A few minutes later, inside the Senate.
The final transmission from the observation post informant—a heavily trembling, blurry video filled with the massive roar of explosions and blinding flashes of fire—completely disconnected, announcing the results of the bombardment.
No one spoke in the assembly hall anymore.
Every noble's face had lost all color, leaving only boundless terror and uncontrollable bodily trembling.
They had finally, thoroughly, and viscerally understood just how terrifying that man named Rover, and the power of the Black Shores he represented, truly were. How resolute his will was.
He wasn't making empty threats; he truly could do it, and without the slightest hesitation!
This devastating method of strike completely exceeded the scope of what their political calculations and schemes could comprehend.
Make an enemy of him? Make an enemy of such power?
A deep, icy, indelible fear, like the most despair-inducing Black Tide, completely drowned the hearts of these dignitaries who once thought they controlled everything.
Watching the images of the camp being completely swallowed by raging flames and countless Tacet Discords being annihilated into ash, the Senate was dead silent.
This was a "Dimensional Strike" in the truest sense. To make an enemy of him, to make an enemy of the Black Shores... this was the outcome.
And they had to realize, this was merely one fleet dispatched by the Black Shores to aid the Seven Hills. Just how many more of such ultimate weapons they possessed, probably only Rover himself knew.
The bombardment lasted for a full five minutes.
When the final missile fell and the explosions gradually subsided, all that remained in the camp was a burning, dead silence and permeating smoke.
The Hunters' Camp, along with the countless Tacet Discords within it, had been physically and completely erased.
And in the Town of Murmurs where the Black Tide had surged from, its stone forests and hilltops had also been sheared off by more than half. Only a few extremely scattered Tacet Discords seemed to have survived, wandering aimlessly without a target.
Rover lowered the binoculars in his hand and looked indifferently at Augusta, as if everything before them was merely a casual act: "The passage to the camp has been cleared. The threat is temporarily eliminated."
"Now, it's time for us to end this once and for all."
His gaze shifted to the distant basin, to the silent Earth-Piercing Wedge.
The final decisive battle had officially begun.
At the edge of the Hunting Grounds basin, atop a steep, black mountain peak that overlooked the entire battlefield ruins.
The deafening explosions had already subsided, but thick smoke and un-dissipated energy glows still permeated the sky above the distant basin.
The scorched earth was like a scar upon the land, silently narrating the heavenly punishment-like destruction that had just occurred.
Two figures stood quietly amidst the biting mountain wind, completely out of place with the gradually boiling cheers of survival rising from below.
One of them was a woman dressed in a red-and-white dress, the spider lily patterns on her hem swaying gently in the wind.
Her gray-green hair was braided into her signature twin tails, but her face bore an almost sickly pallor, and her right eye was still wrapped in that pure white medical bandage.
Her slender fingers unconsciously gripped her skirt tightly. Her exposed left eye stared blankly at the scorched earth that had been thoroughly plowed over by countless missiles, watching the sporadic fires that hadn't completely extinguished, breathing like giant beasts.
The woman was Phrolova.
Ever since waking from her long slumber at the Shores, she had barely stepped away from that Sonora constructed from the obsessions of the dead.
This time, coming to the Seven Hills ahead of schedule like she was possessed by ghosts and gods... was not to obey the Overseer's will, nor for the so-called grand cause of the Fractsidus. She came purely to watch a show.
Even the massive wave of the Black Tide before them had been triggered by "Swartzlo" stepping onto the field himself.
And the reason she came...
Was simply because she sensed his arrival. The arrival of the only "soulmate" who had ever touched the deepest strings of her heart.
She wanted to see how Rover would handle this seemingly unsolvable, desperate situation.
But she never, ever expected to see such a scene.
That rain of missiles tearing through the long sky and falling with the precision of stars; that absolute violence that instantly swallowed the entire Black Tide, turning the earth into purgatory before purifying it in the blink of an eye...
