Chapter 77: From Bad to Worse
The King’s gaze fell on the creatures below, his expression hardening with every second that passed.
What he had feared most had come to pass. A portal had been opened, by that madman, and now they would need to close it as quickly as possible before the situation grew worse than it already was.
Without wasting time, he circulated mana furiously through his body and released a subtle fluctuation of energy outward. For a moment nothing happened, but an instant later the air in the area trembled violently and soon began to swirl.
The Hollows that had paused for a second upon sensing the new presence found themselves dragged away by an invisible force, and before long all of them were spinning furiously inside what was beginning to resemble a forming tornado.
Sounds and shrieks rang out, but the tornado did not stop, it accelerated, and soon dark violet traces began appearing across it from various points, blending together again and again until the entire vortex had taken on that same color.
The creatures inside were being killed one by one.
They were too weak. Far too weak to face a Paragon who had decided to sweep them all away without mercy.
Within seconds, the battlefield that had been filled with chaos and death fell silent, while the adventurers watched a scene they would never forget.
The strange creatures that had been pushing all of them back only moments ago had been wiped out. Every single one. Without exception.
"We’re safe..." murmured one of them, missing an arm, though it didn’t matter to him. In that moment the only thing any of them cared about was seeing this whole nightmare reach its end.
Like him, others began to relax as the pressure of the battle they had just lived through finally started to fade from their minds, but before they could allow themselves even a little relief, another change swept through the area. One that was, in its own way, familiar to everyone present.
All at once they felt a strange fluctuation of energy emanating from above, and instinctively every eye turned toward the being suspended high in the sky, the one that had not acted until now, but that seemed to have finally decided to make its move.
The King felt it too, and unlike the adventurers, he understood exactly what that fluctuation meant.
’This isn’t good. It’s trying to send a signal.’
There was no need to specify to whom, or to what. It was obvious. And what happened next confirmed it.
A powerful rumble rang out suddenly from above, and the crack in the sky began expanding rapidly, growing wider and wider.
Everyone witnessed it, but before any of them could react, an oppressive presence poured from the fissure and crashed down over the entire area, and every adventurer present collapsed. Without exception. Whether they were E-rank, D-rank, or even B-rank, all of them fell, their expressions contorted in pain, blood streaming from their eyes and noses.
They were still alive, but only barely. The King had acted the instant that pressure appeared, and that alone had saved everyone’s lives, but they wouldn’t be able to endure it for much longer, not with what was beginning to emerge.
’This is bad. I need to close that portal immediately,’ he thought urgently, and with a single gesture of his hand a current of air formed, scooped up the fallen adventurers, and hurled them hundreds of meters away, clearing them from the area.
What was about to happen next was not something any of them could survive being near. He had to move them.
He didn’t stop there. He channeled all of his mana into his Concept Core, and immediately a different kind of energy began forming around him. He opened his hand, and within it a vortex of air took shape, one that stretched and elongated into a lance, a construct of hundreds of concentrated winds compressed into a single form, radiating a palpable pressure that could be felt from a great distance.
With a fluid movement of his body, he hurled it upward. A sharp crack rang out, and the lance vanished, reappearing not above, aimed at the fissure, but rather directly at the S-rank creature suspended in the sky nearby.
He knew he couldn’t close the fracture. Not without the proper means. But what he could do was halt its expansion, which would delay whatever was coming from above. And the one expanding it was the creature hovering there, the same one that had exploited the weakening of space to force the fracture open in the first place.
The lance struck instantly. The moment it did, a powerful vibration spread through the air, one that didn’t explode outward but instead collapsed inward, forming a sphere of air compressed to its absolute limit, containing a level of pressure sufficient to disintegrate anything at S-rank on contact, to crush it completely.
But before it could, something else happened. Something struck the compressed sphere directly, and it dissipated, erupting into sharp, powerful currents of air that scattered in every direction, tearing through everything in their path across a wide radius.
The King understood immediately what had occurred. His gaze snapped toward the fissure. There, sharp fingers had taken hold of the fracture’s edges and were pulling it open.
It was obvious what had happened. The being on the other side had acted.
’It’s too late,’ he thought, watching as the being pressed forward, its presence growing clearer with every passing second.
From the torn-open fissure, a hand emerged first, if hand was even the right word. It was large enough to encompass the entire area where the battle had taken place moments before, its fingers as tall as towers, composed of something that was neither flesh nor stone nor energy in any sense that any being present could have understood. It was material and it was not. It pulsed. It breathed. And where it grazed the edges of the fracture, reality itself seemed to yield, to soften, as though its mere touch was sufficient to redefine what existed and what did not.
Then came the outline of a shoulder. A flank. Something that could only be called a torso because language offered no better alternative.
The rest remained beyond the fissure.
Not because the opening was too small. But because what was emerging was so vast, so disproportionate to any conceivable scale, that even the portion already visible was enough to dominate the entire sky above what remained of BranLeaf.
The King did not move.
Not out of fear. But because in that instant he was processing, assessing, measuring the pressure that being radiated with the same cold precision he had always applied to every threat he had ever faced.
And what he measured, he did not like.
’Paragon,’ he thought. ’Perhaps at its peak.’
It wasn’t a certainty. It was impossible to be certain about something that had not yet revealed its full strength directly. But the pressure radiating from that partially emerged form was enough for an estimate, and that estimate was grave enough to make the situation something far more serious than he had anticipated.
He was about to move when he heard the voices.
Distant at first. Then closer. Then distinct, and with them came presences, not one but several, approaching from different directions at a speed that only those who had long since surpassed any ordinary limit could afford.
He recognized all of them.
From the ground rose a column of earth that shattered and released a figure, a middle-aged man with a hard expression, dark with dust and rock that fell away as he straightened.
To his left, living flames appeared from nothing, not from anything burning, from nothing at all, and within seconds they compressed, cooled, and shaped themselves into a woman with short hair and amber eyes who stared upward without a word.
To his right, where the devastated forest began, the vegetation at the edge of the ruined zone trembled, parted, and from within it emerged a man who seemed made of the same material as the trees around him, bark peeling from his arms as he stepped forward.
Some distance from the forest’s edge, near a body of water, droplets began rising into the air, scattered at first, then thicker and thicker, until they formed a silhouette, then a body, a woman with long blue hair, dressed with quiet elegance.
And finally, from high above, where dark clouds churned, a roar sounded from a distant direction, followed by a bolt that appeared and fell like a blade toward the ground, visible for one instant and gone the next, leaving behind a man with a young face, perhaps twenty years of age, whose presence was far too deep and far too ancient to belong to someone who looked like that.
Five presences. Five weights the King of Solren knew well.
The rulers of the other five human kingdoms.
None of them spoke immediately. None of them needed to. A single shared glance toward what was emerging from the fracture communicated everything there was to say.
"The situation is far worse than i had anticipated," said the woman of flames at last, her voice flat, stripped of anything unnecessary.
"Much worse," confirmed the King of Solren without turning.
No one said anything else. Because this was not the moment for words.
It was the moment to decide what to do before that being fully emerged.
