Chapter 214: Retaliation

Walking completely silently through the bustling, vibrant streets of the targeted city, Ethen couldn’t help but let out a long, heavy sigh.

The Demi-humans living here looked absolutely just like ordinary, everyday people.

They casually went about their daily business, completely oblivious to the doom hanging over their heads.

Street performers sang cheerful folk songs, dancers spun in colorful silk clothes, and the rich scent of exquisite, roasted cuisine filled the evening air.

Loud merchants aggressively shouted from their wooden stalls, trying to sell glowing trinkets to passing crowds.

Entire families moved happily through the paved streets, holding hands and laughing.

They were completely, blissfully unaware that their entire world was about to violently, permanently end in a few minutes.

Most of these ordinary people had absolutely nothing to do with the brutal border war.

So was actively, deliberately targeting them like this really the right thing to do?

Ethen honestly didn’t believe so.

He wasn’t foolish or naive enough to pretend otherwise to ease his own conscience.

However, Ethen was also absolutely not such a good, moral person that he could simply ignore reality.

He couldn’t just magically forget what was currently happening on the other side of the world at Windhelm.

The political and military leaders of these happy people were most definitely involved in the invasion.

They were actively fighting his people on the front lines.

They were brutally slaughtering human soldiers and innocent civilians without a second thought.

And if he couldn’t even bring himself to bring their warmachine to a halt, then what was the point of his power?

Standing around in enemy territory, anxiously worrying about whether his violent actions were morally correct, would accomplish absolutely nothing.

It would be exactly like washing his own neck and politely placing it directly onto the enemy’s chopping block.

"That again..."

As if the heavy moral situation wasn’t already bad enough, something brutal suddenly caught Ethen’s sharp attention.

A frail, heavily scarred human slave was being violently beaten by several armored Demi-humans in the middle of the street.

The human was curled into a ball, weeping as heavy boots repeatedly slammed into his ribs.

Ethen’s calm, conflicted expression immediately darkened into something incredibly cold and hostile.

Humanity certainly took prisoners and slaves too, but it was primarily done through strictly enforced magical contracts.

This kind of casual, public cruelty was something he had seen far, far more often on the Demi-human side of the border.

Their vast, inherent bloodline superiority complex made them genuinely believe they were gods.

They believed they could casually do whatever they wanted to the fragile human trash beneath them.

It was absolutely appalling.

Ethen stared at the bloody scene for a few long seconds before slowly, deliberately looking away.

"Sigh."

He reached his gloved hand down and gently patted Jor on the head.

"We’re absolutely all just logs thrown into this massive death machine at the end of the day."

His voice was incredibly quiet, completely devoid of any remaining warmth or hesitation.

Then, his facial expression completely hardened into stone.

Let’s start.

The exact moment those cold words entered his active mind, the young boy Jor instantly disappeared from his side.

Ethen was left standing completely alone in the middle of the crowded, bustling city square.

For a few tense, agonizing seconds, absolutely nothing happened.

Then—

"What the hell is that?"

The first Demi-human civilian to notice the anomaly stopped walking and looked directly toward the evening sky.

His casual expression slowly, horrifyingly changed into a mask of pure terror.

A strange, suffocating coldness rapidly ran through the heads of everyone in the city square.

Then, a deeply bitter, metallic taste mysteriously appeared at the very back of everyone’s mouth.

They didn’t know exactly why their bodies were reacting this way.

They only instinctively knew that something was fundamentally, catastrophically wrong with the world.

Very, very wrong.

A gigantic, impossible serpent suddenly appeared out of thin air along the entire city skyline.

Its massive, armored body was so completely enormous that it easily seemed to stretch far beyond the visible horizon.

Its physical proportions were completely, terrifyingly unnatural for any living creature to possess.

Its jagged, heavily scaled head alone looked down upon the sprawling city like a second, floating mountain had suddenly appeared in the sky.

The thousands of people below completely froze in paralyzed shock, their minds unable to process the scale of the monster.

Then, the true shadow arrived.

The evening light completely disappeared from entire, massive sections of the populated city as the beast blotted out the sun.

The solid earth immediately began to violently shake.

Towering stone buildings trembled and groaned under the sudden, immense shift in atmospheric pressure.

Glass windows violently shattered into millions of pieces across every street.

The paved ground physically cracked and split wide open directly beneath the people’s feet.

