Chapter 221: New

"Enough."

The single word did not merely echo across the ruined landscape; it commanded the fundamental laws of physics to halt.

The endless, deafening cacophony of the global battlefield snapped into a frozen, suffocating silence.

The air thickened, transforming instantly into a sea of lead. Droplets of beast-kin blood hanging in the atmosphere froze in place, suspended mid-splatter over the broken earth.

High above the smoking, cratered ruins of the Celestial City, the dark, stormy sky was forcibly torn apart.

It wasn’t a natural weather phenomenon. It was a jagged, bleeding wound carved directly into the fabric of reality itself.

A pale, otherworldly light spilled from the spatial rift, physically shoving the dense, lightning-laced war clouds aside with the undeniable force of a tectonic shift.

Figures descended through the tear.

They didn’t fly, nor did they float. They simply stood in the air, forcing the very concept of gravity to submit to their overwhelming presence.

As their unified auras washed over the battlefield, millions of combatants—both human and beast-kin—were instantly driven to their knees.

Weapons slipped from numb, trembling fingers, clattering uselessly against the blood-soaked pavement. The weaker soldiers simply passed out, their minds unable to process the sheer density of the mana descending upon them.

Even as a newly ascended Angel, having just slaughtered twenty million enemies to forge his new S-Rank Cosmic Tyrant class, Ethen felt his reinforced bones groan.

The crushing atmospheric pressure tested his newly evolved mana pathways, pushing against his skin like a physical weight.

The figures moved with a synchronized, terrifying lethality, instantly forming an airtight perimeter around the bleeding, thrashing form of the Celestial Dragon.

"Fuckers! You think I can’t handle myself? Go the fuck away!"

Long Ra’s roar shattered the imposed silence, vibrating through the teeth of every soldier on the ground.

The massive dragon snapped his jaws at the descending deities. His voice churned the nearby ocean, sending violent tidal waves hammering against the broken, jagged coastline.

The proud beast-kin prince absolutely refused to accept salvation from humanity’s patrons.

His desperate tantrum was met with deafening, cold indifference.

The descending deities did not spare him a single glance of pity. They treated the crown prince of the Dragon clan like a buzzing insect disrupting a war council.

One of the luminous figures simply raised a single, unarmored hand and pointed a finger directly at the thrashing beast.

A magical seal materialized out of the ether.

Complex geometric runes locked together in a heartbeat, forging a flawless spherical cage around Long Ra’s massive bulk.

The runic orb contracted without mercy.

It forced the dragon to coil inward, mercilessly suppressing his divine power until his earth-shaking roars were reduced to muffled, breathless snarls.

It was a public leashing. A rabid, disobedient dog forcibly brought to heel by its masters in front of millions of spectators.

Ethen watched the display with cold, calculating eyes, his Tyrant aura humming quietly beneath his skin.

These were the fully realized Tier 2 Gods.

These were legendary entities who preferred to manipulate the world through disposable envoys, cryptic mandates, and proxy Angels. They never stepped directly onto the board.

Yet here they were—kings of hidden nations and ancient beings who predated recorded history—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the open sky.

Their direct intervention meant the global war had finally breached a critical, world-ending threshold.

If they didn’t manually choke out the flames of this conflict right now, the sheer scale of the collateral damage would eventually fracture the Nether Realm into cosmic dust.

"Let me go! I want to kill that arrogant human brat by myself!"

Long Ra barked from within his shrinking cage. His adamantine claws scraped uselessly against the barrier, throwing off showers of golden sparks that faded into nothing.

The runes shrank further, forcing the massive beast to curl up in a tight ball of utter disgrace.

Ethen understood the beast’s blind rage perfectly well. In fact, he reveled in it.

He had systematically, methodically dismantled the dragon’s towering pride piece by piece.

Riding the high of his Cosmic Tyrant ascension, Ethen had shattered Long Ra’s supposedly impenetrable white scales, targeting critical nerve clusters and joints with ruthless, surgical precision.

He had carved deep, bleeding canyons into the dragon’s flesh, exposing bone and sinew to the cold air.

For an arrogant royal who had gone thousands of years without suffering a single scratch, being physically broken by a newly ascended human Angel was a sin that could only be washed away in blood.

The dragon wanted Ethen dead down to the marrow of his shattered bones.

Ethen’s lips curled into a slow, mocking sneer.

He casually wiped a smear of hot dragon blood from his cheek, savoring the metallic sting and the simmering heat of the battle still coursing through his veins.

Given another five minutes, Ethen would have gladly skinned the overgrown lizard alive.

He would have ripped those pristine scales from Long Ra’s back one by one, forging them into a new mantle to celebrate his bloody ascension to the Angel realm.

"Keep your distance from him, boy. Those dragons can be despicable when backed into a corner."

The voice drifted through the cold air, carrying a relaxed, conversational cadence that felt entirely alien in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

An older man wearing a strange, oversized top hat materialized out of the shadows, floating just a few paces away from Ethen.

Mr. Mysteries.

His casual arrival brought a palpable wave of relief to the Bastion’s exhausted elite forces stationed in the ruins below.

Ethen, however, didn’t need the reassurance. He felt absolutely no fear toward a caged, bleeding lizard.

"That’s fine," Ethen replied, his voice laced with freezing arrogance. "He can’t win a fight against me now anyway."

He stared directly into the beast’s golden, reptilian eyes, making absolutely sure Long Ra saw the utter lack of respect in his gaze.

Still, Ethen wasn’t a fool. This wasn’t the time or the place for a personal execution, no matter how much his bloodlust demanded it.

