Fort Allston, December 28, 2027

  Twenty thousand semi-trucks sprawled across the blasted terrain, their formation shifting and flowing in a massive wave.

  Leo pressed his face against the reinforced glass of the cab, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.

  Eighty thousand containers. One hundred sixty thousand flak cannons. Three hundred twenty thousand personnel. The dust cloud they kicked up stretched to the horizon, a brown haze that blotted out the pale winter sun.

  Vivian sat in the driver's seat, her hands steady on the wheel, her eyes fixed on the holographic navigation overlay projected across the windshield. She had been silent since H-Hour.

  Matt was hunched over the navigation console, calling out coordinates in a low monotone.

  Tom monitored the communication channels, one hand pressed to his headset.

  Jimbo stood behind them watching the tactical display, rereading the battle plan.

  They all wore headsets with noise-canceling formations built into the earpieces. Leo understood why the moment the flak cannons opened fire.

  One hundred sixty thousand guns cycled through coordinated fire patterns. The air filled with spiritual steel. Tracers stitched the sky in overlapping arcs, a solid curtain of death.

  Leo could feel the vibration in his bones, a deep thrumming that made his teeth ache.

  Through the windshield, he watched the barrage find its targets.

  Obsidian Barges dotted the distant sky like black seeds, rotating constantly, turning their reinforced hulls toward the convoy. Their thick layer of T4 armor glowed from absorbed impacts, spiritual formations flickering as they struggled to shed the accumulated energy.

  One of them flamed out. The Barge's defensive formations flickered, failed. The concentrated flak tore through its hull. It spiraled toward the ground, trailing obsidian smoke, and detonated on impact.

  Another followed. Then another. But the Barges weren't defenseless. Leo watched a formation of eighty Barges concentrate fire on a single transport three sections over. The truck's defensive formations held for perhaps ten seconds before collapsing.

  The cab exploded. The truck veered wildly, clipping another transport, and both vehicles tumbled out of formation. The convoy didn't slow. Couldn't slow.

  The wounded trucks fell behind, and Leo watched them shrink in the rear-view display until a trailing blob of Nascent Souls swept over their position. The tactical display marked them as casualties.

  Thirty-two personnel.

  Gone.

  "Barges taking heavy losses on the northern flank," Tom reported, his voice flat through the headset. "Cult formations rotating to compensate. We've lost eight transports."

  This was war.

  The transport missions had been different. They ran and hid and prayed the Nascent Souls wouldn't notice them. The Azure Profound Continent had been different too, where failure meant respawning fifteen hours later.

  This was real.

  Barges falling out of the sky. Transports flaming out and tumbling from formation.

  Crews that wouldn't be coming home.

  The warning sirens screamed.

  "Weeping Spires firing," Tom announced. "Sixty shells. Four minutes to impact."

  The formation exploded outward. Twenty thousand trucks scattered in drilled patterns, creating maximum separation. They'd spent the last few days practicing this exact maneuver.

  Leo watched the holographic display as the convoy transformed from a dense mass into a one with large holes, each truck following a calculated trajectory that the Boston Command updated in real-time.

  The shells appeared on the display as red streaks, converging on the convoy's former position. The detonations lit up the wasteland behind them.

  Obsidian fire erupted from the earth in towering columns, the heat visible as rippling distortions even at this distance.

  The shockwave reached them a moment later, rocking the truck on its suspension.

  But they were already past it.

  Already reforming. Already continuing the advance.

  "No casualties from the barrage," Tom reported. "All sections accounted for."

  The Strike Element had engaged fifteen minutes earlier. Twenty Nascent Souls racing ahead of the convoy, their mission to find the Divine Child and pin him in place.

  Leo watched the tactical display as twenty blue dots held position against thirty-one red, the two forces locked in continuous combat ten miles ahead of the Weeping Spires.

  One of the blue dots winked out. "Strike Element taking casualties," Tom reported. "Friendly November KIA. Formation holding.

  One November (a Nascent Soul) down. The cost of containing a Divine Child for another few minutes. But the Strike Element's sacrifice was working. The Divine Child was pinned.

  "Boston Command is ordering Task Force Bravo forward," Tom announced. "Northern approach."

  Leo watched through the side window as twenty five hundred trucks peeled away from the main formation, engines roaring as they pushed past battle speed. Forty eight drones surged ahead of them. A flying vanguard of T4 war machines using their Nascent Soul like power to clear the path.