This scene was too magnificent, and too cruel.
Phrolova's lips lost all color, trembling slightly.
This destructive light, this trajectory tearing the sky apart...
The scene before her was like an icy key, violently prying open the coffin of memories deep within her heart, sealed away for centuries, the one she least wished to touch.
That day... her hometown, that tranquil little town where music drifted all day long... the sky had also suddenly been dyed such an eerie color...
And then...
Then came the burning meteorites, like the wrath of gods, instantly turning everything she loved and was familiar with into powder and wails.
That was the starting point of all her tragedy, the primal nightmare of all her obsession and madness.
And at this moment, this "divine punishment" from the Black Shores triggered by Rover before her eyes—although its purpose was entirely different—its form of destruction overlapped suffocatingly with the most terrifying image in her memories.
For the first time, she clearly recognized that Rover... was not merely someone possessing immense individual power, not just that "soulmate" who could understand her music and resonate with her soul.
Standing behind him was a colossal existence possessing a terrifying power beyond her imagination, capable of effortlessly reshaping mountains and rivers.
This power was cold, efficient, and absolute.
"Heh... hehehe... Truly—what a magnificent sight!"
A voice carrying an exaggerated, operatic tone rang out beside her, filled with near-manic joy, shattering the dead silence of the mountain peak.
The speaker was a man.
He wore a conspicuous dark red poet's hat and gorgeous red-and-black attire. A golden mask covered the upper half of his face, revealing a mouth that always curled into an eerie smile.
He tightly gripped a thick script that seemed to never leave his hands.
The newcomer was the Overseer of the Fractsidus—Christopher.
He spread his arms, as if to embrace the destroyed, scorched earth before him. The eyes beneath his mask flashed with intense excitement: "Look! This is the ultimate art of destruction! No redundant struggles, no meaningless wails!"
"Only the purest, most absolute end! This is the most perfect posture for a tragedy's curtain call! Sufficient to compose the most magnificent final chapter!"
He excitedly flipped open the script in his hands, practically dancing with joy as he frantically wrote on a blank page with a quill pen, as if wanting to record every single detail before his eyes.
"Precise! Efficient! Cold-blooded! Yet carrying a, a kind of absurd sense of justice in saving the world! Contradictory! Too contradictory! This is the top-tier material for dramatic conflict!"
"Rover... he truly brings me unprecedented inspiration every single time! Hahahaha!"
He was immersed in his own world, like a conductor cheering for a feast of madness, turning a blind eye to the wails and death beneath his feet, intoxicated only by the grandeur and magnificence of this tragedy.
Phrolova slowly turned her head, her pale face devoid of any expression.
Her exposed eye stared coldly at the fanatic Christopher. In the depths of that gaze was undisguised, bone-chilling disgust, as well as a suppressed, extremely dangerous murderous intent.
This lunatic who viewed the suffering of others as dramatic material was so incredibly similar to those apathetic audiences in her memories who treated lives like worthless grass.
However, she ultimately said nothing.
Any words seemed pale and powerless before this maddened artist.
She merely cast one silent glance at the still-smoking battlefield, as if she could see the silhouette of the man who caused all this through the scorched earth.
Then, she resolutely turned around. The hem of her blood-red skirt traced a lonely arc in the mountain wind as her silhouette silently blended into the shadows of the mountain peak, swiftly vanishing from sight.
Christopher was left alone on the mountain peak, still writing furiously in the howling wind, adding what he thought was a magnificent page to his endless script of tragedy, using the suffering of all living beings as ink.
The mountain wind howled past, rolling up the smell of gunpowder and bringing with it the distant yet clear waves of cheers from those surviving the disaster below.
These cheers formed the sharpest contrast with the icy, dead silence of the mountain peak.
______________
Read Ahead till chapter 350 on my Patreon, that way you support me( thanks in advance)
Meh begging for some support.
Patreon.com/IndifferentVillain