{Chapter: 114: Echoes of the Alsop Stars}
As Dex had predicted, the situation unfolded with an eerie precision that mirrored his unease. What began as a subtle shift in the atmosphere escalated into a catastrophic event within moments. The battlefield, already a chaotic tangle of scorched earth and broken spells, was about to descend into something far more sinister.
At first, the wizarding world's generals remained unaware. To them, the pulse of war followed familiar rhythms—explosions in the distance, sudden disappearances of summoned beasts, unexpected energy readings. But within seconds, these irregularities compiled into a singular, devastating reality.
Entire legions of their summoned war beasts, arcane constructs, and foot soldiers vanished—eaten away by something invisible, relentless, and grotesquely efficient. What had once taken days, even weeks, to achieve through normal attrition was accomplished in under a minute.
Over a million battlefield entities were consumed.
And then came the silence. The eerie, almost reverent stillness that only followed mass death.
Hovering silently in the skies above, a dozen of the legendary [Alsop Stars]—orbiting citadel-class constructs crafted from ancient witch-forged alloys and imbued with astral consciousness—began to stir. Each was a fortress and an engine of arcane devastation, and now, they hummed with growing urgency.
Within them, command teams reacted with a calm born not from ignorance, but from having survived worse.
Several of the [Alsop Stars] initiated their long-range suppression protocols. The air above the battlefield rippled like heat over metal, and a thick, noxious green fog appeared, spreading out from arcane vents shaped like enormous leech maws. This was not ordinary gas—it was the corrosive fog of the Blightwave Protocol, an acidic ether designed to annihilate machines and disrupt magical energy signatures.
The fog surged downward in rolling tides, descending upon the battlefield like an apocalyptic tsunami. Where it passed, mechanical constructs disintegrated instantly. Even enchanted metals screeched and melted, leaving behind craters of smoking ruin.
But the mechanical insects responded.
From their birthing swarm near the Jarnser warships, a silver tide began to rise. The once-invisible nano-swarm had multiplied so extensively that it now shimmered visibly in the air, a living fog of death. They moved as one organism, forming spires, tendrils, and waves of metallic mist that roared toward the encroaching acid storm.
The two forces met with a horrific screech, the battlefield erupting into light and sound. It was as if the air itself was screaming. Countless mechanical insects sizzled in the acidic ether, melting mid-air like snow in fire. But it wasn't enough.
Instead of retreating, the swarm began absorbing the energy from the acid. Corrosion became sustenance. Deterioration turned into fuel. With horrifying efficiency, the insects used the destructive wave to multiply further. They absorbed the necrotic energy, analyzed it, and adapted in real time.
The fog that had once melted steel now became food.
And then, in a moment of unspeakable horror, the acid wave collapsed.
The green fog scattered, dispersed by its own prey.
Aboard one of the leading [Alsop Stars], seated in a chair grown from silverroot crystal and humming with predictive enchantments, Commander Hewlett Holtz observed the battlefield below through a wall of transparent obsidian. His long white beard, braided with starlight-thread, shimmered faintly as he leaned forward, brushing a hand over the display of swirling energies.
He showed no fear. Only a sense of weary amusement.
"Well now," he muttered, voice low and reflective. "This reminds me of the Coron War… back when the Coron Civilization unleashed their mind-forged wyrms. Those damned things burned through five provinces before we finally shattered their ether-seed."
He tilted his head, his eyes shining with millennia of wisdom and conflict.
"They thought we would panic," he mused, as if explaining a lesson to a classroom that only he could see. "But we've stared into worse abysses than this. And the abyss blinked first."
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Holtz felt no fear. No seasoned commander of the wizarding world did. They had survived the collapse of the Western Isles. They had fought off the crystal liches of the Thousand Dunes. Their magic was forged not from safety, but desperation.
Still, he knew this had gone too far. The swarm had tasted victory. It would grow bolder.
"Arrogance," he whispered, "must be answered with precision."
Without further hesitation, he laid his palm on the control sigil embedded in the arm of his throne. The structure groaned, ancient locks disengaging. A deep, subsonic hum resonated from the heart of the [Alsop Star].
Authorization codes fluttered into existence—layered runes from hundreds of different schools of arcane encryption. One by one, each was accepted. A chamber sealed for over nine centuries opened with a soundless pulse, unleashing something never before seen by Jarnser eyes in this war.
A new something erupted from the [Alsop Star], invisible to the naked eye but undeniable in its impact.
It wasn't a fire. It wasn't magic.
A pulse spread out in perfect concentric ripples, consuming everything in its path. The silver swarm tried to flee, but the pulse moved at the speed of causality itself. Wherever it touched, the insects didn't simply die—they ceased to function, then ceased to exist.
They were unraveled, their matter broken into theoretical particles before even hitting the ground.
Within seconds, the battlefield fell into a near-unearthly stillness. The silver mist was gone. The ground, pocked with craters and littered with charred bones, was once again visible. Even the scorched remains of earlier victims remained untouched by this new force, as if it had surgically targeted the nanite swarm and only them.
For a full minute, no one spoke.
On the other side of the battlefield, inside a command spire sculpted from neutron-iron and black glass, the supreme commander of the Jarnser civilization stared at the aftermath with cold disbelief. His previous confidence had been eroded by what he had just witnessed.
That had been a trump card—no, a death god sent to feast upon the living. Those mechanical insects had decimated countless fringe worlds, turning entire moons into nothing but food. Their adaptive consumption ability had outwitted dozens of technological and magical defenses.
And yet here… they had been erased in mere seconds.
He clenched his fists tightly, the veins on his forehead bulging as he turned to one of his adjutants. "They've developed anti- defense fields. That weapon… it isn't just suppression—it's retroactive."
His voice dropped, grim with realization. "It unmade the insects before they could become a threat."
No one dared speak. Not in the presence of such failure.
For all the pride the Jarnser took in their survivalist ideology, they had underestimated the ancient, battle-forged cunning of the wizarding world.
Although he already knew that this trick alone would not pose much of a threat to wizard civilization, he still felt a little uncomfortable when he saw them easily get rid of this weapon. After all, in the conventional sense, this was already a killer-level method, and it was no problem to get rid of a few low-end worlds with one of these bugs.
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