AN: I am Back
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The air was thick.
Not with heat.
Not with smoke.
With memory.
Every breath carried the scent of ozone, acid, and burnt clone flesh. The sky above the ruined city was no longer gray it was permanently scarred, lit by the afterglow of lightning storms and the distant, pulsing glow of the Flesh Mountain.
And on the ground, they stood.
Not in chaos.
Not in fear.
In formation.
The sky over them was burned like an open wound. Ash rained in a slow drizzle, coating everything in shades of gray. Where once the clones of Lucky moved with the reckless enthusiasm of experimental magic, now they marched with the discipline of an army.
Their eyes were colder. Their movements sharper. They were no longer just extensions of magic. They were soldiers born in war.
And their war had just begun.
And thier thought not like Lucky no jokes, no recklessness, no dreams of OL cards.
They thought like veterans.
Their minds were linked, their wills synchronized. They didn't see death as an end.
They saw it as data.
And every time a clone dissipated, the rest learned.
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First Week – The Flyers' Siege
The first true battle began on the shattered highway overpass.
The swarm came Again but bigger winged abominations with jagged bone protrusions, multiple eyes glowing faint green, and mouths dripping acid. They weren't the usual shambling corpses. They were coordinated, tactical.
The clones formed lines instantly. Shields forward. Long-range casters behind. Runners ready with portals.
The flyers dived. Acid spewed. Wind magic deflected part of it, but one clone was splashed and dissipated in smoke.
"Keep formation!" the lead barked, his tone more commander than comrade.
A scientist-clone devised the plan: [IRON DUST] clouds spread in the sky, followed by synchronized [LIGHTNING – WIDE AREA]. The air became a trap. The sky exploded in blue fire.
Dozens of flyers dropped. Screams filled the ruined city. But the Flesh Mountain at the horizon pulsed again, birthing more.
Some fused mid-air, becoming grotesque multi-headed horrors. The clones enacted Protocol Chain Surge linking mana like circuits. It cost hundreds of them, their bodies cracking and dissipating under the strain, but the result was catastrophic: a column of lightning wider than a tower speared the fused beast out of existence.
Victory. Bloody, costly victory.
187 clones were gone
By the end of the week, the overpass was littered with charred corpses of flyers. Clones sat in disciplined silence, no longer celebrating their wins.
They had survived. But they knew survival was temporary.
They weren't just surviving.
They were campaigning.
The warzone was no longer a battlefield.
It was a base of operations.
Battle Log – Day 7
Casualties: 187.
Cause: aerial acid + fusion units.
Countermeasure: Chain Surge + Iron Dust trap.
Status: Survivors stable. Morale silent.
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Week two
The second week began with sound.
A scream.
Not loud to the ear.
Not sharp to the mind.
Ultrasonic.
It was an invisible blade, slicing through the air until it found its mark. Clones collapsed mid-stride. Ears seeped crimson. Eyes ruptured in their sockets. Mana cores flickered and destabilized. One clone, his report unfinished, vomited a torrent of black fluid and dissolved into nothing. The enemy was unseen, a phantom killer known only by its horrific sound.
Then they emerged: the Howlers. Skeletal titans with cavernous, vibrating mouths and hollows where eyes should be. Their very forms shuddered with each scream, unleashing waves of force that pulverized stone and liquefied clone flesh. Dozens were erased in seconds. The neural network, usually a river of calm data, flooded with panic. For the first time, the clones felt a foreign, chilling emotion: pure, undiluted fear.
Amid the chaos, one figure stepped forward. A scientist, his glasses webbed with cracks, his arm a lattice of fresh burns. He had been cataloguing the death-songs. His solution was a rune: [SILENCE ZONE]. A bastion of absolute quiet, a bubble where sound ceased to exist.
They tested it. A volunteer stood within the shimmering script. A Howler turned and screamed its ultrasonic shriek. The clone inside merely blinked. A cheer went up a raw, relieved sound.
The scientist did not cheer. "Silence is a shield," he stated, his voice cold. "It is not a weapon. We must lure them."
Thus, the hunter-killer squads were born. A bait clone would step into the open, shouting taunts and casting bright, noisy spells. The others waited, shrouded in perfect silence. When the Howler stalked into the kill zone, the command was given: [LIGHTNING – CHAIN]. The scream died. The monstrosity fell.
They discovered a critical truth: the Howlers were not mere monsters. They were command units, their screams a grisly network that directed the lesser zombies with terrifying precision. Slay a Howler, and its swarm descended into mindless chaos.
But as they adapted to the threat from above, the earth itself betrayed them. The Flesh Mountain pulsed, and the ground split open. From the fissures came Burrowers pale, worm-like horrors with armored, grinding jaws. They erupted from below, snatching clones and vanishing back into the soil before a scream could be uttered.
