaker monsters were thinning out. But none of it mattered in the face of what was coming.
Enormous rifts split open at the far edges of each quadrant. From them emerged kaiju-sized horrors, ghastly and awe-inspiring in all the worst ways.
They stepped onto the battlefield with the confidence of fear itself.
Even the smallest among them stood over a hundred feet tall, and each one was a walking extinction event.
**Taowu Ravager Behemoth (SS-Rank) Lv. 70**: *Behemoth warbeasts that slaughter for pleasure, trampling the weak beneath clawed hooves. Touched by Taowu Essence*.
It let out a guttural, joyless laugh as it charged forward. Plated in dark, jagged bone, its hoofprint alone collapsed an entire ridge.
**Taowu Shriek Behemoth (SS-Rank) Lv. 70**: *Behemoth terrors that weaponize agony, cracking stone and sanity with every scream. Touched by Taowu Essence.*
It slithered from the rift, a grotesque hybrid of insect and corpse, with a hundred spiraling mouths yawning across its face.
It shrieked once, and every Awakened within a half a mile dropped to their knees, their hands protecting their ears, and eyes leaking blood.
**Taowu Aberrant Behemoth (SS-Rank) Lv. 70**: *Behemoth horrors born from greed unbound, mimicking what they see to lure more prey. Touched by Taowu Essence.*
The third pulled itself into the world in segments, chewed pieces of living flesh stitched together.
Its shape twisted with every breath, limbs and torsos patchworked into mockeries of whatever it looked at.
When it turned to the front lines, it became the front lines.
**Taowu Tyrant Behemoth (SS-Rank) Lv. 70**: *Dominating behemoths that hoard power and servitude, reducing rivals to ash or obedience. Touched by Taowu Essence.*
And last came the largest of them all, wreathed in a crown of blood and malice.
Monster, man, beast, and element alike bowed beneath its dominating presence. Its aura alone was subjugation.
All four moving cataclysms. All were SS-Rank, and Level 70–each one capable of destroying New Meridian on its own.
Even bolstered by the Territories, the Awakened on the field knew the truth: They weren’t enough.
But they were never meant to be.
Four distinct confluences of light and pressure swept across the field.
The Heads of the Big Five made their presence known.
Obadiah Vermilion descended first, red light billowing behind him like a curtain. His robes drifted without wind, and his skin glowed faintly, as if lit from within.
Six wings of white flame unfurled from his back, stretching wide with blazing majesty. In his hand, a blade of pure radiance burned, its edges wrapped in white fire.
He did not need to speak.
His complete Bloodline Resonance layered over the top of his body. He became the flaming, winged judgment he had always carried inside.
His presence alone cast dancing shadows across the entire battlefield.
Obadiah raised his blade, and dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of flaming swords formed behind him, burning across the sky.
With a flick of his wrist, they surged forward in a wave of blinding white flame—*Swordfall Benediction*.
They struck the Tyrant Behemoth and erupted.
The shockwave tore through the battlefield, splitting stone and vaporizing the air.
It cut clean through the monster’s crown, and the Tyrant Behemoth reeled, its dominion now fractured.
In the next quadrant, a glimmering red mist began to boil.
Elizabeth Bathory stepped forward, her heels clicking sharply against the blood-soaked ground.
Her lips were stained crimson, and her eyes glowed like garnets buried in shadow. She exhaled, and the blood around her rippled in response.
With a single step, she lifted into the air as her Bloodline Resonance took form.
A giant, nightmarish bat of blood unfolded around her. Its wings stretched wide, webbed with gem-threaded veins that danced like rubies in motion.
Its mouth opened in a silent scream, rows of needle-like teeth exposed as it bared its fangs toward the Shriek Behemoth.
Elizabeth laughed. The sound overlapped on itself, melodic and chilling, beautiful and terrible.
She raised both hands, and scarlet rings of blood and shadow formed, circling the battlefield. They twisted, then collapsed inward, condensing into a single massive orb.
Blood missiles launched forward, cutting violent arcs through the air—*Vérzés Requiem*.
Every monster in their path erupted from within as their blood vessels burst, joining the streams.
Every single one of the Shriek Behemoth’s mouths was hit unerringly. Blood flooded its throats, silencing its screams.
The monstrous creature began to thrash violently as thick, black blood erupted from every orifice.
In the quadrant beside her, sand erupted skyward like a geyser.
Lucian Arges rose from the spiraling column, his robes untouched. Wind circled his hands, pulling grains of sand into jagged, cutting rings.
His Bloodline Resonance wrapped around him in a cyclone of black sand and howling storm.
The Aberrant Behemoth surged forward, its flesh warping grotesquely into distorted copies of Lucian’s face.
He didn’t flinch.
