The barrels of the ten Gatling guns whirled into motion at once.

  In just half a second, the rotation speed ramped from zero to its peak. Six barrels spun together in a blur, the friction-generated heat causing the runes etched onto the metal to fre with a brilliant blue light. The light seeped from the grooves, casting an azure glow over the battlements.

  Then came the sound.

  It wasn't the "shing" of an arrow or the "cng" of cshing steel. It was a sound this world had never heard before.

  "Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat—!"

  Densely packed explosions, too fast to distinguish as individual notes, erupted simultaneously from ten firing points. The barrels spat out half-meter-long blue muzzles of fire as magic-powered projectiles poured forth at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute.

  The projectiles weren't lead balls. They were pointed armor-piercing rounds forged by the system, each etched with a micro-array for elemental penetration. The moment they left the barrel, the shells were encased in a visible film of pale blue light.

  Ten lines of fire swept across the frozen pins, creating a crossfire that bnketed the three-hundred-meter zone directly in front of the fortress.

  At the vanguard of the beast tide were the Iron-armored Rhinos.

  Each rhino stood three meters tall at the shoulder, with hide so thick and tough it was covered in a natural yer of mineralized pte. On the Winter Barrens, they were recognized as living city walls. Any attack below the Silver Rank usually failed to leave even a white scratch on their carapaces.

  The first row of Iron-armored Rhinos thundered toward the walls, reaching the two-hundred-meter mark.

  Then, the Gatling rounds arrived.

  The first bullet struck the lead rhino’s frontal pte. The moment the elemental penetration array activated, the blue film exploded. The bullet tore through three fingers' width of mineralized armor, punched through the back of its skull, and exited in a spray of red and white brain matter.

  The rhino’s head pitched forward. Its front legs were still mid-stride, but its hind legs had gone limp. Its massive body skidded five or six meters across the frozen soil, plowing a deep trench.

  But that was just one bullet.

  Following it were hundreds per second.

  Ten trajectories sliced through the front of the rhino herd. The sound of armor-piercing rounds hitting carapaces became a continuous roar, drowning out the sounds of bone snapping and flesh tearing.

  The first row of rhinos went down in three seconds.

  They didn't just fall; they were shredded.

  Three-meter-tall behemoths were reduced to piles of mismatched meat. Their heavy armor was bypassed, shattered, and flipped into the air. Shards of bone and blood mist flew dozens of meters in every direction.

  The second row charged over the pulped remains of the first.

  The Gatling barrels tilted down two degrees, and the lines of fire lowered.

  Another three seconds. The second row was gone.

  The third row trampled over even thicker yers of gore.

  Three seconds. Gone.

  In the area between two hundred and three hundred meters from the wall, intact corpses were no longer visible. A thick yer of carapace fragments, broken bones, and entrails covered the ground. Blood soaked into the permafrost, churned into a crimson mud by the beasts behind them.

  Qian Duoduo y ft behind the battlements. His hands cwed into the brick joints so hard his fingernails split from the pressure.

  He could no longer hear anything. The roar of the Gatling guns had reduced his hearing to a wall of white noise.

  But his eyes were wide open.

  He saw the projectiles hammer into the beast tide. He saw the rhino armor, as tough as steel, being punctured like rotten wood. He saw packs of Frost Wolves being cut in half; their upper bodies would skid forward ten meters while their lower halves remained behind. He saw White-bone Lizards hit by a perfect line of bullet holes—the lizard would remain standing, but its insides had been hollowed out, leaving only an empty shell.

  The beast tide kept coming. The monsters behind trampled over the corpses of those in front. They had no reason, only the primal instinct to charge.

  But the area within three hundred meters of the wall had become a meat-grinder funnel.

  The crossfire from ten Gatlings sealed the zone. Sweeping from left to right, right to left, the trajectories overpped without a single blind spot.

  As many monsters as rushed in, that many were turned into mince.

  Limbs and flesh piled up faster than they could be cleared. The yer of gore grew so deep it reached the knees of the smaller beasts.

  Qian Duoduo’s mouth finally moved. "What the hell… what kind of magic is this?!"

  His voice was hoarse, his scream breaking into jagged fragments. But no one heard him. The thunder of the Gatlings drowned out the world.

  Old Karl knelt on the wall. He didn't know when his knees had given out. He y prostrate, his forehead pressed against the cold metal surface. His single arm trembled as he muttered the same words over and over.

