Chapter 138: Chapter 138

Deic’s expression smoothed, no longer twisted in anger but sharpened with a dangerous readiness as she lifted her hand. There was no hesitation now, no frustration clouding her intent. She had measured her opponent, seen how Vaeliyan dared to warp her battlefield into a fortress, and she would answer in kind. The jungle was hers. The jungle had always been hers. All she needed to do was call, and it would obey.

The earth trembled beneath the weight of something vast. At first, the 93rd thought it was only the constant groaning of Nespói’s shifting canopy, but then the ground split and bark cracked open. What they had assumed were nothing more than crooked, rotting trees began to stir and peel themselves free of the soil. Roots tore upward in wet clumps of dirt, the sound like flesh being ripped from bone. Four stilt-like legs pushed upright, groaning under their own bulk as they steadied themselves. From the torsos unfolded two mantis-arms, each lined with jagged leaf-like blades, the disguise of branches snapping open into weapons that glinted in the dappled light. The forest itself bent into nightmare, revealing its truest form.

Vaeliyan’s voice tore across the comms, raw and urgent, his shout louder than the cacophony of the trees awakening.

The word hit like a thunderclap. To the 93rd it meant almost nothing—just another monstrous name among the whispers of Nespói’s horrors. But to the insurgency, and to Deic, the name carried weight. Wartrees were ambush predators, one of the jungle’s oldest killers. They appeared as warped trunks until they moved, their bark a living armor of camouflage. For days, weeks even, they would remain motionless, waiting for prey to wander near. Then those mantis-arms would snap out with horrifying speed, dragging victims screaming from the earth, tearing them apart before they even realized they had stepped into reach. The 93rd had never seen them, but they had only ever read about them in textbooks, and seeing the real thing was nothing like study or rumor. The giants lurched forward, mantis-arms clattering against each other in an awful cadence, their bodies scraping the sky as they advanced on the fortress.

The cadets braced. anchors locked, lances angled up, jaws clenched hard enough to crack teeth but their pride and the walls at their backs kept them rooted. The wartrees hit the palisade like siege ladders. Their mantis-arms drove deep into the kalacrete, gouging holes with screeches that made every fiber in the body vibrate. The wall trembled. For a heartbeat, it seemed certain the creatures would rip cadets straight off the ramparts and drag them into the dirt below.

But that was not Deic’s plan.

Her class surged forward in perfect synchrony. Where the 93rd expected chaos and slaughter, the 90th revealed ruthless precision. They used the wartrees not as predators but as siege gear, tools twisted into weapons of war. Boots hammered bark-carapace, the sound of leather striking chitin echoing like drums of war. Cadets gripped twisted ridges and knots, finding handholds in the crooked bodies. The mantis-arms that had sunk into the palisade became anchors, stabilizing their climb. One by one, they vaulted upward, sprinting along the monsters’ crooked trunks and leaping across the last gap to the ramparts. To them, the wartrees were not nightmares, but ladders.

The fortress still stood. Its walls had not fallen. But now they crawled with shrieking creatures, claws raking and limbs thrashing, and enemy cadets pouring over their backs with terrifying ease. The proud defenses of the 93rd had been turned into a stage for invasion. Nespói had always been a living weapon. Now, under Deic’s command, it was wielded with its natural, brutal efficiency, and the 90th carried themselves like the sharpened edge of that blade.

Sylen shouted into the comms, her voice sharp and wild, brimming with reckless joy: “Phase Four! Scrap Three!” Her words crackled across every headset, cutting through the roar of combat like the toll of a bell.

Jurpat, Lessa, and the twins reacted instantly, dropping from their towers without hesitation. They scrambled down to the basement, boots hammering the rungs and stone, their breaths ragged but steady. Rokhan tore the AC unit free with brute strength, metal screeching against its bolts, while Varnai grunted as she wrestled the purifier loose from its mount. Together, burdened but determined, they hauled the heavy machines into the dark below, joining their squadmates in the improvised fallback position.

Above them, Sylen broke into hysterical laughter. It wasn’t forced or panicked, her voice was raw, ecstatic, like someone set free. The comms carried every crack of it, bouncing through the helmets of her classmates as she marched forward into the night. The jungle canopy pressed heavy overhead, broken only by the glow of simulated moonlight and the harsh flashes of lightning . Shadows stretched long and sharp, swallowing her figure as she strode toward her fate. “Cousin!” she shouted, her grin audible through the comms. “Did I ever tell you you’re the only part of the family I actually like? I’ll see you on the other side!” There was no hesitation, no fear. Only certainty.

