Chapter 408: The Battlefield (2)
Each time Agaroth swung his Divine Sword, the world was carved apart by red lines. Resistance was impossible once something was swallowed or even touched by those lines. Any contact with those lines meant death.
As the God of War, Agaroth’s divine power proved to be fittingly violent. But even though he had killed thousands of monsters in a single instant, there were still countless monsters gathered beneath his feet. Wherever he looked, all he could see were monsters. Only when he turned his head and looked far behind him did he see something different.
The fortress in which they had withstood the monsters for so long.
Although it was called a fortress, apart from the outer walls, no other structures were contained within. These walls were the only feature in this otherwise barren land.
At one point, this place had been the capital of a kingdom. However, now, there wasn’t even a single trace of that kingdom remaining.
When they had first arrived in this land, everywhere they looked, all they could see were terrible sights. No, it was not just this land. The same went for each of the kingdoms that had been destroyed by these monsters. As for the people who once had lived in them....
Imagine the sight of tens of millions of corpses left unattended in the open air for months. Even the word ‘hellish’ was not enough to describe such a scene.
Although Agaroth and his army had all been through countless wars, his soldiers had still ended up vomiting, and honestly speaking, Agaroth himself had almost felt the gorge rise up in his throat when he witnessed that sight and the accompanying stench. Let alone the Devildom, even among all the countries invaded by the Demon Kings, he had never seen such a terrible and disgusting scene.
That was why he had erased it all. The corpses had rotted away long ago, and the ruins of the kingdoms had already developed into a disgusting ecosystem centered around the countless dead bodies, so Agaroth had erased everything, including the remaining ruins.
That was how this plain had been created. A barren landscape that was made when Agaroth had personally erased all of the countless human corpses and the city in which those innumerable humans had once lived. But after that, just like how it had once been carpeted with human corpses, the monster corpses that were now strewn across the ground far outnumbered the former human corpses.
It might be presumptuous, but in Agaroth’s opinion, no other land in human history had witnessed as much death as this one.
“Just what on earth are they?” Agaroth muttered to himself.
He could not count just how many times he had already asked this question.
These monsters didn’t seem to feed on people. That said, they did not feast on each other either. The blood they spilled didn’t appear to be able to seep away into the ground, and ordinary flames couldn’t erase their corpses or any of the other traces they left behind. Only the flames personally created by Agaroth through his divine power were able to eradicate their corpses.
Such abominable monsters were currently gnashing their teeth at Agaroth and letting out screeches. The sounds they made didn’t form any language. Just like the word screech suggested, it was just bestial screaming.
These monsters were as diverse in type and size as they were in appearance. Some walked on two legs like humans, while others walked on four. Still, others had even more legs and crawled around like insects.
Naturally, there were also some that flew through the skies on flapping wings. In no time at all, hundreds of such flying monsters had gathered around Agaroth. The sound of their flapping wings even managed to drown out the ruckus of their cries.
Agaroth narrowed his eyes and held out his left hand. Dark red divine power swirled on his palm as he curled his fingers into a tight fist.
Roooooar!
The divine power that burst out from his fist transformed into a storm that spread out in all directions. Hundreds of monsters were slaughtered in an instant, and their blood and flesh poured down like rain.
Boooooom!
Accompanied by a thunderous noise, monsters as large as giants leaped towards Agaroth with their hands outstretched. Agaroth just swung his Divine Sword without the slightest change in expression.
His slash was not accompanied by a burst of sound. The Divine Sword, which Agaroth had forged through refining his own divine power, did not create any extraneous effects when it was just swung like this. But there was no way that something like these monsters would be able to stand up to a Divine Sword that even Demon Kings would find difficult to deal with.
‘As expected,’ Agaroth thought as he looked down below with narrowed eyes.
Since the start of their battle, Agaroth had continued to swing his Divine Sword numerous times. In these short few moments, a rough estimate would put the number of monsters that had been killed by Agaroth well into the thousands. Despite this, the tide of monsters below showed no signs of abating.