Then, absolute, unadulterated panic finally erupted.

People began screaming at the top of their lungs, frantically running and trampling each other through the breaking streets.

The orderly, beautiful city instantly descended into bloody, apocalyptic chaos.

Standing completely still in the middle of it all, unaffected by the shaking earth, Ethen could only sigh again.

He watched blankly as tall buildings violently collapsed into dust one after another.

He watched terrified people flee for their miserable lives.

He watched the entire, vibrant city rapidly descend into a screaming nightmare of destruction.

[ Jormungander is prophesied to be the absolute end of this world. ]

[ Wherever the serpent goes, it brings inevitable catastrophe. ]

[Catastrophe: When the user deliberately chooses, he may bring localized natural disasters to relevant areas of a target. Note: Jormungander must be manifested in its true form for this divine skill to activate.]

Ethen looked up toward the enormous, world-spanning serpent blocking out the sky.

So this was Jormungander’s true, unrestricted conceptual power.

Natural disasters.

Not a single, targeted magical attack.

Not a single, designated enemy target.

An entire, massive geographical area wiped entirely off the map.

"Bloody human bastards!"

After several long, agonizing minutes of violent shaking, mass destruction, and screaming chaos, the city’s military defenders finally began to emerge.

Hundreds of heavily armored beast-kin warriors.

Then thousands.

They moved in strict, desperate coordination, clearly having received emergency orders to deal with the lone human intruder as quickly as possible.

The furious defenders rapidly surrounded Ethen in the ruined city square.

Their heavy, glowing weapons were raised and pointed directly at his chest.

Their suffocating, collective killing intent completely filled the dusty area, locking onto his aura.

Ethen didn’t even blink.

His physical body simply disappeared into thin air.

At the exact same time, the other elite human forces assigned to destroy the city began arriving from every spatial direction.

They attacked the bewildered defenders completely without restraint or mercy.

The massive outer city walls were violently struck by concentrated artillery fire.

More towering buildings completely collapsed under the human bombardment.

Ancient defensive formations were systematically overwhelmed and brutally destroyed before they could even fully activate.

The relentless destruction rapidly spread through the bloody streets as the precision strike turned into a full-scale, military assault.

From the high vantage point of the ruined city wall, Ethen quietly watched everything unfold below.

His handsome expression remained completely, chillingly calm.

But his chest felt incredibly heavy, a cold weight settling directly over his heart.

He had always expected real war to be ugly and unforgiving.

He had simply never expected to be the lone monster standing directly at the absolute epicenter of the destruction.

After a long moment of watching the flames rise, Ethen disappeared alongside Jor.

The two terrifying figures immediately reappeared in another highly populated location on his kill list.

Then another.

And another.

The brutal, apocalyptic process repeated itself over and over again in rapid, merciless succession.

Absolutely everywhere Ethen went, true catastrophe violently followed.

The vast Demi-human territories rapidly began to flare up with screaming chaos and towering flames.

Dozens of major cities were aggressively attacked.

Frontline defensive lines completely collapsed under the sudden, massive natural disasters.

The total war spread much faster than anyone on the enemy side could possibly, properly contain.

It wasn’t long before the ancient elites of the Divine Beast Mountain were forced to officially join the fray.

The global situation rapidly became even more chaotic and unpredictable.

Ethen had just barely appeared near another towering city gate when a strange, imposing figure suddenly emerged directly before him.

It was an older, heavily scarred Demi-human man.

His long, flowing beard was made entirely from a strange, sluggish, ink-like substance.

The dark ink constantly shifted and writhed around his jaw as though it were a living, breathing creature.

His ancient, powerful eyes moved critically across the burning battlefield before finally settling squarely on Ethen and Jor.

"You’re the infamous Dragon Envoy?"

Ethen simply looked at him, his dark eyes completely devoid of any light.

The old man clearly, arrogantly expected a proper answer or a dramatic villain’s monologue.

Instead, Ethen just slowly, tiredly shook his head.

"I’ve killed a lot of fucking people today."

His facial expression remained completely, terrifyingly blank.

"I’m absolutely not interested in discussing anything with you."

The old man’s arrogant expression changed slightly, a flash of genuine anger crossing his inky features.

Ethen’s eyes remained completely cold and dead, his grip tightening on his saber.

There was absolutely nothing left to discuss between their races.

The true war had already violently begun.