Chapter 622 - 622: Snap

The morning sun had finally risen fully over Orario. Yet instead of bringing warmth and hope, the dawn light sweeping across every corner of the world merely lifted the veil of illusory peace, exposing the stench of blood and the insatiable greed that never slept.

Under Charlie's Magic Sense, which extended without limit to encompass the entire planet, every instance of cruelty was laid bare in perfect clarity, fueling the fury now raging fiercely within him.

In Orario's slums—the Daedalus Street district—the arrival of morning did nothing to stop the criminals from carrying on with their business.

In a narrow alley slick with filthy water, three burly men had cornered a young adventurer who was already gravely injured and covered in blood.

"Please, this is all the magic stone loot I managed to collect in the Dungeon today, risking my life to get it." The young man pleaded, clutching his torn-open chest.

*BAM!*

A heavy boot slammed into his face, instantly breaking his nose and sending fresh blood spraying everywhere.

One of the tattooed thugs picked up the fallen coin pouch, then spat on the ground in disgust.

"That's all you've got? Are you fucking kidding me?! The boss of this territory needs a bigger cut! And since you're completely useless..." The man drew a rusty dagger and twirled it with a vicious grin. "You might as well die!"

PU-CHI!

The sound of the stab cut off the young adventurer's breath. His body collapsed lifelessly beneath the morning light.

"..."

In another alley not far away, lewd laughter rang out in bursts.

Several thugs were extorting protection money from a poor shop girl and sexually harassing her, paying no heed to her tearful pleas for mercy in the cold morning air.

"..."

Far beyond Orario's walls, in Altena, a city renowned for its supremacy in magic, cruelty took the form of cold, merciless magical experiments.

Inside a hidden underground laboratory, several elite mages in white robes stood around a stone examination table.

A little girl of the Demi-Human race lay chained atop it, her body trembling violently as Mana was forcibly pumped into her veins.

"The Mana destabilization process in the test subject has failed to withstand this artificial energy flow. Her heartbeat is weakening," an assistant mage reported in a flat tone.

The experiment's leader merely stared at the scene coldly, without the slightest flicker of emotion.

"Failure is commonplace in the pursuit of magical perfection. Clean up this laboratory and find a fresh supply of village girls from the border to serve as the next test subjects. In this world, power is everything, and the sacrifices of insignificant little rats will never be recorded in history."

"..."

Meanwhile, along the borders of the Kingdom of Rakia, a land ruled by the military tyranny established under the War God Ares, the morning air was filled with the roar of flames and billowing smoke.

Under the command of their aggressive military leadership, columns of soldiers marched through the ruins of a border region they had just conquered.

"Round up all the captives! Tie their wrists!" a Rakian military commander shouted, raising his sword, which was stained with Elf blood. "Make sure all the goods and young girls are properly separated!"

"The rich and the Pleasure Quarter in Orario are always in need of fresh slaves. They'll pay us a fortune!"

The soldiers' laughter mingled with the sound of the young village girls' unsteady footsteps as they stumbled along in tears, forced into slavery by the insatiable political ambitions of a tyrannical military regime.

"..."

On the other side of the world, the beautiful archipelago of the Far East, with its classical architecture, was no more immune to the shadows of evil than anywhere else.

At a secret harbor shrouded in the morning mist, a large merchant ship was preparing to weigh anchor.

Inside the ship's dark, suffocating hold, dozens of impoverished girls from villages and towns, illegally abducted by a human trafficking syndicate, were imprisoned in cramped storage compartments.

"Not a sound, or I'll feed you to the sea monsters!" the vicious-faced ship captain barked as he inspected their chains.

He turned to look at a slave broker dressed in luxurious clothing.

"This shipment has gone exceptionally smoothly. Goods from the Far East have an excellent reputation on Orario's black market. The rich there will be scrambling to outbid one another for them, whether to serve as personal attendants or to satisfy their lust."

"..."

Every one of these vile scenes—from the fighting, murder, extortion, and harassment on Daedalus Street, to the inhumane experiments in Altena, the military oppression in Rakia, and the illegal slave-trading network in the Far East—was projected with crystal clarity into Charlie's mind through the reach of his Magic Sense.

The atmosphere inside the living room of the Empyrean Citadel suddenly plunged to a bone-chilling cold.

An extraordinarily dense and intense aura of fury erupted from Charlie's body.

His Six Eyes flashed sharply, emitting a sky-blue radiance that pierced the boundaries of space, while his fists clenched so tightly that the surrounding energy seemed to tremble violently. His composure had completely crumbled.

Feeling the sudden emotional upheaval radiating from Charlie, Astraea asked with concern,

"Charlie? What's wrong?"

"Huuu... Sorry. I lost control for a moment." Charlie rubbed his face, then looked at Astraea with a faint, apologetic smile. "Life here is so comfortable that sometimes I forget just how low human beings can sink."

Kei, who had a history of surviving in a harsh post-apocalyptic world, could vaguely guess what he was getting at.

