"Heavenly Thunder"

When the light show and the rewards were over, I found myself looking at an entirely new landscape of broken and sunken rock that stretched for more than a mile in every direction.

In the middle was a somewhat flat stretch of land maybe a thousand square yards in size with most skinny fissures stretching all throughout the broken earth. In this area were two large groups of people and creatures, one side was made up of mostly just several thousand players divided into several large ruined camps of around a thousand apiece with a large vanguard gathering at the front.

The other side was only a few groups of around a thousand, which made for a few less camps of players. However, their vanguard was twice the size of the opposing side because it was made up of both players and large numbers of native creatures like trolls and ice birds with every player or troll riding a giant scorpion or wolf.

At the front of mixed vanguard stood a smaller vanguard consisting of a single commander troll riding my own Alpha, several chiefs, a few dozen players, and a vaguely noticeable pale blue body barely visible against the pale snowy ground.

Around this estimated quarter-mile of land was a broad but relatively short ridge of broken boulders that actually fit together lough rough cobblestones for the most part. It was on this ridge that I and everybody else from the dungeon had appeared, overlooking the small armies preparing their forces. It was already clear from the large banners in the distance which side was which.

"Imperial," I quickly call out after taking in the situation. "Zekrom, Orion, gather my party together and carry them along in a few seconds then go back and get the other clan leaders. Everybody else, march," I add quickly as the giant black crystalline hornet soon flies around to my position so that I can mount up.

Instead of mounting, though, I simply spread my wings and silently summoned the familiar to me so that it alights about my upper body with its uppermost legs. Once its upper four legs had encased midriff it began softening and conforming to my body while corrupting its own head into a large helmet around my own.

Once we had combined, Imperial took off over the edge of the thirty-foot tall earthen wall straight ahead toward the no-man's-land between the two armies. With my wings stretched out and Imperial managing our forward speed, I could control our altitude with ease simply by angling the shoulders of my wings up and down to catch or minimize wind resistance.

Since Imperial only had to worry about whizzing forward in a straight line with our crudely combined stats, we really did shoot forward with a blurred speed on par with Quick Step. At that pace, it took less than a minute before Imperial was finally slowing down just a few dozen yards outside of the area surrounding the armies to travel at a more watchable speed.

The other players from the dungeon were only now just heading out from the bottom of the ridge. However, all of them were mounted on some form of demon with others all around every player making for a wide and dispersed formation of about a thousand people.

Behind them, though, were the real threats. Little more than a thousand black crystalline skeletons overburdened with large bundles and canister clusters fuller of lances and arrows were trundling calmly along behind the mounted vanguard. Their numbers were much less than I remembered, but I could only assume the goddess had discreetly offered 'our' troops the same chance of life or death she gave to Sir Pence and his men.

They were never our main source of numbers, anyway. Following behind the cathedral NPC were the remaining demon commanders mostly hopping or stepping over the ridge line before thousand of troops began cresting the ridge in their wake. All activity had already stopped as our numbers started sending out noise and vibrations through the broken earth but as more and more bodies shadowed the horizon on one side of the territory the players started reorganizing.

The side made up of the inner and outer dungeon alliance clans did not so much since they could recognize their leaders and receive clan announcements. The other side, on the other hand, began pulling back their vanguard and performing a strategic retreat.

Their planned turned out to be that they were going to give up about a hundred yards of field so that they could hide behind their ruined camps as if they were an obstacle course or bulwark. Considering how much mana it would take to change the surrounding earth on a large scale to make defenses, it was the best economic option available. They had probably already been skirmishing for the last few days with the other clans, attacking each other's supplies with attrition.

Headed by two familiar banners that I had already seen and stepped on, the opposition reforms their vanguard around their ranged troops while preparing a heavily defensive inner formation of troops to supper their mages. Since it was archers and a variety of other physical ranged troops armed with everything from slings to spears at the front, it was clear to see that they would end up retreating behind the mages in battle while they sacrificed the camp bulwark into a burning mortar field.

Such tactics were not bad and were certainly reliable. However, it would be a waste of effort. Most of our players had some form of armor or accessory enchanted with a movement skill which could clear more than their camps in a couple seconds or even instantaneously in the cases of Mistress' and my clans.

