Lord of the Foresaken-Chapter 196: THE LEGION’S LAST STAND

Ash fell like snow over the battlefield—soft, silent, and wholly out of place.

Shia stood at the edge of the Rift-blasted wasteland, where the fortress gates had once stood. Now there was only ruin, and beyond it, war. The sky above bled light in the wrong direction, and reality twitched like a sick animal trying to wake from a nightmare. The goblin phalanx waited behind her, shields braced, eyes fixed not on the horizon, but on her.

They were warriors reborn from a war that should have ended. Veterans of a dozen deaths. Goblins, humans, fragments of old spirits sealed into shells of flesh and metal. Whatever they had been, now they were one legion.

And this was their last stand.

A ripple passed through the ranks as the first shape emerged from the breach—an entity too large for physical space, limbs phasing in and out of dimensions like broken reflections. Eyes—dozens of them—blinked in patterns that hurt to look at. A dark-touched brute, bent by the void and dripping with the raw stench of cosmic decay.

Shia gripped her glaive tighter. Beneath the metal, her fingers trembled.

Not from fear. From pressure.

The Network pulsed inside her mind, the emerald strands that connected her to every soldier shimmering with unbearable tension. So many lives braided together. So much will resting on one heartbeat.

She raised her weapon.

The phalanx moved.

The first clash came like thunder. Spears drove into shifting flesh, only to be absorbed into probability. The creature turned inside out and screamed in backwards time. A shield-bearer vanished mid-chant, his entire concept of defense unmade by a burst of inverted logic.

The legion faltered.

They were soldiers trained for death—but this was worse. This was fighting things that did not die, that had never lived, that bled equations and screamed in data.

Shia activated Soul Sight.

The world peeled back.

She no longer saw her enemies. She saw strings—threads of cause, intention, belief. The logic lines that anchored every being to existence.

She slashed through one.

The brute collapsed in a flash of white-blue light, its entire presence erased from reality with a sound like pages burning underwater.

Shia’s voice rang out, hoarse from overuse. "Cut the threads! Aim for the anchors, not the flesh!"

A moment of clarity swept the ranks. Then the phalanx surged forward.

Goblins moved with terrifying precision, cutting through logic like reapers through wheat. They adapted faster than thought. One warrior turned his broken sword into a tuning fork, humming it through a Dark-touched specter until the thing imploded. Another slammed her spear into her own shadow, binding it with runes that spread like ice underfoot.

The battlefield changed by the second.

One heartbeat they fought on shattered cobblestones. The next, they stood on a frozen ocean of mirrors. Rain fell upward. A heartbeat became an hour. Time snarled and unspooled and bit down again. Reality collapsed and stitched itself back together like an indecisive god.

Shia pressed forward, cutting through tangled threads of what-could-be with each strike. The glyph on her chest burned. Her hair—emerald strands alive with memory—lashed the air, threading itself into the Network.

Each mind she touched gave her more.

More vision. More clarity. More pain.

She could taste their exhaustion. Their grief. The phantom ache of limbs lost and regrown too many times. She could feel the desperate hope burning in them like dry oil.

Then she felt the collapse.

A wave of dark memory surged from the flank. Shia turned, but it was too far—dozens of consciousness refugees were exposed. Their minds, fragile things barely clinging to borrowed flesh, had no defense.

One figure broke ranks.

Grax Ironjaw.

The old war-sergeant launched himself into the air, golden dusk trailing from a shattered vial in his grip. His body ignited with green fire as he plunged into the oncoming tide.

Each impact was an explosion of memory. Each blow a sacrifice. His soul flared once—blinding, defiant—and was gone.

The wave stopped. The refugees survived.

Grax didn’t.

Shia fell to one knee. The pain in her heart was a blade twisting deeper than any wound. The Network hissed, reacting to the severed bond. She could still feel the echo of his final thought:

"Tell Reed... the debt’s repaid."

She stood.

"Phalanx," she growled. "New doctrine. We carve Ironjaw’s name into the next thousand kills."

The chant rose like an avalanche.

"IRONJAW! IRONJAW!"

They surged forward again.

Time blurred. Pain became a rhythm. The battle didn’t ebb or flow—it simply was, an endless, grinding tide of transformation. Weapons twisted into new forms. Shields became lenses. Goblins reshaped how they thought, how they fought, how they existed.

This was no longer war. This was evolution.

And in the middle of it all, Reed arrived.

He cut through a dozen anomalies on a steed of stardust and obsidian. His eyes glowed with the mark of prophecy, the edges of his mind fraying into something more than mortal.

He spoke only once.

"Collapse the breach. Use Division Null."

Shia froze.

Division Null meant annihilation. It meant every mind they had just protected—every refugee, every reborn soul—would be turned to ash. A tactical erasure.

She stepped forward. "Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll reach the node and destroy it."

Reed hesitated. For one second, the man beneath the prophecy looked back at her.

Then he nodded.

"Fifteen."

She turned. No orders needed. The phalanx moved with her.

They tore through the final wave, aiming for the crystal obelisk that pulsed at the breach’s center. Each facet of the obelisk displayed fragments of alternate pasts. Each step closer twisted their thoughts, whispering lies in voices that sounded like lost loved ones.

Shia ignored them.

The obelisk loomed. Its guardians descended—winged paradoxes, things made of failed promises and rotting futures. The sky fractured around them.

The phalanx did not break.

They moved like fire through paper. Shia led them in, glaive a blur of emerald and shadow. Her glaive struck the crystal, and cracks bloomed like veins of rebellion. The node screamed, reacting, rewriting itself.

They needed more.

The captains formed a ring. Shia joined them. Together, they poured resurrection energy into the wound. Each memory offered was a blade. Each sacrifice a hammer.

The crystal buckled.

Time was running out.

Fifteen minutes.

In the distance, Division Null stirred. Reed was preparing the kill field.

They were out of time.

Shia slammed her hand into the node’s heart.

Her mind erupted.

She saw paths. A thousand timelines. A billion deaths. Universes that never knew her name. One thread shimmered—a single chance where they could survive.

She seized it. freeweɓnovel-cøm

The node detonated.

Reality screamed.

She floated within the core, vision dark, limbs gone.

And there—on the edge of all that could ever be—stood him.

The figure in the prophecy.

Un-Reed.

Eyes like twin infinities. Armor stitched from ruined choices. Fingers raised.

He looked at her. Smiled.

And snapped.

The void rushed in.

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