The first rankers could not face such high-ranked monsters as easily as the second rankers, and the most casualties were always them. They tried to give them accommodating roles, but it was a battlefield, and no role was safe enough. But they were soldiers, and they all had lost people—death was not a stranger to them.
The second the battle seemed to pass a point that made it clear they would survive, and even win.. Bloodedge moved forward. The giant flying monstrosity he was on top of shadowed the narrow valley, pigmen soldiers looked up to see what was going on.
Along with the enormous flying monster, Lucian suddenly felt something was wrong beneath her feet. Something that had just happened? No! Something that had just stopped?
The land had stopped shaking!
What even was that? She assumed it was the battle of thousands that left such effect but she was mistaked, fooled even. Lucian's senses flared as her gut told her something had gone amiss.
Why was Bloodedge coming to fight in a losing battle? Unless.. He thought he would never lose..
As if on cue, a massive explosion resounded from the distance. Lucian quickly looked to the side, and her heart felt the dread she had long since forgotten. Primal fear.. Not for herself, but for others. The fear that she could not save. The fear she felt when Thomas died.. The fear she felt when she heard about her father's loss..
The towering snow mountain to the side had its whole snow crumbling and falling down. The impenetrable snow mountain now had a giant hole at the base. Multiple streams of harrowing, powerful fire had drilled a tunnel from one side of the mountain—where over 110,000 emperor-rank black army monsters were standing mindlessly—to the other side, where just meters away, the pigmen warrior camp was set up. Many injured pigmen lay inside the otherwise empty camp.
Bloodedge distracted them! Fuck!
Bloodedge let them think they were succeeding by stalling his army, but it was all an excuse to come close to the other side of the mountain and drill a tunnel through snow and stone. As if he wanted to bury the last nail in their coffin, even the mindlessly standing-still army at the edge of Lucian's wormhole suddenly came alive and started to scale sides of the valley to get across—just as she had feared they would.
Even with the tunnel—just to have an advantage of a few more troops at the cost of killing many—Bloodedge wanted to leave not a single way out for them.
"Damn it!" Lucian cursed.
Tens of emperor-rank black ones were streaming out of the tunnel. Their camp was already being ripped to shreds from streams of fire and blood-chilling ice.
This had gone out of hand.
Lucian gritted her teeth, pulled her sword up—both her hands on the sword's surface—as she charged right into the valley, where monsters were still falling out of the sky, pigmen were shooting lasers and fighting injured monsters on land. Lyska and Rurik were further in and had not even noticed what had really happened.
Sam and Einar kept themselves in the air, teleporting from one monster to another, trying their best to let the minimum number reach down alive. Lucian jumped and kicked away any monster attacks that came in her way as she screamed at the top of her lungs, "Fall back! Retreat! FALL BACK!! RETREAT!"
Soon she reached near Lyska and told him to get everyone to fall back. He didn't understand the reason but immediately shouted the order. In the air, finally, Sam and Einar faced off against the biggest flying monsters—and of course, Bloodedge riding on its back.
Flashes of lightning and tremendous heat and light were released from above as Lucian continued running inside the valley to get as far from the fighting pigmen warrior army as she could.
At last—kicking, jumping, and falling in places—she finally crossed the last pigman in armor fighting a monster in the valley. After a few meters, Lucian finally stopped and breathed in. She had to do this as fast as possible. Her hands were numb.
Preparing herself, Lucian let go of her sword and let it get buried in the hard, darkened-in-blood-and-burn-marks snow, and forced her two hands inside the two mana containers at her sides.
In the next second, the wormhole spell broke, and the pitch-black 700-meter-long rectangle disappeared—revealing the white, clean snow beneath.
She used all the mana she could, bleeding from her nose and eyes, and activated her skill on a scale she had never attempted before. The monsters standing at the edge of the wormhole froze for a second as a primal, guttural sound tore from deep within Lucian's throat.
The enormous army of pitch-black giant monsters—who were once pigmen—finally broke out of their stupor and charged like the mad beasts they were, shaking the whole valley under their powerful feet.
Red blood dripped on the pretty snow, beside a pretty pure white metal sword. Just a few meters from Lucian and her sword, the effect of her skill finally took shape. At a binding speed, an enormous giant mountain of ice started forming, extending its edges higher and wider than anything Lucian had ever done before.
The hard ice generated endlessly, using a chunk of her liquid mana that was going through her numb hands inside her body, endlessly powering this skill of hers. Her head was hurting like someone was hacking away at it with an axe, her hands now gone below numb with the overuse of mana. She was not used to exposing so much mana through them at once.
In the end, she fell down on her knees, and the blood on her face froze, affected by her skill. She was having a hard time keeping her eyes open, but she had done it. The whole 3,600-meter-wide narrow valley now had an enormous 1,000-meter-high snow mountain blocking it.
Lucian lost consciousness and was about to fall when Rurik caught her. He had been shouting behind her back for a while now. He put her on his shoulder and made a run back to the entrance of the valley.
The retreat was in full effect.