Chapter 586: Hordes Upon Hordes

Technically, Kai should have been much less nervous going into his second incursion.

He was overwhelmingly more powerful than he had been the first time, stronger than all the normal monsters and potentially even the worst destroyers. Instead of precious few friends, he had strong alliances across the continent. In the intervening years he had fought against demons, patriarchs, and countless other foes.

And yet, as he felt the world itself trembling before the incursion, uncertainty welled up within him.

"I'll do my job in Irun," Omilaena was saying, "but I'm going to keep an eye on all my experiments. I really don't want all my work getting eaten by stupid random monsters."

"I will likely be very mobile in Krysal," Zae Zin Nim warned, "so it would be difficult to contact me. Use the elites' scroll if there's a disaster."

Kai should have been talking with his wives, but he only stood nearby, his mind in the abyss. There had been no actual loss of control over the past few days, yet he kept getting flashes of sensation as the monsters poured forth, continuing even now. It wasn't his monstrous nature that made him distant, just his preoccupation.

"I'll see you both soon," Kai forced himself to say, smiling as if everything was fine. He kissed both Omilaena and Zae Zin Nim, and they kissed one another, then they parted to step into separate portals.

And, contrary to all logic, Kai had the overwhelming feeling that he'd never see them again.

On the other side of his portal, he stepped into an empty portion of wasteland, deep in the Frontier in between the abyss and the wall. This was his position, the swath of territory he needed to defend, one link in the chain of elites. Currently there were no monsters visible, but he could sense them over the horizon.

In the very early days, as his premonitions got stronger, there had been real fear that the god-like fighters would return and all his preparations would be useless. He and the other elites had waited on the Frontier wall, their only possible defense, and searched for unexplained arrivals. But now that there were monsters in the wasteland and no gods had shown up, it seemed they were just dealing with a normal monstrous apocalypse, so his wives should be in no danger at all.

Ugh, his head was throbbing. If he couldn't get answers about the battle, he wanted to at least fly to the abyss and see what might lie within. Last time, he had seen nothing, but the being who called himself Koleiman the Magnificent had been convinced there was something, and he seemed to know a lot more than Kai.

But he couldn't go to the center, not yet. At this early stage in the incursion, uncoordinated attacks could easily lead to unbalanced monster hordes, or worse, trigger even more of them. When phased monsters started coming out, that was when the elites had the greatest risk of dying.

So he would wait. Even though it was a grim comfort, the outpouring was likely to last most of a day and the consequences would last for much longer, so he would have time.

Pushing aside all such thoughts, Kai instead focused on his own soul.

<

Name: Kai Clanless

Total Power: 1174

Monstrous Hunger - XV (omicron)

Cultivation: Nascent Foundation 83% (267)

Savage Heart: 29 (291)

Physique Level: B-4 (520)

Beggar King's Robes: +3 (15)

Soul Level: 9 (81)

Behemoth's Heart - XII (mu)

Thunderbird's Wings - XI (lambda)

Tyrant's Claw - XIII (nu)

Manticore's Spine - VI (zeta)

Baleful Breath - VIII (theta)

Void Gaze - IX (iota)

Legion Bite - III (gamma)

-

Direboar's Strength - XV (omicron)

Famished World - VI (zeta)

Mutefang's Stealth - XV (omicron)

Isulfr's Bite - X (kappa)

Sahagin's Soul - XII (mu)

Monstrous Tail - III (gamma)

Wallcrawler's Feet - V (epsilon)

Abominalgum - II (beta)

Bloodtrap - III (gamma)

Slime's Immortality - II (beta)

Silver Demon - II (beta)

Voidmaw's Bite - II (beta)

Great Cetae - III (gamma)

Bloodtail's Armor - III (gamma)

>

The incursion hadn't been gracious enough to wait for him to reach a cultivation breakthrough, so Kai was entering the battle with 1174 Power. He didn't think his monstrous powers had fully grown to match that yet, but he was more interested in flexibility anyway.