"Circle formation! Shields underground!" a commander's voice roared, cutting through the bedlam. New, desperate tactics were forged in blood and soil.
The scientist-clones adapted again, etching the earth with [SOLID SCRIPT: EARTH – SPIKES]. Burrowers would surface only to be impaled, their screeches echoing briefly before they dissolved into black mist.
But the enemy learned. Within days, the Burrowers attacked in coordinated packs, collapsing tunnels to bury entire squads alive. The clones responded in kind, creating layered portal traps that funneled the subterranean horrors directly into waiting [FIRE – TORCH] barrages. It was a brutal dance of bait and execute.
The losses were staggering. Each night, the survivors gathered, not to mourn, but to recite battlefield logs. Knowledge was their only currency; no mistake could be repeated. Their humor turned grim, a necessary shield for their eroding sanity.
"Next one drags me underground, I'm suing."
"You don't exist long enough to file lawsuits."
"Then I'll haunt you."
They laughed, the sound hollow, their eyes reflecting the cold void.
By the week's end, the tremors ceased. The silence returned, heavier and more ominous than before. The cost was quantified: 985 clones lost. Their victory was measured in 500 dead Howlers and over 3,000 Burrowers destroyed.
But morale? It was hardened, tempered in the crucible of a two-front war against the unseen and the underground. They had faced annihilation from the air and the earth.
And they had won.
Battle Log – Day 13
Casualties: 985.
Causes: Ultrasonic rupture + subterranean ambush.
Countermeasure: Silence Zones + Portal Traps.
Status: Morale grim. Adaptation successful.
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Week Three
The third week began not with a sound, but with a tremor. A deep, grinding vibration that rose from the earth itself. The Flesh Mountain bellowed, and from its base, the Juggernauts came.
These were not mere zombies; they were living war machines. Hulking forms of flesh and muscle fused with plates of rusted steel. Arms were replaced by massive, bladed limbs. Some bore two heads that screamed in horrific unison; others had four arms that pounded the earth like war drums, charging forward with bestial rage but terrifying precision. Clones who tried to dodge found themselves tracked and crushed. Those who raised shields were simply shattered.
"Focus fire! Aim for the joints!" commanders roared over the din, but the Juggernauts were nearly unkillable. Their regeneration was obscene severed limbs writhed and regrew in seconds, and even decapitation only spawned a new, shrieking head.
The answer, discovered by the scientist-clones in a frenzy of analysis, was corrosion. They combined [WATER – ACID] to weaken the metal armor, [FIRE – TORCH] to sear the exposed flesh, and [SOLID SCRIPT: IRON SHATTER] to send metal shards tearing through them from the inside. It worked, but the cost was brutal. Each Juggernaut fought for hours, and every clone lost was a critical drain on their collective mana and tactical knowledge.
Yet, the survivors adapted faster than ever. Shields were no longer used to block, but to redirect momentum. Wind magic disrupted their charges. Portals were used to drag the behemoths into pre-prepared killing zones filled with acid and flame. By the end of the week, the Juggernauts fell by the hundreds, their corpses piling into towers of molten metal and seared bone. The clones who remained were no longer just tired; they were scarred, their resolve hardened into something cold and unyielding.
But the Mountain was not done. From the smoldering wreckage of the Juggernauts, it forged its ultimate response: the Brutes. Larger than the Juggernauts, they were mountains of armored muscle and fused bone. One charged, a living tank that inhaled [FIRE – TORCH], laughed a wet, gurgling sound at [WIND – SLASH], and was only momentarily stunned by [LIGHTNING – CHAIN]. Firepower failed. Portals were useless becuase of acid spit. They were being used against the clones.
Then, the engineer emerged. A clone covered in soot and scrap metal, he had been silently studying the wreckage. He proposed a new tactic: Siege Teams.
His plan was brutally elegant:
Step 1: Lure the Brute into a narrow space.
Step 2: Open a portal directly inside its mouth.
Step 3: Drop a spells such as [WATER – ONLY LIQUID OXYGEN] and [WATER – ONLY LIQUID HYDROGEN] followed instantly by a [FIRE – TORCH] into the portal.
Step 4: Close the portal.
They tested it. The Brute roared, the portal flared in its throat, and a catastrophic explosion of fire and expanding gas erupted from within. The Brute burst apart from the inside.
The clones cheered, but the engineer was already moving. He was not just a tactician; he was a builder. From the wreckage of their foes, he assembled war machines: ballista-like launchers powered by Solid Script propulsion, catapults that hurled mana-charged spikes, and a mobile fortress cobbled together from fused scrap and stone. They were no longer just fighting; they were waging industrial war.