With a single raised hand, a desert of sand surged up to swallow the creature whole—*Sands of Oblivion*.
Hundreds of flesh-rending sandstorms flared, combining into something so dense that it erased all visibility inside.
The deafening roar of the wind silenced all but the faded screams of the Aberrant Behemoth.
In the final quadrant, silver frost clung to the air, and the temperature dropped instantly.
Astrid Lapis hovered just above the ground, her long white hair haloed by drifting snowflakes.
Silver water surged beneath her, carrying her upward on a rolling wave as her Bloodline Resonance took form.
A massive mermaid tail replaced her lower body. Elegant and vast, its scales glimmered like silver glass.
Raising a trident longer than a tower, Astrid summoned an entire sea.
The raging waters split into dozens of massive sea serpents, each thirty stories high—*Leviathan’s Descent*.
Their heads were frozen solid, their bodies laced with mirrored ice, and their tails hissed with boiling foam.
They crashed into the final Behemoth with enough force to displace mountains, coiling tight around it as they bit deep into its flesh.
Each of the four quadrant bosses had been engaged—each by a near demigod.
Their Bloodline Resonance techniques tore across quadrant lines, leaving craters in their wake and reshaping the battlefield.
The sheer force of their attacks carved out a new topography.
Xay and the others could only watch in awe. The fight had escalated far, far beyond their league.
At best, they launched potshots from behind the protective walls while the Group Heads shook the world around them.
It was humbling to witness that kind of power.
Terrifying, even.
Once the Group Heads unveiled their complex Territories across the sky, overlapping one another in layers of overwhelming elemental mastery, they trapped the Behemoths.
For everyone else, the task became simple: clear the field.
Xay summoned his *Artillery Swarm* again, unleashing volleys of destructive Jetnir Orbs across the ground, making sure to keep Dragon safely tucked away.
He even let loose a few *Psion Emission Beams*, draining the last of his Mana Pills to keep going.
Tyra, Willow, Rox, Ezra, and Shifu Wu were right at Xay’s side, firing their own ranged attacks.
Even Vice Headmistress Blake had appeared nearby, keeping a close eye on Rox. She hadn’t seen exactly what had happened, but it was clear she suspected something.
The creatures fought hard, but against the combined efforts of the Group Heads, the Behemoth boss monsters finally fell.
That was quickly followed by the last of the twisted creatures being taken down across the field.
A deafening chorus of cheers erupted from the Awakened.
They had done it.
They had survived a Blood Moon.
Normally, this would be the moment the moon receded, and the essence of the slain monsters poured out across the battlefield.
But something was wrong.
Dark, crimson light bled down from the moon in thick, liquid threads, coalescing into the silhouette of something entirely new.
“What is this?”
“What’s happening?”
“We were done!”
Shouts echoed across the battlefield, rising in confusion and alarm.
A dark entity took the shape of a muscular, ten-foot-tall, scaled tiger with a serpentine tail that stretched at least three times its body length.
Its form flickered between physical substance and something not of this world. Its eyes burned with an eerie, malevolent glow.
The face was disturbingly human, but stretched too tight across its skull. It was framed by jagged, curling red tusks.
It grinned a sickening grin, revealing far too many rows of far too many razor-sharp teeth. Even nature around it recoiled at its visage.
Behind him, Xay heard Omar and others screaming in instinctual terror. But he didn’t fully register it.
He couldn’t. His mind was locked on the thing floating at the center of the battlefield.
**Herald of Taowu**
It didn’t have a rank, a level, nor a description—just a presence that bent the world around it.
It raised a single clawed paw.
And the battlefield split in two.
A wave of red energy exploded outward in a straight line, carving deep into the ground and vaporizing everything in its path.
The air ruptured, and stone turned to dust. Dozens of Awakened were flung like rag dolls.
The Group Heads responded instantly.
Obadiah surged forward in a nova of white flame, his blade cutting a massive arc that split the sky itself.
Elizabeth’s blood beast form shrieked across the field, slamming into the Herald’s side with feral force.
Lucian’s desert storm tightened into a cyclone, slicing into the entity with walls of cutting sand.
Astrid hurled her trident, summoning an ocean that fell with the weight of mountains.
None of it made a difference.
The Herald twisted, and space buckled.
Obadiah was knocked back a hundred feet, his radiant blade flickering. Elizabeth’s blood collapsed and rebelled.
Lucian and Astrid barely escaped, retreating just as another arching claw swipe split through multiple quadrants.
Their offense was undone in seconds.
Then the Herald turned, and its burning eyes locked onto Xay.
**“The Inheritor must die.”**
It spoke with an echoing, blood-curdling baritone voice that sounded straight from a horror movie. It was as if it were near and far away at the same time.
It was a deeply, deeply wrong sound.