As I finally landed in the extended no-man's-land only a little out of reach of the enemy's arrows from their camp, Zekrom and Orion soon flashed over in my wake, magically or physically carrying my friends over with them. Once my team was dropped off behind me, they flashed away back to the dungeon alliance players to collect the next group. Sadly, their mounts and familiars were all left behind and forced to start running the distance.

Cweeper, Hermes, and my own familiars were all mounted up and riding hard or running and leaping across the broken land. They were swiftly followed by the familiars and mounts of Duality's elites as my two fastest remaining familiars continued playing transport. Then came Mistress's familiars a few seconds before her and her party joined Donne and my parties in the no-man's-land before finally came Thirteenth Incorporated's party.

Even the outer clan alliance leaders were brought over next, forming a group consisting of almost eighty people between the five clans involved. We were not even a hundred bodies strong but that was already seconds away from changing as my party's familiars and mounts neared our location. Even then there were over a hundred other mounts and familiars following behind in waves.

In about a minute, our eighty players doubled numbers just in mounts alone before doubling again with the other familiars involved. Our small group was now well over three hundred strong with more than twice our numbers being made up by overpowered demons from The Lost Divinity Raid. Just the present bone fiends alone could empty out the munitions and mana of the enemy's ranged tactics.

Especially if we spread them out with the support of geckos and buffs on top of the boosts of being our familiars.

Taking several steps forward while still combined with Imperial, keeping Cweeper and Hermes close at my sides, I slowly grow and transform into my basic hulk form. Opening up my lower face and throat into a few dozen 'mouths', I deepen all of my voices for fun and amplify my voices with mana while saying, "We are willing to come to terms if you are. Come, bring the leaders of your alliance forward."

I was honestly considering ways of isolating and either holding Fallen Monochrome hostage or wiping their guild as an example. However, setting up such a situation would require some thought. Unlike my expectations, though, the tenfold larger player force advanced in unison, butting right up to the rear of their quaked camps.

Responding with further actions instead of words, their thousand-plus ranged vanguard all raised their weapons high and fired across the shortened couple hundred yards of distance. The rest of our dungeons troops and affiliated forces had maintained their casual doomsday march and thus were only now crossing roughly two thirds of the distance.

Even as the ranged vanguard all fired their weapons into the air, our alliances forces maintained their disciplined march forward with little regard for the assault to their leaders. The clans had already seen what my capabilities were against numbers in the few hundreds during the territory phase. Most of them had also seen what I was capable of in The Lost Divinity Dungeon and that was not limited to combat power.

Our parties and clans should be the only people with access to our A and S grade materials for our weapons and armor, meaning these guys were still entire steps behind us in terms of equipment. The best they could do was combine their territory gains with the far reach of their numerous clans.

This could amount to equipment rivaling level one hundred and above with enough skill and magic, but the demons themselves were rarely below level one-fifty. Their materials themselves were leagues ahead, then add to that the meticulous and intensive treatments performed by Mistress clan. The elites and leaders of the clan did not get by on being fed kills as far as I knew, everybody here crafted for a fair share of their experience.

Nothing on our bodies or in our hands was below epic in name while they would be lucky to reach epic without my team's blessings or a top ten crafting guild's abilities. Simply because of the style of the leaders that I was familiar with, I was fairly certain Fallen Monochrome and similar clans based their numbers on expendable quantity more than quality.

At first, our demons were tensed up from the PTSD stress caused by witnessing our own attacks based on numbers but they soon relaxed as much as the players they were bound to. Nobody facing the volley of well over a thousand projectiles showed any signs of care or movements. They simply enjoyed the short show of so many projectiles flying up into the air.

Off to one side of the field away from both clans, the pre-noon sun on one side of the sky cast a dark and far reaching shadow that stretched out almost to the ridge line opposite the sun's position.

I simply relaxed my wings while minutely flexing my shoulders to signal Imperial's upward flight as the volley of arrows reached the zenith of their arc and slowed for a split second. The arrows alone had made their way several hundred feet up into the air but I only rose about fifty feet above the our small 'peace party' about two hundred yards away from the camp.

Self-Enchanting a solid thousand lightning elemental mana into my transformed body, I swiftly tap into Zekrom's incredible reserves of mana to continue gathering thousands of MP worth of electricity within my body. Alongside this electricity I added some of my own perception and awareness mixed with Zekrom's as a tether of sort.

