What?
A woman in half melted armor had appeared next to the pillar of flesh that was the [Aberrant Shapeshifter]. The Trial System didn’t let anything obstruct the actual portal location. It was simply reallocated next to Pinkie
But the Lich King hadn’t known any of this, nor understood who the hell it was that had both seen him and was able to destroy both his shield and split him in one throw.
Not that it mattered, Rahess the Lich King reconstituted himself from a shattered state in almost an instant.
He stopped having fun with the mortals and got ready for battle.
Without having time to craft his true army, he did not fancy himself in direct combat with any of the ascendants that were here. In fact, there was a good chance that even with his army that the trio could take it on.
So it would be a game of balance. If they came after him, he would increase the rate of soulfire raining down on the city. If they stopped chasing him, then he would ease up so he could return to playing with individual mortals.
Rahess raised his arms and—
The rushing sounds of wind cut off.
The soulfire in his eye sockets dimmed a little as Rahess looked to the left, then the right, confused. He threw out a great amount of his soulfire towards the woman that had just arrived.
Even before the ball of flames could reach halfway, it slammed into an invisible surface, hundreds of feet from where he was. The soulflames raced across the wall then spread out until the shape of the invisible wall had made itself known.
An enormous barrier had formed around him without him realizing. It had been so traceless that he hadn’t noticed it before.
What sort of madness was this?
The voice of an [Aegis Guardian] echoed out throughout the box.
“That’s enough out of you. I hope you’ve been enjoying terrorizing the city, because you’re never doing that again.”
The walls started to close in. This was no magical barrier Rahess was aware of, it hadn’t even felt the ripple of mana when it first formed. The Witch had told him that he would be outmatched, but this was ridiculous.
The spreading fire touched every single surface it could, making it look like it was containing a raging storm of purple flames.
There was no functional weakness in the barrier.
While it was impressive, Rahess could only laugh.
“You are a fool to think this could contain the soul of the Great Rahess, Lich King of the End World. I will remember this for next time.”
Rahess churned its reanimated mana core, pushing it to the limit. An explosion of a mana core from an ascendant like him would be more than enough to level a city like this. It would be a good test for their future battles.
Normally, exploding a mana core was a last move, even for a Lich with a phylactery. Overloading his core would cause soul damage and make reconstitution take years instead of months.
Not for an ascendant. Now, this move would only set him back a couple of weeks at most.
A core overload was simply the best deterrent against those that believed they could assassinate him without fighting his creations.
Rahess only hoped that the barrier caster would blame himself for it when the barrier blew up.
As his reanimated mana reached its limit—it stopped.
The soulflames in his eye sockets dimmed in confusion.
The cold judgmental voice echoed out once again.
“Did you really think we haven’t dealt with Liches before? This is a [Barrier of Mercy], nobody can harm what’s within and those within cannot harm others, or themselves.”
“Impossible. You simply have not gone up against someone that has full control over their own power.”
“You are welcome to try.”
The barrier started to close in rapidly as Rahess tried to blow his mana core once again, only to come to another failure. It was like his own mana was refusing to listen whenever it crested that point. When he tried to just crack his own mana core with magic, it simply fizzled out.
“Ridiculous! How could anyone be so craven to craft a barrier where one cannot die while within?!”
It turned out the [Aegis Guardian] was one such craven class. The Lich King did his best to warp the barrier’s concepts with his own soulflames. He just needed to burn it hot enough to have an opening where he could crack his core. He poured and poured his mana until the dark purple flames started to become transparent. Temperature hot enough to vaporize the land and he poured and he poured and—
The Great Rahess, Lich King of the End World ran out of soulflames.
The barrier closed in around him, forcing his bones into a compact, compromised position where his arms were bent around his head and torso and his legs were up inside his ribs.
“How would this not injure a mortal?!”
“Well, do you feel pain?”
Rahess’ eyes boggled as he was placed in the most humiliating pose in his life. For all of the city to see. At any other time he would have blown himself up far before it got to this position.
He had truly underestimated exactly what he was dealing with. The Witch Tyrant had told him and he was ready to be careful—just not like this.
Dragonslayers at the twelfth realm. Blessed by the Trial System. Skills that should have taken centuries to master.
Not only that, dragonslayers that were far, far beyond the average.
The Lich King came face to face with the frozen judgmental stare of the [Aegis Guardian], holding the one and a half foot cube in his palm.
“I could have done much worse to your city, boy.”