He needed Behemoth's Heart for stamina and Thunderbird's Wings for mobility, so that left him with only five slots. Ultimately the choice wasn't too difficult: he didn't need specialized skills here, and the monsters weren't likely to have any powers that would require Famished World. So he picked Tyrant's Claw and Manticore's Spine as his bread and butter, with Void Gaze and Baleful Breath for crowd control, then his new Legion Bite for efficiency.

Hopefully. As much as Kai had trained and prepared, he hadn't actually used any of these abilities in an incursion, and the role he was going to play was nothing like seven years ago.

When the monsters started to pour over the horizon, Kai had to admit that he took a breath. They weren't individually strong, but they rolled forward in a wave, carpeting the landscape, a wall of teeth and claws that scraped the land dry. This was the raw concentration of monstrous power that threatened a continent, that required such an elaborate system for people to possibly survive.

And now he was taking it on directly. Kai exhaled and raised his hand.

His first Tyrant's Claw, extended to the largest size he could, tore a swath through the horde. It killed hundreds of monsters, creating a hole in the mass and hurling their bodies into the others. A massive portion of the incoming horde flinched back from the raw impact, but the monsters knew no fear and more poured into the empty space over the bodies of the dead.

The blow had been effective, but even with his strength the claw energy couldn't cut through bodies forever, plus he thought the angle from the ground was ineffective. Intending to conserve strength, Kai didn't start flying, he just used muscle to leap into the air and get an aerial view.

From above, he could see the rush of monsters even more clearly. Toward the horizon they were a solid wall of monstrous flesh tumbling over itself, only beginning to separate into a distinguishable horde at his distance from the center. The elites had, through years of careful analysis, determined that this radius was the best place to try to thin out the monsters, so he would trust their judgment.

Kai formed another Tyrant's Claw and hurled it downward into a different part of the horde. When his power impacted, for a moment he saw three claw marks of bloody chaos torn into the horde. After that, the cascade of bodies slammed into the others nearby, turning the claw marks into an impressionistic smear. Hundreds more were dead... but the monstrous hordes crawled onward.

Looking to either direction, he saw nothing but more monsters as far as his eyes could see, though the next nearest elites could be sensed just beyond his visual range. It would take hundreds of claw attacks like this to stamp out the current wave, and there were more beyond.

Seeing this, he understood on a different level how the basic power he had gained from training Physique as a young man would never have been enough to fight here.

But he wasn't that man anymore, and Kai was just testing his limits against the mass of monsters at this point. He threw himself back down, directly into the monstrous hordes, to see just how much he could distract them.

When he landed his legs crushed the monsters beneath him, and the echo of power from Thunderbird's Wings flattened more. But it was only a second before monsters charged in from all sides and he was swarmed by tooth and claw. They couldn't break his skin, and the Beggar King's Robes regenerated easily, but for a moment he was completely buried in a hill of monstrous flesh, unable to even see the sky as the monsters massed around him.

Which was the intent, of course. Kai let his body shift to a monstrous form and began swinging, mauling monsters in all directions. The impacts and tumbling bodies drew even more, and even though they dissolved in a windmill of death when they reached him, that didn't stop the others from charging in.

How long could he fight like this? With Behemoth's Heart regenerating his stamina, Kai thought that he might be able to keep up low level combat almost forever. The problem was that he was only distracting a portion of the monster horde - he wasn't sure how much - and he would need to be more mobile to handle the others. So Kai dropped to one knee and began utilizing Legion Bite.

Instantly bite marks began disappearing from the monsters around him, heads and hearts vanishing into the void. Kai didn't need to move to use the technique, yet he found his jaws opening and his teeth growing sharper as he extended the effect.

At first he had tried to control it precisely, targeting hundreds of individual bites, but that had proved unwieldy. Now Kai just opened the potential, as if he had dozens of invisible mouths questing from his body. They could choose targets on their own, or rather, he thought that the technique was a raw expression of the hunger within him, which aimed to consume everything.

Encountering a point of resistance made the monsters come in even greater numbers, tumbling over one another in waves higher than he was tall, but Legion Bite kept up with the incoming masses. Kai could feel the essences filling him and being burned to fuel more bites, leaving nothing but the taste of blood. No matter how many monsters massed together like this, so long as they were weak, he could keep consuming them.

