Chapter 748: 748: Only a Ruthless Heart, Only a Relentless Hand
Let the enemy tower higher than mountains, spread wider than seas.
Let the demons come by the billions, never-ending.
Let the gods rule these stars and claim all life in their names.
Orson would break every rule, cut down every lurking fiend.
Bellara stood stunned as the six Demon Gods and the swarming horde streamed past her, hurling themselves at that colossal, godlike silhouette.
He simply lifted his hand. A string of crystal orbs spilled away.
Space buckled. Tens of millions of demons were dragged into the lattice of orbs and shredded to cosmic dust in an instant. The Six were caught in the silent detonation, torn and blood-slick, limbs sheared away as they reeled.
Orson took one step and vaulted the sky, dropping onto the Broodmother’s surface.
The horror was so immense he felt he had landed on a planet. No life, only a nauseating tide of pulsing energy. The crust was a mesh of knotted muscle and throbbing veins, twisted into a landscape out of nightmare.
“Manifest Heaven and Earth, revised.”
His face turned grave. The God of War staff in his hand distorted and grew, and Manifest Heaven and Earth lengthened a second weapon into its other palm. A sword like a mountain pulled from the first dawn, its edge drowned in rolling chaos mist.
His roar shook the stars. He drove the blade straight down into that scabrous flesh. The world split. Chaotic swordlight tore into the heavens.
The dead crust woke screaming as a million warped mouths yawned open and howled. The next heartbeat, the tide of mouths was erased beneath the storm of sword-qi and fell silent.
You killed 1 Infinite Dimensions adventurer.
You killed 1 Infinite Dimensions NPC.
Orson’s brows pinched. He had hurt nothing that mattered. His blows had cut down not the Broodmother, but tens of thousands of living beings.
He understood at once. The thing had no attack stat, but its tricks were monstrous. It was spending the “stored rations” from the three feeder worlds to soak damage. Every writhing mouth was an adventurer, a life being burned on command.
Vile did not begin to cover it.
Strike the mother, and three worlds would die by your hand.
A soft soul would falter here. A conscience would balk at the next swing.
Orson’s eyes did not waver.
The blade fell, plain and without ornament, more terrible than an SS-tier forbidden curse. Another million died beneath his edge.
The worm had misjudged him. He was a man whose years were nearly ash, a man who still had a family waiting, a man who intended to go home.
Mercy on the surface was never mercy at all. From the day the three worlds were wired to this queen as feedstock, they were already dead. What he could do was end it fast.
Fast enough that some few would live.
Only a ruthless heart. Only a relentless hand.
His war-avatar trudged down through the sundered meat, one step at a time.
Half an hour later, he no longer knew how many times he had swung, how many ultimates he had burned. He had only one thought left.
Bury the Broodmother with the dead it had devoured.
Critical Hit – 32.9 billion
Chaos raged. A tide of black blood geysered in the dark.
“Devour the firmament.”
The rasp crawled through the hollow caverns. Orson could not see the outer fields, but he knew what was happening. More lives were being stripped to fuel the queen.
And so it was. Within heartbeats, the Broodmother’s health bar surged and its maximum climbed again. One hundred and thirty billion. A number that made the mind white out.
BlazeKing had been right. Leave this thing to grow and it would be a calamity beyond counting. Not the end of a few worlds. The end of many.
“Behind you,” Bellara snapped.
Four Demon Gods came slavering down the canyon carved in gore. Bellara threw herself into two of them, holding them hard. She was clever. She could have killed those two outright in their state, but she left them one sliver, denying the brood the trigger to reincarnate them again.
“Chaos Judgment: Inferno.”
Orson flicked into his chaos mage form. Dozens of death-stars hurled out at once. Gravity webbed the four demons together, pinning them in place.
He left them all at a thread. He could clean house later.
“Roughly thirty seconds between Devour cycles.”
His eyes were cold on the black river boiling far below.
That meant unless the three feeder worlds were bled empty, he had to dump more than a hundred billion damage inside thirty seconds. For a mid-tier god, that was a fantasy.
“Good thing I don’t play by the galaxy’s rules. I am Earth’s Supreme Firepower.”
His mouth curved. While Devour cycled and the brood rose back to full, he struck.
“Please name the skill.”
Six A-tier awakened magics braided into one. The blade drank six colors of light. The prompt chimed again.
He had no time left to waste. His lifespan was almost gone. “Time’s short. Random.”
“Chaos Battle Art Random Slash has been named.”
Orson stared for half a heartbeat at the new entry. He had meant for the system to toss out a name, not take his words literally. It even added Slash as if anyone would miss the point.
Thank the void he hadn’t said “whatever.” New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on novel·fıre·net
He threw the avatar forward. Two hundredfold attributes. The giant blade came down like the fall of a moon.
No flourish. No trick. Only raw inevitability.
The Broodmother flared with a thousand rivers of sword-qi, brilliant lines spearing up from every point across its titanic bulk. Any demon that touched that light exploded to cinders and drift.
For minutes the cosmos rang. The queen’s screams did not stop.
The endless horde and the six torn Demon Gods pivoted under a hidden hand and hurled themselves homeward, piling bodies onto the blade-lights to blunt them. They died by the tens of thousands, and the line still burned.
In his book there was no such thing as underestimating an enemy. No matter how strong the numbers on your panel, no matter how gorgeous the spell you just cast.
You finish the kill. Always.
His six classes flipped without pause. If it twitched he cut it. He cut until he saw clean light again.
The crimson text rose. The taut wire inside him went slack at last.
Manifest Heaven and Earth fell away after an hour of strain.
He drifted in the dark, leaning on the War Staff, the fatigue plain on his face. He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week.
A pale hand slid beneath his back and held him up.
“Woman,” he murmured, the old crooked smile on his mouth, though the corners of his eyes were webbed with lines and his temples had gone gray in seconds. He could feel death waving cheerfully from just beyond the veil.
Lifespan remaining: 30 days.
He studied Bellara’s perfect face and gave a weak chuckle. “If you kill me now, I think the people of the Sunforge will revolt.”
She said nothing. His fingers brushed his cheek. Wet.
“The God of Arms, crying?” he teased.
Her face did not change. She caught his collar and hauled him upright. “You want to go home. Then I will take you home.”