The Oracle Paths

Chapter 1236: The War Beneath the World

At an unknown depth beneath Dusken, capital of the Duskwight Lands, more than five hundred bronze-skinned humans stood grim and grim. Their builds were outrageously overdeveloped, muscles layered over muscle, their manes and eyebrows a striking silver that marked their race at a glance. Iridescent veins of molten light pulsed beneath their skin, constantly evaporating the blood around them.

Mostly their enemies’. Sometimes their own.

Among them towered a figure even more colossal than the rest. Nearly six meters tall, Gerulf stood like a mountain planted in the underworld, holding back over ninety percent of the endless tide alone.

In his hands was a massive incandescent greatsword longer than his entire body, its blade burning white-orange as it cleaved through abominations. Even the steel-sheened lower fangs jutting from his jaw—more primal, more savage than those of any Duskwight native—dripped with black blood.

Gerulf had been forced to stop holding back.

Jake’s order had been simple: the Kintharians were to intercept the spawn rising from the depths across the Duskwight Lands, with special priority on its capital. If Dusken fell, completing their Ordeal objectives would spiral into a logistical nightmare.

At first, the Kintharians had handled it with almost insulting ease. Their monstrous strength and their absurd underground mobility let them cover nearly half the continent. Gerulf alone, stationed beneath the capital, had been more than enough to guard its underbelly.

That had changed. Fast.

The number of abominations trying to rupture Twyluxia’s already-fractured membrane had begun increasing at a literal exponential rate. Worse, their average individual strength was climbing just as sharply.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Anthace’s roots—spread everywhere beneath the continent and long since identified by the Kintharians—suddenly began functioning like a planetary highway system. The creatures were being funneled straight to the surface, bypassing defenses entirely. At first, no one noticed.

Kintharians were lazy by nature—but they were also among the bravest and most dependable warriors in the cosmos. Their strength and growth potential were beyond dispute, and underground, it was nearly impossible to hide anything from them for long.

One of their scouts uncovered Anthace’s trick. The information spread instantly. What followed was a savage counteroffensive against those deceptively harmless-looking roots.

For most Players, the gargantuan roots of a Titan Tree were untouchable—an environmental constant, not a target.

For these aliens? Just biomass waiting to be melted.

More than five hundred Kintharians who had survived five Ordeals could turn Twyluxia’s subsoil into a pressurized ocean of magma in record time. Lava hot enough to reach tens of thousands of degrees by this world’s standards—hot enough to reduce even Anthace’s roots to cinders if the tree wasn’t careful.

At that moment, the Titan Tree’s consciousness was largely focused on Lustris and the central battlefield. The movements of Kintharians and subterranean spawn near its roots registered no differently than moles or earthworms. It paid them no mind.

Until agony ripped through half of its deeply buried root network.

When Anthace identified the culprits, its fury detonated. Millions of buds destined for the surface abruptly bloomed underground instead, reinforcing the monsters below.

The manageable assignment Jake had given them instantly mutated into a brutal, personal struggle for survival.

Kintharians were absurdly strong—even compared to the elite Players of this Ordeal—but this counterstrike was excessive even for them. Only Gerulf had realistic odds against a Saint or a Celestial. And among their enemies were uncountable numbers of both.

Asfrid, overseeing the various fronts from afar while watching Jake’s overwhelming display at the central battlefield, immediately issued the regroup order.

By intelligently configuring a network of Space Links through one of their faction skills, they teleported and consolidated beneath Dusken in moments. Not a single one of them had fallen.

But they were nowhere near safe.

”Activate Vitality Link. And United We Stand.” Asfrid’s command reached Gerulf without hesitation.

Vitality Link allowed injuries to be transferred to a consenting individual. The Kintharian leader instantly volunteered. He could directly link to only three at a time, but the others could establish additional chains through the faction skill, creating a layered network.

With their combat experience, they had long mastered how to optimize these links—connecting their life forces into a living web capable of redistributing fatal wounds or accelerating regeneration in seconds.

