Gulag collapsed onto her hands and knees. Blood spilled from her lips onto the ascending bedrock. Her amber core flickered erratically as the Herald’s absolute spatial authority crushed her earth magic entirely.

Chris Pitt lowered his hand to casually inspect his manicured fingernails. He glanced down at the struggling commanders suspended thousands of feet in the sky.

"You fight like cornered insects," Chris announced. He pointed his index finger directly at the raging emerald cyclones pinning the Vanguard soldiers to the floating debris. He twisted his wrist clockwise.

A miniature singularity condensed inside the center of Iron-Scale’s wind anchors. The anomaly violently swallowed the emerald downdrafts, stripping the soldiers of their secure footholds. Hundreds of armored troops immediately tumbled upward, drifting helplessly toward the freezing upper atmosphere.

General Krax planted his gauntlets flat against the surface of his floating platform. Veins bulged across his green neck while he forced his knees underneath his torso to push upward against the crushing pressure. His bronze armor groaned under the immense structural strain.

Chris tilted his head to watch the massive Orc defy the gravitational multiplier. He isolated the spatial field directly surrounding Krax and doubled the downward vector.

The compressed stone beneath Krax shattered into dozens of jagged fragments. The sheer force drove the Orc general flat onto his chest, burying him under the debris of his own platform.

Up in his sanctuary, the holographic projection displayed the rapidly deteriorating battlefield. Red maintained his silence, watching his commanders face the ultimate test of their mass ascension.

He could send down Glitch and do the same as he had done with Jason and Chloe, but Red didn’t want the battle to end so soon. Even though he didn’t have to worry about spending DP anymore.

If Red intervened somehow, his troops won’t learn a thing, and they will end up being the same as the followers of all other gods who were originally players of this game.

What made Red different was that he didn’t micromanage, nor did he intervene unnecessarily. Otherwise, his followers wouldn’t learn to adapt, evolve, and survive without him and be entirely dependent on him.

That was why despite being lower ranked than other gods, his followers were stronger and more capable than others.

Iron-Scale dodged a spinning boulder to slam his dagger into a rising slab of bedrock. He looked across the chaotic expanse of floating debris and struggling troops.

’He controls the vectors of solid matter,’ Iron-Scale analyzed, his draconic eyes tracking Chris Pitt’s movements. ’We cannot reach him physically. We need to strip his vision entirely.’

"Gulag!" Iron-Scale roared over the rushing wind. "Shatter the rock! Turn the entire valley to dust!"

Gulag wiped the blood from her chin. She abandoned her attempt to pull the terrain downward and released the safety constraints on her amber core. She projected her magic directly into the thousands of floating boulders surrounding the army.

The ascending mesas and massive slabs of bedrock violently detonated. Millions of tons of solid stone pulverized into microscopic grains of abrasive sand.

Iron-Scale extended his claws to channel his entire mana reserve into the atmosphere. He generated a colossal, sprawling cyclone to whip the pulverized earth into a violent vortex. The resulting maneuver entirely engulfed the inverted valley in an impenetrable golden sandstorm.

The abrasive cloud instantly bypassed Chris Pitt’s gravity shield. The Herald choked loudly as a lungful of fine dust invaded his airway. He squeezed his eyes shut to block the stinging debris, losing all visual contact with the Vanguard forces.

Iron-Scale utilized the sudden blindness to restructure his defense. He drove his claws into a rising slab of sandstone to anchor his footing.

"Kingdom Knights! Scouts!" Iron-Scale roared over the rushing wind. "Deploy your tethers! Bind the largest foundations together!"

The elite human knights and agile Kobold scouts immediately uncoiled their climbing ropes and iron chains. They hurled their grappling hooks through the dust cloud to snag the passing chunks of intact bedrock. They pulled the lines taut, linking the massive stone platforms into a makeshift, interconnected web to stabilize the chaotic ascent.

Most of the allied army possessed no such gear. Hundreds of Blood-Mane Orcs and infantrymen continued to drift upward, completely exposed to the chaotic collisions of the debris field. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Iron-Scale looked down toward the spinning platform where Gulag knelt. "Shield the infantry!"

Gulag wiped the blood from her chin and thrust her hands outward. She bypassed the larger chunks of rock to seize absolute control over the swirling sandstorm itself.

’The dust is just broken earth,’ Gulag calculated, her amber core flaring brightly within her chest. ’I can mold it from the air.’

She commanded the microscopic grains whipping through the atmosphere to gather around the tumbling soldiers. The abrasive sand coated the Orcs and infantrymen, rapidly condensing back into solid bedrock. The earth formed protective, hollow spheres around the vulnerable troops.

Gulag manipulated the outer layers of these earthen cocoons to extend rigid stone tendrils outward. She fused the tendrils directly to the rope-tethered web created by the knights. The Vanguard forces transformed into a single, unified structure of stone and iron chains, successfully resisting the erratic gravitational pulls.

Chris Pitt hacked violently inside his protective bubble. Blood dripped from his nose as he rubbed his stinging corneas. He could not see the massive web forming below him. His face contorted into a vicious snarl as he randomly twisted his wrists to project isolated gravity wells blindly into the sandstorm.

Invisible kinetic forces crashed against the Vanguard web. The tethered bedrock groaned, and several stone cocoons cracked under the localized pressure. The interconnected mass absorbed the impact, preventing the individual soldiers from being crushed or launched into the upper atmosphere.

General Krax punched a viewing hole through the front of his protective earthen shell. He watched the golden-armored Earthling thrash wildly within the dust cloud. The Orc general gripped his greataxe securely.

’The monster is finally bleeding,’ Krax noted, baring his fangs in a brutal smile. ’He cannot kill what he cannot see.’