Roan shifted to her side, visor glinting faintly under the pale light. His voice was steady, even warm, despite the madness surrounding him. “Guess that makes two of us. See you later. Even if we don’t win, I don’t think I’ll ever regret being here with you all.” His words rang in every ear, cutting deep into the silence that followed.

And then the comms went quiet. Nothing but the rush of breath and the thrum of their own hearts filled the void. Everyone knew what that silence meant. In the Legion, sometimes survival was never part of the plan. Sometimes to win, the path demanded sacrifice.

Fenn turned to Vaeliyan, and their eyes met. A look between them carried more weight than any words could. They had trained together, bled together, and now stood at the brink together.

“This is it, my friend, ” Fenn said softly, his voice hoarse but resolute. He gave one short nod, sealing the pact.

Vaeliyan swung onto the ladder and dropped without pause, his boots slamming into the ground below. Fenn was on his heels in a heartbeat, following close, his pulse thundering in his ears. They both turned just in time to witness Sylen and Roan’s charge.

The two first-years hurled themselves at the 90th with wild abandon. Their movements weren’t careful or cautious, they were deliberate suicides, burning bright and fast. The sight was both glorious and harrowing. It was short, a flash in the storm, but it was everything they had promised it would be. Together they carved through the chaos, Sylen’s pack clutched tight in her arms until she hurled it into the center of Deic’s formation.

The 90th never noticed. They were too focused, too sure of themselves, cutting down the two charging cadets with ruthless precision. Blood sprayed, armor crumpled, and Sylen and Roan fell beneath the weight of lance fire. They died as they had lived, loud, unyielding, and impossible to ignore.

Then Fenn raised his bow, breath steady, hands sure. He fired.

The shot found the pack.

The detonation ripped the world apart. The explosion bloomed like a false dawn, lighting the jungle night in a searing blaze. Fire and shrapnel exploded outward in a storm of heat and ruin. The sound swallowed everything, the concussive blast hammering against lungs and bones alike. Smoke boiled into the air, blotting out the stars and the false moon above the pit. Screams tore from throats, some cut short, others ragged with pain. Bodies fell. Armor split. The clearing became a graveyard of twisted metal and shredded flesh.

Not every member of the 90th was caught in the inferno, but enough. Six of Deic’s cadets were obliterated, their lives paid for in fire and steel. All for the cost of two of the 93rd’s strongest, a trade written in blood, the kind the Legion never forgot.

When the smoke thinned, the silhouette of Deic still stood against the pale glow. She had survived the blast, her armor blackened but her posture unshaken. Her eyes blazed like tempered steel as she stared through the haze at the ruin, at the fading bodies of her squadmates, at the defiance the 93rd had dared to show. She was alive, she was unbroken, and the promise in her gaze was as cold and sharp as the night itself: this fight was far from over.

Vaeliyan had already been dropping into the basement when Fenn raised his bow. He didn’t look back. In this moment he trusted Fenn more than gravity itself. The ladder rattled under his descent, gauntlets scraping the rungs as he slipped into the darkness, the chaos above fading to a muffled roar. Behind him, the world was still burning, and two of their strongest were making their last stand.

Above, Sylen and Roan made their final charge.

Fenn loosed his shot. The basement shuddered as the shockwave hammered into it.

And that was when Alex struck. The fire scattered across the walls didn’t die; it bent. The flames pulled together in a sudden surge, drawn like a tide rushing toward a single point. Every spark, every ember, every licking tongue of flame was called to him, dragged screaming into the night. The inferno collapsed into a column, and then it slammed into Fenn. The impact was violent, merciless, a pillar of fire swallowing him whole. His silhouette twisted inside the blaze, a black shape against white-hot light, writhing for an instant before it shattered. Then he was gone. The air itself shuddered at the force, the ground trembling under the weight of the strike.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelHub for the authentic version.

Vaeliyan didn’t flinch. He couldn’t afford to. He had seen Alex fight before, had studied the way the fire manipulator bent the battlefield into a furnace. He had known this was possible, maybe even inevitable. Fenn had known too, but he had stood his ground until the end, and that end had come in fire.

The rest of the squad had already taken shelter, pressed tight into the basement’s narrow dark. The space was cramped, filled with the stink of oil, dirt, and smoke seeping through cracks above. Their breathing echoed too loud, every exhale sharp with tension. Vaeliyan turned to Ramis, his voice low, steady, ironclad. “Is it done?”

Ramis didn’t waste breath. He just nodded once, his eyes hollow but certain.

Peppy as ever, Lessa grinned, her expression jarring against the suffocating tension. Somehow, she still carried lightness in her step, even at the edge of death. “Alright, ” she said, her voice carrying a bizarre cheer, like they were planning a prank instead of a final act. “You all should run. This is going to be… well, this is going to be awesome. Thanks, Vael. I’ll see you on the outside.”

