Chapter 147: The Eleventh Impact, Black Cavity

"——The elements have now stabilized; beginning the second round of Magic injection."

... A hazy voice could be heard.

The once-legendary warrior, a mercenary renowned in Deepwater City, blinked his eyes, staring at the ceiling, feeling as if there were certain disconnected gaps between his Soul and his consciousness.

He remembered that he had been recruited into the Salvation Army, spending infinite time to forge a perfect anti-Magic fortress. And just as they were rejoicing and planning to use the theoretical budget—which still had a full year remaining—to step-by-step press that mad god to the edge of sealing, he suddenly appeared.

He remembered that the pillar of heaven supporting the Planetary Shield suddenly shone with a white light. It was not a color of the mortal world, nor was it a color that Subspace could contain. It might not even have been white light. It was just that the intense energy and emotional color that erupted in that instant were so overwhelming that the human brain instinctively branded it with that most basic yet most complex color.

No, if one thought about it carefully, was it really white...

If his memory served him correctly, it shouldn't have been white within that pillar of light. What was contained within that radiance was absolutely not mere pure energy; what he saw at the time should have been—

Just as the warrior recalled what exactly he had seen, he suddenly felt a tremendous sense of terror spreading from his body into his marrow. A strong sense of unease, a terrifying omen that felt as if it would tear his past life to shreds, made him gasp subconsciously.

But the more he felt the danger, the more he wanted to try and touch it.

The sense of self-destruction of life made the warrior stare with wide eyes, struggling to recall that radiance and color.

And just at the moment he was about to remember, letting out a shrill scream, a club suddenly smashed fiercely onto his head, instantly knocking him dizzy and causing him to completely lose the thought of recalling that period of time.

"Ugh!"

"I am very sorry to use such methods, but we don't have much time left now, so don't think about anything else from here on out; you must obey my words and remember what I am saying!"

Speaking with a somewhat stiff Deepwater City accent that sounded like a foreigner, the young girl cleric in green looked exhausted, but her rough, blood-stained hands pressed against his head, her emerald-green eyes staring straight into his, allowing the warrior to see his own disheveled, panicked reflection in her pupils.

"Do not think about what happened! Do not try to recall it! That period of time has already passed!"

"We are currently at the Antarctic Pivot! We are the Salvation Army! We must act for the peace and justice of this world, and act so that the final Demon King will no longer destroy this world! Do you hear me!"

"Do not think! Do not understand! The things we saw do not exist! Don't even think about him! Remember my words! We intelligent beings pursue beauty, we crave stable development, we seek the help of wisdom, we pursue passionate competition, and we appreciate wonderful emotions, and all of this requires staying alive! Stay alive! Instead of chasing that beautiful and exquisite death! Do not chase death!"

"Death and destruction cannot be touched! We cannot reach out our palms toward a dangerous environment!"

She was very nervous, and also very diligent.

As an elite mercenary, the man naturally knew very well the severity of the current situation.

To say nothing else, looking at her dark circles, the already red and swollen eye sockets, and her trembling palms, he knew she was not joking. It was even highly likely that countless dangerous situations had already occurred.

However, looking at the girl who was on the verge of a breakdown, the man opened his mouth, but what spilled out was a string of sounds he had never heard before, yet they were incredibly fluent. And upon hearing that voice, the expression on the girl's face instantly turned extremely terrified. The man also realized in the blink of an eye what he was saying.

"Resist danger?"

It was not his own voice erupting from his mouth.

"If you truly resist danger and death, then from the very beginning of evolution, you should not have picked up torches from the forest burned by heavenly fire. This was not taught to you by the Ancient Ones, but was your own choice."

"Biological organisms naturally have the desire and tradition to pursue destruction; we are born capable of taking dangerous actions for the sake of better continuation. Without danger, there is no profit, and danger and profit are always complementary. Compared to the profit of the entire universe we face today, a little danger is worth allowing, don't you think?"

"You can understand pain, understand backwardness, and naturally, you can also understand—"

"You have already killed seventeen billion people!!!"

This seemed to be some kind of ritual; the girl spoke forcefully with her stiff accent, tears streaming down her cheeks, glaring at the corners of his lips as if she wanted to kill the man, and issued a sharp interrogation.

