Translator: HunterW
Editor: RED
The soldiers of Skyla’s faction that were chosen to be left behind did not have a shred of hope that they would survive this battle. All they felt was hatred and contempt towards Angel for losing this battle, and for the other soldiers of Claudia’s and Adora’s factions. They especially hated their own deity officers for deciding their fate.
“Stop them!”
“If we’re going to die here, then we take as many of them with us!”
“Fuck! Why do we have to die here?”
“Fuck this! I’m out of here!”
“Same here!”
Many of them tried to escape. They had lived their lives as devas as slaves; there was no way they were going to willing die for their deity masters. Unfortunately for them, their rebellion was already expected.
“Rise. Devil’s Roots!” Black, thick roots burst through the ground around the Crootian soldiers, sealing their escape route and holding down those that tried to escape.
“Just one hour! Just hold them off for one hour!
“That’s right. We can retreat after one hour. There are still three hundred thousand of us remaining. We can hold the enemy off for one hour.” The Skyla’s deity officers had come down to join their deva soldiers.
“If you still try to run away then…I’ll kill you myself.” Proshem, the higher ranking officer, had come down to stand at the rear, with five thousand other deva soldiers. They were ready to attack at once at Proshem’s orders. They were devas as well ,but not all were slaves. They were the devas most loyal to Skyla and her deities, whose role was to keep the lower devas in check.
“Fuck!”
“Bastards!”
The lesser soldiers swore before turning back to the fight without another word. They knew that it was no idle threat.
“Think of your families back home and fight for one more hour! Attack!” Proshem shouted to the soldiers, stirring them into battle once more. Unfortunately, it would be all for naught.
—
“Gah!”
“No!”
I swung my spear without rest, cutting down enemy soldiers left and right.
==[You have obtained 90,000 golden rings.]==
==[You have obtained 70,000 golden rings.]==
==[You have obtained 160,000 golden rings.]==
Each time I earned more golden rings, it gave me the energy to keep going. Not only that, the enemy had seen how strong I was.
“Run!”
“He’s coming this way!”
“Shit! Why here of all places?”
They panicked and scrambled to get away whenever they saw me. As they pushed and shoved each other to get out of my range, they ended up grouping up together to become easy prey for my soldiers. The enemy stood no chance against the Empire.
—
Five hours later…
“We can’t pursue the enemy any longer.”
“How many have escaped?”
“At first, about 320,000 split off and retreated, leaving about 350,000 behind.”
“Right.” I knew that much. 350k enemy soldiers were left behind to hold my army off, but they hadn’t fought to the end. About an hour after the first half of the enemy soldiers had retreated, the remaining two hundred thousand soldiers that had managed to survive turned tail and fled the battlefield at a breakneck pace. Any of them who lagged behind were cut down without mercy.
We had chased the fleeing soldiers for the past four hours. Killing as many of the enemy’s elite soldiers was beneficial for us in the long run.
“We’ve killed about 150k fleeing soldiers, so about fifty thousand more managed to escape.”
“So that’s 370k soldiers in all.”
“Yes, sir.”
The enemy had brought a million soldiers, and left with just a little over a third that.
“What about our casualties?”
“We still need an exact headcount, but I would assume about one hundred thousand dead.”
“Is that right…?” Five hundred thousand of our soldiers had fought against a million enemy soldiers. We were heavily outnumbered, but they lost more than six hundred thousand, while we only lost a little more than a hundred thousand. This battle was easily our win.
I looked around me and scanned the Empire’s soldiers and the mercenary devas from the other guilds. I could see the euphoria clearly in their faces, but I knew that they still saw the faces of their fallen comrades. They were too busy being depressed to properly celebrate this victory for the time being.
I turned to the officer standing next to me. “Let’s throw a party for the soldiers that fought here today. Let’s make it a big one that’ll throw all of their sorrows out the window, at least for a few days.”
“Yes sir. We’ll get right on it once we get back.”
“Let’s go home.”
“Yes sir.” The officers turned around to bring the soldiers back to base. Not me, though.
“I’ll leave it to you guys. I’m going to go get us the money to throw the party.”
“Sir? What do you mean?”
“I still need some more exercise and if we’re going to throw a big enough party, we definitely need more golden rings to do it,” I said as I turned away from the officers and without waiting for answer, I Blinked away.
There were fifty thousand enemy soldiers left. They may have lost all will to fight and would be exhausted, and it was still a lot for me to fight at once. Still, I was confident and there was no way I was going to pass up this big of an opportunity.
I sprinted forward while following the enemy’s tracks, using both Blinks each time they were off cooldown. It didn’t take me long to see them in my sights. They were taking a break, seemingly relieved that they had lost their pursuers.
“Oh, shit!”
“It’s…it’s the enemy!”
“Fuck! It’s the guy who killed Angel! Run!”
“Fissure!”
“Gah!”
“No! Please!”