A visceral fear crept down Xay’s spine, unnerving him to the bone and settling in his chest.
It recognized his Bloodline. The thing was here for him.
“Xay—!” Rox shouted behind him, but Xay was already moving.
The Herald blasted forward with impossible speed, flickering through space and nearly distorting the battlefield.
Xay barely managed to teleport out of the way, and even then, the resulting shockwave still caught him.
He slammed into the ground five hundred feet ahead, with a deep gash torn across his side.
Xay dropped into *Flow State* without thinking—the full version that shut down his conscious mind.
The world darkened. His body relaxed. His perception fused with his instinct, and his reflexes sharpened to the razor edge of survival.
The Herald was on him in the next instant.
Xay’s body reacted, twisting aside and teleporting away. His instincts demanded he run, not attempting any parry’s or counters.
Even with the aid of the ambient psychic flow, he was only inches from certain death.
The Herald didn’t stop.
The Group Heads hurled attack after attack, but it either dodged effortlessly or dismantled their techniques mid-air, never breaking stride, and never easing up.
No matter how far Xay moved or how much pressure the others applied, the Herald stayed locked on him.
It was relentless. Its entire existence centered on his destruction.
Every dodge came by the narrowest of margins. Every teleport was just barely in time.
Xay’s body moved with preternatural grace, his reflexes honed to the edge of precognition.
But it wasn’t enough.
The Herald’s long tail clipped him mid-teleport, tearing a chunk out of his side and snapping him back to full awareness.
Xay screamed as vitality poured from his bones and organs to seal the wound—but no sound escaped.
The blow had splintered the dimension around him, flinging his body through twisting folds he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
The world lost cohesion. Color and sound collapsed into each other.
For a breathless, brutal moment, it felt like falling through layers of splintered crystal and broken thoughts.
But just as quickly as it began, it ended, and Xay was right back on the battlefield as if he’d never left.
His dimensional storage ruptured in the process, however, scattering a torrent of items across the field: hoodies, sneakers, the Concord Flower, his A1-X, and the small white pebble from Grandmaster Wu.
The Herald reappeared in front of Xay in the next instant, ready to end him in the next strike.
But at Xay’s feet, the white pebble flared with brilliant golden light.
A mystical avatar of Grandmaster Wu materialized around it, radiating a powerful, heavy pressure.
The avatar intercepted the blow, and diverted it into the sky, splitting the air above.
“What have you gotten yourself into this time, brat?” Grandmaster Wu asked, his voice tight and straining.
“Just trying not to die,” Xay panted, clutching his side.
He had no idea what kind of “fuzzy woo-woo” bullshit the old man was pulling here, but god damn, was he relieved to see it.
“This creature should not be,” Grandmaster Wu declared as his avatar brought his hands together.
His fingers blurred through a vast array of intricate mudras, and in the next heartbeat, he thrust both palms forward.
A dense, multi-layered seal made of bright golden light and etched with glowing glyphs appeared around the Herald.
Then it tightened around its body and limbs, slamming into it with enough force to crush a mountain.
It wasn’t a killing blow, and it probably wouldn’t hold the thing for very long.
But it was enough.
“Everyone,” Grandmaster Wu called out to the approaching Group Heads, his voice echoing with authority, “together.”
Obadiah reengaged first, his flaming white wings flaring wide. Elizabeth rose beside him, her eyes boiling with ruby blood.
Lucian’s sandstorm surged denser, twisting into a new formation. Astrid’s trident carved the air, answered by a new crashing tide.
Xay could only watch in silence as the battlefield lit up again.
Flame and light, blood and shadow, sand and wind, water and frost—all of it bound together, spiraling through the mystic seal locking the Herald in place.
It wasn’t a single strike from each of them, but thousands layered in a perfect sequence.
The Herald’s body fractured on the first impact.
It twisted, screeched, and bent its own limbs backward as the attacks continued to assault it.
“What are you waiting for, brat?!” Grandmaster Wu shouted. “End this!”
Xay dug deep, generating silver-white psychic echoes of every element he knew.
He condensed them, channeling mana from his core, mana from his crystallized channels, vitality from his breath, and vitality from his infused body.
He wrapped it all inside a sphere of oscillating psychic force and condensed it further with the full weight of his will.
Screaming loud enough to tear his own throat, Xay unleashed a *Psion Emission Beam* as wide as his chest.
The sparkling, iridescent blast ripped forward, merging with the other attacks into a bright, focused eruption of annihilation.
After one final ear-splitting screech, the Herald shattered like glass, and the pieces quickly disintegrated.
Battlefield fell silent.
The moon returned to normal.
Grandmaster Wu’s avatar faded, and the pebble shattered.
Exhausted and strained in every possible way, Xay immediately collapsed, blacking out completely.