The reason for this was simple. As many monsters as Agaroth may have killed, new monsters just kept reappearing.
This was such an absurd sight. However, such complaints had already been made a long time ago. Things like common sense did not seem to apply to these monsters.
‘It makes sense that they weren’t able to end this battle,’ Agaroth realized.
Next to Agaroth, the mighty warrior was the second strongest in the Divine Army. If he wasn’t able to finish the battle, even after Agaroth had lent him his personal ring that would allow the warrior to draw on Agaroth’s divine power directly, there had to be a good reason for it. Despite being a soldier sworn to the God of War, no matter how strong the mighty warrior might be, it was still impossible for him to annihilate so many monsters simultaneously.
But what should they do with the battles from now on? Even though they kept killing them time after time, instead of their numbers decreasing even slightly, the amount of enemies just kept increasing....
While feeling irritated, Agaroth raised his Divine Sword high into the air.
Cracracrackle!
The dark red blade of the Divine Sword extended, growing long enough that it seemed like it could touch the sky.
So when Agaroth swung the gigantic Divine Sword, the world was literally split apart. Even after the Divine Sword had already passed through the air, the trail of its slash did not disappear; instead, it spread outwards to engulf the surrounding monsters.
The end of the ever-expanding slash connected right back to its beginning. This created a ring of dark red divine power that swept over the battlefield. After watching this for a few moments, Agaroth turned to look at the sky.
The sun made from his divine power was still floating high up there. When Agaroth reached out towards it and pulled, the sun slowly floated closer to Agaroth.
Rooooar!
The sun began to spray down flames of divine power. The wave of flames covered everything below. After burning through the monsters, the divine power didn’t just disappear but instead repeatedly changed its form as it followed Agaroth’s will. The divine power first transformed into an enormous blade that cut another swathe through the monsters, then into thousands of arrows that shot through the horde before reforming back into a hammer that flattened even more of the monsters.
Now that Agaroth’s massacre had begun in earnest, the speed at which the monsters were dying finally exceeded the speed at which the monsters were appearing. It was as if a hundred monsters were being killed for every ten monsters that suddenly appeared.
Even as he conducted this massacre, Agaroth still had a lot of leeway to handle other matters. So, as he was sweeping through the monsters on the front line, he was also keeping an eye on the state of the battle at the rear lines and was intervening whenever necessary.
This wasn’t a difficult matter for him. All of those who were fighting here were followers of Agaroth, so all he needed to do in order to perform a life-saving miracle was send them as much divine power as they needed. The Saint, who was still standing atop the walls, also played a role in this matter.
Across the vast distance, their eyes met. The Saint pushed out her lips towards Agaroth, making a smooching noise, then winked an eye at him.
“Crazy bitch,” Agaroth muttered.
At some point, the monsters had stopped appearing. With that, today’s battle, at the very least, had come to an end. Considering the time, the next battle would probably resume tomorrow. Though perhaps... just perhaps, it might start even sooner.
Agaroth’s brow furrowed as he stared down below. The plain was packed full of corpses that had yet to be incinerated by his divine power, and the ominous poison that these corpses were spilling was causing Agarorth a headache.
Even if he burned the corpses to the point where no smoke or even ashes remained, that would still leave him with the poison to deal with... and it was also disgusting to leave so many corpses unattended.
With an air of ease, Agaroth conjured up flames of divine power.
Fwooosh!
A wall of flames began to crawl over the earth. Even without Agaroth needing to pay attention to them, these flames would burn all the remaining corpses.
Agaroth turned his back to the wall of flames and headed towards the fortress.
The Divine Army was still fighting over there, but since there weren’t many monsters left, it seemed like the battle there would be ending soon.
...But even this clean-up wasn’t a very satisfying sight for Agaroth. Seeing his soldiers like this, Agaroth had confirmed something. The Divine Army was indeed weaker than what they had been at first, and the same went for Agaroth. This was because their minds and bodies were becoming increasingly exhausted and worn out as the war continued without any apparent end in sight.
