(Planet Juxta, Charles’s POV)
While Raymond's fleet drew closer and closer to Juxta, Charles calmly fiddled with the storage ring on his finger, which contained one of the three orbs Søron had given him to use for emergencies.
Having already used one of the three orbs previously to ward off Raymond a few months ago, Charles was now left with just two more to spare.
However, he sent one of them alongside Dumpy to Leo, just in-case the boy ever needed it more than him, while keeping the last one for this fight as his hidden ace.
"And so it begins..."
He mused as the planetary barrier shattered, as at that moment, he stopped fiddling with his storage ring and unsheathed his sword, his expression turning serious.
"Come you bastards..."
He said, before shooting up into the sky, as from the very start of this battle, he did not intend to hold back at all.
*BOOM*
The moment his boots left the ground, the sky itself seemed to shudder, his blade flashing once before vanishing into a storm of motion, as the heavens above Juxta erupted in chaos.
Arcs of sword light tore through the void, each one carving apart a ship like paper, their armored hulls splitting into neat halves that burned with ruptured mana cores.
One slash cut a line through twenty destroyers at once, their explosions blooming together into a chain of fire that lit the sky like a second sun, while another stroke sent a ripple across the fleet, its unseen edge carving a crescent path so wide that a hundred frigates were reduced to drifting scrap metal before their crews even understood they had been struck.
Charles moved with frightening calm as his sword weaved through the air, each motion clean, controlled, and absolute, yet the destruction it wrought was anything but restrained, for wherever his blade pointed, death followed, and the invading fleet began to scatter like startled prey as enemy Commanders barked frantic orders that died in their throats the instant his next strike ripped through their formations.
Ships tried to retreat, but their evasions meant nothing when Charles’s slashes carried faster than light, cutting from angles impossible to predict, as the air above Juxta became a storm of invisible blades and burning wreckage, each detonation feeding into the next until the battlefield resembled a sea of falling meteors.
No longer the restrained commander the universe had grown so accustomed to seeing, Charles revealed himself as what he had always been at heart: a beast of war, a calamity in human form, a man who needed only a sword to turn the sky into a graveyard.
And as the shattered remnants of yet another battleship rained into the atmosphere below, Charles hovered in the smoke and flames, eyes narrowed, voice a whisper that rolled like thunder through the chaos he had made.
"Not one step further."
He said, pointing towards Raymond's ship in particular, as he challenged the Demi-God to walk out and face him if he dared.
---
Meanwhile, across the other parts of Juxta, the ones that Charles could not cover, thousands upon thousands of enemy ships descended from the skies, their shadows blotting out the blue sky as the battle spread across the horizon.
The Cult's planetary defenses roared to life at once, the ground trembling as railguns rotated into firing position, their barrels glowing with runic inscriptions before unleashing streams of hypervelocity slugs that tore through enemy formations.
*BOOM—BOOM—BOOM*
Entire clusters of frigates exploded like fireworks, their debris raining down in molten showers as the sky was carved open with streaks of light.
Mana turrets spun in every direction, spewing concentrated beams that melted enemy hulls mid-flight, while inferno towers spat searing firestorms into the clouds, igniting troop carriers before they could even reach the lower atmosphere.
From the military bases, waves of surface-to-air missiles screamed into the heavens, weaving arcs of contrails across the black sky before detonating in brutal blossoms of fire, shattering entire wings of incoming fighters.
And above it all, the Cult's air force surged forward, thousands of pilots rallying beneath the crimson banner, their mana-powered fighters screaming across the skies as they intercepted enemy squadrons head-on.
"FOR THE CULT OF ASCENSION, FOR COMMANDER CHARLES!" they shouted, voices trembling yet resolute as they tore through the air like arrows loosed from a divine bow.
Dogfights erupted across the atmosphere, missiles chasing fighters through spirals of smoke while mana-charged cannons ripped apart destroyer escorts at close range.
Cult Pilots fought until their wings were ablaze, some even diving their crippled crafts straight into enemy battleships in desperate kamikaze strikes, their last breaths spent in service of the Cult.
For every ship that Charles's blade felled in the skies above, the soldiers and pilots below matched him in blood and steel, fighting with the fury of men who had no choice but to win or die.
And for a time, it seemed as if the impossible was within reach.
Enemy losses climbed by the thousands with every passing minute, their formations buckling under the ferocity of Juxta's defenders.
Cheers broke out in command stations as counter-strikes landed, as railgun crews saw enemy battleships split in half, as turret teams watched their beams lance clean through the cores of carriers, as soldiers saw invaders plummet in burning wreckage.
But numbers... numbers had always been the one advantage the Righteous Faction carried without shame.
For every squadron destroyed, five more pressed forward. For every enemy Destroyer cut in half, ten more filled the gap.
The void around Juxta swarming like a living tide, its vastness suffocating, its mass overwhelming.
Inevitably, bit by bit, the Cult's defenses soon began to buckle.
The railguns fell silent one by one, their barrels overheating or their ammunition stores being reduced to ash under relentless bombardments.
Mana turrets sputtered, runes cracking from overuse until they burned out entirely. Inferno towers collapsed under concentrated fire, their flames extinguished as rubble buried their crews alive.
The air force, though valiant, was torn apart in the endless storm of reinforcements. Brave pilots screamed final oaths into their comms as their wings were clipped, their voices cut short in bursts of static as the last of them fell burning into the seas and mountains below.
And though the surface-to-air missiles launched until their silos were empty, the skies above Juxta remained a sea of enemy banners, the Cult's resistance thinning with every heartbeat.
It was a massacre in slow motion — not for lack of valor, nor for lack of strength, but for the simple cruelty of scale.
Eventually, the Cult's defensive net shattered, the last bastions overwhelmed by brute force as the invading fleet descended freely through the broken skies.
*THUD* *THUD* *THUD*
Troop carriers pierced the clouds, slamming into the soil with quakes that split the ground, their hatches unfolding as waves upon waves of enemy soldiers poured out.
Armored divisions fanned across Juxta's plains, banners of the Righteous Faction unfurling as they marched forward, their war cries shaking the very ground beneath their boots.
The Cult had fought hard. They had fought like demons in the dark.
But in the end, it wasn't enough to stop the enemy from putting their filthy boots on the Juxta soil, as the war for planetary capture finally began.
(More chapters in Buyers club for TMT)