The Guardian gods-Chapter 566

They didn’t cast a spell or anything, as doing that once, opens a gate no one wanted to see.

On the demon side of the battle, a palpable caution had descended upon the endless hordes. No low-tier demon or high tier fifth stage demons, no matter how feral, wished to be the first to get caught in the terrifying crossfire of a Sixth-Tier Mage’s attack. Their sheer power and destructive capabilities were a well-known, and deeply feared, deterrent.

However, the demons’ fears of collateral damage were, for now, somewhat misplaced. The Sixth-Tier Mages, formidable as they were, were currently grappling with their own escalating crisis.

Kaelen, the tireless commander, along with mages of all tiers from the lowest initiates to the most powerful Sixth-Tier adepts and even the hulking Fifth-Stage Ogre Knights, were feeling the immense pressure. These people, renowned for their mental fortitude, who once shrugged off the Abyss’s psychic assaults, were now visibly struggling. It was as if with every step, every inch of progress made towards the Abyss, its psychic attack grew exponentially stronger.

What was once an insidious, invisible mental assault now manifested with terrifying physicality. These were no longer mere whispers in the mind; they were tangible entities, tormenting and relentless. These spectral attackers ensured the soldiers had no respite, no peace, no sleep, knowing that such a horror was just an arm’s reach away, waiting to breach their defenses.

Tonight was a stark example of this nightly torment. Every eye in the fortress was turned towards the sky. The shimmering, translucent dome of the psychic shield, conjured by a Sixth-Tier Mage, covered the entire fortress and its walls.

But behind this shield, a chilling spectacle unfolded: smoke-like entities, swirling masses of dread and despair, continuously crashed against the psychic barrier. Sometimes they remained ethereal, formless wisps of terror, yet at other times, they would momentarily coalesce into compact, solid forms, slamming into the shield with a deafening, percussive Thum sound. Each resonant impact echoed through the fortress, a physical manifestation of the mental warfare, ensuring that sleep was a luxury no one could afford.

Inside one of the larger, reinforced tents within the fortress, a scene of immense concentration unfolded. Three figures floated effortlessly in the air, legs crossed in a meditative posture. One occupied the center, while the other two formed a protective, symmetrical arc around him. These were the very Sixth-Tier Mages who had joined the war, their vast power now dedicated to the grim reality of the front lines.

For the past month, they had been forced into a grueling rotation, taking turns maintaining the psychic shield. What was once a task for a single mage, even a powerful one, was now a shared burden, a stark indicator of the Abyss’s escalating assault. The sheer mental fortitude required to hold the shimmering barrier against the relentless, corporeal psychic attacks was immense. It wasn’t even a matter of mana drain – their enormous pools of arcane energy remained largely untouched. Instead, it was the unbearable mental strain, the constant push against the corrosive despair and chaotic malice of the attacking entities, that wore them down.

Compounding their plight was the utter lack of respite. There was no time to recover, no lull in the nightly onslaught. The attacks were relentlessly persistent, growing stronger with each inch of ground the Empire reclaimed, each step closer they drew to the Abyss itself. Their minds were being frayed, stretched to their limits, with no end in sight.

There was, however, one desperate solution, one method to cleanse the very source of this torment: Holy Spells. These divine incantations, infused with purity and light, held the power to wash away the insidious corruption seeded into the very ground that the Empire had already taken back, and the lands they still sought to reclaim. It was the only known way to truly push back the Abyss’s pervasive psychic influence and grant them a moment’s peace.

The grim reality for the Sixth-Tier Mages was that the Empire possessed only one individual truly versed in the intricacies of these vital Holy Spells: Vellok. And for those who understood the profound secret Vellok harbored, making such a request was an unthinkable act.

This presented a crushing dilemma. Inside Vellok resided a literal being of pure holiness, an entity capable of solving their immediate problem with a single, effortless snap of its will. This celestial presence could, undoubtedly, purge the abyssal corruption from the land, granting them the desperately needed respite from the psychic onslaught.