‘It really is time for us to take a break,’ Agaroth decided.
Now that he thought about it, they hadn’t had a proper day off since they had first arrived here. After all, once each battle had ended, their preparations for the next battle always took too long for any of them to rest properly. It might be impossible for Agaroth to order a full retreat, but once the God of Giants or the Sage arrived, he would ask them to take charge of this place for about a month, allowing his Divine Army to get some rest—
Agaroth suddenly stiffened, “...?”
There was an unnatural feeling coming from behind him. It was almost ominous... but the sensations coming from the presence could not be so easily labeled. There was an almost instinctive sense of unease rising within him, along with a terror that Agaroth didn’t wish to admit to.
Agaroth immediately turned to look behind him.
He saw the wall of flames still soaring high enough to touch the sky, but something was squirming away inside those flames.
Agaroth couldn’t sense what that thing was. There seemed to be something like a shadow flickering within the flames, almost like a haze. It seemed to both exist and not exist, with even its form left ambiguous....
Whoooosh!
That something suddenly swallowed up all of the flames. It looked as if a huge hole had been punched into the flames and was now sucking everything in. It was only after the flames had entirely disappeared that Agaroth was able to see that “something” more clearly.
That thing... looked as if a hole had been torn open in the world. The colors surrounding the hole were being pulled in and blended together. The fusion of colors was unstable, with each shade growing and shrinking as they all mixed together, creating all sorts of visual distortions, so the boundary between what was still in the world and what wasn’t wasn’t very clear.
But in the center...
...at the very center of the hole....
Agaroth instinctively stared at that spot. Even amidst the riot of all sorts of different colors, only one color existed in the very center. A pitch-black darkness. The deep darkness in the center of the hole seemed to be sucking everything towards it.
“What the...,” Agaroth murmured in an uncertain voice as he took a step back.
Crrrrrrrsk!
The monster corpses that had yet to be burned were being dragged towards the hole. At that moment, Agaroth couldn't help but feel a shiver run down his spine.
Through the hole, he had sensed an ominous and immense presence, one that had a slight demonic aura mixed in with it. That alone may not have been enough to identify that existence, but... this terrible and ominous entity clearly possessed dark power.
In other words, that meant this thing’s true identity was that of a Demon King.
“The Demon King of Destruction,” Agaroth muttered in horror.
If that thing truly was a Demon King, then apart from ‘Destruction,’ there was no other epitaph it might possess. That was just how unstoppable and absolute the aura of destruction that Agaroth could sense coming from that entity was.
What was the Demon King of Destruction doing here? Wasn’t it said that Destruction, who didn’t act like any of the other Demon Kings, never left the Devildom? How could they have suddenly appeared here without any warning? For a moment, Agaroth didn’t know what to think.
“My Lord!” the Saint cried out from her place at the top of the fortress wall.
She could also sense what an incomprehensible existence Agaroth was currently facing. Even though she was viewing it from such a long distance, it felt like her mind was going insane, and her very soul was being polluted by the sight. Nevertheless, the Saint didn’t turn her head away and instead cried out to her god, even as she was shedding dark tears of blood.
“You-you can’t! Please, my Lord!” the Saint begged.
They wanted to run away. Such a thought filled everyone’s head. Even the mighty warrior, who among all of Agaroth’s countless believers had followed him for the longest time, could not muster up any bravery at this moment.
He wanted to throw away the sword in his hand. He wanted to pull off his armor so that he could run away even just a little bit faster. When even the mighty warrior had such thoughts, how could the other soldiers be any less terrified? There were many who fell to the ground in fear, and there were also plenty who dropped their weapons.
However, not a single one of them actually ran away as fast as they could.
This was because they were still within the range of Agaroth’s holy ground. It was because the dark red sun still hung in the skies above them. Their faith in Agaroth allowed the Divine Army to resist the terror they were feeling. It made it so that none fled the battlefield, even if they had already lost their will to fight.
This was possible only because Agaroth himself refused to run away. It was because Agaroth was still resisting his own feelings of terror.
