Breakthrough and Advance

Southern Seleucia, the Doomsday Forbidden Zone. "ROAR—!" An earth-shattering roar tore through the expanse, churning up violent gales that sent grit and boulders flying amidst swirling clouds of dust. Upon this magma-strewn wasteland, a monstrous serpent coiled its colossal body and bellowed toward the heavens. Nearly a hundred meters long, with jagged horns and craggy scales, its entire frame was armored in dense volcanic rock, resembling a sinuous, undulating mountain ridge from afar. Surrounding it, tens of thousands of players formed a surging tide. Brandishing all manner of strange and exotic weapons, they swarmed like an army of ants, hemming it in from every angle. Among them, a good number of reckless daredevils had even scaled the behemoth, scrambling and leaping across its rugged scales as they danced around its thrashing bulk. "Keep up the DPS!" "Don't just stand there—scrub that overgrown lizard's back!" "Where's the Dragonator? Blast it!" "Explosives are set! Packed every last one into the cracks between the scales! I'm detonating!" "Wait, don't blow it yet! I'm still inside the blast radi—" *BOOM!* *BOOM! BOOM!* Detonation after detonation ripped across the great serpent's hide. Fire and billowing black smoke threatened to swallow its massive bulk whole. The serpent hissed and thrashed in fury, sweeping its tail around and reducing over a hundred nearby players into meat paste in the blink of an eye. Yet the players remained completely undeterred, gleefully throwing themselves forward in an unrelenting onslaught. Bullets, cannon shells, arrows, fireballs, energy beams, and rockets slammed into its body like a tempest, battering this staggeringly durable beast until it was covered in wounds. "ROAR—!" The serpent roared once more. Its eyes burned blood-crimson, spitting fury and fire. The ground beneath seemed to ignite as scalding magma ruptured the earth and shot into the sky, instantly drowning over a thousand players in liquid fire. From the distance, however, arcanotech armor suits raised their mechanical arms. Blinding, highly destructive beams crisscrossed through the air, converging squarely upon the serpent's gargantuan skull. The impact violently whipped its head back, wrenching a guttural, agonized shriek from its throat. "The boss's HP is in the red!" "About damn time! Tens of thousands of us have been whittling it down for nearly two hours! This piece of garbage is made of solid stone from head to tail, bouncing every blade—pure, unadulterated shit-tier design!" "Max out the damage output! Our Machine Cult holds twenty-seven percent of the total DPS! Open the gap and we lock down the top rewards!" "Blow it to pieces!" *BOOM!* With a dull, thunderous crash, the enormous serpent collapsed, gouging countless deep fissures into the earth. Scalding blood gushed from its wounds like boiling magma, scorching scores of caught-off-guard players to ash. "We won!" "Finally chipped it to death..." "Holy crap, why does this trash boss have an on-death explosion? My entire party got fried!" Amidst cheers, laughter, and bickering, the terrifying fire elemental serpent breathed its last. Its coiled corpse would likely settle into a rocky mound in the near future. This great serpent had another identity: Nasu, the Mountain-Swallowing Serpent, the most physically gargantuan among the favored servants of Kazul, embodying the concept of greed. Legend had it that Nasu was once an insatiable noble official. After receiving Kazul's blessing, he gorged day and night, devouring every relative, friend, and servant in his estate before being driven out into the wastes. Feeding endlessly on volcanic rock, it took him centuries to become this monstrosity. And now, this mythic leviathan had fallen before the siege of over a hundred thousand players—though it was far from the first of Kazul's servants to be slain. Over the past several days, as ever-growing numbers of players grouped up to tackle the Doomsday Forbidden Zone, they had already eliminated five of Kazul's favored servants. At this moment, players swarmed atop Nasu's mountain of a corpse like sharks smelling blood, frantically carving away at its body for monster materials. "Dibs on this!" "This boss is literally rock from top to bottom, hard as hell. Harvesting it feels like open-pit mining! Who managed to pull a rare drop?" "Heh, I just mined a High-Concentration Fire Elemental Core. Worth a dozen gold coins at least." "Get out of here, you lucky bastard!" "Which idiot is still lighting fuses? You nearly blew me up! Show yourself!" * * * Over the following half-month, lured by the promise of immense rewards, over a million players flooded the Doomsday Forbidden Zone. Layers of scorched corpses and excavated bedrock caused the terrain of the restricted area to churn and rise by several feet. Under the relentless, staggering human-wave tactics of the player base, this hundreds-of-kilometers-wide