—
Section 115 of the Judge’s Continent…
A heavy silence had washed over Claudia’s controlled territory. The news of Angel and the invading army had just arrived.
“Only a third of the army survived? And we lost Angel, too?”
“Um…another fifty thousand managed to…”
“That’s not important right now!” Claudia snapped. Soon, the room fell silent once more, not because Claudia was angered, but because they couldn’t believe what had happened. Angel had died. Not even Adora could have managed such a feat.
Claudia sighed. “Where are the retreating soldiers now?”
“From the check-in we received a few minutes ago, all 320 thousand soldiers have escaped Section 4, while the enemy is still pursuing the remaining fifty thousand soldiers. They’re moving as fast as they can.”
Claudia sighed again. “Very well. We’ll hold another meeting when they all return. We need to find out as much as we can from them before we can figure out our next step.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And with that, the High Council meeting was adjourned, but none of them knew what was happening to the soldiers who were still in enemy territory.
—
I panted as I watched the remaining enemy devas move away from me with shaking steps. I thought I could have completely slaughtered all of them while they scrambled to run away from me, but some of them weren’t willing to die that easily.
“It…doesn’t matter if he’s strong! He’s still one man! Get it together! If we work together, we can beat him!” one of them cried out as I cut down more and more enemy soldiers. That voice seemed to stir the hopeless soldiers once more. They all wanted to live. The ones who were still standing grouped up and moved together to surround me. They managed to close in on me even as I cut them down left and right. It was to the point that I couldn’t avoid all of their attacks.
If there were only five thousand of them, I probably wouldn’t have taken a single point of damage and killed them all pretty quickly, not to mention the fact that I was alone. Still, there was no way I was going to let any of them go and grit my teeth through their attacks and continued to cut them down.
I fought against them for three more hours. Even if I couldn’t kill all of them, I had to kill as many as I could. Finally, I stopped. My HP were getting too low for comfort. I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed as I watched the surviving enemy soldiers sprint away from me. Once the last soldier disappeared from view, I turned around and headed back to base. I had at least earned enough golden rings and gained more than enough levels.
—
Section 3…
When I returned to Section 3, I noticed that the solemn atmosphere I expected wasn’t there. It was the complete opposite, in fact.
“That’s a lot of people.”
“Hahaha. They all saw how we defeated the enemy army and caused them to turn tail.” That was true. Many people from all over Earth’s Sections had come to Section 3 to watch the battle, while constantly ready to flee if they had to. I didn’t like that part about them, to be honest, but I didn’t say anything. Even if they were weak and couldn’t fight alongside us, at least they wouldn’t end up becoming prey to the enemy.
“Huh… Well, take this. It’s to help with the costs of the feast.” The feast was going to be huge. There were already about four hundred thousand peoplehere at Section 3 and more from the guilds that sent mercenaries were on their way.
“Oh, don’t worry about it.”
“Please, take it. I’ve earned a lot today as well.” I really did. I did almost bankrupt myself getting my base STR to 50k before the battle started, but I had earned 3.7 billion golden rings in all today.
“No, really. It’s fine. We received donations from many others.”
“Really?”
“Yes sir. The Empire is doing so well that just about all of Earth’s guilds want a foot in our door.”
“Huh…”
“So don’t worry about the party and go and get some rest. It’s going to get loud and busy tomorrow.”
“Alright. I’ll leave it to you, then.” I said my farewells to the few officers staying at Section 3 and returned to my home at Section 35. I needed to let my family know that I was alright.
—
Section 115…
Claudia sighed as she stared at the soldiers who had just arrived. It was bad enough that a third of her army had to run away from battle, but when she found out that only a little more than half of the soldiers of the second wave had survived, Claudia wanted to pull her hair out. She shook her head before turning to the officers who had collected the videos of the battle. She didn’t have time to just sit around; she had to figure out how to prevent this from happening again and how to best get her revenge.
As she watched the video, she finally saw the man responsible for this mess.
“They called him Lee Jiwon. He is also a deva.”
“…” A grim silence enveloped the conference room. The fact that he was a deva didn’t sit well with anyone.
“It’s clear that Angel played right into Lee Jiwon’s hands. Lee Jiwon seemed to have figured out that not only did Angel grow stronger after every death, he also lost his grip on his sanity.
“The bigger problem here is that Lee Jiwon is powerful. According to the videos of the second wave of survivors, they had him completely surrounded and fought back, but…” The officer trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence.
“So… we were the little fish in the pond…” Claudia half mumbled. No one could deny it, not with the video on screen paused on Lee Jiwon. “We lost over 700 thousand elite soldiers. That’s the same as losing hundreds of millions of our people. After all, we are not on the Judge’s Continent to grow stronger; we are here to find out which world best utilized its Otadolon stage.”
The rules of the Judge’s Continent forced the two worlds to fight. In other words, the world that had become the strongest during the Otadolon stage would be the victor.
“We were too complacent. Bring the Troublemaker to me. He’s our last hope.”