But was it enough? After enough time had passed, Kai burst off the ground to get a view from above.

From there, he could see that a large portion of the monster hordes had turned toward him, a horde that could have consumed a city on its own. But to the east and west, more monsters continued pouring outward, ignoring him and stampeding toward the Frontier wall.

Just this alone wasn't pulling his weight, not when the elites had trusted him to cover so much space. Kai burst west first, sweeping in front of the hordes and exhaling Baleful Breath as densely as he could.

His breath annihilated a whole swath of the monsters and more importantly, the wall of flame and darkness lingered. Some of the monsters tumbled directly into it and were annihilated, and more pushed from behind, wiping out part of the horde before it managed to slow down and part, trying to circle around the wall of Baleful Breath.

Kai was already bursting in the other direction to handle the east as well. Here he tried something different: flying just above the ground, keeping Legion Bite active around him. He discovered that he could bite a bloody swath through the horde, but if he moved at top speed, Legion Bite couldn't keep up with consuming every single monster he passed, so there was a limit to how fast he could consume the edge of the horde.

Ahead, Kai finally saw the next elite to the east: an Earthborn man who was raising great walls of spiked stone, which the monstrous hordes impaled themselves against before more collided with the bodies and began to tumble over. It looked as though the man had already fallen back several times, letting the monsters collapse on one another before he raised a new wall of spikes.

That was actually better than average: the whole point of this step was a fighting retreat to thin out the monsters' sheer numbers. Kai hurled out a Tyrant's Claw, tearing through the mass of monsters, just to give the man a break. The elite - who must have a speed phase - turned to glance at Kai, and they exchanged a brief nod before Kai reversed back in the other direction.

As he returned to his central position, Kai exhaled another wall of Baleful Breath, longer this time. He created a long wall of flame that would seriously slow the monsters, but his throat burned by the end. Behemoth's Heart couldn't sustain such a powerful technique forever, so he would need to pace himself.

Still, when he soared skyward to get a better view, Kai thought that he had done well. He hadn't given that much ground while killing thousands of monsters in the process, defending all the leagues of the circle that were his responsibility. Both east and west, he could sense that the monster hordes had progressed much further than the section he'd defended.

Monsters were funneling down to the space in between his two walls of Baleful Breath, so Kai smashed down into the group, crushing them with raw physical force. He plunged into the gap, tearing through the hordes, and then began making his way west.

Along the way, he experimented with running while using Legion Bite, which let him carve a line through the horde. That only took out a portion of them, but it also drew them inward to try to kill him, pulling back the lines of encroaching monsters. This was good enough for moving between two points.

When he arrived, Kai saw that Sheiri Kagskan was the elite to his west. She held a raised point, lashing out with a whip of Irunian steel that extended to great lengths, scything through hundreds of monsters with each swing. This easily kept the horde at bay, so the only problem was that limited mobility meant she couldn't stop the monsters beginning to circle around her.

Kai blew in on a wave of monster bodies and landed beside her, grinning despite himself. The momentum sent a cascade of monstrous bodies tumbling past them, wiping out a swath from the point where he'd stopped. It was a mark of her experience that Sheiri didn't shudder at the sight, just nodded.

"How does this compare to normal?" Kai asked.

"About average," Sheiri said as she lashed out with her whip on the other side. It didn't sound like she was joking. "The real question is how much it intensifies."

"So how much ground do we give?" Kai moved to her back, handling the east with Tyrant's Claws while Sheiri whipped further west.

"We have to give some. People who aren't you need to conserve their stamina for the fight at the wall, then the nation destroyers or the hordes that get past."

Kai had more questions, but at that moment their easy slaughter of the monsters was interrupted. Sheiri's whip had been slicing through the monsters like butter until abruptly one of them survived. It was built like an armored bug, covered in armor that managed to deflect the Irunian steel. That threw Sheiri off, and worse, the monster unfolded, revealing a maw filled with venom...

A Manticore's Spine went through its head and the monster fell. Sheiri gave him an appreciative nod, but she looked grim.

"The stronger ones are coming," she said. "That's what really determines how much trouble we have."

Readying his claws and forming more spines, Kai turned to face the rushing hordes.