I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 751: Apostles of the End

The plane barrier was like a pale blue veil, sealing the two worlds inside and outside the plane apart from each other.

It did not obstruct light on its own account, but it filtered out, one by one, the various unknown fluctuations bleeding in from outside, gently “lowering the dimension” of any form of existence beyond this plane’s comprehension until it became an image the naked eye could accept.

And so, when the living beings inside the plane raised their heads, what they saw was not two distinct individuals, but two enormous silhouettes, distorted and magnified by the barrier’s refraction.

The two figures hung outside the barrier, their outlines blurred past recognition by that refraction.

And it was precisely that blurring that pushed the fear to a far deeper level.

No features, no expressions could be made out. There were only two masses of shadow, vast enough to blot out half the sky.

It was as if two giants had bent down and brought their faces close to a transparent glass jar, examining every tiny thing inside it with a gaze beyond comprehension. That gaze pierced the barrier and settled heavily on the shoulders of every creature looking up.

It was not any deliberate show of pressure. It was simply the undisguised presence of higher-order life.

The barrier could filter law fluctuations, but it could not entirely block that fundamental crushing weight, any more than a veil could block the heat of the sun. Down among the hills and hollows, the plant-people gathering life energy along the field ridges were the first to feel it.

Nothing in their memory or their history had ever recorded a situation like this, yet the instinct carved deep into the genes of every living thing was screaming wildly in that moment.

Overhead, something was watching them!!!

Hundreds of plant-people stopped what they were doing at almost the same instant.

The little flowers on their heads closed in that same moment, petals drawing tightly shut into balls.

It was their race’s stress response: in the face of irresistible danger, they instinctively shut down every sensory organ.

Their slender vine bodies dropped flat into the mud, tails pulling free of the soil to coil at their sides, curling themselves up to wait for the storm to grind past overhead.

On the rock above the fields, the two octopus-face guards and the comrade who had just come running with the news went rigid at the same time.

The one who had taken off his helmet stood with his mouth open, the tendrils hanging around it still in the lazy posture they had held while he was talking, except that now they had gone stiff one by one, as though frozen by a sudden cold, hanging motionless in midair.

The helmeted one still held his arms folded, but his fingers had tightened without his noticing, knuckles digging hard into the edge of his vambrace, actually pressing a few fine dents into the alloy surface.

As for the one who had come with the message, beneath his crooked helmet the tendrils that had already flared out now flared completely, every one of them trembling at a different frequency, as though something invisible had seized their nerves in its grip.

At that moment, an ear-splitting emergency alarm went off on all three of their communicators at nearly the same time.

The sound was sharp and short, like someone smashing a pane of glass right beside their ears.

But it was thanks to that emergency alarm that the three of them were called back out of their terror.

The helmeted octopus-face reacted first, forcing his stiffened fingers down onto the communication key.

The next moment, a technician’s nearly hysterical voice came through the device.

The man was clearly fighting to hold onto his composure, but his breathing had gone completely ragged, and every word sounded forced out of a violently pounding throat. “Two hostile units detected outside the plane barrier. Energy spectrum analysis identifies the enemy as Apostles of the End! Repeat, Apostles of the End! All personnel to combat readiness, prepare to engage at any moment!!!”

Apostles of the End.

Those four words drove out of the communicator like an icicle, and in an instant they pulled the color from every octopus face present.

The tendrils of the unhelmeted octopus-face went from rigid to ashen in a single heartbeat.

The mucous membrane on their surface had lost every trace of sheen to sheer terror, until it looked like a coating of dried frost.

He opened his mouth as though to repeat something without sound, but not the faintest noise would come out of his throat.

The helmeted one jerked his head up, his eyes fixed on the sky.

The focus of his visor cycled wildly on automatic, trying to lock onto the two vast shadows blotting out half the sky, but he was shaking so badly that he could hardly keep his arms folded at all.

When the final order to prepare for combat reached them, the three octopus-faces turned almost as one, their armored boots gouging three deep scrapes into the rock as they bolted for the medium transport ship berthed at the edge of the hollow.

One of them flew off in such a rush that his shoulder slammed into the trunk of an ancient towering tree, actually snapping that thick trunk clean through the middle.

He did not so much as turn his head. He only pushed his speed up another notch on reflex.

For all the wretchedness of it, he looked less like a soldier hurrying to his post than like a man running for his life.

The plant-people peered out through the gaps in their curled vines, and then saw a sight they had never seen before.

In the sky, the metal constructs that ordinarily only cruised slowly at high altitude were now darting in every direction like insects out of a kicked nest. Hundreds upon hundreds of warships launched in waves, enough of them to blot out the pale violet daylight.

The energy coating on the hulls threw back a metallic sheen under the light of the star, and the roar of engines as the fleet massed set the ground trembling faintly.

Around every warship swarmed great numbers of armored octopus-men, and the exhaust flames trailing from their armor as they flew wove a dense net of light across the sky.

Under the stunned gaze of every plant-person on the plane, the entire military strength of the octopus-men was taking to the air at once.

The warship formations were divided into several echelons.

The interception fleet at the very front had already fanned out into a defensive array beneath the plane barrier, while the heavy gunships behind it began swinging their muzzles around in unison, bringing every gun to bear on the position of the two huge shadows above the barrier.

Tens of thousands of octopus-man warriors ringed their respective ships with every energy weapon live, the shield generators on their armor humming with charge in overlapping waves, like a thundercloud gathering itself to break.

Inside the command cabin of the flagship “Iron Curtain,” the atmosphere was oppressive in the extreme.

The octopus-man commander stood before the command console, one hand braced against its cold metal surface, the other clenched into a fist at his side.

The enormous light screen in front of him was displaying the detection feed from outside the plane barrier in real time.

Even after multiple layers of filtering by the plane barrier and algorithmic enhancement, the image could still barely sketch out two blurred outlines.

The detection system was straining to analyze the enemy’s energy fluctuations. Dense columns of data refreshed endlessly down the right side of the screen, most of them glaring red unidentifiable markers, a smaller portion barely-generated yellow conjectures.

“Barrier penetration rate… cannot be measured!”

“Law fluctuation frequency band… beyond the database’s comparison range!”

“Target One energy level… sixth-level! Target Two energy level… fifth-level!”

The tendrils on the commander’s face pulled taut and straight.

His eyes locked onto the smaller of the two shadows at the top of the screen, trying to dig some scrap of useful information out of that blurred shape.

A sliver of wishful thinking still lingered in him.

Only fifth-level. Perhaps the enemy’s strength had not actually reached the point of being unbeatable…

But in the very next second, an observer’s warning shattered that scrap of hope completely.

“Report! Target Two’s volume is expanding rapidly!”

The commander’s pupils contracted sharply.

At the top of the screen, the smaller shadow that had held perfectly still until now suddenly moved.

In the detection system’s enhanced image, that humanoid figure was swelling at a rate visible to the naked eye.

Within seconds, every data field on the screen turned red.

Target Two’s volume was growing exponentially.

The spatial structure around it, unable to bear a force unfolding on that scale, began to warp. Beneath his shadow the plane barrier gave off a low-frequency hum of overload, and the sky blue light patterns flowing across its surface flickered wildly.

And that figure had already raised its arm.

Five fingers closed tight, in unmistakably the posture of something about to come smashing down.

The hand the commander had braced on the console clenched hard, and the cold metal surface bore a clear set of finger marks where he had crushed it.

“All hands…”

The commander’s voice was badly hoarse, but he forced the shout out of it anyway.

“Prepare to engage!”