Agaroth was facing the Demon King of Destruction at a closer distance than anyone else. Since he was the guardian deity of this holy ground, he was forced to bear the brunt of the enormous pressure emanating from the Demon King of Destruction. So Agaroth felt like he was going crazy. It felt like his godhood itself was about to be crushed.
Whether when he was still a human or after becoming a god, Agaroth had never once thought of himself as an insignificant existence.
When he was a human, he believed that he was the most exceptional talent among all humans. He wasn’t entirely wrong to think so. From the time he was a human, he had stood on the same battlefields as gods and had killed a few Demon Kings while saving numerous countries.
And after he had become a god? He still didn’t have any respect for his elder gods either.
A massive war was currently being fought against the Demon Kings and demonfolk. In such an era of strife, it was a quick matter for heroes to write their own legends and attain godhood, so in this current era, there were many young gods just like Agaroth. However, even they didn’t seem so impressive in Agaroth’s eyes.
The only gods that Agarath treated as an equal, or rather, slightly lower than himself, were the barbaric but enormous God of Giants and the Sage, who sought to save the world from her ivory tower.
For this young and arrogant God of War, his current emotions were extremely unfamiliar to him — feelings of inferiority, of being a lower level of life-form, and such shitty feelings.
Agaroth silently clenched his jaw.
In his right hand, he was still holding his Divine Sword. He did not need to look at it to know that the light of the Divine Sword had dimmed. He could feel the terror in his pounding chest. This terror was stifling his will to fight and dulling his edge.
Agaroth strengthened his grip on the sword.
He used his rage and frustration to erase the fear in his heart.
Please, my Lord!
The Saint’s scream wasn’t heard with his ears this time around, but instead inside Agaroth’s head.
When he focused his senses in that direction, he could hear many — oh so many — similar voices.
What is that? I’m scared. Why did something like that suddenly appear? Just what am I doing here? I want to run away. Please, I don’t want to die. Oh Lord, please give us permission to run away. My Lord, please, don’t just stand there like that.
Agaroth just listened silently.
He could even hear voices coming from much further away.
What should I cook for dinner tonight? Is Mother doing okay? When is that guy going to come home? Let’s have another glass, no, two more glasses of beer. Is he really going to show up here? I just need to work a little more. It will be payday soon. I love you. I miss you. Thank god. You did well today. Tomorrow....
“...Run away? Don’t bullshit me,” Agaroth growled.
The Divine Army that Agaroth had led here wasn’t the full sum of all of Agaroth’s believers. Followers of Agaroth lived all over the continent. Their faith was the source of Agaroth and the Divine Army’s strength.
“If we run from here, just what are we supposed to do about that?” Agaroth scoffed.
Agaroth didn’t know all that much about the Demon King of Destruction. However, he instinctively realized at least this much. If they didn’t stop that thing here and now, then something terrible would happen. That thing would go on to destroy the entire world.
“Also, there’s no way that thing will just let us run away,” Agaroth muttered with a dry chuckle.
He didn’t sense any hostility or murderous intent coming from that Demon King. But... even without sensing such things from it, Agaroth knew just what it wanted.
This was the Demon King of Destruction. It existed to kill everything without ever showing any mercy. The reason why it would continue to kill and destroy everything in its path wasn’t due to any murderous intent, hostility, hatred, or any such emotions. For the Demon King, it was just in its nature to do so.
“Everyone,” Agaroth shouted.
Grrrrk.
Gritting his teeth in determination, Agaroth lifted his right hand into the air.
‘Your feelings of wanting to run away. I’ve listened to them closely. However, I can’t accept them. After all, if we all just ran away whenever we wanted to, what was the point of going to war? Unfortunately, the god that you’ve chosen to serve is a stubborn and vicious fucker. According to the judgment of this damned god of yours, there is absolutely no way that we can run away now.’
‘Because of that, you all will be dying here today. There are no other options. All of you will definitely perish here.’
Agaroth gave his final order, “Follow me.”
‘And I’ll be dead along with you,’ Agaroth silently promised.
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