  Boston Command was threatening the Weeping Spires from the north.

  The Cult couldn't ignore it.

  "Ten Nascent Souls breaking from the Divine Child's guard," Tom reported. "Moving to intercept Task Force Bravo."

  Jimbo's expression didn't change, but Leo caught the slight tension in his shoulders easing. The Divine Child's personal guard had just dropped from thirty to twenty.

  The Strike Element pressed immediately. On the tactical display, Leo watched the blue dots surge forward, taking advantage of the weakened defensive line. The Divine Child's advance slowed, then stalled.

  While the main convoy continued its steady march forward, the gap between them and their deadly foe widened with each passing minute.

  Task Force Bravo reached its objective distance and executed a synchronized turn, heading back towards the main convoy. The northern feint had cost them nothing.

  The Oblivion cult faced a decision. They could send the ten Nascent Souls who'd broken off back to reinforce the Divine Child, a twenty-minute journey. Or they could redirect those Nascent Souls to plug holes in the main army's formation, which was slowly stretching thin as the pace of battle stretched out the battle line.

  They chose to plug the holes.

  The main cult formation began shifting to compensate. Leo watched the blobs on the tactical display start to spread, trying to cover the gaps created by the high speed of combat. The tight defensive blobs that had been concentrated began to thin as Nascent Souls repositioned.

  "Task Force Delta, southern approach," Tom announced.

  Three thousand trucks accelerated toward the Weeping Spires' southern flank. Twenty-four thousand flak cannons from those sections alone intensified their barrage on vulnerable blobs of Nascent souls. Barges began their frantic rotation, bottoms glowing from absorbed fire. More flamed out.

  But the Barges fought back.

  A transport two sections over took a direct hit from coordinated Barge fire.

  Leo watched it catch fire, smoke pouring from the cab, before it tumbled out of formation. Another few followed when a blob of Nascent Souls swept close enough for their domains to reach the convoy's edge. A third exploded outright, its ammunition cooking off in a spectacular fireball that forced the trucks on either side to swerve.

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  "Eighteen transports down," Tom reported.

  The Dreadnoughts were fighting, doing their best to hold the line. Sixty drone carriers struggled to cover and defend the entire convoy against nearly three hundred Nascent Soul Lords.

  The drones swarmed, over five hundred war machines forming a screening cloud between the convoy and the Cult blobs. They couldn't stop a Nascent Soul, but they could harass.

  Leo watched a cluster of drones engage a blob that had pushed too close to the southern edge. The drones died in waves, swatted aside by Nascent Soul techniques, but they kept coming. Replacements launched from the Dreadnoughts to fill the gaps, maintaining the screen through sheer persistence.

  The blob withdrew, unwilling to push through the drone screen while under sustained flak barrage.

  "Divine Child dispatching another eight," Tom reported. "His guard is down to twelve."

  The southern feint had worked. Eight more Nascent Souls pulled from the Divine Child's protection, racing to reinforce the blobs that Task Force Delta was pressuring. On the tactical display, Leo watched the Strike Element press their advantage against the Divine Child's skeleton guard.

  Another blue dot winked out. An American Nascent Soul, killed trying to hold back a blob that had threatened to encircle and cut off a portion of the convoy.

  "Task Force Echo, center approach," Jimbo said, watching the display. "This is the one that matters."

  Sections 15 through 20 surged forward, threatening the Weeping Spires from a third angle. The Divine Child had almost no guards left. He couldn't dispatch reinforcements without exposing himself completely. Instead, he ordered the blob formations to extend their coverage.

  Leo watched the tactical display as the Cult's defensive posture weakened. Domains that had started the battle tight in an overlapping, mutually supporting blob of doom. Now stretched into a thin line of battle.

  But the convoy paid its own price.

  Dreadnought Four pushed too close to the line, trying to direct its drones against a blob pressuring Task Force Echo's flank. It crossed some invisible threshold. Eight Nascent Souls surged toward it.

  The drones threw themselves in the way, but there were too many enemies, too much concentrated power. Leo watched blue drone dots wink out in rapid succession before the Dreadnought itself disappeared from the display. Six Gold Core operators. Gone in seconds.

  "Dreadnought Four is down," Tom reported. "Dreadnought Seven withdrawing with damage."

