The hundred-foot horror instantly realized the apex predator had landed on its spine. It thrashed violently, attempting to buck her off, its hundreds of hooked legs tearing up the earth.

Veylara just smirked. She anchored her essence into her boots, cementing herself to the beast’s carapace.

And sprinted directly down the length of the Centipede’s back.

But, as she ran, she dragged the bladed tip of her obsidian spear behind her, pressing it down with the full, devastating weight of the White Tiger’s suppression. The blade tore through the beast’s thick, armored plates as if they were made of parchment.

She carved a massive, fifty-foot-long trench down the direct center of the Centipede’s spine, exposing its pulsing, vulnerable necrotic flesh and severing its central nervous system.

The Centipede let out a gurgling, agonizing hiss. Thick, highly corrosive green blood erupted from the wound, but Veylara was already moving too fast for the acid to catch her.

She leaped off the dying, thrashing insect just as the Nightfang Wolf lunged at her from the shadows.

The wolf’s jaws, lined with iron-hard bone-saws, snapped shut. But they only caught the fading afterimage of the Warchief.

Veylara slid through the mud completely under the massive wolf’s guard. As she slid, she drove her spear upward, slicing a deep, debilitating gash across the wolf’s exposed belly, spilling its hot, black blood across the battlefield.

In the span of thirty seconds, the dynamic of the apocalypse had completely inverted.

...

A hundred yards away, the defensive perimeter of the Veynar Elders and the Elite Vanguard stood in absolute, stunned awe. They had been fighting desperately to keep the lesser beasts off her back, terrified that the Warchief would be overwhelmed.

Instead, they were watching a masterclass in absolute slaughter.

She was systematically, aggressively dismantling the Sovereigns of the Great Orrath. She moved with a terrifying, rhythmic elegance, turning the overwhelming size and power of the Behemoths completely against them.

The Warchief stood up from her slide, her chitin armor gleaming wetly with the blood of four different Layer 3 entities. Her White Tiger phantom roared, its ethereal fangs bared, daring the surviving, bleeding Behemoths to make another move.

But the Sovereigns of the Great Orrath did not know the concept of surrender, the omen Blood in their bodies made them accept death rather than surrender.

As Veylara’s White Tiger phantom tore through their ranks, the remaining, bleeding Behemoths realized that survival was an impossibility.

The primal terror that had momentarily gripped them fractured, replaced instantly by a suicidal, berserk frenzy. The Stonehide Ursid, bleeding heavily from its palm, and the Nightfang Wolf, its belly sliced open, completely abandoned their self-preservation. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

They threw themselves at the Warchief with absolute, unhinged abandon, turning the epicenter of the battlefield into a blinding hurricane of dust, blood, and clashing auras.

Even though she had planned to kill them one by one, she was forced to fully commit to the melee, completely bogged down by the sheer, desperate weight of the dying Layer 3 entities.

And in that chaotic distraction, the Great Orrath played a terrifying card.

While everyone’s attention was on the fight between Veylara and other beasts, the Rockhorn Beetle, which had been thrashing blindly in the mud, its brain scrambled by Veylara’s spear, suddenly stopped screeching.

Since common insects were horrifyingly resilient, naturally these buffed, primitive ones were even more so.

The destruction of its higher brain functions didn’t kill the Rockhorn Beetle, it merely severed its pain receptors and conscious thought, handing complete control over to its rudimentary, localized nervous system.

Driven by pure instinct, it did what a dying insect would do, the dying biological siege engine locked onto the largest source of thermal heat and vibration in the area: the thousands of terrified civilians huddled behind the Veynar walls.

With a sickening crackle of shifting chitin, the Beetle righted itself. And without any roar or warning, which it wasn’t even capable of right now, simply lowered its massive, branching horn and charged at full speed.

It was entirely blind, leaking yellowish-green ichor from its shattered eyes, but its momentum was catastrophic. It was a walking mountain of iron-hard armor accelerating straight toward the already cracked and groaning obsidian-timber gates.

"The Beetle! It’s running towards the gates!" a Spirit Warrior who just happened to kill a beast saw the Beetle and shrieked from the wall, his voice cracking in absolute despair.

But, to their despair, the Elders were too far away. The Warchief was completely engulfed by the suicidal frenzy of the other Behemoths. And the wounded and weak warriors stationed at the breach couldn’t even dent the armor of a Layer 2 beast, let alone stop a near-Layer 4 siege engine in its terminal death-charge. If that multi-ton monstrosity hit the walls now, the petrified wood would shatter like glass. And the entire settlement would be wiped out.

And even further away, even though Sol had recovered from his trance-like state of Chief’s beauty, and was busy killing the beast, his attention was still on her battle, and he almost immediately saw the massive shadow break away from the Warchief’s battle.

With a swing of blade, he killed a charging beast, and looked around and instantly got a grasp of the dire situation. He mentally calculated various scenarios, all pointed towards the worst.

So, he didn’t hesitate, avoided the attacks and abandoned the swarm of Omen Blood beasts he had been slaughtering, his eyes locking onto the charging mountain of chitin.

If that thing hits the tribe, countless people will die, Sol thought, his mind instantly calculating the trajectories.

The world around him seemed to violently hit the brakes. Time crawled to an agonizing, suffocating halt. He could see the clumps of bloody mud being kicked up by the Beetle’s massive legs, hanging suspended in the bright air. He could hear his own heartbeat hammering in his ears, a deafening, frantic rhythm that pushed a thick, choking knot of pure panic straight up into his throat.

Even if he didn’t give a damn about the survival of the tribe, there was no way in hell he was going to stand there, and watch Kira die.