The [Guardian] answered the guilty not, he simply drifted down back to the aggrieved party, the [Witch] that was straining to finish the teleportation spell.
Though she still had enough mental capacity to gloat. Her eyes flickered over to the cube with a hateful gaze.
“I will make you suffer for every single life and loose brick that you have remotely damaged in my domain. My word as a [Witch] on that.”
It was the first time in a very long time that Rahess felt a shiver down his literal spine. Other than the time that the Witch Tyrant had made the same promise. He rattled his bones at her.
“Do you think I have not seen and experienced everything there is to suffer? Even the Witch Tyrant’s tortures weren’t enough to make me repent. You better hope this barrier can hold because the next time I won’t be half as kind to your city as I was this time.”
Apparently those were the wrong words because it just gave a glare from the meatbag that had thrown the axe at his head.
“It’s best to just get it over and done with, where’s its phylactery?”
“It’s likely written into the bones of the Witch Tyrant herself, the one buried inside that pillar of flesh.”
The woman in melted armor stared at the pillar. “The thing we can’t attack?”
“Yes.”
“Damn. I clearly need to be brought up to speed. Also, since it turns out you’re a dragonslayer, can you help enchant some clothes for me?”
“Please give me some space so I can focus.”
——
With the Lich King contained, Seffara took post dealing with the spawns from the flesh pillar while Ulhen the [Barbarian] sped around the city, destroying every single loose monster, undead and stomping out the flames.
The [Aegis Guardian] stuck with Grettfield, keeping hold of the Lich King and staying guard on Grettfield just in case.
All of the other adventurers were spreading throughout the city, more constantly coming through the System portal and spreading throughout the city to work in search, rescue and healing. Potions were taken out, [Healers] were called, though there were actually less injured people than the dead.
Any civilian that even touched the soulflames were guaranteed to die in seconds.
The [Shades of the Dead] also tended to kill people as efficiently as they could.
Both so that more undead could spawn in perfect shape.
What they ended up doing was search, destroy monsters, and carry dead bodies back.
It was fifteen minutes later when Ineza arrived alongside a few other dragonslayers that had traveled from around the world.
Neil Kelly had rushed as quickly as he could from Australia, arriving at the same time as Ineza and staring at the flesh pillar and the damaged city.
“Bloody hell.”
“Please do not touch the monster.”
“Yeah, I got the brief. Damn that thing’s terrifying, everything else okay here?”
“Everything’s stable, if you want to help out, there’s plenty of rubble that needs clearing.”
“On it.”
“Thank you for coming, Neil.”
“No worries. You gotta tell me your tenth realm story later though, okay?”
“Of course.”
Every dragonslayer that arrived was somewhat the same way, they were more than happy to avoid the giant leg and arm that was half the size of a skyscraper and was still folding the damned sky.
All of them knew what to do and they had saved everyone that needed to be saving.
Now all that was left was to send the pillar of nightmares out of the city.
“Please clear the area.”
‘Pinkie, if you can hear me, I will be using magic on you to teleport you, please do not move an inch.’
Seffara and a few other adventurers stepped far, far back from the pillar. The black spell circles that surrounded the great pillar of flesh spun around, taking in great amounts of mana that washed over the world. A city’s worth of mana, a twelfth realm’s accumulation over decades used… all for this.
Black script surrounded the pillar, encasing it in a wrap of magic that stabilized space and isolated it from the rest of the world.
The portal opened up beneath Pinkie, letting gravity take hold and sending it through the tunnel.
Seffara flew next to Grettfield.
“Where’s it being sent to?”
“Farallon islands.”
“Isn’t that a little close?”
Farallon islands was a natural reserve only thirty miles from the coast of San Francisco. Fifty miles away from San Kingsgrove. It was only a spitting distance should the pillar of flesh actually decide to attack.
“Even creating a spatial tunnel that could transport that it fifty miles was difficult enough. I could have thrown it into the ocean, but would you rather it be summoned to a location where we couldn’t observe it?”
Seffara scratched her head, then looked at the [Witch] up and down.
“So, you were actually a dragonslayer all along?”
“Indeed.”
“I always thought you were a shifty one.”
“Yes, please continue to interrupt me while I am focused on teleporting a dangerous creature that could kill us all at any moment.”
“Hahaha, oops sorry.”
Though Seffara had a point. While plenty of people were pointing and staring at Seffara, the actual residents of San Kingsgrove were mostly staring at the [Witch] standing on her broom with a book in her hand.