"Seventeen billion people died in the aftermath of your shockwaves! A full seventeen billion! We don't even know the death toll from the secondary disasters to this day! The number of people you have killed now exceeds all tyrants and monsters! And now you still claim to be on the side of justice?!"

"I have never said that I stand on the side of justice, Miss. What I have always said is that I stand on the side of what is correct. Correctness is sometimes bloody and cruel, but it can solve problems."

In the warrior's numb mind, another kind of alien distortion was spreading, turning into substance and reaching out its palm.

"And correctness does not mean justice. Let me show you a more reasonable world—"

"Now!"

Seeing the man acting like a puppet, the girl did not hesitate to pull out a wooden hammer and strike him on the head once more. Accompanied by a strong sense of dizziness and a feeling of being outputted again, the warrior shook his head, feeling as if his consciousness had been re-rendered once more in a short period of time.

Facing the man's completely numb expression, the girl nimbly pulled a huge needle from her bosom and instantly jabbed it into the man's arm, pushing the contents into his body.

It was like a cool touch, a strange sensation of coldness spreading to his limbs and bones.

It made the warrior feel as if he had broken through some kind of Veil, instantly opening his eyes and gasping for air.

"... I... what happened to me?"

"Your Soul has been retrieved; can you understand my existence now? Can you still hear me speaking? Look closely, how many fingers do you think I am holding up?"

"I... I can't tell... I just feel like you did something..."

"That's good, that's good. Your current state is a lack of life elements. Wait a moment, I will prepare the Life Potion for you right away. After you drink the potion, I will observe you for one minute; if no mutation occurs, it means the treatment was successful. You can go straight to the battlefield."

"And what if a mutation occurs?"

"..."

The girl, who was filling out the prescription, looked up at the man, then glanced at the blade in her own arms. The man very sensibly closed his mouth and then casually switched to another topic.

"What was it that I saw... before I fell unconscious at the very beginning?"

"What what?" "I mean, after that thing unfolded, I saw a black hole. I remember seeing something pure black appear, and after that, I didn't remember anything. Is that something that will affect the war?"

"... A void of elements."

The girl, who was nimbly preparing the mixture on the medicine rack behind her, said without raising her head: "That monster has now begun to officially devour the entire planet. It succeeded in striking a tiny crack in the Planetary Shield and caused the Planetary Shield to begin deforming. The price was a full seventeen billion people losing their lives in that disaster. The entire land was as if it had been flattened... My hometown is right over there."

"..."

"Sorry, I seem to be a bit emotional. But that is how it is; it drained all the elements of Ulthuan. The sky, the ocean, the soil, Magic, and everything that can or cannot be named, finally leaving only a pure 'nothingness' there. That is the corpse of Ulthuan, and it is also our future end."

The place once called Ulthuan, the gathering place of the Elf, that vast ocean and the Elf Floating Island itself had already turned into a huge void, standing in the center of the Old World, exuding a terrifying significance.

There was nothing inside.

Literally, nothing at all.

Light, sound, disaster, screams, the roar of seawater rushing in—nothing at all.

Even the process of the bombardment itself had been forgotten and deleted, because if one were to remember that process, their reason and Soul would involuntarily be eroded and scorched.

Just as witnessing light that is too brilliant will scorch the retina, witnessing that process of destruction will cause a person's thinking to be corroded by that intense terror. Resistance and dissenting opinions will completely collapse, and people will realize that only self-destruction is the antidote.

Even though people had already gained awareness and begun to realize that the other side was using Magic and rituals to do something terrifyingly extreme, when truly faced with it, they were still so horrified that they would faint. But fortunately, they were all battle-hardened warriors, and everyone had their own beliefs and the meaning of their actions. They would not be easily crushed just like that, whether it was the red-eyed girl before him or the man lying on the hospital bed.

"... We must continue to fight. There is one last chance."

"One? Aren't there still two chances left?"

The man lying on the hospital bed was momentarily stunned.

"Previously it was the Shiyici Chongji, wait a moment and there will be a twelfth, and only then the thirteenth. We should still have two chances, right?"

"No, because after the twelfth, there will be no more of us."

The girl shook her head, gave the green potion a shake, and countless fungal colonies emerged from within, only to disappear without a trace.