forbidden zone was thoroughly shattered. The twelve favored servants of Kazul—Grimagos the Crimson Eye, Nasu the Mountain-Swallowing Serpent, Jer of the Bursting Wings, Tara the Fiery Doomsday Star... These infamous dragonspawn fell one after another to the combined might of the players, despite suffering casualties in the hundreds of thousands. With the death of each servant, the Doomsday Forbidden Zone fractured further. Once every last one of these disaster-anchoring champions was slain, the forbidden zone ceased to exist entirely, and the jagged mountain ranges returned to their former tranquility. The ash clouds that had blotted out the sky for ages parted and dissolved. The sun emerged once more, casting radiant rays across the earth, and even the violently erupting volcanoes subsided, falling dormant like tamed beasts. Basking in the golden sunlight, several hundred thousand imperial frontline troops assembled along the southern frontier. Stretching for more than ten kilometers, the army resembled a vast, kaleidoscopic river. Steam tanks, armored personnel carriers, and arcanotech armor platoons flanked both sides of the column, their imposing presence causing the earth to vibrate continuously. In the sky above, aerial warships cast sprawling shadows upon the ground, while wyverns and flame drakes beat their wings in dense, cloud-like formations. Close behind followed the legions of the Seleucian Kingdom, likewise numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Their equipment was an eclectic mix reflecting the diverse traditions across Seleucia, falling far short of the empire's standardized refinement. Mounted atop the largest wyvern, the hobgoblin Duoluo held a horn in his left hand and a thick stack of speech notes before him. His deep, commanding voice carried for leagues across the plains. "Soldiers of the allied forces! For years, we have been plagued by the scourge of the Cult of the Dragon. They plunged all of Seleucia—and indeed the entire southern continent—into turmoil! "Worse still, the people residing in Seleucia suffered unspeakable atrocities. Over a million individuals were driven from their homes, and countless perished amid the rampant dragon calamity! "Our empire has always striven to resolve disputes through peaceful means. His Majesty Cassius made repeated attempts to negotiate with the Queen of Chromatic Dragons, sparing no effort to secure peace for Seleucia. Yet regrettably, none of these endeavors changed reality! "On the contrary, the followers of the Cult of the Dragon grew ever more brutal, reckless, and unhinged. Not only our imperial citizens, but every civilized race pursuing freedom, justice, and order could no longer tolerate their deeds! And so, our coalition was born! "Throughout this past year since the alliance's inception, we marched across the realm, fought valiantly, reclaimed vast stretches of lost territory, and drove these savage marauders from civilized soil, forcing them to cower in the southernmost reaches of Seleucia! "Yet they remain obstinate! Blinded by fanaticism, they seek to summon their deity down upon this world, bringing catastrophic ruin upon all of Feanso! To that end, they did not hesitate to sacrifice millions of southern Seleucian lives, burying them forever beneath lava and ash! "Every thinking creature with a conscience should feel appalled and outraged! None can tolerate such atrocities! Our empire's love for peace and commitment to restraint is by no means an invitation to be trampled upon! "Today, the Cult's wicked deeds persist and worsen. Evil dragonspawn have descended upon the borders, slaughtering several more villages. We, the allied forces, must stand united and march south as one! "Our shared objectives are twofold: "First, eliminate every last remnant of the Cult of the Dragon and utterly annihilate these butchers! "Second, properly settle all grievances across Seleucia, ensuring that this long-suffering land will never again bleed beneath the flames of war! "As supreme commander of the allied forces and a soldier of the empire, I know the gravity of this war. I am willing to lay down my life to fight for my people and for their glory. Here and now, I make a solemn vow: even should the deity of the Cult of the Dragon descend in person, we shall never bow! "Before us, countless noble souls walked a treacherous path to break the tyranny of the dragon cult. Their sacrifices and unyielding devotion are the fuel driving our march today!" At this point, under the watchful gaze of hundreds of thousands, Duoluo swept his eyes across the vast ranks. His voice rose to a passionate crescendo: "Finally, I shall conclude my address with a phrase His Majesty once used to inspire me: "So long as our resolve remains unshakeable, nothing can stand in our path! The iron will and might of our alliance shall overcome every hardship and trial, crushing all obstacles before us! "Forward! Victory to the