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The war in the second layer had stopped making sense by any conventional measure.
The Castle Faction outnumbered the demons a hundred to one, but numbers had never been the point. The Dimensional Demons were a God Class Race. One demon could hold off two or three Castle Faction troops at equal level without much effort. The Castle Faction's finest units fell just as fast as the weaker ones. So the Castle Faction did the only thing available to them: they threw bodies at the problem and refused to stop.
The cost for doing this was… catastrophic. Corpses layered the ground so thickly that soldiers climbed over the dead to reach the living. Blood pooled in the low places and didn't drain. More than ten thousand separate battlefields stretched across the second layer, and every single one looked the same—ruins, bodies, and two sides that had each decided retreat was worse than death.
What unnerved the demons wasn't the casualties. It was the mechanism. The Castle Faction troops weren't cultivating their power through years of discipline and technique. They were getting stronger by simply killing. Every demon that fell fed their enemies' strength. New Gods were being born mid-battle. A soldier who had been a mortal at sunrise might be a Demigod by noon.
There is no counter-strategy for an enemy that becomes more dangerous the longer you fight them. The Demonic Gods understood this, and it frightened them in a way that pure slaughter never had.
Just then, the Space-Time barrier between the second and third layers dissolved, and hope exploded through the demon ranks like a fire catching.
The barrier was down. That meant the Demon Lords had broken through and the hundred-thousand-strong Demon God Legion was coming. The tide was about to turn.
The Castle Lords felt the shift in their enemies' morale instantly, and their faces went tight.
Soon, when the reinforcements didn't arrive, the Demonic Gods reached out with their Divine Senses, searching the third layer for the familiar signatures of their kin, but they found nothing. Not delayed. Not regrouping. The third layer was simply empty of any sign of life. Even Tenebris, that immense fortress that had stood for ages, was gone. Not occupied. Rubble.
The Demon God Legion has been erased and both the Demon Lords have ceased to exist. The silence that followed was the loudest thing on any battlefield.
It didn't last though. The cheering started somewhere and spread instantly, rolling across the thousands of battlefields like a wave. The God Tier Castle Lords also scanned the third layer and figured out the truth that Haru had been in the third layer the entire time. Apparently he'd been demolishing their base while the Castle Faction held the line.
The effect was immediate and total. Soldiers who had been fighting with grim mechanical endurance remembered what hope felt like, and it hit them like a drug.
Every Castle Faction creature understood with sudden, clear certainty what this moment meant: the demons were dying out, the Divine War was still coming, and every Demon killed today was power they'd carry into that future war. They stopped holding the line and started hunting.
…
The Demonic Gods reached their conclusion simultaneously, across every battlefield, without needing to consult each other.
Their lords were dead. Their legion was ash. And somewhere in this underground world, the two Supreme God Tier Angels, who had done all of that, were on their way back. The arithmetic was simple.
They ran. They didn't warn their mortal subordinates. Didn't organize a retreat. Just turned and bolted for the blood lake channels, straight for the surface, to leave Arboriel, abandoning everything beneath them without a second glance.
The ordinary Demons, watching their gods flee, lost whatever was left of their will in an instant. Their lines buckled, then broke, and the castle faction crashed through like a flood. Above, the Castle Faction Gods launched in pursuit—not out of duty, but because everyone who'd ever played an MMORPG video game understood one thing instinctively:
{A fleeing boss is still a boss. And a boss is worth killing.}
~ Sun Tzu
The second layer became a chaotic mess and then began a deadly hunt.
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T/N: This chapter might feel a little different, and it's because I cut out all the conversations, including the rambling of the Demons repeating that Castle Lords are in far greater numbers than them and how they keep getting stronger. That was condensed into one sentence.
If you think that this chapter is way too fast-paced, I'll slow it down from the next chapter onwards. If nobody objects, I'll take it as this chapter being good enough.
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