"According to the calculations of the great Chaos Gods, they were wrong. The more the Paradox Engine triggers time stasis, the more the seeds of destruction accelerate at billions of times the speed within our minds along with the accelerated time."

"Just as our living provides power and soil for the Chaos Gods, creating the Subspace, the same applies to that monster. The more we fear facing destruction head-on, the more we fear the arrival of destruction, the more we will welcome destruction. It was never far away; it is right within our hearts."

"The wails of seventeen billion dead, and even more people abandoning thought due to fear and throwing themselves onto the path of self-destruction—our world is already riddled with holes... but we cannot surrender."

"Stand up and prepare to fight. For the reconstruction of our home... for our future."

The girl prepared the potion with a serious expression and delivered it to the man, who drank it in one gulp. The man only felt a warm current surge from within his body, and then he saw the girl clutching a stopwatch, beginning to time him.

After an embarrassing sixty seconds, the girl finally let out a sigh of relief, then pulled the man up without hesitation. She pushed him directly in front of the room's sealed door. Like the machine gun of a Star-Bearer, she burst out several sentence fragments in an instant, rapidly introducing the current situation to this man.

"Now grab the door handle, then start thinking about your abilities; the world will give you the answer."

"Eh? Ah, oh..."

The man nodded blankly and hurriedly grabbed the handle.

Subsequently, he felt his consciousness rise high in an instant, and countless shouts of battle and sounds of war began to spread from all directions, as if a tidal wave were about to drown his consciousness.

"For the future! For the world!!! Cavalry company! Charge with me!"

"Everyone prepare the defensive line to intercept! We cannot let the Star-Bearers unite! Split them up! Split them all up! Do not let them communicate!"

"Artillery team! Get the Hellfire up here for me! Organize a suicide squad to act as cannonballs! Even if you die, you must blast a path through their defensive line! The Antarctic Giant Tower must be captured; we must pave the way for our brothers before time runs out! Everyone, attack!!!"

"This is..."

Feeling that clamorous battlefield, the man could not help but freeze in place. Meanwhile, the girl beside him began to rapidly introduce everything he was feeling.

"In reality, the war has been going on for nearly seven days since then. Utilizing the instantaneous tidal vacuum of the Subspace, the Demon Legion summoned the hidden armies in the Old World to advance toward the Antarctic Giant Tower. We are currently at the Antarctic Pivot on the edge of the Antarctic, having just seized the city here, and are planning to advance deep into the Antarctic Giant Tower."

"The immortal players have already agreed to join our ranks; although these vermin are not trustworthy and are full of malicious thoughts, they are indeed an objective combat force."

"Don't worry about anything else; all armies and all living things capable of movement have begun to attack the Star-Bearers. They absolutely cannot spare any strength to stop us. Rather, they have already exhausted all their strength just to maintain their defensive line. We only need to break the Antarctic Giant Tower, and then it will be our victory! To satisfy all the conditions, that madman viewed the North and South Poles of the entire Old World as the origin point of an infinite intersection; as long as the Giant Tower is destroyed, the entire ritual can be lifted."

"And once the ritual is completely lifted, we will gain freedom."

"Goodbye, I have to receive the next patient."

Before the legendary mercenary from Deepwater City could ask two more questions, the girl took a deep breath and kicked him into the portal. She then closed her eyes, exhaled slowly, and turned to look at her hospital bed.

At this moment, a long-robed woman with a ferocious expression, as if trapped in a nightmare, had appeared on the hospital bed at some point. Even the longbow in her hand had been gripped until it snapped, her expression so manic it was as if she had seen the most terrifying sight in the world. And all the physician girl had to do was provide endless, vacation-less recovery for these high-end combatants who had witnessed the end-of-the-world scene, allowing them to make their final contributions on the battlefield.

"Amanda Saffulin. A mercenary from Baldur's Gate, skilled in longbow and close-quarters sword fighting, common phrase is Sword Coast accented Common, witnessed Doomsday for four seconds... I understand, I will soothe her."

Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, the girl opened her eyes once more, and the seal representing life flickered within her pupils. While holding a wooden mallet, she tapped the skin of the woman lying on the hospital bed, then stuffed a Soul that looked exactly like the figure on the bed into a syringe and injected it into the body.

"Amanda, wake up! Amanda!"

(Really stuck to death...) (End of chapter)