Alliance!" Before his voice had even faded, wave upon wave of deafening, sky-rending roars erupted from the moving masses below. Among them were the fervent battle cries of imperial soldiers and the tear-choked shouts of Seleucians. "Victory to the Alliance!" "Destroy the Cult of the Dragon! End the war! For Seleucia!" "For the Emperor! For the Cinder Empire!" Watching this thunderous, awe-inspiring spectacle, Duoluo nodded with deep satisfaction. Once this campaign ended in triumph, the empire would hold absolute dominance over the Feanso Continent. By then, the Cinder Empire would surpass the ancient Holy Fadelan and forge its own glorious legacy. And he, Duoluo, would be etched into the racial annals of the hobgoblins as a figure of towering renown and supreme authority. * * * Tens of thousands of feet in the air, Cassius slowly beat his massive wings, gazing down upon the earth. From his vantage point, the million-strong allied host looked like a colony of migrating ants, infinitesimally small. Several days earlier, Cassius had arrived from Dragonblood Mountain, keeping a constant eye on the unfolding situation in Seleucia. After all, this concerned the physical descent of Tiamat herself, a catastrophic event that could alter the fate of Feanso and indeed the destiny of all Elezerg. Even he dared not treat it lightly. Had Kazul attempted to commence the ritual directly, Cassius would have torn straight through the so-called Doomsday Forbidden Zone, driving deep into enemy lines to halt Tiamat's descent. Cassius's gaze was calm and detached. He paid little heed to the grand army beneath him, tilting his snout instead toward the distant mountains. His piercing vision seemed to pierce hundreds of miles of space, locking onto the capital of Seleucia—Sunset City. *What immense divine fluctuations...* A strange luminescence flickered within his narrow, molten-gold vertical pupils. Through Cassius's eyes, that magnificent, millennia-old city was now blanketed under a dome of suffocating dark clouds, as though an apocalyptic tempest were poised to break at any moment. He could distinctly sense Tiamat's intensely foul, chaotic divine power churning through the heavens and seeping across the land, a sensation capable of making any mortal's skin crawl. Yet Cassius merely observed without acting rashly. The Dragon Queen was a schemer through and through; staging such a massive display might well be an elaborate trap meant to lure him into striking. Tiamat had lusted after Cassius's physical form for a long time. Throwing his own flesh and blood into danger over a moment of impatience would be a disastrous trade. Cassius could also vaguely perceive numerous gazes representing great divine wills cast down from the Outer Planes, bare and unhidden. Among those he could identify were Bahamut the Platinum Dragon King, Sehanine the Moon Goddess, Tyr the God of Justice, Ilmater the Crying God, and Garagos the God of War... It was hardly surprising. For tens of thousands of years since the Second Era, the gods had been constrained by the supreme will, forbidden from entering the Material Plane and limited to spreading their faith. If Tiamat managed to descend in her true form, the ancient boundary that had separated heaven and earth, mortalkind and deities for millennia would shatter entirely. The landscape of all Elezerg would undergo a tectonic upheaval, and the primordial age where gods walked the earth would be reborn. Nearly every deity was watching Tiamat's descent in silence—some supportive, some opposed, and others merely intending to use the Chromatic Dragon Queen as a scout to test the changing laws of the cosmos on their behalf. Furthermore, while Tiamat held the rank of a lesser deity, her core essence was that of a true dragon, granting her raw power far exceeding typical deities of comparable rank. Once hailed as the "Enemy of the Gods," her sheer might and exceptional nature were beyond doubt. Across the multiverse, countless mortals and divine beings were watching this unfolding war with bated breath. Yet what truly surprised Cassius was that, alongside Tiamat, he caught another familiar presence. Radiating the essence of destruction and primal chaos, it clearly belonged to the Lord of Fire, the All-Consuming, the Cleanser of Worlds—Garyx. Cassius sneered, his gaze darkening. *I knew it. They intend to seize Garyx's divine seat as well. It looks like I really am the final sacrifice Tiamat picked out for herself.* *Still... let us see if you actually have the power to claim it!* The Red Dragon Emperor's gaze hardened. He beat his wings, churning up furious gusts of wind as he continued to circle high in the vault of heaven. Down below, across the vast, scorched expanses of the southern plains, the allied host surged forward like an unstoppable river, marching resolutely to the south. They had but a single destination—the millennia-old capital of the Seleucian Kingdom: Sunset City.