The week culminated in a battle against the Brute King, a monster the size of a small castle. It took five siege teams, three mobile fortresses, and the entirety of their remaining mana reserves. But they brought it down. Its fall shook the very foundations of the battlefield.
The clones stood in the sudden silence, surrounded by the ruins of their invention and the carnage of their enemy. Then, a chant began. It was not a cheer of victory, but a cold, unified battle cry that rose from all of there throats.
"NEVER SURRENDER."
Battle Log – Day 21
Casualties: 2,412.
Cause: Juggernaut-class warforms.
Countermeasure: Corrosion + Siege Warfare.
Status: Survivors hardened.
Half their number was gone. But their will was not just unbroken; it had been forged in fire and metal into something greater. They had stopped reacting and started building. They had become an army.
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Week Four
The fourth week brought horror.
It started with whispers.
At night, some clones heard voices faint cries, laughter, even songs. By morning, some had dissipated without reason.
The scientist-clones investigated. The source wasn't inside the camp. It was coming from the Flesh Mountain.
By midweek, the truth arrived.
The Flesh Choir.
Grotesque amalgamations of multiple bodies fused into writhing towers of flesh, mouths upon mouths singing in discordant tones. Their voices weren't sound. They were hypnotic. Sonic waves shredded flesh and bone, cracked shields, and shattered mana circuits.
Clones clutched their heads, blood dripping from noses, ears, eyes.
The commanders ordered immediate adaptation: [SILENCE BARRIERS] were cast in layers, dampening the magical frequencies. Others crafted earthen bunkers to muffle the sound.
But the Flesh Choir adapted too. They shifted frequency. They screamed in patterns designed to break concentration.
The clones countered with suicide squads units that dissipated willingly after forcing portals open beneath the Choir, dropping them into magma pockets formed by [FIRE – TORCH MAX].
Each kill cost dozens of clones.
But the Choir fell. One after another, their songs silenced by blood and fire.
By the end of week four, the battlefield was quiet again. The clones stood together, fewer in number, but more like an army than ever before.
Battle Log – Day 28
Casualties: 1,900+.
Cause: Hypnotic resonance.
Countermeasure: Silence + Sacrifice.
Status: Survivors fractured but unyielding.
They turned their eyes toward the horizon.
The Mountain of Flesh loomed, pulsing, its surface writhing with half-formed abominations clawing to escape.
The clones didn't flinch.
They marched.
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The final day dawned, but the sky did not lighten. It deepened into a bruised, bloody purple. The ground trembled not from a charge, but with a slow, rhythmic pulse, like the heartbeat of a continent-sized beast.
The Flesh Mountain was waking up.
It was not merely a spawner of horrors. It was the horror itself, alive and aware.
The clones advanced. They did not march in fear or in blind anger, but with a grim, silent resolve that was more terrifying than any battle cry. Their path was a gauntlet of their own history a plain littered with the evidence of their sacrifice. Pools of cooling, molten metal marked where Juggernauts fell. Fields of blackened earth were scarred by fire and acid. And everywhere, the faint, fading golden glimmers where thousands of clones had dissolved, their forms burned, melted, crushed, and dissolved into nothing.
They stepped onto the living slope of the Mountain.
The ground yielded softly under their boots, warm and unnervingly organic. It breathed. A low, wet susurration filled the air, the sound of the Mountain itself. Eyes, lidless and weeping a thick fluid, opened beneath their feet. Mouths lined with needle-teeth whispered half-formed curses in a language of pure malice. Tentacles, slick with mucus, lashed out from fleshy crevices.
But the clones did not flinch. They did not break formation.
They marched.
One step.
Then another.
A clone, his armor scarred and fused from weeks of fire and acid, felt the fleshy ground pulse. "Four weeks," he muttered, his voice a hoarse rasp, stripped of all academic pretense. He was a soldier now, nothing more. "Four weeks of hell, and we're still standing."
Another clone, missing an ear and part of his jaw, spat a glob of blackened phlegm into the pulsing flesh. It sizzled briefly. "Standing's not enough." His eyes, cold and hard, scanned the shifting terrain ahead. "We end this."
The others around him nodded, a silent, unified gesture. Their eyes, once bright with the curiosity of newborn mages, now burned with a single, war-forged purpose.
They didn't look back at the graveyard they had crossed. They didn't hesitate at the nightmarish biology that sought to break their will. They were no longer shadows of a single lucky man, no longer jesters of magic.
They were soldiers of calamity. An army forged in the crucible of extinction.
And this war, they knew as they took another step into the breathing, whispering flesh, had only just begun
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Far from the nightmare, Lucky sat quietly in the forest.
He smiled faintly, holding a card between his fingers. His eyes were tired becuase of Erza training, but he was steady.
"Time to bring them back."