United We Stand, meanwhile, cost one million Aether Points per minute from its activator. At level twelve, it boosted every faction member’s stats by 1.2% within a 1200-meter radius.

Five hundred Kintharians stacked in the same location. Their combined combat output multiplied sixfold.

Still not enough to solo a Celestial. But together, they could hold.

For a while.

Even their monstrous vitality had limits. Accumulated damage would eventually drain the tank dry.

As Gerulf watched gallons of magma-like blood spill from his brothers-in-arms, something inside him cracked. They could have dumped their wounds onto him and survived comfortably. But because he was fighting an entire cluster of beasts, Saints, spawn, and resurrected Celestials alone, they refused to burden him.

The mix of wounded pride, gratitude, and helpless fury was unbearable.

The former Coliseum champion stopped conserving strength.

With a deafening, guttural roar that shook the bedrock, he hurled himself fully into the slaughter.

The region beneath Dusken transformed into a hellscape of lava and plasma. The environment warped into a perfect domain for his people—and a purgatory for their enemies. Even Anthace’s roots couldn’t withstand that kind of heat. Seething with hatred, the Titan Tree withdrew from the zone, abandoning vast hollowed tunnels behind.

The retreat stemmed the tide of monsters and resurrected warriors But the ones capable of surviving—or forcing their way through—that inferno?

Those were the real nightmares.

Instead of victory, the underground war beneath Dusken escalated again. And for the first time in five Ordeals... a Kintharian fell.

The war was only beginning.

*****

Beneath Lustris, at the opposite end of the continent, a similar desperate battle raged—without the advantage of environmental control that magma granted underground.

And unlike the Kintharians, the Throsgenians were fewer in number.

Just over four hundred.

They too had been forced to regroup under Asfrid’s command the moment Anthace escalated the conflict to the next tier. The ever-growing swarm of spawn slaughtering civilians on the surface of the capital was the direct consequence.

Where Kintharians and Throsgenians were rival races with comparable potential—both capable of burrowing and manipulating the earth—their dominion over cold didn’t allow them to liquefy the terrain nearly as easily.

Some of them, like Rogen, could. Either because they had pushed their mastery of earth to such an extreme that they could force solid rock to behave like pressurized liquid, heating it through sheer control... or because their command of cold had reached perfection, allowing them to invert it entirely. It was the same path Jake himself had once walked.

But being capable of creating lava didn’t mean it suited them. They were a race born of frost. An environment of molten rock wasn’t home field advantage—it was slow suicide.

Which meant their battle was even harsher and deadlier than the one Gerulf and the Kintharians were enduring.

Every discharge of Rogen’s near-absolute-zero frost could flash-freeze thousands of monsters and resurrected warriors in an instant—including Anthace’s roots. Entire sections of the underground turned into crystalline graveyards.

But the cost was mounting.

The surrounding rock rapidly cooled, solidifying into increasingly dense, stable formations. The deeper the frost sank, the more the earth hardened.

Soon, even for them, movement would become a struggle.

The only silver lining was simple: if traversal was becoming difficult for Throsgenians, it was exponentially worse for the monsters and the fallen Light Warriors. Black Lumyst could corrode and annihilate almost anything—but pulverizing kilometers of frozen bedrock demanded absurd amounts of energy.

For now, Rogen and his kin had managed to delay the inevitable death clash.

But in doing so, they had failed Jake’s mission.

Instead of grinding themselves down against a few stubborn Players like these Throsgenians, the spawn found it far more efficient to bypass them entirely and surge toward the capital unobstructed.

That was why Cho Min Ho and his faction, lying in wait along Lustris’ outskirts, were dragged into the maelstrom as well. The density of monsters erupting from the ground along the city’s perimeter was climbing by the minute.

Even so, certain abominations—whose sinister auras burned like black stars in the void—kept burrowing straight through the frozen stone without altering course. They didn’t detour. They didn’t hesitate.

They tunneled forward with singular, relentless intent.

And when they reached the surface—whether beneath Lustris or anywhere else across the continent—both natives and surviving Players would face their second Armageddon.