However, the mages knew the complex, volatile relationship both they and Vellok shared with this being. Unleashing it, allowing it to act so directly, would not solve their problems, but instead add a new, potentially catastrophic issue to the Empire’s already precarious situation. The consequences of drawing upon such power were too dire, too unpredictable.

As Sixth-Tier beings, they certainly possessed the means to individually deal with the smoky creatures relentlessly hammering their psychic shield. They could banish them, destroy them outright. But that would be like pouring water into an ocean – a futile, short-term solution. They could clear the immediate threat for one night, perhaps. But what about the next night? And the night after that? The sheer, inexhaustible nature of the Abyss’s psychic assault made individual intervention pointless.

The thought alone sent shivers down their spines. They now shuddered at the very idea of what prolonged exposure to the Abyss itself would entail, once they finally managed to push through these relentless defenses. The battle for the land was already mentally crippling; what horrors awaited them in the heart of the enemy’s domain?

Across the embattled front, within the relative sanctuary of a command tent, Rattan couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually witnessed the battlefield firsthand. His days, stretching into weeks, had blurred into an endless cycle of confinement with Kaelen, both relentlessly grappling with the insidious psychic attacks emanating from the Abyss.

Right now, Kaelen stood with a deep frown etched onto his face, one hand thoughtfully stroking his chin. Rattan, by contrast, lay sprawled on the tent floor, his gaze fixed blankly on the artificial light illuminating their workspace. The veneer of formality between them had long since dissolved, stripped away by the crushing weight of their shared dilemma.

"How can such a thing even exist?" Rattan mused aloud, his voice flat, devoid of its usual academic precision. "How can something have so much corruption ingrained into it?"

Since the very first night of the psychic onslaught, early in the war, Kaelen had immediately sought out Rattan. Both practiced the Magitech System, a fusion of arcane principles and technological innovation. While Kaelen had, by necessity, forcefully adopted the mage’s path to adapt. Rattan was unequivocally the more deeply versed expert in the system. Now, their combined expertise was being pushed to its absolute limits by an enemy that defied all known magical or technological logic.

A grim, bewildering new world opened up for Rattan and Kaelen the moment they officially began their research into the psychic attacks. Their laboratory was the very battlefield, their materials the very ground they fought to reclaim. They had an abundance of samples, for the source of their insurmountable problem was the land itself, saturated with the Abyss’s pervasive influence.

What greeted both seasoned researchers was a single, all-encompassing phenomenon: Corruption. Nothing more, nothing less, just this stark, simple word. It was as if a fundamental law of the Abyss had been irrevocably engraved into every particle touched by its dark influence, and that law was ceaseless decay, abundancy and distortion. They quickly lost count of how many meticulously prepared materials had been irrevocably destroyed or grotesquely altered by the subtle, yet potent, influence of the abyssal corruption.

Rattan, in particular, was horrified by the sheer unnaturalness of it. He’d never conceived that iron could spontaneously grow flesh, that stone could pulse with a sickening, organic beat. He did, however, inadvertently gain something from this harrowing exposure: the constant, intense interaction with such profound corruption had paradoxically pushed him to Fourth-Tier Mage status. But the promotion brought him no joy. It was a hollow achievement, a testament to the sheer scale of the problem, a problem that remained utterly unsolved.

Kaelen finally broke the tense silence, his voice heavy with a weariness that even his Sixth-Tier power couldn’t fully mask. "Another night, another barrage. And no closer to understanding why a rock grows flesh." He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. "We’ve thrown every diagnostic spell, every material analysis, every theoretical model we have at this ’corruption,’ and it just... laughs."

Rattan pushed himself up from the floor, leaning against a crate of discarded, warped sensors. His eyes, still holding that distant, haunted look, met Kaelen’s. "Laughs is an understatement. It mocks us, Kaelen. Every failed experiment, every ruined sample... it’s like a perverse lesson in how little we truly understand about fundamental existence." He gestured vaguely towards the tent flap, where the faint, rhythmic THUMMM! of the psychic entities against the shield echoed. "How do you fight something that redefines reality on a molecular level? We can’t even purify a single shard of corrupted stone, let alone an entire battlefield."

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