A clawed hand ruptured the front lines, sweeping away men, barricades, and war machines like toys scattered in a storm.
"Don't let it open its mouth!" Helios shouted over the thunder of collapsing steel. "It'll suck in your souls!"
Soldiers who had been parrying its strikes now faltered, shields trembling as the dread of that fate clawed at their discipline.
The demonic beasts were also their prime concern. They had to kill the beasts as well as attack Dabbah.
But the stranger part had begun.
Where the monster's maw opened, a shimmering cyclone erupted—silent at first—then deafening as it tore the essence from the living. Screams faded into nothingness mid-air, their owners reduced to vacant husks.
And the beasts ran back to it as if becoming one with the entity.
"Its recovering?" Alessio gaped with disbelief.
"Rear lines—attack on red flares!" Erebus commanded, eyes locked on the beast's massive shoulders.
"Understood!" Alessio fired a red flare high into the murky sky.
In response, rune-charged artillery and long-range incantations roared across the valley. A hail of elemental fire, alchemical bolts, and spirit-piercing arrows blanketed the colossus. But even as the barrage struck, one sweeping motion of its limb annihilated the entire flank of catapults as if time had skipped a beat.
"Get around!" Erebus ordered, unsheathing his blade as he charged forward.
"It's flaw is that it is too slow," Alessio mounted his steed and wheeled it close to Erebus' beast.
Erebus saw a greenish yellow flare in the sky. It meant re enforcements.
"The Amanécerian army is approaching!" Rudolph announced.
Erebus led the vanguard, not as a foolhardy martyr, but as a decoy—diverting the monster's attention so the rear could reposition for a strike from behind. Helios, moving in tandem, led the second formation up the far ridge, angling to flank the remaining demonic beasts of every category on the blind side. Their movements were surgical, rehearsed—and yet, the scale of the creature dwarfed even their boldest strategies. But one slim hope of creating a confusion for it, they readily did so.
Helios carried out the demonic cultivation.
It was no easy task to kill an eight-hundred-meter-tall soul-siphoning abomination. They had lost track of time. Neither hours counted nor did the ending day go noticed.
And it was about to become harder.
The ground shuddered with a tremor not caused by the creature, but by something emerging from behind the third line. Towering war machines—part brass, part bone—hauled forth an obsidian core suspended in radiant containment clamps. Sigils crawled across its surface like living scripture.
A soldier, perched atop a cliffside watchtower, relayed the signal to the alchemists below. His voice, amplified by arcane resonance, rang out:
"The troops are here!" He called out and launched two other green yellow smoke flares to alert them.
"About time" Helios sighed in relief.
"Deploy Cosmos' Verdict—now." Cornelius ordered.
The border defense troops were stationed at the foot of the mountains that surrounded Olympus.
Engineers and rune-scribes scrambled into motion. Built over a decade by the Alchemists' Tower, Cosmos' Verdict was not merely a weapon—it was a divine ordinance made manifest, forged from relics of people's prayers and encoded with laws that bent even the divine.
The clamps hissed open.
A silence fell. The sphere pulsed once. Then—
Detonation.
Reality fractured.
There was no sound—only inversion. Light collapsed inward, then burst outward in a geometric bloom of annihilation. The colossus was flung backward as if gravity itself had turned on it. Mountains bowed under the pressure wave. The soul-cyclone ceased instantly.
When the smoke cleared, the battlefield was a scar. The front lines surged into the breach, charging with renewed fury.
But from within the cratered, motionless hulk of the monster… something stirred.
The behemoth convulsed. Flesh peeled open—not from damage, but by design. A second head—smaller, horned, and plated in shadow-forged armor—tore free from within. It hissed, then laughed, voice laced with mockery.
A floating shape detached from the monster's throat and hovered above the battlefield. A man. Or something more.
Cloaked in veils of dark ether and wearing a crown of intertwined nerves and metal, he radiated the oppressive gravity of a dying star. His presence turned flame cold, and froze movement in those nearest to him.
Erebus stepped forward, eyes narrowing.
"Asmodeus!? No...Iblis…!" He growled.
The warlock-controller. The architect of the soul-harvest.
"I should thank you," Iblis said, his voice laced with layered echoes that spoke across dimensions. "You've done what no weapon could—you've peeled away the shell. And now, I stand reborn."
Above him, the sky began to crack—not with lightning, but with fissures of dimensional light, as though reality itself protested his presence.
Cornelius and Canute took the Alchemists and the guardians to create a barrier so that they would not be effected by the fissures in the sky.
Helios raised his blade. "We end this now—before he becomes something worse."
But Erebus already knew. This abomination was Iblis. But the rage that surged inside him was not because it was Iblis. But the appearance of his long dead twin he had taken up.
" You do live up for the evilest existing bastard in the realms." He snapped at him.
" Ahh~ How rude! Atleast your brother was more obedient. He willingly gave himself to me for the sake of power." He guffawed.
" Well then I'm tired of using others now. How about a duel? You and me." Iblis brushed off their curses and protests.
"Because even if thos battle favors you I shall still win."