They knew her as the friendly neighborhood [Witch] that played pranks on naughty children and drank tea while watching them grow up.
They might never see her the same way again. She could already see and feel the emotions of the city from above.
Fear, grief, awe and gratefulness.
They saw her for what she truly was now. A dragonslayer. One that could hijack every single enchantment from the city. One that had risked her life to save their city from certain doom.
The [Witch] of San Kingsgrove.
——
Four hours later…
The casualty numbers were still rising as both cities took stock of the dead. Over four thousand were confirmed dead from Sunstone city while it was estimated that the number would balloon to nearly ten thousand once the dust settled.
It was hard to identify bodies when a lot of them had simply turned to red mist when Pinkie had waved her hand.
So, ten thousand Realmers and twenty-four adventurers. Eleven of which were on their last lives.
Considering the scale of the disaster, it wasn’t as much as it could’ve been. Most Realmers had enough time during the start of code red until Pinkie arrived at their city to have evacuated to the various underground bunkers.
Still, ten thousand lives.
Perhaps in another time and in another place it would have been considered a mere statistic. Certainly during the war with Earth those kinds of numbers had been common.
The only problem was that in the modern days, Realmer lives were considered precious above all else.
Oh certainly, every life was equal and all that, but it really was different these days. The Realmers had never let Earth forget about just how much they had been killed in the wars. The Realm had built a culture around the idea that adventurers should never and could never harm Realmer lives at all.
A reminder that there would be an instant blacklist if you did it without cause. There were also rumors that adventurers would hunt you down because a Realmer you injured was someone that was the cousin of a friend that was the daughter of a dragonslayer.
These things were one of the main ways Realmers could live comfortably around with the equivalent of demigods.
So when ten thousand Realmers died to an unknown adventurer losing control, it was not a statistic.
Every single Realmer stopped to watch the news. There was unity amongst them that would startle even the most unified nations of Earth. They grieved together and got furious together.
The Realmers watched, waited and now would once again look at the adventurer rising up in Sector One and start to wonder… would they be next?
The smallest mercy was that Sunstone City wasn’t actually the one that had been the most damaged by this event.
San Kingsgrove, one of the greatest cities on Earth, had gone through a reckoning most Realmers sympathized over.
Unlike cities in The Realm, no city on Earth had truly prepared for a disaster. There were no roaming monsters on Earth. The worst had been Gamar the Mad decades ago and even then, his strikes had been scattered and people believed it was impractical to prepare for.
Emergency procedures had turned lax, San Kingsgrove was one of the fanciest and magical places on Earth. There were normally thousands of adventurers in the city. Who would dare to attack?
The lax attitude meant that an estimated forty-two thousand people had died. The upper ranges were nearly fifty percent more people dead. There simply hadn’t been enough time for people to have evacuated from public areas.
Even then, when people panicked and gathered into a building, a single shade could fly in and rip apart the entire crowd in two seconds.
The purple fires that had spread burned and created undead with power that was equivalent to fourthers.
So, forty-two thousand dead. While the city was already cleaned by adventurers, the collapsed burnt skyscrapers made his heart drop. Everywhere you looked, someone was wailing in the streets.
That was the scene that Ryan had arrived at.
Four hours too late.
It was something that most adventurers had to face before the tenth Trial. In one of your earlier Trials, a dragon would swoop down while you were just out of reach and devastate a city in front of you.
Oftentimes, it was a city you had gotten to know. One where you might have seen it develop over different Trials. One that you might have spent a Trial protecting even.
It was part of the reason why Ryan had dragged his feet completing the next Trials, He knew the Trial System would move the world in such a way that he was likely to see the Kingdom of Valmere be devastated in one way or another.
He had come up with plans to see if he could defy that fate. There were already plenty of things in motion he had set up with King Theskar and he was confident that Valmere would at least survive no matter what. He even had some small childish hope that Valmere would be able to push the dragon back without him.
So it felt like a cosmic joke when the same situation had played out with San Kingsgrove anyway. A city that he had started to love, burnt down while he was taken far away, away, only to come back when it was all over.
Ryan added another sixty-two thousand sins on the Manager’s head.
At the very least, he knew the first steps he had to take. Ryan went up to a security guard at the border of San Kingsgrove proper, a friendly smile on his face.
“Hey, evolved adventurer here, I came as soon as I could. Where am I needed most?”
///////
Another chapter tomorrow as well! 99.99% chance!
0.01% chance reserved for if a dragon appears and burns down the city I live in.