It had to be divine intervention. Under Pierce's guidance, they fled toward the border, gathering more people along the way, encountering almost no danger. It felt as if they walked a road once traveled by a god.
But just before reaching the border, this remnant Demonkind force caught up. Pierce whispered doctrine to himself, saying they had already endured the darkest night, and only one final step remained. Faith gave him strength to persist.
Bado did not understand a word and only grinned viciously. With a wave of his hand, far more Demonkind surrounded Pierce's group. Pierce felt his heart sink, as his body was still weak from lack of supplies.
"This is a trial," he thought. "Someone has to try." He felt as if someone told him to hold on, and he saw faint light appear along the edge of a dark mountain.
He charged forward, ducked in close, and drove the broken sword upward through Bado's head. The Troll did not die immediately, letting out a furious roar that ordered the others to attack.
Countless figures swarmed Pierce and his companions. Some slaves drew hidden weapons or picked up stones, but most turned and ran, or collapsed to wait for death. The earlier miracle felt like an illusion.
As if to confirm it, the sky itself darkened. No sunlight remained at all.
Darkness fell without warning, pushing many people toward deeper despair. The sky turned completely black, and those who had only held on because of the earlier miracle now felt real fear in their bodies. The sudden change crushed the thin support that belief had given them.
Pierce felt the same way, and in truth he was barely holding together. Fighting a Troll had already weighed heavily on his mind, and this only made it worse. His breath grew uneven as he tried to keep his grip on himself.
But when he looked up, he noticed something even more shocking. The Troll in front of him was trembling. It was shaking because of fear.
Yes, it was fear, without doubt. It was not alone either, because the surrounding Demonkind looked as if they had seen something impossible. Many dropped their weapons and ran in all directions, moving without any order at all.
"No, impossible, that thing again..." "He is coming again, why..."
A large part of the Demonkind were shaking badly, while some did not even understand what was happening. Only those who had lived through it before truly understood this kind of fear. Their voices broke as they shouted in panic.
"That is an unstoppable disaster!" "A dragon, it is a dragon!" "Gah, ah!"
What were these Demonkind even talking about? Their reactions made no sense at first glance.
Nyx seemed to realize something from the state of the sky. Judging from the darkness alone, something far more dangerous was descending. The air itself felt wrong.
"Dragon? What are those Demonkind talking about? Did something like a Great Dragon come here?" "I do not know. The surrounding Magic and elemental flow are in chaos. I cannot detect anything at all."
The few mages and professionals in the group were already sweating heavily. They knew very well that this situation could not be caused by a mere Great Dragon. Even the powerful Gold Rank could never create something like this.
"They say it is a Great Dragon, but we cannot see anything." Darkness covered everything in all directions, and even their eyesight could not pierce it. Where would a Great Dragon even be?
Pierce paused, then slowly raised his head. His heart felt as if it had stopped.
Within the black sky, Rend tore open three Rift, glowing blood red. An overwhelming presence poured out, mixed with intense negative emotions. At that moment, Pierce finally understood.
They were right. This was indeed a dragon.
But the dragon was not hiding in the darkness. The darkness itself was the dragon.
When the blackness began to move violently, they finally noticed the mottled scales almost merged with the background. Each scale was nearly as large as a truck. Just catching a glimpse of a moving claw or scale exhausted their vision, and everything they could see was its body.
A head as massive as a mountain emerged from a swirling vortex and lowered toward the ground. It looked down at the tiny figures below like dust, carrying the pressure of the sky itself collapsing. The sense of scale erased any thought of resistance.
Its huge mouth opened like a Rend-cut Canyon. Inside roared wind, fire, and Lightning Magic, and the violent airflow lifted Pierce's hair. His body stiffened as his mind failed to catch up.
"What... is this?"
His expression went blank, and his eyes could no longer focus on anything else. He could only accept the overwhelming information forced into him. All gazes were swallowed by the darkness.
Was it fear, curiosity, or something else? Pierce could not find the right word. Strangely, he was not very afraid, like an ant looking up at mountains.
If you cannot even see a corner of the mountain, and cannot grasp the distance between you, then fear feels meaningless. Still, Pierce knew the mountains were looking back. Everyone knew that the three pairs of narrow eyes were watching each and every one of them.
"This is bad. Even I cannot save them like this." "If it were me from before, I really would have had no way. But you are lucky."
Belial ignored the Demonkind that had already been wiped out by the area effect. He looked over the refugees and confirmed they were the group he had saved before. He had thought they would be able to leave safely, yet some stragglers had dared to come and steal the results of his work.
It seemed he really needed to be more thorough in the future. Leaving loose ends was annoying.
"I really did not clear the map enough." "If I had wiped everything, would this have happened?"
Saving these people had been casual for Belial, like doing a small good deed. If it did not take effort, helping was fine. It was like picking up a bicycle that had fallen by the roadside.
The bicycle had nothing to do with him before or after. But if a Teddy Bear came over and kicked the bicycle down again, then it became his problem.
His gaze swept over the injured first. That part was easy, since sickness or missing limbs made no difference to his method. He simply discarded the old parts and rebuilt new ones through magnetic reconstruction.
Then his eyes moved to the corpses lying on the ground. In his vision, their souls had already drifted out, and the gray-white material that made up their memories was dispersing. At this stage, they were already lining up on the other side.
In the past, Belial could not save people like this. They were already beyond the point of return. But that was before.
Through continuous research and trial, he had developed a new method. With extremely precise control and records of light, darkness, and time, he could rewind all the basic particles that made up a person to an earlier state.
In simple terms, it was time reversal. He had considered revival through this method before, but quickly realized that the matter he rewound did not include the special forces that formed the soul. Those light points were clearly the core of a person, and he still did not fully understand them.
He could rewind physical reality using recorded information, but that relied on stored templates of light and darkness. With souls, he had no clear reference for what they used to be like. That had always been the problem.
However, there was something special about these people. Around their souls, between light and darkness, there was a faint and unusual trace. This detail made one of Belial's ideas suddenly feel possible.
"This feels similar to that light I could never find." "So these people are connected to it." "Then this unique power should be related as well."
He chose the man with the clearest and brightest soul as a sample. From him, Belial could read the soul templates of the group, the original light points combined with memories. Whether this was left for him on purpose did not matter.
What mattered was that this excited him. It meant that both body and soul could be rewound together, making true revival possible. If someone insisted this was not really the same person, he did not care.
Beyond the excitement, he had another thought. The chat platform he planned to launch later might be able to include this kind of save data. As long as a soul template existed and the light point remained, he himself was a walking fountain of revival.
"In that case, let us try it." "If it fails, nothing is lost since they are already dead." "But if it works, you profit a lot."
With that thought, Belial grinned and swallowed all the souls into his body. One by one, he read the templates and reconstructed their memories. This process was not simple, which was why he activated his Black Mist Form.
That form allowed better energy control and increased Computational Power. Even with ready-made templates to copy, handling nearly a thousand people was exhausting. He focused carefully until the work was done.
Then he guided the power of light and released it from his fingertips. The glow spread outward, calm and gentle despite its scale.
A miracle appeared.