No one argued. They didn’t even try. Legion training carved hesitation out of them, and victory demanded they obey. One by one they moved, slipping into the escape tunnel Ramis had carved alongside the Constructor. Rokhan and Torman led the way, shoulders hunched, gripping their burdens tight as they disappeared into the earth. The tunnel swallowed them whole, footsteps echoing and fading, until only silence remained.

Lessa stayed. Alone now, she swayed in place, shimmying lightly as if dancing to a rhythm no one else could hear. She hummed under her breath, the tune faint but unmistakably upbeat. Something about burning down the house, her own absurd choice of anthem for the end. The absurdity of it matched her perfectly, as if she could look death in the eye and grin.

Still humming, she lowered her cannon-arms toward the ground, servos whining as the barrels angled down. Her eyes, sharp and unflinching, locked on the trapdoor above, the only way back into the night, the only path her friends had taken to escape. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t even somber. She was herself until the very last moment.

Vaeliyan smiled behind his helmet.

They heard the thunder of Lessa’s cannons above, the deafening roar shaking dirt and stone from the ceiling as the fortress collapsed in fire and ruin. The ground trembled with the shock, dust falling in gritty clouds that clung to their visors. The blast brought the walls down on the 90th, and on Lessa herself. Her laughter had been the last sound carried through the comms before the detonation silenced her forever. The cavern echoed with the distant rumble, the vibrations rolling through the earth like a drumbeat. For a moment the squad was silent, each of them listening to the way the battlefield itself seemed to groan in the aftermath. Vaeliyan’s visor tilted just slightly, the faintest smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Even in death, she had made it count. Even in her final moment, Lessa had brought hell down on their enemies.

“Wonder how many survived that?” Xera finally asked, her voice sharp but steady, as if she already knew the answer. Her eyes glowed in the dim light, narrowed and calculating, but beneath the hard edges there was the quiet ache of another comrade gone.

“Don’t know, ” Vaeliyan replied without hesitation, his tone flat and certain. “But you and Torman are up.”

Xera’s lips curled into a grin that was part joy, part defiance. “Then let’s make them wish they hadn’t.”

Torman was already moving, his hands weaving in practiced, fluid motions. Threads of nanites unspooled from his palms like strands of silk, smooth and gleaming in the cavern’s half-light. Razor-thin and gleaming faintly in the cavern’s half-light, he spun them into lattices, layering pattern over pattern until the space between walls shimmered with invisible death. His focus was absolute, his eyes locked on the weaving shapes as the threads wound tighter, stronger, more intricate. To an untrained eye it looked chaotic, random strands crisscrossing in the gloom, but every line was deliberate. Every strand was a snare waiting to close around a throat or limb. It was art, delicate and deadly, a trap disguised as beauty.

The tunnel had led them into one of Nespói’s vast caverns, a hollow space where roots dangled like chains from the ceiling and the air tasted of damp soil and iron. Water dripped steadily somewhere in the dark, echoing like a metronome between their heartbeats. Ramis and Rokhan were already buried shoulder-deep in the stone, their armor scraping against jagged rock as they dug with brutal precision. The sound of chiseling metal and tearing earth filled the air, harsh and relentless. They weren’t digging for escape. They were digging the battlefield itself into a weapon, twisting the cavern into a labyrinth of choke points, kill zones, and hidden jaws. Every wall they touched became treacherous, every corner a place where death could wait unseen.

The longer they worked, the more the space around them transformed. The cavern was no longer a place to hide, but a living snare. A place where the 90th would come hunting only to be hunted themselves.

What had begun as the 93rd being forced to fight an insurgency in Nespói had been flipped on its head. The simulation had meant to pit them against the insurgents of the jungle, to teach them how to endure in hostile ground. Instead, they had seized that role for themselves. They had turned siege into insurgency, fortress into trap, survival into a weapon. It was ridiculous and genius all at once. Against the 90th, they stood no chance in a straight fight. Everyone knew that. Fourth-years were stronger, faster, more brutal. But this wasn’t a straight fight anymore. This was their fight. This was guerrilla warfare, stripped raw and remade in their image.

They weren’t soldiers meeting force with force. They were moles in the dark, unseen architects of ruin, laying traps the fourth-years kept charging into, arrogant enough to believe they could simply overrun them. Every deadfall, every collapsing wall, every blast of fire or shrapnel was another reminder: the 93rd would not fight fair. They couldn’t. And they didn’t need to.

And every time the 90th thought they had the advantage, every time they pressed in believing the end was near, the 93rd had made them bleed for it. Slowly, methodically, brutally. Bleeding them down one life at a time, until victory no longer seemed like a question of strength, but of who was willing to pay the higher price.