  "A miracle… the Young Master is a god…"

  The vanguard of the beast tide had colpsed. With the heavy hitters in front turned to slush, the mid-tier beasts began to slow. The Frost Wolves were the first to turn tail, fleeing toward the fnks. The White-bone Lizards scattered.

  But the rear of the tide was still pushing. The momentum of a hundred thousand monsters couldn't be stopped instantly. Those in the back pushed those in the front, and those in the front were shoved into the fire zone to be ground into paste.

  The barrens had become a site of one-sided, industrial-scale sughter.

  Suddenly, a roar erupted from the heavens.

  The blue ghost-fire in the Frost Skeleton Dragon King’s eyes doubled in intensity. Half-meter-long pilrs of sapphire fme spat from its empty sockets. Its skeletal wings beat once, lifting the gargantuan frame a hundred meters above the fortress.

  Its jaw unhinged.

  From a gullet wider than the city gates, a thick, bluish-white chill gushed forth. Before the breath even escaped, the metal ptes on the wall began to frost over. The temperature plummeted, and the snow on the crenels instantly turned to solid ice.

  Frost Dragon Breath—a Dark Gold Rank area-of-effect annihition skill.

  The Dragon King aimed its maw directly at the front wall, targeting the spot where Lin Yuan stood.

  Lin Yuan tossed away his cigar. He turned and walked toward the ballista.

  Six steps.

  The Heavy Modified Magic Ballista sat on the ptform above the main gate, tilted up at thirty degrees. The massive bolt was still in pce, the red explosion arrays on its tip glowing faintly.

  Lin Yuan pressed his shoulder into the rear support of the weapon. His right hand gripped the trigger lever while his left rested on the aiming rail, making micro-adjustments.

  The Dragon Breath had materialized. A sphere of blue-white light condensed deep within the dragon's maw, growing brighter and denser. A freezing mist expanded from the dragon, turning the air within fifty meters into visible white ribbons of frost.

  Lin Yuan aligned the sight with the dragon's throat—the junction where the jaw met the cervical vertebrae. Being a skeletal dragon, there was no flesh; the throat was just exposed spine supported by three ribs on either side.

  The gap was huge—rge enough for a bolt as thick as a man's thigh to pass through.

  The Dragon King was about to fire. The light reached the edge of its teeth, the temperature dropping so low that water vapor in the air turned into ice shards that rained down like needles.

  Lin Yuan pulled the trigger.

  The bowstring snapped with a crack that sounded like a muffled sonic boom.

  The bolt left the groove so fast that the fletching was torn away by the air pressure. The thick shaft dragged a visible white wake, crossing two hundred meters of sky in an instant.

  It flew straight into the Dragon King’s open mouth.

  The bolt passed between the jaws, skimmed over the condensing orb of breath, and smmed precisely into the gap in the cervical vertebrae.

  Two-thirds of the shaft vanished into the bone.

  The explosion array activated. Red patterns fred from the tip, spreading across the entire shaft in less than a tenth of a second.

  Then, it detonated.

  The explosion erupted from the inside of the dragon's throat. The shockwave tore the vertebrae apart from the center, sending shards of bone and blue ice flying in all directions. Half the dragon's neck was bsted away, left hanging by only two wobbling ribs. The severed spine exposed the dark blue mana core conduit within.

  The half-condensed Dragon Breath leaked out. Instead of a directed beam, it became a chaotic energy discharge. The cold struck the wall, encasing the upper half in a thick yer of ice, though the structure remained unshaken.

  The Dragon King let out a mangled scream—a screech of grinding metal that had lost all form.

  The thirty-meter wings lost their rhythm. The left beat, but the right failed to follow. The massive skeleton tilted and began to plummet.

  It struggled for two seconds, the left wing beating once more to stall the fall for a heartbeat. But the shattered neck had destroyed the frame's bance. Its head dangled, dragging the entire body into a tumble.

  The Dragon King crashed down from a hundred meters. Its skeletal frame scraped against the metal wall, wings screeching against the pting before smming into the frozen ground outside.

  The earth colpsed. A crater over ten meters wide opened up, swallowing the dragon in a cloud of dust and ice shards.

  The surrounding beast tide went silent for a moment—and then they broke.

  The Dragon King was their core, their source of will. When it fell, the monsters stopped. And then, they scattered.

  It wasn't a retreat; it was total chaos. Wolves fled east, lizards dove west, and scorpions buried themselves in the dirt. The remaining rhinos turned and trampled anything in their path.

  In three minutes, a hundred thousand monsters vanished. All that remained were mountains of flesh and the Dragon King in the pit.

