Age of Adepts

The war raged on!

Unlike skirmishes of three to five hundred fighters, a battlefield of tens or hundreds of thousands of combatants was exceptionally brutal and bloody.

It didn’t matter how individually powerful you were. You had to maintain a low-profile on a battlefield as chaotic and intense as this one as long as you weren’t invincible yet. You could not catch the attention of the enemy.

Otherwise…

Greem personally witnessed an undead knight shrouded in a chilling aura of death ravage the battlefield unchallenged upon his towering skeletal mount with his Third Grade prowess.

Numerous Orc Skullsplitters shivered before the sight of his mighty mount, and countless more orc powerhouses were split in two by the knight’s gleaming, two-meter-long sword. The Halo of Fear followed the knight wherever he went, causing all orcs to flee in terror.

For a moment, the undead knight’s ferocious might was unstoppable. No one dared to test its blinding edge.

However, the knight quickly caught the eye of a few equally powerful opponents in the ranks of the orc army.

Wuuuuuuu!

Fierce winds howled in the air, and a few giant rocks the size of millstones smashed toward the knight, creating sonic booms as they hurtled across the sky.

The Third Grade death knight courageously sliced three of the rocks to pieces but was hit by the final one. His bones snapped, and his armor dented as he was blown away to land amid the undead.

His skeletal mount had also been crushed to bits and scattered across the earth.

The death knight got up from the ground with much difficulty. Though most of his bones had been broken and cracked, the soul fire deep in his skull was still unharmed. Just as he attempted to absorb the surrounding death energies to repair his broken body, the earth around him started to tremble violently.

The Third Grade death knight struggled as he lifted his head. The blood red soul fire deep in his empty eye sockets abruptly shrank into a cross-shaped gleam as he watched on with terror. A war mammoth had smashed through the undead crowd and was charging toward him with earthshaking steps.

The beast’s body was as large as a small hill, its trunk was as agile as a python, and its slender tusks were as sharp as battering rams. Even more terrifying were those giant feet that were as thick as pillars of stone and as large as carriages. They were moving toward him with unstoppable momentum.

The war mammoth stampeded across the death knight’s body, crushing his body and the skull that contained his soul fire into bits and pieces of bone.

The desolate howl of a Third Grade death knight’s soul rang throughout the air.

The orc shaman sitting high upon the war mammoth’s back waved his thick horn staff and started yelling in a strange language that no one could understand. A blinding red light gathered in his palm every so often and shot into the body of the mammoth below.

A dozen orc spearthrowers gathered around the orc shaman. They shouted loudly as they threw the short spears in their hand at the unmoving masses of undead below. The war mammoth that had been sent into a frenzy by the Berserking Spell raised its trunk and let out a long trumpeting sound that echoed across the battlefield. It then charged toward the portal.

In front of the eight-meter-tall war mammoth, most of the undead were like dwarves before a giant. They had no hope of stopping the mammoth’s wild advance with their size and strength.

However, this arrogant war mammoth only lived for forty-three seconds longer than the Third Grade death knight.

The high-grade undead of the army let out a volley of spells under the direction of the liches hidden among them. Their barrage of spells turned the mammoth and the one dozen orcs on its back into tattered rags full of holes.

The giant mammoth crumbled to its knees with a sorrowful cry before falling to the ground!

A massive dust cloud was sent spiraling into the skies.

Blood was still splashing everywhere. Broken limbs and severed heads danced int he air.

Countless orcs were fighting and battling against the tide of undead across the sprawling frontline of the battlefield.

They had forgotten death, putting their lives on the line against the enemy.

Yet, their lives appeared to be cheap and worthless at this moment!

With their axes and hammers, countless orc warriors bathed in blood, cutting or smashing to pieces the endless zombies. However, the thick, rotten, purple-black blood that splashed everywhere carried a terrifying virus with it. Clouds of yellow and green smoke erupted everywhere on the battlefield, causing the orc warriors caught within them to cough violently.

The large areas of rot and pus that had appeared on their bodies caused them to bleed with every movement. Their bulging muscles quickly rotted away, and their muscular forms started to collapse and wither.

Rotblood zombies, poison zombies, plague zombies.

Undead with withered forms started to explode into clouds of smoke as the orc army slaughtered them. Soon, most of the battlefield had been engulfed in poisonous smoke clouds.

These smoke clouds even started to gather into a plague tide under the manipulation of the high-grade undead. The wave then surged toward the places where the orcs gathered in the highest concentration.

The orc warriors may not fear powerful enemies, but they had no means of dealing with these lethal, microscopic viruses that they could neither smash nor kill. Their previously tight formation gradually started to fall apart.

