Even after taking a wound that severe, the wyvern didn't die right away.
"What ridiculous vitality…"
Its pain-filled roar was so piercing that it still shook the air over the battlefield. Soldiers below had to clamp their hands over their ears. A few unlucky ones who'd been too close had blood streaming from their ears; they staggered, lost their balance, and were dragged aside by comrades for treatment and rest.
Serandur immediately began casting healing spells in a steady stream, triaging the injured.
That was the cruelty of ordinary people on a battlefield like this—forget trading blows with a monster like that. Even the shockwaves of its attacks were more than most bodies could endure.
"Don't stop! Anyone who isn't hurt—keep shooting!"
Captains behind them continued to bellow orders, pushing soldiers to keep firing freely into the darkness beyond the walls.
In the sky, Gauss had just recalled his holy water and was about to finish the wounded wyvern with a second shot—
—when a second wyvern arrived, swooping in with enormous claws aimed straight at him.
Those claws could split boulders, and they were wrapped in a savage gale. Gauss had no interest in testing them with his own body.
He had no choice but to abandon the follow-up shot.
But below, Albena chose her moment and launched herself upward—Shadow moved with her, one on the left, one on the right.
"HAH!!"
Albena swung her giant axe at the wyvern's weaker wing.
Shadow appeared on the other side, and together with her duplicates pierced the thin wing membrane and pinned the wyvern hard against the wall tower.
"RIP!"
Green, corrosive blood geysered out, splashing onto the stone and instantly burning smoking pits into the bricks.
Gauss was still tied up by the remaining wyverns overhead.
Red drake Hephaestus took one of them off him for the moment, grappling it.
"Thousand-Thread Severing Domain!"
Gauss growled low. The pale-blue water threads—so fine they were almost invisible—suddenly shivered.
Not ordinary vibration—this was an insanely high frequency, powered by magic, a cutting oscillation.
Under his precise control, those living strands expanded outward from him into a woven kill-zone.
"ROAR—!"
The second wyvern—the one lunging at him—flew straight into the newly formed water-mesh before it could react.
A dense, scalp-crawling slicing sound erupted.
The wyvern's supposedly indestructible claw hit the outermost threads and began to disintegrate like it had been fed into a grinder.
First the thick hide peeled away. Then tendons shredded. Sticky green blood turned into a stinking green mist, exposing pale bone beneath.
The wyvern flailed its wings and shot upward, desperately gaining altitude.
Gauss's eyes snapped to the injured wyvern still pinned on the wall by Albena and Shadow.
The water-mesh collapsed into streams and gathered in his hands again, reforming into a bow.
He didn't hesitate. No extra thoughts.
He shifted his weight slightly, left shoulder dipping, right arm drawing back. In his left hand, the elegant bow—glossed in blue-gold—flared, lighting the black night.
The remaining water compressed between his right index and middle finger—condensing, stretching—into a deep-blue magic arrow.
"HUMMMMM—!"
The spell Control Water poured power into the arrow in a continuous flood.
This wasn't a hurried shot like before. The energy building in the bow and arrow began to hum with a terrifying resonance, like a deep-sea leviathan singing.
The bow bent—smooth, perfect—until a blue crescent moon seemed to hang in the air.
Mana surged across the arrow, brighter and brighter, bathing Gauss's focused profile in cobalt light.
His gaze sharpened to a single line. Emotion stripped away.
His clear sight, the arrow's shaft, and the wyvern's skull locked into one lethal vector.
Shadow and Albena—already reading him—had moved aside the instant the bow formed.
Gauss held his breath at full draw.
For a heartbeat, time felt frozen.
The soldiers' shouts, the monsters' roar, even the wyvern's widening eyes—everything felt like it paused.
Then—
TWANG!
A crisp, elastic snap ripped through the night like a starting pistol.
All that stored force and mana found one outlet.
A blue streak flashed—
The arrow left the string with a rolling series of sonic booms, carving a lingering blue afterimage into the air.
In an instant it crossed the gap and slammed cleanly into the target—straight into the braincase.
BOOM!
A blue magic bloom exploded on impact.
It shattered the wyvern's hardest bone like brittle pottery.
