Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 890

When Perfect entered the survivors' camp under the protection of the missionary leader and the Steam Knights, the entire ruins seemed to be cast under a silence spell.

Everyone bowed their heads before the honorable Regent of the Victoria Empire and Lord of the North, and even their breathing became cautious.

The old nobles who once claimed to be the descendants of Romulus were now humbly clutching their tattered winter cloaks, as if the worn-out cloth could hide their long-lost glory.

One of them was once proud of a bronze brooch from an archonal ancestor, but now it was dull and rusty.

Some people still stubbornly wear rusted family emblem rings on their fingers as dry as branches, as if the ring can still prove their once noble bloodline.

But when the shadow of the floating city module covered the camp like a sky, these remnants of the old era all hunched their backs at the same time, like reeds bent by an invisible hand, unable to straighten themselves up again.

A poor businessman wearing gold-rimmed single-rimmed glasses even staggered to his knees, the lens reflecting a distorted image on the ice.

He in the shadow is no longer the tycoon who monopolized the commercial routes of the City of Seven Hills, but just dust crawling under the gears of the new era.

However, when Perfecto stepped through the ruins covered with black ice, she leaned over and helped up a homeless child whose knees were cut by sharp stones while kneeling. The moment her fingertips brushed across the wound, the glimmer of alchemy smoothed out the rolled flesh, and the child's sobbing stopped abruptly, replaced by a surprised gasp.

In the newly built prefabricated housing area, she waved the Midas Touch light, and the red light moved like lava, melting the leaky iron seams into a seamless metal barrier. The cold wind could no longer invade this crude shelter.

When passing by the greenhouse built by the immigrant group, she stopped to stare at the cold-resistant crops that thrived in the greenhouse environment, and the corners of her lips slightly raised: "You have done better than I expected to grow crops in such an environment."

When the missionary leader nervously reported that some survivors were still hostile to the Empire, Perfect simply stroked the warm metal shell of the energy tower and said in a calm and firm voice: "Instead of blaming them for their ignorance, it is better to let the heat of the steam core teach them how to survive."

At dawn the next day, the supplies unloaded by the three transport airships completely changed the ecology of the camp.

Tons of compressed biscuits filled the stomachs of every survivor, and those backs that were once hunched over by hunger could finally straighten up a little; modular houses rose from the ground under the precise mechanical arms of large-scale engineering autonomous robots, and the sound of metal frames being spliced ​​together was like the bell of a new era.

An old nobleman who once wore the emblem of the Romulus Senate trembled and touched the wall with constant temperature runes. The temperature from his fingertips reminded him vaguely of the fireplace in the family banquet hall.

The turbid tears fell on the rusty family emblem ring, and the ice crystals accumulated in the cracks of the family emblem were melted, turning into a winding water mark.

That ring can now only bear witness to the rise of a new era, just like the worn-out family emblem, which will eventually become a relic of the old era.

However, the glimmer of hope has not yet dispelled the shadow. It flickers in the darkness like a candle in the wind and may be swallowed up by deeper darkness at any time.

Above the ruins of the City of Seven Hills, lead-gray clouds rolled like an iron curtain, and the low-pressure thunder sounded like the blasphemous prayers chanted by the old gods' believers in the crypts. The sound seemed to come from the depths of the earth, with a creepy echo.

Perfect stood in the command room of the floating city module, her slender figure reflected on the cold metal floor.

On the sand table in front of him was a miniature model of the ruins of the City of Seven Hills and the survivors' camp, with every bit of building wreckage accurately restored.

The ones marked with blue marks are the survivor camps, and those tiny dots of light represent the innocent people who are still struggling to survive.

Those followers of the evil god are lurking in the underground areas outside the camp and in the ruins further away, coiling in the shadows like poisonous snakes, waiting for the full moon night to tear everything apart.

"Sir, the God-killing Armor has been deployed. May I ask if we should start clearing out those evil god believers now?" The Knight Commander of the Steam Knights reported respectfully behind Perfect.

Following Perfectot's instructions, he has deployed all the god-killing armors at key locations in the areas where the evil god's followers have been found to be active. Those steel behemoths are lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment of hunting to come.

Perfect didn't look back. She just stared at the sand table in front of her. Her slender fingers gently stroked the location of the survivors' camp. She said casually, "Let them make a fuss. The bigger the better."

Her plan was simple, almost cruelly simple.

The followers of the evil god believed that the sacrifice on the full moon night would be their victory, that the whispers of blood and madness would tear apart reality and allow the power of the old gods to descend upon the world.