She knew all too well that when driven by ego and stripped of their morals, human beings could become monsters far more terrifying than even the monsters of the Dungeon.

"All right. Let's begin."

Unwilling to waste any more time, Charlie raised his right hand in front of his chest. He rubbed his thumb against his middle finger, and then...

SNAP!

He snapped his fingers decisively.

The small sound rang out with remarkable clarity throughout the living room of the Empyrean Citadel.

Yet that snap was like the tolling of a death knell for a mass execution, resounding across every corner of the planet.

The Dragon King's Authority: Annihilation, customized to work in conjunction with the karma-scanning technique he had created, was immediately triggered on a global scale.

Its power instantly locked onto every individual in the world who had accumulated negative karma, without exception.

◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆

At that very instant, a terrifying global phenomenon began to unfold across the world.

The judgment did not arrive in the form of a tremendous explosion or a deafening bolt of lightning. Instead, it took the form of an erasure of existence—a process that unfolded slowly and silently, yet was utterly terrifying.

On Daedalus Street, the tattooed thug who had just pulled his dagger from the young adventurer's chest abruptly stopped his cruel laughter.

He blinked as he felt a strange numbness spreading from the tips of his toes.

"Huh? What's this...?" the thug muttered in confusion.

When he lowered his head, his eyes widened in incomprehensible horror.

His leather boots were slowly beginning to crack, disintegrating into fine black ash.

The cracks crept up his ankles, turning his flesh, bones, and clothing into dust that scattered in the morning breeze sweeping through Orario.

"H-Help! My legs! My legs are disappearing!" he screamed hysterically, trying to take a step, only to discover that his lower body could no longer support him.

His two companions standing nearby were powerless to help.

The skin on their own hands had begun to peel away, transforming into gray particles of dust that evaporated into the air like sand eroded by a storm.

They screamed in terror and clawed at the alley walls, only for their fingers to crumble into ash the moment they touched the stone.

Throughout the entire slum district, thousands of thugs, murderers, and extortionists writhed on the ground, wailing hysterically as they watched their own bodies slowly disintegrate from their feet to the tops of their heads, unable to comprehend what kind of magical catastrophe was punishing them.

"..."

The same scale of destruction unfolded in Altena.

Inside the sterile underground laboratory, the leader of the elite mages, who had just ordered the search for new test subjects, froze in place. The quill in his hand fell, but before it could touch the floor, his own fingers had already disintegrated into fine dust.

"What... What kind of magic is this...?" the mage whispered, his breathing ragged.

As a high-ranking mage, he tried to cast a curse-dispelling spell as quickly as possible.

A defensive magic circle materialized around him, but it immediately shattered into pieces, having no logical foundation with which to counter Annihilation.

The flesh on his upper arm began to crumble slowly, like dry sand blown away by a fan.

The laboratory assistants screamed in panic and rushed toward the exit, but one by one, they collapsed in the corridors as their bodies crumbled into piles of ash on the stone floor, leaving behind only their empty, deflated white robes.

"..."

At the border of the Kingdom of Rakia, a military commander riding his horse suddenly felt a chill that pierced his very soul.

Terrified screams erupted from his ranks.

"Commander! My body! Look at my body!" a foot soldier screamed as he watched the flesh beneath his iron breastplate evaporate into black ash, leaving holes in his chest.

The horses whinnied in panic as their riders vanished from their saddles one after another, disintegrating into clouds of dust in the morning air.

The commander tried to draw his sword, only to discover that his palm had already crumbled into drifting ash.

Horror spread across his face as the ashen cracks crept up his neck.

All around him, thousands of brutal raiders notorious for their cruelty along the border collapsed en masse, transforming that morning's battlefield into a vast expanse of black ash that scattered beneath the powerful wind.

"..."

Even out on the vast ocean en route to the Far East, a secret slave-trading vessel suddenly lost control.

The captain at the helm could only stare at his hands as they slowly vanished like smoke.

"No... Impossible... Amaterasu-sama, save me!" he shrieked hoarsely before his mouth and face cracked into grains of dust, leaving only his captain's hat to fall onto the wooden deck.

The slave brokers and guards in the ship's hold suffered the same fate. They scattered in sheer panic, colliding with one another, yet every impact only hastened the disintegration of their bodies, which crumbled into fragments of black ash.

Within minutes, the entire illegal crew had vanished without a trace, leaving dozens of captive girls in the ship's hold, bewildered as the chains binding them suddenly slackened because their captors had evaporated into dust.

"..."

This slow process of extermination unfolded simultaneously across the entire planet.

Because it caused no immediate physical pain, but instead gradually erased its victims from existence, tens of millions of people around the world were forced to witness an invisible power executing criminals. Mass hysteria erupted as evil people wailed and begged the heavens for mercy, only for their names and very existence to be completely erased, leaving behind nothing but scattered piles of dust beneath the light of the rising sun.