  The Gatlings stopped. The barrels continued to spin, but no more rounds were fired. The metal glowed red, and the blue runes dimmed.

  Lin Yuan stood up from behind the ballista. He climbed over the battlements and jumped.

  Ten meters down.

  He nded in the crimson mud outside, his boots sinking into a slurry of flesh and soil. He walked twenty paces to the edge of the crater.

  The Dragon King y at the bottom. Its thirty-meter frame was a tangled mess of bones. Its left wing was snapped, bone shards buried in the dirt. Its neck hung by a thread, and the mana conduit was hissing, leaking blue light. The ghost-fire in its eyes had dwindled to two tiny blue sparks.

  Its jaw moved. It wanted to speak, but with its throat gone, it only produced a wet, rattling gurgle.

  Lin Yuan watched for three seconds. He looked back up at the wall. A Gatling gun, loosened by the shockwaves of the battle, was leaning precariously off the crenel.

  Lin Yuan walked over, grabbed the seventy-pound machine, and hauled it down. He carried it over his shoulder back to the pit and jumped in.

  His boots crunched on the dragon's ribs. He walked up to the skull and shoved the six barrels of the Gatling gun directly into the dragon's left eye socket. Metal clinked against bone.

  "Two choices," Lin Yuan said. His voice was calm, but in the silence of the pit, every word was razor-sharp. "Sign the contract and work for me. Or, I throw you into the recycling station for some pocket change."

  The ghost-fire flickered. It had slept for three hundred years, only to wake up and have a teenager shove a metal pipe into its brain.

  Its jaw moved again. This time, it forced out a single word.

  "...Contract."

  Lin Yuan didn't pull back immediately. He waited two seconds, confirming there would be no counterattack, before withdrawing the barrels.

  The system panel popped up.

  [Dark Gold Rank creature surrender detected. Establish Master-Servant Contract?]

  Confirm.

  A circle of dark red light expanded from Lin Yuan's feet, covering the entire skeleton. The light contracted and condensed, finally forming a bck mark the size of a thumb, branded onto the center of the dragon's forehead.

  The skeleton shivered. The contract was complete.

  Lin Yuan climbed out of the pit.

  Qian Duoduo was still on the wall, his legs shaking. His gaze darted from the sea of blood and corpses to the dragon in the pit, and finally to Lin Yuan, who was walking back covered in mud and gore. He opened his mouth but couldn't find the words.

  Lin Yuan reached the base of the wall. He didn't climb back up yet. He opened the system panel.

  [Battle Results Calcution...][Recovering beast tide corpses (Massive)... Energy Points +142,800][Recovering carapaces, bones, mana cores... Energy Points +38,700][Recovering scattered projectiles/casings... Energy Points +1,200][Total Assets Updated: 3,787 Gold, 196,129 Energy Points, 84 Basic Mana Crystals, 12 Zenith Mana Crystals]

  Lin Yuan closed the panel. He looked up at the ten-meter-high bck wall. There were bullet scars, frost burns, and deep gouges from the dragon’s fall, but the structure was intact.

  He wiped the mud from his face and walked toward the gate. Behind him, the piles of meat stretched to the horizon.

  The Abyss Iron Fortress was established.

  Hundreds of miles away.

  In the temporary meeting hall of the Northern Territory Lords' Alliance, Blood Knight Bart sat at the head of the table, sipping wine.

  A crystal ball sat on the table. The image was blurry due to the distance, but the silhouettes were clear.

  The bck iron walls. The mountains of monster materials. And the skeletal dragon pinned in the pit with a bck mark on its brow.

  Bart put down his gss and licked his lips. "Ten thousand beasts worth of materials, a Dark Gold Rank skeletal dragon, and an iron fortress that likely hides even more treasures."

  He turned to the dozen lords in the room. "Gentlemen, it seems that the 'trash' young master thrown out by the Lin family has struck it rich."

  Low ughter rippled through the hall.

  Bart stood up, smashing his gss on the table. "Assemble all your knights. Is a hundred thousand enough? If it is, then move."

  He pressed his hand against the crystal ball. "Those things belong to him now. But in three days, they will be ours."

  What he didn't know was that on Lin Yuan's system panel, a new row of icons was turning from gray to bright blue.

  [Lv3 Preview: Magic Tanks, Alchemical Artillery, Gryphon Paratroopers...][Unlock Condition: 200,000 Energy Points]

  The deficit: 3,871.

  Outside the walls, there were still over a hundred thousand monster corpses waiting to be recycled.