Pupupu!

A series of massive fireballs shot out from behind the orc army, creating a sea of fire in the middle of the plague tide.

The shrieks of countless tiny poisonous insects gathered into one massive sound wave that reverberated in the air above.

For a moment, countless poisonous insects and viruses were burned to death by the heat of the flames!

That might not have stopped the advance of the plague tide, but it had significantly reduced the damage that the witches could deal with the plague. It allowed the badly beaten orc army to recuperate and not be immediately defeated temporarily.

It was the orc shamans!

The witches behind the undead cast cold glares at these orc shamans draped in hides and feathers, with magical tattoos drawn all over their faces and bodies.

These orc shamans appeared to be skinnier and frailer compared to the average orc.

However, given how large and thick the horn staffs they held were, smashing a few enemy skulls wouldn’t be a problem either.

In terms of ability alone, even the weakest of warriors in the orc army had a more outstanding Physique than an advanced body-refining adept. In fact, most of the qualified orc warriors in the army had bodies as tough as body-refining pseudo-adepts.

Supposedly, an official adept of the World of Adepts could easily slaughter a dozen orc warriors. However, if the numbers were to increase by any more, then even a First Grade adept was at risk of injury.

If both parties were engaged in a deathmatch with nothing reserved, then a First Grade adept might be able to exterminate twenty or thirty orc warriors. However, the adept themselves would die under the crude yet simple stone hammers of the orcs.

It couldn’t be helped. The bodies of the adepts themselves were far too fragile!

If one could bypass those multiple layers of shields and magical defenses, then the adept himself might not be much stronger than an ordinary human. A blade to the neck or a stab to the stomach and even those noble adepts would die.

Meanwhile, these orc shamans were like a weakened version of official adepts.

The magical powers they possessed were far too crude. Apart from the Berserking Spell, Bloodlust, and Great Fireball, they had no spell or magic of great might. The more mystical aspect to the orc shamans was their ability to wield the powers of four elementium attributes simultaneously. Moreover, their enhancing magic, along with their healing and offensive skills, were all completed through the use of totems.

They would place these one-meter wooden totems into the earth before them and rapidly summon the corresponding magical elementium in their hands. The magic they unleashed might not be very powerful, but it was swift.

Greem narrowed his eyes and watched from behind the battle.

According to the Chip’s senses, he could tell that the strange tattoos on the bodies of the shamans appeared to be resonating with the patterns on their totems on a certain elementium frequency.

The oscillation and fluctuations of the magical radiance from the tattoos and the totems were almost entirely identical!

What was this? Magic resonance or elemental harmony? What method then did they use to cause a cold, inanimate object to become akin to a living being, and be able to sense and absorb the wandering elementium in the air?

Were the totems miniaturized and weakened versions of an elementium altar?

A series of questions rose in Greem’s mind.

No wonder those adepts loved to go on otherworldly conquests. As expected, any other world possessed plenty of mysterious knowledge and secrets for them to explore and decipher!

At this moment, Greem wanted to capture an orc shaman, split his skull apart, and conduct some thorough research.

However, even from a distance, he could see the muscular and well-trained orc blademasters surrounding the orc shamans. He had no choice but to stuff this idea into the depths of his heart silently.

If the Skullsplitters were ordinary orc warriors, then these orc blademasters were elite orc warriors on the level of body refining adepts.

They might not be very tall, and their bodies might not be as muscular as ordinary orcs, but their every movement was exceedingly fast and agile. The weapons they used weren’t dull and heavy warhammers or greataxes either. Instead, they only used flat and long knives or terrifying longswords.

That meant that their attacks excelled at speed and agility, along with explosiveness!

If Greem simply charged over and got surrounded by a group of orc blademasters with their giant razors, he wouldn’t end up much better than a piece of meat placed in a slicer.

These blademasters possessed extreme physical explosiveness and attack speed. When combined with the four elementium powers that the orc shamans could summon, they became a challenging foe. There might not be any high-grade individuals among that group of shamans and blademasters, but even a peak Second Grade fire adept like Greem didn’t dare to test the waters.

Maintaining a low-profile on such a brutal battlefield was the only way to survive!

The orcs weren’t just comprised of idiots with all brawn and no brain. Under Greem’s observation, the orcs far behind the frontlines were most likely the true powerhouses of the orc army.

Greem was only curious why they were being so patient and biding their time. They had yet to start an assault on the portal after so long. Couldn’t they see that the orc army was almost collapsing under the attacks of the witches’ forces?