They expected a wave of despair to engulf the survivors, and for mortals to kneel in fear and become sacrifices for a new era.

But Perfect wants them to know that true despair never comes from the abyss, but from the moment when the fate they thought they controlled is crushed.

When the ritual of the evil god's followers reaches its climax, when the terrifying existence extends its tentacles from the void, when the cries and screams of the survivors resound through the ruins - the steam core of the God-killing armor will start up with a bang, and the muzzle of the floating city module will light up with a dazzling light.

Steel and fire will tear through the chaos at the most precise moment and reverse this crazy feast.

This is not salvation, but a reckoning.

The power of the evil god's followers will be uprooted, their nests will collapse in the explosion, and their flesh and blood will turn to dust under the crushing of machinery.

And the survivors, those trembling, praying mortals, will witness with their own eyes how the creations of the old gods collapse in the roar of steam. Those twisted, indescribable existences are as fragile as dead leaves in front of cold steel.

Then, they will understand that the New God is their savior.
-
The ruins of the Pantheon looked like the skeleton of a giant beast under the light of the blood moon, and the broken columns cast distorted shadows.

The evil priest stood in the center of the altar, holding an obsidian dagger high in his skinny arms. Dark red lines like blood vessels flowed on the blade, and every pulse was accompanied by a teeth-grinding sound of metal twisting coming from afar.

Three hundred fanatical believers were crawling on the ground in strange postures, their spines bent abnormally and their jagged joints piercing their skin.

The cracked lips kept opening and closing, and the hoarse prayers echoed among the ruins, as if millions of beetles were gnawing at the foundations of this world.

The air was filled with the sweet smell of rotting fruit, mixed with the pungent smell of sulfur.

"Blood as guide, soul as sacrifice!" The priest's roar made the ground tremble.

The first sacrifice was a teenage girl whose eyeballs had been gouged out and the empty eye sockets were crawling with maggots.

When the obsidian dagger slashed across her gray neck, the gushing blood condensed into strange symbols in mid-air, wriggling like a living thing and falling onto the surface of the altar.

When the runes carved in the ancient language came into contact with the blood, they began to swallow like hungry mouths, emitting a dark green glow with each swallow. As more and more life fluid seeped into the altar, the entire Pantheon began to groan like it was dying.

Foul black fog poured out from the cracks in the ground, and countless translucent tentacles could be vaguely seen emerging from the fog. They entwined the believers' limbs and sucked the souls of the sacrificers out of their seven orifices.

One of the believers suddenly convulsed violently, his crown split open like petals, and his gray brain was shaped into the shape of a miniature altar by an invisible force.

The black fog surged more and more violently, and the stone pillars that had collapsed for hundreds of years suddenly began to wriggle like sea anemone tentacles.

The whites of the believers' eyes were completely filled with inky darkness, and the torn wounds at the corners of their mouths extended all the way to their earlobes, but strangely not a drop of blood flowed out.

They laughed wildly at the same time, and the sound was mixed with the noise of metal rubbing against each other.

Warm mucus began to seep out of the ground, and everyone could feel that they were approaching, and the indescribable existence was squeezing its body out of the dimensional crack.

And above the clouds above their heads, the floating city's observation system was recording all of this with its cold mechanical eyes.

The sophisticated optical array penetrates the thick lead-gray clouds, converting every detail happening on the ground into a data stream that flows into the central computing core of the floating city.

The energy fluctuation detector flashed a dangerous scarlet light, and alarms rang out in the command room, but they were all deliberately turned to silent mode - this was exactly the effect that Perfectoct wanted.

The alchemical runes outlined the trajectory of dimensional distortion on the holographic projection. Those distorted lines squirmed like living things, indicating that the dimensional barrier was being torn apart.

The alchemists nervously recorded every abnormal reading, their fingers flying over the console, transmitting the data in real time to Perfecto standing at the command desk.

Perfect's plan is progressing steadily - she deliberately allows the evil god's followers to complete the blood sacrifice ritual, allowing despair to come first, and then crushes it with her own hands.

When the bones of the last sacrifice shattered into ashes on the altar, the entire ruins suddenly fell into an eerie silence.

In the three seconds when even the sound of the wind froze, the detection equipment of the floating city captured the energy shock generated when the dimensional barrier was breached and sounded a shrill alarm.

The ground cracked into countless scarlet pupils like rotten eyelids. Sticky black pus and blood oozed from the edges of each crack, corroding the frozen soil into hissing foam.