Inside its skull, it was as if a water-element bomb—compressed to madness—detonated.
The blue burst collapsed inward first, punching and drilling… then erupted outward, releasing countless microscopic yet razor-sharp high-pressure water blades.
In less than a tenth of a blink, the wyvern's head—and most of its neck—was erased.
The first wyvern was dead.
"Wyvern Slain ×1"
A new commander-class entry unlocked in Gauss's Index.
Cheers erupted below. To the soldiers, this wasn't a true dragon, but it was still a dragon-shaped nightmare—fast, vicious, hideous.
And Gauss had killed it cleanly in two shots.
It was impossible not to feel hope.
Gauss's eyes flicked to two other wyverns nearby.
Hephaestus was still wrestling one.
The third—whose claw he'd stripped with Thousand-Thread—was hovering above, shaken. Its dead comrade had clearly rattled it.
Ballista bolts began firing from other sections of the wall, forcing it to dodge and climb to a safer height.
Gauss let it go for now.
He focused on the aerial brawl—Hephaestus entangled with the other wyvern.
That earlier arrow had already flowed back into him as water.
He drew again, shaping another arrow with Control Water, but he didn't shoot yet.
He waited—watching the angles.
Finally, Hephaestus created the opening.
He bit into the wyvern's neck and twisted, flinging it so it turned broadside—face toward Gauss.
The wyvern struggled mid-air.
Gauss drew, full-draw, aimed, and released in one seamless motion.
TWANG!
A blue thread ripped across the sky.
The compressed energy struck the wyvern's abdomen—precisely.
RIP—!
Water mana exploded, shredding the softer belly.
A gory cavity opened—blood everywhere—and the blue mana spread like poison, continuing to eat outward.
Even Hephaestus jolted at the force of Gauss's charged shot.
But Gauss controlled it perfectly, angling the blast so it avoided Hephaestus; unlike a Fireball, the Moterra Bow + Control-Water Arrow hit harder on a point, but with far tighter range and control.
Hephaestus grabbed the now-unstable wyvern and hurled it down into the monster mass gathered below the wall.
THUD!
The wyvern fell like a meteor.
Between its weight and the fall, it crushed another dozen monsters on impact.
Gauss recalled the arrow, then snapped a quick standard shot at the crippled wyvern—
Straight through the skull.
"Wyvern Slain ×1"
The second wyvern fell.
Gauss looked up.
The third wyvern was gone—either it fled in fear, or it repositioned to strike elsewhere.
He didn't chase it.
Because the ground war had reached the wall.
Elite monsters—especially ogres—had arrived under cover of the fodder. They grabbed goblins and gnoll-kin alike and threw them over the parapet.
The bodies rose, then fell—clearing the low inner wall and landing on the walkway.
"WAAAGH—!"
Close-quarters slaughter began.
Ogre mages started casting levitation too, floating other elites into the air.
Reinforced ladders slammed up against the wall. Under spell cover and arrow suppression, monsters swarmed upward like ants.
"WHOOSH WHOOSH!"
Soldiers on the wall loosed nonstop. Goblins climbing the ladders were shot and fell, breaking on the ground below.
Scalding, stinking "golden oil" poured from iron cauldrons behind the crenellations—waterfalling down onto the climbers.
"Screeee—!!"
Inhuman shrieks tore out.
Skin and muscle blistered, smoked, and sloughed away. The toxin-heat agony made their hands fail, and they tumbled, crashing into more climbers beneath them.
Inside the specialized towers, battle-mages coordinated:
A Level 1 Grease spell, followed by Burning Hands or even a simple Flame Arrow, created temporary walls of fire.
These magical flames were far harder to extinguish—only monster casters with cold rays, water magic, or suppressive spells could manage them, or else they had to leap over with Jump magic and scramble up.
Walls could stop the masses of low fodder.
But elites had ways up.
Adventurer squads fought the monsters that made it onto the ramparts.
From above, Gauss scanned the battlefield and saw everything at once.
Human soldiers and adventurers collided with the monsters at every section of wall—blood soaking into stone, death happening every breath.
Flame, acid, frost, steel, arrows—all crashing together along this narrow line.
