Chapter 283: Simultaneous Breakthroughs
"Monsters. A lot."
Nicole gave those three words in reply after tapping Layla on the shoulder, pointing at the cat spirit that was shivering in fear in her arms.
Right after that the city’s emergency alarm suddenly began blaring, followed by a knight barging into the room.
"Apologies my lord, but we’re about to be besieged by monsters!
They number in the thousands! And they’re all at least inferior stage masters! And worst of all, we’ve spotted a few Superior stage grandmaster monsters!"
The expressions on the faces of all those in the room suddenly darkened upon hearing this news. The knight captain and the guild master got to their feet, ready to go and begin commanding their respective forces to combat the monsters.
"Hold on for a moment you two."
"What?! There are more than a thousand monsters out there! We don’t have time to waste!"
"The citizens need to be evacuated!!"
"I said...Hold. On."
Although they cried out, Layla only repeated her words, spreading out her aura to pressure everyone in the room.
Save for Undine and the few spirits she could not see, Layla was arguably the strongest person here. Her energy forced the two intermediate-stage grandmasters to their knees, much to their surprise.
’Even if she’s from another world, the difference in power just from a single stage should not be this much.’
Sakaala thought to herself as she noted how helpless the two men were against Layla. Turning to the side, she saw that Count Vako had something to say but Layla only looked at him and he suddenly became unable to move.
’Her eyes, they’re glowing?’
While the high priestess was analysing Layla, the girl turned her attention towards her companions and asked.
"What are the odds that attack was something they had planned beforehand."
"Very low.
It’d be prudent to assume that the god of darkness can sense when these parasites or the monsters they control perish.
So, I believe the fact that we took out so many grandmaster-level monsters under his command, made him able to zero in on our location."
"Still, this is too fast, we’ve barely been here for an hour."
Edward stated after Esna’s answer, citing that the timing was just too short to gather a force this large.
"What if they already had these monsters gathered nearby for something else, but because he sensed us here, he ordered their mobilization?
What if...the monsters we attacked earlier when we got here, were the advance force of this army, and what’s coming now is the main force."
Nicole’s two ’What ifs’ had the eyes of all those who listened widen in surprise, but when they thought about it, they realised she was right.
Hearing her, Undine smiled lightly as she patted the girl’s head, an indirect confirmation that her words held true.
’This ’god of darkness’ is quite proficient with fate. He was able to discern to place his forces at a certain location beforehand as that’d increase the chances of him taking out his potential enemies.’
The Great Spirit thought to herself as she read the threads of fate.
"How long can you guys hold out against those monsters?"
Layla stopped pressuring them with her aura and asked a question that made the Knight captain look at her like she was some sort of Alien, which she was.
"Hold out? We would be grateful to even last thirty minutes. Even that would not be enough to have all the citizens get to safety."
’He seems so concerned about the citizens...he’s not a bad person, I guess.’
The green-eyed girl thought to herself as she pulled out a large magic stone from her spatial ring before replying.
"Thirty minutes? That’s more than enough time."
Seeing the magic stone in her hands, Sakaala instantly realised what she was planning to do.
"You all want to ascend to the next realm...to the realm of demigods!"
"You can become demigods?!"
Hearing them call the Epic realm the realm of ’demigods’ made Edward’s brow twitch as he knew just how ridiculous real demigod realm beings were.
’Hopefully, they never meet a real one.’
He thought to himself as he pulled out his own energy cores that had had long prepared to use to aid his breakthrough to the Epic realm.
"Undine."
[I know, Nicky dear.]
The great spirit knew without being told what her future contractor wanted, snapping her fingers and using her power over space to instantly enchant the room.
A translucent barrier of purple light surrounded all of them before the room around them suddenly expanded to over ten times its original size.
"...the law of space itself!"
Sakaala spoke with shock as she recognised what Undine had done casually, but the Spirit wasn’t done yet.
Undine snapped her fingers once more and used the law of Fortification to strengthen the building so it could withstand the influence of her spatial expansion.
She also sealed energy flows to prevent anyone outside from knowing just what was happening inside it.
As for the people of Gade in the room, they were looking at Undine with newfound reverence, like she was one of their gods descended to the mortal world.
[You all can begin your breakthroughs now.]
"You don’t need to tell us that."
Edward replied with a smile as he could finally break through and surpass his other classmates who had long become inferior stage epic realms and reclaim his top position.
ꕥ ꕥ ꕥ
The Knight Captain had said they could last thirty minutes against the incoming army of monsters, but it didn’t take him ten minutes to realise how wrong he was.
First off, when he arrived at the city walls in person, he was finally able to get a full report and know just how many monsters they were up against.
To the nearest thousand, they had close to four thousand monsters coming for them, and none of them was below the master realm.
As for the grandmaster realm monsters at the rear, his scouts reported at least five hundred of them, and most of them were in intermediate stages.
About fifty of the monsters they had sensed, were superior-stage grandmaster realm monsters, and all of them were infested with those strange parasites.
The ground the monsters stepped on was deprived of all life, fitting of the servants of a malevolent god.
Worst of all, was that the knights and adventurers could not go too deep behind the monster liens to fight them as the power of death they carried would drain out the life of anyone who stayed near them for too long.
It was something that they had learned the hard way, through the loss of some of their knights.
Each of the monster’s attacks also carried this death and decaying power with them, so they had to fight battles where in addition to being outnumbered, they could not afford to get hit by any of the monster’s attacks.
The priests and priestesses of the Churches were helping with their holy magic, but it had reduced efficiency against the power of the universal law of death itself.
Twenty minutes into the fighting, he gritted his teeth and joined the fray himself, intending to push back as many grandmaster realm monsters as he could with AOE aura-based attacks.
However, due to his impatience and negligence, he ended up making a fatal mistake that put him in the middle of three inferior-stage grandmaster realm blade wraiths.
The trio of monsters attacked him with their swords, all filled with their death-infused auras, and the man was sure he could not block and/or dodge all three attacks at once.
Just when he resolved to take a hit to his arm, the three monsters suddenly stopped moving as if something was holding them in place.
’What?’
It was then that a light-hearted voice rang out from above him.
"Whoa...these monsters are a lot more than I thought."
**BANG! BANG!! X3
What followed the voice were six loud noises, and the sound of the blade wraith’s corpses dropping to the ground.
Looking up, he could see the figure of a young black-haired girl, a bit over 5Ft6 in height, staring down at the monsters with her green eyes that glowed lightly.
Emerging from her back, were two neat pairs of black bat-like wings, flapping lightly and keeping her in the air.
In her hands were two guns, ’strange weapons’ that the people of Gade did not understand how they worked.
She looked no different from how she was when he saw her about 25 minutes ago, except for the fact that he could not sense any energy fluctuation of any sort from her.
’Did she really...?’
Although Layla and the others acted like going to the Epic realm was no big deal, it was something from legends to him, so it was only natural that he’d be sceptical considering she was already out so soon.
On the ground not too far from her was Nicole, holding a cat-shaped water spirit in her hands and petting it lightly.
Despite her looking so defenceless, the monsters around her hesitated to come closer as they instinctively sensed something ’off’ about her.