Combined with Zekrom's tether was a solid ten thousand mana worth of Splash which was vaporized and condensed within my body. By the time the arrows had fallen half of the distance down toward my peace party, I had finished stockpiling energies and materials within and around myself.

In the past few seconds, I had used my time to not only identify the enemy leaderships at the very rear of their army but also the leadership and elite soldiers of a specific clan by their positioning and surrounding defenses. Since I could not directly identify their soldiers to go for the masses, I could target their few hundred elites by their equipment and surrounding clan standards and thus their leadership gathered in the middle and hidden by a dense magical mesh foxhole pavilion.

Unleashing not only the gathered energies but also my own enchantment's full amplifying effects up into the air, the massive stream of cloudy lightning streaks through the air for several hundred feet. The projectiles of the surrounding volley with a hundred fight of the lightning were all blown outward or prematurely detonated by the passage of my lightning bolt.

A split second after the launch of the lightning, the sheer speed of the lightning bolt broke the sound barrier several times over and trigger several overlapping Sound Barriers, producing massively expanding walls of condensed sound waves growing up into the air. By the time the lightning bolt detonated a thousand feet up into the air to form a dark gray storm cloud only a thousand feet above the battle field.

Within this lightning bolt had been my small portion of awareness and Zekrom's perception tether, which now anchored the storm cloud in place. From this godly bird's-eye view, I watched as the Sound Barriers detonated all of the skills and enchantments on the projectiles just under a hundred feet over the heads of the.

After the initial Sound Barrier broke the arrows, the following Sound Barrier blocked out the skills and magic displays in the air while the final Sound Barrier flew up into the air and did nothing at all.

While a thin haze of ashed and dusted materials sank through the air harmlessly toward my alliance's leadership, I used Zekrom's mana to condense and conduct the storm cloud with another ten thousand MP worth of lightning mana that once again vaporized and compacts the cloud.

Though they had been surprised by the loss of their first monstrous volley displaying their supposedly overwhelming power, the enemy alliance was already preparing their second volley. Sadly, they only had enough time left to launch their second volley.

Once the cloud and its rumbling lightning had condensed into a giant orb of shimmering light about ten yards in size, I briefly took aim before releasing the mana storm down upon Fallen Monochrome's foxhole hiding their leadership with two softly spoken words. "Heavenly Thunder."

Just like the lightning bolt I had unleashed to create this energy storm, this lance of storm energy streaked straight and true down through the air, covering hundreds of feet in fractions of a second. Just before the energy storm struck, Sound Barriers were produced and falling through the air.

When the storm energy struck, the lightning seared straight through the thick meshing of the pavilion and splashed down into the foxhole, pouring out and expanding with the release of the condensed evaporated water. Everything within the foxhole was disintegrated as if it had never even been there while the growing maelstrom of forming storm cloud melted the broken granite ground while spreading outward.

When the lightning bolt itself had finished feeding into its contact point, the cloud that was originally only twice the size of the foxhole simply exploded outward in an instant. There had momentarily been some of their defensive formation of elite troops spared during the full-second process of lightning striking, but then they and their neighboring 'command posts' were almost immediately blown apart by the expanding mushroom cloud of vaporized water and lightning.

[Leveled Up x7]

[All stats raised by 7]

While the steam continued rushing outward in a ground-covering cloud that swallowed up over a thousand health bars draining in the heat and electricity the Sound Barriers had been expanding outward and smashing down through the second volley before it ever reached its peak. The first Sound Barrier once again destroyed the volley while the following Sound Barrier destroyed the skills and magic.

However, this several folds stronger storm energy had two more remaining Sound Barriers remaining. Both of them had expanded to over a thousand feet in size with the distance from their starting points a thousand feet in the air. Both of them easily covered the entire enemy alliance with plenty of excess.

Just one Sound Barrier brought the entire alliance to the ground, crushing them to the granite while directly damaging their equipment as well as breaking down the surrounding landscape with vibrations. The first Sound Barrier left nobody among the thousands with more than sixty percent of their health. Then came the second Sound Barrier.

With their equipment already broken down as much as their health, every single member of the enemy alliance was left crippled and in critical condition on amid a thin but enormous dust cloud of granite powder that blew outward to cover the entire quarter-mile space.

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