  More transports flamed out across the formation. A squad of five on the western edge, trapped in a domain when their section drifted too close to a blob. Three more on the eastern flank when Nascent Soul techniques reached past the drone screen.

  Two that simply broke down, their formations failing under the sustained stress of high speed maneuvers, tumbling out of the convoy to be swept up by the Cult's rear guard.

  Leo watched the casualty counter tick upward.

  It didn't seem that bad. Three hundred of twenty thousand. A small fraction.

  Then he did the math.

  Nearly five thousand people. And the battle was just getting started.

  What am I doing here?

  The question surfaced unbidden, and Leo couldn't push it back down.

  He was sixteen years old. He was a Qi Refining cultivator. He had been skipping class to play Elden Ring nine months ago.

  Now he was part of the largest military operation in American history, and his job was to fly into a Nascent Soul's domain and kill them with a weapon that used heavenly tribulation lightning.

  This is insane.

  He should have stayed home. He should have kept his head down, cultivated quietly, and waited until he was stronger. He could benefit Earth so much more if he just reached Foundation Establishment. Gold Core. Nascent Soul.

  Instead, he was here. Sixteen years old, surrounded by over three hundred twenty thousand soldiers, watching people die.

  Why?

  Because Zhao asked him to. Because the military needed his skills. Because he was could thread a Nascent Soul Mountain domain.

  But that wasn't really the reason.

  Leo looked at his teammates.

  They didn't have to be here either.

  They were volunteers. All of them. Just like most of the three hundred twenty thousand personnel in the convoy. Just like the twenty Nascent Souls of the strike team fighting to contain the Divine Child.

  He thought about Mike's words, spoken in the Azure Profound Continent what felt like a lifetime ago.

  "It's something out of our control. There is no perfect solution. You cannot save everyone. You can't even save most people."

  "We don't need to save this world. We just need to know we gave a good enough try. Right?"

  Right.

  Leo wasn't in control of his own life. He never had been. From the moment he transmigrated into this world, from the moment he discovered the Azure Profound Continent, from the moment he developed his divine sense abilities, his path had been set.

  This was his destiny.

  Even if he didn't have his cheat, he would still be here. Maybe not in this specific truck, maybe not with this specific mission, but here. On this battlefield. Fighting this war. Because that's what his generation did.

  The only thing he could do was try his best.

  "All Scorpion elements, stand by for Operation Sting. Acknowledge."

  The transmission went out convoy-wide. To the thousands of other transports, the words meant nothing. Just another coded operation order. But Boston Command had broadcast it deliberately, letting every unit know something was coming. That command had a trump card ready to be played.

  The Cult formation stretched across miles, their blobs spread thin from the various feints and maneuvers. The massive convoy had surrounded them on both flanks.

  The battle line resembled naval warfare from the Age of Sail.

  A wall of Nascent Soul blobs extended for miles, each blob centered around flak resistant domains. These domains provided a three hundred meter sphere of protection created an island of safety in the flak storm. Obsidian Barges orbited these spheres like wooden frigates surrounding flagships, their reinforced hulls turned toward the heaviest concentrations of fire.

  The convoy formations flanked the Cult line on both sides. Twenty thousand transports arranged themselves in staggered rows, creating overlapping fields of fire.

  Teams of drones and their associated Dreadnoughts directly engaged the largest concentrations of Cultist Nascent Souls. The war machines formed screening clouds, surging forward in coordinated strikes before pulling back as the flak batteries opened fire.

  The pattern repeated over and over. Drone assault, flak barrage, drone assault, flak barrage. The space between the two forces churned with death. Shells and spell arts filled the air so densely that visual identification was impossible through the smoke.

  The Cult's return fire came in concentrated volleys. Clusters of dozens of Barges would coordinate their attacks, timing them with Nascent Soul charges and breakout attempts. The convoy's drones and Nascent Souls blunted what they could.

  But every minute, another transport would have its shields broken, its movement crippled. They would flame out and fall behind, soon to be intercepted by the megablob of twenty five Cult Nascent Souls that swept up stragglers.

  Four enemy blobs glowed brighter than the others on the tactical overlay. They were small isolated blobs that were anchored by an anti-flak domain. Two Southern Domain. Two Great Gate Domain. These domains provided absolute protection against flak, so these blobs sat smaller and more exposed than the others, content in their safety.

  Boston Command had marked them for death.