Hundreds of tentacles dripping with rainbow-colored mucus shot up into the sky, reflecting a morbid halo in the moonlight. The surface of each tentacles was covered with mouth-like organs that opened and closed constantly, and corrosive saliva dripped between the jagged teeth, making a creepy sucking sound.

Those indescribable shadows gradually condensed into semi-solid entities in the real world. Their shapes kept twisting and changing. Sometimes they looked like pieces of flesh made up of countless human limbs, with rusty chains hanging on the joints; sometimes they turned into flowing black asphalt-like substances, with the outlines of human faces struggling in pain emerging on the surface.

The piercing screams emitted by the minions of the Old Gods as they tore open the dimensional barrier caused all glass products within a ten-mile radius to shatter simultaneously, and the flying fragments formed a deadly silver storm in the air, cutting the nearby tents and board houses into broken strips of cloth and wood chips.

They swooped down on the survivors' camp with a maddening buzzing sound, like a million bees fluttering inside the skull, or like a rusty saw cutting through nerves.

Wherever the sound waves passed, metal products twisted and deformed, and spider-web-like cracks appeared on the outer shell of the energy tower.

Blood oozed from the survivors' ears. Several weak ones fell to their knees on the spot, holding their heads in their hands and wailing in pain, but everyone had a strange smile on their face - their pupils dilated into dark holes, and the corners of their mouths were torn to their ears, revealing dense fangs that did not belong to humans.

This is exactly the "holy moment" that believers long for!
At this moment, even the air began to be filled with the sweet and fishy smell of decay, as if the whole world was being dragged into the digestive cavity of some indescribable existence.

Every breath felt like inhaling sticky pus and blood. The burning sensation in the lungs caused the survivors to cough violently, but they could not cough up anything - only the taste of rust rising from the depths of their throats and a slippery, living touch.

The arrival of the nameless being broke through the underground water supply system, pushed open the manhole covers, and surged onto the ground of the ruins of the City of Seven Hills like sewage backflow.

Their wriggling bodies squeezed concrete pipes, twisted rusted metal into blasphemous sculptures, and the road surface collapsed like melting wax.

Those monsters made of mucus, rotten flesh and unnameable substances rushed towards the survivors' camp, leaving bubbling corrosive trails wherever they passed, and even the frozen soil was melted into a swamp with black smoke.

The walls and watchtowers surrounding the survivors' camp were reduced to dust the moment the tentacles swept past them. The reinforced concrete was as fragile as biscuits.

The guards on the watchtower didn't even have time to sound the alarm before they were caught by the tentacles and dragged into the wriggling black shadow with the sound of bones breaking.

Acid rain made of flesh and blood fell from the sky, corroding the prefabricated houses and tents that had just been built in the camp. The metal frames dissolved with a sizzling sound, and countless holes were corroded in the canvas roof, revealing the blood-red sky behind.

The sky was now filled with wriggling, blood-veined clouds, as if the entire world had become the internal organs of some giant creature.

Screaming mothers shoved their children into drains, blocking the entrances with their bodies.

Their backs were soon burned by the acid rain, but they still held on to the iron fence until the last bit of consciousness was swallowed up by the severe pain.

The patrol members fired their rifles in vain. The bullets passed through the monsters' bodies like passing through thick fog, leaving only fleeting ballistic tracks in the air.

The Steam Knights set up their recoilless cannons. The flames from the muzzles illuminated their silver helmets, but could only leave fleeting burn marks on the squirming black shadow.

The wounds were almost immediately filled with new granulation tissue, as if they had never existed.

Everyone's retinas were seared with those horrific, wriggling shapes that defied the laws of geometry.

Sometimes they swelled up like mountains, casting shadows that covered half of the camp; sometimes they shrank like needles, piercing the victim's eyeballs from impossible angles.

The dodecagonal eyes blinked at the same time at impossible angles, and each pupil reflected a different nightmare scene; barbed limbs stretched out from a completely non-existent dimension, tearing the fleeing people to pieces like dolls.

A young soldier suddenly laughed wildly. He dropped his weapon, walked towards the monsters with open arms, and muttered something in a language that no one could understand - the tone was high and low, like some kind of incantation from an ancient ritual.

His eyeballs melted in their sockets, but he still maintained a strange smile until a tentacle covered with mouth-like organs suddenly stretched out from the void and wrapped around his head.

At the moment when his skull shattered, his laughter still echoed in the ruins, forming a terrible harmony with the buzzing of the monsters.

(End of this chapter)