Tch. So it's finally here.
Annihilation.
On the battlefield of the Norfall Barrens, Rover stared down her enemy with a grim expression, certain now that this was the final trial.
Not long ago, Ovathrax had entered its second phase and summoned four Overlord Class Tacet Discords, each one strong enough to rival an entire legion, hoping to shatter the stalemate and crush Jinzhou's defensive line in a single stroke.
But the Rover and her Echo army had far exceeded the Threnodian of War's expectations. The Impermanence Heron, the Tempest Mephis, and the Thundering Mephis, three Overlord Class Tacet Discords born from the Retroact Rain, had all been defeated by her three matching Overlord Echoes and their Frequencies absorbed.
Her forces were stronger than ever.
A shame, though, that no miracle had sparked from it. Pitting three identical Echoes against their Tacet Discord counterparts hadn't triggered anything as dramatic as a Second Awakening. Even so, every one of those Echoes had doubled in power.
As for the Overlord Class Crownless...
That one was already sealed inside Rover's gourd. The first Echo her counterpart had ever wanted, its capture had been inevitable.
With all four Overlord Class Tacet Discords vanquished, the Threnodian of War seemed to crack. From the start of this battle, aside from scraps of weapon Frequency and whatever Tacet Discord Frequencies Fractsidus had supplied, Ovathrax had gained almost nothing.
Anyone else would have called this the most lopsided victory they'd ever fought.
Ovathrax had never fought so lopsided a defeat.
It watched this girl who looked more like a Threnodian of War than the actual Threnodian, growing stronger with every wave of a battle that should have spelled the end of Civilization. She'd gained more levels than anyone could count, and her Echo army had swelled past a thousand. A full thousand.
Ovathrax finally grasped the severity of the situation.
And resolved to play its last card.
In an instant, the world drained of color.
Under the Threnodian's control, one final deluge of Retroact Rain hammered the sky. In a heartbeat, the battlefield's Tacet Discord count surged by a hundred thousand. This was its absolute limit.
Rover and everyone on Jinzhou's side tensed. A hundred thousand Tacet Discords was a staggering number, enough to drown out any gap in individual power through sheer volume alone, enough to bury even Overlord Class Echoes under bodies.
But not one of them believed they'd fall.
They'd come too far. They'd forged an unbreakable conviction.
Then something beyond comprehension happened.
"Become sacrifices, you useless fodder."
The voice of the Threnodian boomed from within the towering statue, hundreds of meters tall. In the next second, every Tacet Discord born of Ovathrax's power across the entire battlefield self-destructed at once, leaving behind nothing but raw Frequency energy.
Before Abby could so much as brace itself and open wide to absorb that terrifying flood of Frequency, the energy was already being drawn together, converging, fusing into a single entity.
And it wasn't only the Tacet Discords' Frequency.
Ovathrax had paid in blood.
It poured the bulk of its remaining power, even a portion of its Authority, into this creation about to be born. Its sharpest weapon.
Every set of eyes on the battlefield went wide.
Silence swallowed the world.
The Threnodian moon phase overhead blazed with sudden, blinding brilliance.
Then something emerged from that violet moon.
A Tacet Discord gestated within the "moon" itself. Countless arms formed wings that radiated ominous purple light, like a mass of souls clawing to escape an abyss of despair, and failing. The abyss they tried to flee was the creature herself. She resembled a corrupted moon goddess, her slender feminine form like a masterwork sculpture that had been defiled. A star-shaped Whisperin Core pulsed like a heart at her left breast. Dark violet hair trailed behind her. Countless feathers obscured her face, and six interlocking star-shaped Whisperin Cores rested atop her head, forming a crown.
Calamity Class Tacet Discord... Dreamless.
The moment she was born, Ovathrax's fortunes reversed.
"For Mother... an offering... of death..."
A massive scythe of dark violet materialized in Dreamless' hands. She gazed down at them all without pity, without sorrow, then brought the pale right hand gripping the Havoc war scythe sweeping down.
The earth split open beneath it.
The shockwave tore across the battlefield.
"No!" Rover cried.
Without a second's hesitation, she teleported every allied soldier off the front line. Strengthened many times over by all the Frequency she'd absorbed, her Forte had grown with her. In the space of a blink, every Midnight Ranger and Black Shores operative found their vision blur, and then they were standing on a hillside, staring back at where they'd been.
Where they'd been was now a chasm.
A single strike from Dreamless had cleaved a kilometer of earth into a ravine nearly a hundred meters deep. One blow, and the maps of the Norfall Barrens would need to be redrawn. Again.
Because centuries ago, the first time Ovathrax had appeared, it had created a Calamity Class Crownless Tacet Discord that punched what had once been a mountain range into the vast plateau the Norfall Barrens was today.
This was the power of a Calamity Class. World-breaking.
"Ova... Ovathrax?!"
One Midnight Ranger screamed the name, his voice raw with horror.
Every head turned toward him. This was a veteran who'd never flinched in the face of death, yet his expression now held fear, shock, helplessness, and beneath it all, a fury that burned brighter than all the rest.
"Ovathrax? You mean this Tacet Discord?!"
"Yes! It's identical to back then! I'd never mistake it!"
"Back then... you mean the Battle Beneath the Crescent?"
The veteran gave a hard, savage nod. Around him, several other Midnight Rangers who'd survived that same battle locked their eyes on Dreamless and white-knuckled their weapons.
Their commander back then, General Geshu Lin, had led the Midnight Rangers deep into enemy territory to destroy this very creature, believing it to be Ovathrax itself. Then the Retroact Rain had hit, and the entire force had come within a breath of total annihilation.
Every survivor still remembered the general's order: hold the line, fight to the last. If he could kill "Ovathrax," Jinzhou would never again suffer the Threnodian's scourge.
But Geshu Lin and the creature had both vanished without a trace, and the Midnight Rangers had nearly been wiped out in the Retroact Rain.
Now they were staring at that same "Ovathrax" once more.
One Black Shores operative nearby wore a complicated expression.
"You... you've got it wrong. That isn't Ovathrax."
"What?"
"It's a Tacet Discord that Ovathrax created. Well, 'just a Tacet Discord' doesn't do it justice, since it's clearly Calamity Class, a tier above Overlord. But... she's not the Threnodian."
This was Ovathrax's most lethal blade.
But it was not the Threnodian of War itself.
If the Midnight Rangers and their general had mistaken this creature for Ovathrax during the Battle Beneath the Crescent, then their defeat had been inevitable from the start. Fighting it at all had been meaningless.
The real Ovathrax had hidden within that statue all along, hundreds of meters of carved stone. Ever since Rover and Jué had wounded it into slumber centuries ago, it had never once shown itself. It had lurked in the dark, biding its time and gathering strength.
While the Midnight Rangers had thrown everything they had at Dreamless, fighting with the resolve of the doomed, the Threnodian of War had likely been nestled inside that statue, savoring the spectacle of soldiers struggling against its puppet.
Until today.
Today, Ovathrax intended to return.