Xera started spewing pools of liquid nanites that spread silently across the cavern floor, seeping into cracks and flowing outward-like veins of quicksilver. They functioned like acid, eating through anything they touched, but in the dark, they were indistinguishable from water. The pools gleamed faintly in patches of reflected stone light, appearing no different from the harmless puddles left by dripping roots. To an untrained eye they were nothing more than wet earth, subtle hazards hiding in plain sight. Some pools were shallow, little more than skinning hazards, but others were deep enough to swallow a person whole. Anyone careless enough to step into one without testing the ground would sink instantly, their armor and flesh dissolving in a vat of cruel death. And even if they somehow managed to claw their way free, they would emerge half-dissolved, their body crippled, survival little more than prolonged agony.

Torman’s latticework only made the killing field worse. He pulled silk-thin threads of nanites from his hands, weaving them into tight patterns that narrowed the terrain and forced anyone following to twist through choke points. His threads gleamed faintly, vanishing into shadows with predatory patience. Each web funneled intruders straight toward Xera’s traps, every path a guided march to ruin. The first choke points led over nothing but harmless damp patches, a calculated deception meant to lull their enemies into thinking they had caught the trick early. But deeper inside, the real pools waited. Their still, black surfaces yawned like open maws. One misstep, one careless rush, and a cadet of the 90th would vanish screaming into an invisible grave, their flesh stripped away by unseen jaws. Those few unlucky enough to survive the plunge would crawl out mutilated, every breath a rasp of torment.

The 90th might begin cautiously, wary of what waited ahead, but caution could only last so long. Patience cracked under pressure, and once they realized the defenses were meant to delay, frustration would drive them to charge. That was the heart of the trap: when they lost discipline and surged forward, when they gambled speed over care, that was when the pools would take them. Each step became a test, a gamble with death beneath their feet. Move slow and risk pursuit, or move fast and risk a scream cut short by the dark.

The cavern seemed to hold its breath, every drip of water and faint scrape echoing louder than it should. When the sound of footfalls finally pounded down the tunnel, heavy and hurried, it rang through the stone like drums of war. Torman and Xera exchanged a single look in the dim glow, no words needed between them. They turned and started to run, their footsteps deliberate, loud enough to carry. Even if they didn’t make it out, even if the 90th cut them down before the exit, the sound of their retreat would be enough. It would pull their enemies deeper, chasing shadows, drawing the flies ever deeper into the snare spun in silence and laid in death-dark pools. Content orıginally comes from N()velFire.net

Deic didn’t know what to do. This had never been part of the plan. In her mind, as soon as they forced their way into the fortress, it should have been over. She had seen real war, had commanded in chaos before, but this… this wasn’t war. This was like fighting Nespói itself, and somehow, she wasn’t the one in control. She was supposed to be the master of this battlefield, its insurgency, its traps. Instead, the jungle had turned against her.

Her squad was in ruins. Out of the sixteen who had marched in with her, only six were still on their feet, and even that number was a lie, because she didn’t know if Kerso could keep fighting. They had only killed four members of Vaeliyan’s class. Four. What in the hells was happening? Every step they took bled them further, every tactic she tried turned to ash. Nothing worked. Everything went wrong.

They were moving through some kind of maze, twisted and unnatural, tunnels built into the caverns as if the 93rd had been born there. They had built a gods damned maze. Meshes of nanites webbed the way, delicate as silk and strong as steel, slowing her squad to a crawl. Every step was agony, every motion cautious. She could feel time bleeding away with every breath.

To her horror, when Alex finally grew impatient and tried to burn through the meshes, his flames searing the dark into furious light, he stepped forward, and vanished. One moment he was there, the next the ground beneath him collapsed, and he was gone into black water. His scream was cut off almost instantly, swallowed by the pool.

“Kerso!” she shouted, but the big lancer was already moving. He dropped down, shoving his armored arm deep into the pool to grab Alex, teeth bared as he strained. For a heartbeat, it looked like he had him. Then Kerso started screaming.

They dragged him back, hauling him out of the shimmering liquid. Alex was gone, lost beneath the surface. Kerso’s armor ended in a jagged stump. The entire arm, gone. She could see where the nanites had eaten clean through bone, leaving nothing but ruin.

She would have nightmares about that for the rest of her life.

Six left. Maybe five and a half, if Kerso could even keep standing. That was all she had. Six squad members, brought to ruin by first-years. And she hadn’t even laid eyes on Vaeliyan yet. He was a ghost in the mists, a phantom whispering through traps and fire, cutting her down one step at a time.

Deic clenched her teeth. For the first time, she knew the truth: she wasn’t the better apprentice here. Not today.