With a dozen Tier 2 Gods floating above him, a single pulse of his Tyrant aura could spark a chain reaction that even he couldn’t control.

He smoothly sheathed his heavy saber. The sharp, metallic scrape rang loudly in the tense air.

He locked his violent aura down, forcing the predatory instincts of his class to simmer quietly beneath the surface as the heavy hitters took the stage.

"Are we really doing this today, Ao? Don’t forget, you don’t even have your real body anymore."

Mogran stood at the very forefront of the human deities, exuding the unquestioned authority of the King of the Sky.

He didn’t just emit an aura; reality itself seemed to bend and warp around his muscular physique, struggling to accommodate his sheer mass.

His piercing, aggressive gaze locked onto the battered, heavily scarred form of Duke Ao.

The atmospheric pressure between the two factions grew instantly suffocating, threatening to crush the remaining architecture of the ruined city into diamond dust.

This entire apocalyptic war had sparked for one simple reason: the unprovoked beast-kin invasion of human territories.

Humanity hadn’t planned for a global conflict. They hadn’t wanted this slaughter to kick off so soon.

But when the borders were breached, the Bastion had responded with relentless, unyielding brutality, unleashing their full arsenal without hesitation.

Now, with millions dead, armies decimated, and cities reduced to ash on both sides, humanity was ready to dictate the terms of the ceasefire.

"We are willing to pull our armies back on one condition."

Duke Ao spoke through gritted teeth. His golden eyes burned with contained fury as he calculated the imposing lineup of human Gods across the sky.

Ao knew that pushing the Divine Beast Mountain any further today would invite total annihilation for his people.

They had lost too much territory, too much elite blood, and far too many resources in this grueling, miscalculated campaign.

They couldn’t afford to look vulnerable in front of the other hidden factions lurking in the shadows of the world. Sharks were always circling, waiting for a drop of blood in the water.

"And what is this condition?" Mogran asked, his tone laced with heavy mockery.

"We want the Celestial Dragon."

Ao made his non-negotiable demand, his deep voice echoing over the ruined landscape like rolling thunder.

What the Almighty God truly, desperately wanted was for the humans to return his stolen divine body.

But given the catastrophic losses his forces had suffered today—mostly orchestrated by the merciless monster standing next to Mr. Mysteries—he had to settle for a tactical retreat.

Losing his original, flawless body to human thieves remained a historical humiliation that gnawed relentlessly at his soul.

"She isn’t really that useful to us anymore anyway."

Mogran sneered, agreeing instantly. No hesitation. No posturing. No political grandstanding.

Duke Ao blinked, visibly taken aback by the incredibly swift capitulation.

The beast-kin leader had braced for intense political resistance. He had fully expected a grueling, drawn-out negotiation to extract his hostage.

Instead, Mogran had dismissed the demand as if swatting away a minor, irritating insect.

The swift, insulting response threw Ao entirely off balance, and his greedy, draconic instincts immediately flared to life.

Sensing a momentary weakness, the dragon opened his mouth to secure additional territorial concessions while the diplomatic window remained open.

Mogran gave him zero face.

The human god waved his hand dismissively, instantly shutting down every subsequent demand the dragon attempted to voice with a sharp spike of killing intent.

The tense political exchange continued in the sky, but the lines were firmly drawn. The Bastion was yielding absolutely nothing else.

"Hm?"

Ethen tuned out the political posturing. The very texture of the air had suddenly changed.

His newly ascended Angel senses prickled with an urgent, primal warning, pulling his attention away from the floating deities.

He looked past the standoff, his dark eyes locking onto the hazy, distant horizon.

He couldn’t rationally explain what had caught his attention. The geographical distance was mathematically insurmountable for standard mortal vision.

Yet, his Cosmic Tyrant class afforded him a conceptual view of the world. He felt the tectonic shift in reality long before he saw it.

Far away, a solitary man sat quietly upon the thick, winding branches of an ancient tree.

The glowing figure possessed flowing gray hair and a striking, undeniable physical resemblance to Adam.

His calm, glowing gaze was fixed on the burning ruins of the battlefield, stretching across the massive continent.

Ethen watched in absolute silence. The distant man’s spiritual aura was multiplying exponentially with every passing microsecond.

An overwhelming, suffocating pressure began to violently emanate from that singular point in space.

It pushed across the horizon like a physical shockwave. The remaining storm clouds over the Celestial City were shredded to vapor by the sheer force of its arrival.

Something fundamental to the world was breaking apart and reforming.

A blinding beam of pure, holy light pierced the distant skyline.

The pillar shot directly upward, evaporating the war clouds and brilliantly illuminating the curvature of the earth.

Simultaneously, the ancient World Tree erupted.

Its towering branches stretched outward, eating the sky at an impossible, terrifying rate.

The massive wooden trunk surged higher, piercing the stratosphere, tearing through the atmospheric layers until its glowing canopy brushed the cold void of space.

Its divine presence clamped down on the entire globe in an instant, suffocating the ambient mana of the world and replacing it with something entirely new.

Even from halfway across the world, standing in the rubble of the Celestial City, Ethen could clearly see the World Tree towering over the horizon.

The sheer, overwhelming physical scale of the transformation was beyond logic. It eclipsed everything Ethen had seen in the Nether Realm.

Ethen’s breath caught in his throat.

He had personally, painfully felt this specific density of energy only once before.

It was the exact same conceptual weight that had tried to tear his physical body apart from the inside during his earlier trials.

It was the oppressive, unyielding force that defied the very limits of biological evolution.

Ethen’s cold, calculated expression finally cracked, replaced by a sharp, absolute focus as the energy washed over him.

There was no mistaking that signature pressure.

God Almighty.