He steadied his breath.
He swallowed several low-grade mana stones, restoring himself to peak.
Then he triggered Ironscale Bloodline—his body flaring with light—and re-gripped his pale staff.
"Fireball!"
"Fireball!"
He hovered in place. His Turret Mage specialization quietly kicked in.
Control sharpened. Range extended.
Fireballs rose and bloomed again and again in the monster mass beyond.
BOOM!
BOOM!
Each blast erased dozens—sometimes over a hundred.
Gauss exhaled.
Cast, relocate, hover, choose the angle—cast again.
He fired seven, eight fireballs in a row.
Hundreds of monsters died in the rising blossoms of flame.
Between fireballs he threaded countless Magic Missiles—not to kill, but to snap ladders and supports, sending monsters tumbling and crushing each other.
When the flames cleared…
The scene outside the wall was apocalyptic.
A swath of the monster line had been turned into empty space.
Charred craters littered with unrecognizable remains.
Some half-living bodies twitched at the edges.
The monsters who survived raised their heads and stared up at the floating nightmare above them.
On the wall, soldiers and adventurers looked out at the devastation, stunned.
This is… magic?
This was the killing furnace the young Crimson Dragon Knight had made—alone—in seconds.
A heartbeat of silence.
Then a roar of cheering exploded across the ramparts.
The defenders gripping weapons suddenly felt stronger, as if a strange momentum lifted them.
Meanwhile the monsters climbing the wall shrank back like they'd been abandoned.
The tide of morale shifted—visibly, even though morale itself had no shape.
"Kill!!"
"Long live Sir Gauss!"
"Cut these monsters down!"
Encouraged soldiers and adventurers hacked apart the attackers on the wall.
Above them, Gauss's face had gone slightly pale.
Even for him, chained fireballs needed a breath.
Fireball was "only" a Level 3 spell, but to truly unleash its power usually required a master-tier caster—and most still couldn't match his output.
He was functioning like a one-man army.
And beyond the kills, the blasts shattered the enemy's momentum—within a single minute, his sector of the wall became a rout.
He inhaled, steadied, ate more mana stones.
His own segment was now under control.
He looked elsewhere—and his expression tightened.
Because in sectors with thinner defense, parts of the wall had been blown open.
Monsters were pouring through like floodwater.
Horns screamed.
Inside the town, adventurers and soldiers fought the intruders in brutal street clashes.
Flying on a griffon, Eberhard swept to Gauss's side.
Wall breaches had always been expected.
The enemy had scouting too; they avoided the strongest points and concentrated elsewhere.
Grayrock still had several other commander-tier defenders—Smith Gron, Vice-Guildmaster Shirley a Warlock, Deputy Belrock's, and a Level 6 Ranger—holding those gaps.
"Gauss," Eberhard said, eyes hard. "In a moment, light cavalry will hit from the side gate. We'll coordinate with them and strike the enemy command tent from the flank."
"Got it."
Gauss followed his gaze to the rear of the monster host.
Those horn calls—carrying strange magic—were binding the mixed monster army into a single, fearless engine.
Break that, and the army would lose cohesion and take a devastating morale blow.
His fireballs couldn't keep doing what they just did.
The lines were too tangled now.
He couldn't drop indiscriminate blasts where humans and monsters were locked together.
A command-tent strike would let him fight without worrying about friendly fire.
But it was also far more dangerous.
Eberhard and Belrock both knew it.
Then the cavalry gates opened.
Light riders burst out, smashing into the flank and drawing attention.
Wolf-riders surged to intercept.
"Go."
Gauss vaulted onto Hephaestus's back.
Shadow-wrapped teammates climbed on as well.
The red drake shot across the battlefield like an arrow, piercing into the monster army.
The griffon followed slower.
On the wall, Belrock looked up, instantly understanding the plan.
"Maintain frontal pressure! Extend ranged fire!"
He kept hurling heavy spears—each throw skewering an elite ogre.
They had to hold the front.
If the monster army could pull large numbers back to intercept, Gauss's team—deep behind enemy lines—would be crushed by the army's collective momentum.
That pressure would grind them down like a nightmare until the mud swallowed them whole.