At the very front of the Cultists' army.
The cultist priest who had been commanding his underlings to bombard the barrier now stood rooted to the spot like a rigid statue.
Clatter.
The staff slipped limply from his hand and fell into a muddy pool of blood.
The priest slowly turned his head, his face twitching violently beneath his mask.
Through the gaps in his mask, he stared blankly at the enormous crater behind him and the battered survivors groaning across the ground. His mind went completely blank.
"Wh... what happened?"
His hoarse voice now trembled with undisguised fear.
His army of Cultists!
The elite formation of spellcasters he took such pride in had been blown apart from the inside, right under his nose?
Even a charge by Winterhold's regular knight order couldn't have inflicted such horrific casualties in an instant!
"L-Lord Priest... it was those three low-ranking cultists..."
A squad leader covered in blood scrambled and crawled to the priest's feet.
Clutching his shoulder, half of which had been blasted away, he broke down sobbing:
"They're lunatics!"
"They detonated Alchemical Bombs! They said they were Venom and the Jade-Faced Grenade King... and one of them wanted to carry rice up two floors..."
Listening to this utterly incoherent report, the priest felt his legs give way.
What the fuck was all this nonsense?
How could such suicidal lunatics exist in this world?
They'd chosen to blow themselves up, every last one of them, just to defeat us?
The priest felt blood welling in his chest and nearly passed out from sheer rage.
He had spent years roaming the Abyss frontier and had seen every kind of brutal, desperate battle, but never anything like this!
What infiltrators blew themselves up to clear a path the moment they got in? This wasn't