  Twenty blue triangles appeared on the tactical display, scattered throughout the convoy formation. Scorpion teams that had been hiding among the twenty thousand transports, waiting for this moment.

  "All batteries, load T3 and T4 rounds," Tom relayed. "Prepare for follow-on barrage on command."

  Across the convoy, one hundred sixty thousand flak cannons adjusted their ammunition feeds. The continuous T2 barrage that had been hammering the Cult for three hours fell silent for a heartbeat as gunners loaded their heavy shells.

  "Scorpion teams, this is Boston Command. You are go. Godspeed."

  The triangles moved.

  Forty Flyers burst from concealment across the battlefield. They emerged from Scorpion platforms hidden among the transports, from the cover of drone screens, rising into the flak free sky.

  The Cult had no intelligence on this weapon system. No understanding of what was about to happen.

  Scorpion Team 1 hit a Southern Domain anchor on the northern edge. Multiple groups of flyers engaged the blob's outer defenders while two pairs of T4.5 flyers dove toward the domain's heart. Concentrated T4 Spell Arts ripped into them immediately. One flyer died instantly. A second followed moments later.

  But the heavenly tribulation claw connected.

  The Southern Domain Lord convulsed as heavenly lightning erupted through his body. His screams cut off as the tribulation cleansed him from within, an unwanted baptism of heavenly fire. Flesh charring, infant shattering, his 300-meter sphere of protection collapsed in one final test of cultivation.

  "November Down." Boston Command announced over the tactical net.

  The entire assault lasted less than three minutes.

  "Operation Sting complete," Tom announced. "Four November anchors eliminated. Seven Flyers KIA."

  Four anti-flak domain Lords. Their protective spheres collapsed. And the Nascent Souls who had been sheltering within those spheres suddenly found themselves exposed to open sky.

  "Flyers clear. All batteries," Boston Command ordered. "Fire."

  One hundred sixty thousand flak cannons spoke as one. T3 and T4 shells, pre-loaded and waiting, screamed toward the four blobs of newly-exposed Nascent Souls.

  The volume of fire was beyond anything Leo had witnessed. Every transport in range concentrated on the four target zones. Spiritual steel filled the air so densely that their transport automatically dimmed the windows to protect their lives.

  "Splash November." The calls overlapped now, different voices from different sectors. "Splash November, Blob Two." "November down, Blob Four." "Two more November, Blob One."

  Leo counted the red dots winking out on the tactical display. Three in the first Blob. Four in the second. Three in the third. Three more in the fourth.

  Thirteen Nascent Souls. Dead in less than ten seconds.

  "Seventeen Novembers confirmed killed," Tom reported. His voice cracked slightly. "Seven Flyers KIA. No Scorpions lost."

  Seventeen Nascent Souls.

  In less than four minutes, Boston Command had eliminated nearly six percent of the Cult's Nascent Soul force. Four domain anchors gone. Thirteen of their defenders gone with them.

  The Cult panicked.

  The stretched battle line shattered as isolated blobs desperately sought allies. Nascent Souls fled their positions, desperately trying to find blobs with true anti-flak protection. The careful posture that had held for the battle dissolved into chaos.

  The convoy maintained battle speed. The Cult formations, trying to contract while under continuous fire, couldn't outrun the pressure. Gaps formed between retreating blobs. Nascent Souls who had been on the formation's edges found themselves isolated as the center consolidated without them.

  The Barges were dying faster now too. Without domain protection spread across the line, the flak barrage found them more easily. Leo watched them flame out in groups, their formations failing under sustained assault.

  "Two more Novembers down," Tom reported. "Stragglers caught during consolidation."

  The Cult's defensive line had contracted. Their Nascent Soul force had dropped from roughly three hundred to two hundred eighty. Half their Barges were burning wreckage on the wasteland floor.

  A devastating reveal.

  But the battle wasn't over.

  "Scorpion Seven," Tom said, turning to look at Leo. "Boston Command has identified a priority target. A Mountain Domain anchor on the consolidated line's northern edge. Three November blob."

  Leo's throat went dry.

  "You're up."

  Jimbo turned to look at Leo.

  Leo nodded back.

  He stood, bracing himself against the truck's motion, and made his way back to the first container. The armor waited for him on its rack, gleaming with protective formations. The tether mechanism hummed quietly, ready to deploy.

  He was going to kill a Nascent Soul Lord.

  Or die trying.