Kabur, Gloriana, Bashi, and Lily were shocked to see Alrein killing the True God that had been about to kill them all, but they didn't have the strength to even speak at that moment, so they could only observe in silence.
Alrein descended to the places where they were lying and healed them after gathering the four in the same place. There was no way he would leave with those four in such a sorry state.
"You should be alright now. You can just look for some weak ones to kill if you want, but your part in the Second Calamity is over, so you can just retire. Take it as some kind of extreme training to temper yourselves. Without me triggering your luck to the extreme, you wouldn't have survived this kind of opponent."
It was a fact that Lily and Bashi would have wanted to battle even if Yale said that they were too weak. If possible, he didn't want to send them to battle since they were just Gods and far too inexperienced, but he knew that they would have ended up involved in some way, so he prepared the situation, so they experienced the truth without letting them be in real danger by having Alrein protecting them.
Only after seeing the disparity between themselves and the enemy, they would forget about any ideas of trying to play the hero. In any other situation, they wouldn't have to worry, but the Second Calamity was a place where even some of the most renowned True Gods of the history could die.
Even without Alrein's words, they already knew that their battle didn't have any real meaning since Alrein had been there from the beginning protecting them. However, they understood his reasons very well. They had just seen that they weren't enough to face opponents at that level.
Of course, not all the enemies were at the level of the one they faced, but he wasn't the strongest either, so the level of danger was easy to understand.
Although everything was set for the sake of Bashi and Lily, Kabur and Gloriana also learned how weak they were compared to the strongest of their opponents.
After all, they weren't among the strongest members of the Council of Gods, not they were very well-known.
If it wasn't because they allied themselves with Yale, they didn't doubt that they would have died in the Second Calamity.
"Do as you wish, but I am leaving now. I need to kill others at the level of this bastard. They had already wiped out the teams in charge of delaying them while I was protecting you, so at least I will avenge them."
Alrein disappeared after speaking those words, but although the words were about serious stuff, Alrein didn't seem too concerned about those deaths.
However, he had sacrificed a lot of people just for the sake of them, so those four didn't dare to think of speak something about Alrein being too partial.
Of course, they didn't know the truth behind the Second Calamity, so they believed that it was their fault that the others died. They didn't think that Alrein wasn't going to save the others anyway if they were unable to endure until he reached their place.
"It is my fault..."
Bashi had calmed down once the True God died, so when he recovered, the effects of the Rage Divinity faded.
At that moment, he understood that without Alrein's interference, Lily would have died, and he would have followed her moments after that. Even their masters would have died just a bit after that.
He never took that war too seriously. Even if he couldn't defeat the opponents, he believed that staying alive wouldn't be a problem, but it was all a problem of perspective.
He wasn't used to facing people like the members of the rebels. They weren't only strong, they were merciless.
When training with people he knew like his father or his master, he knew that he was weaker than them, but he never felt that he would be killed by them since they never had the intention to harm him.
"You don't need to think about it anymore. We all overestimated ourselves. I should have predicted that something like this could happen and designed a proper strategy. If I had led you properly, this shouldn't have happened."
Kabur felt the greatest shame since he was the strongest of the group, but when the situation was at the worst, he had been useless.
Even though all had part of the fault, he should have been the one to cool them down as the leader of the group, but he failed.
"Don't worry more about this. We are lucky that Alrein was protecting us. Let's retire from the war."
Gloriana didn't want to think more about that topic, and since they weren't forced to battle, she didn't want to do it anymore.
She saw how easily Alrein killed that powerful enemy. Although she thought that part of it was because the True God was somewhat distracted at that moment due to the victory, Alrein showed to be far more powerful than she expected. It wasn't just that his defense made him unbeatable, his attack power wasn't weak at all, even in the context of the Second Calamity.
Since Alrein himself told them that they didn't need to continue battling, she was willing to take the offer.
"I am with my master. This war is out of our league. We aren't needed anymore, so let's not waste our lives here."
Lily had been eager to battle before, but after being almost killed by a single attack, she knew what she should do.
Bashi seemed to want to say something, but he knew that what Lily said was the truth. Although he didn't want to be seen as a coward who retires after losing a single time, the images of Lily being almost dead and how he was trashed even after obtaining a huge power-up were still fresh on his mind.
"Bashi, you aren't a coward, but continuing in this war, no, in this calamity, is just being reckless."
Lily knew how Bashi felt, and she had seen him attack the True God before, but with such a great difference in strength that was just seeking death. However, she couldn't deny that she felt happy to see how he reacted at the same time as she didn't want him to act like that reckless.
"I know. Let's just retire. We will just worry our parents if we continue to battle with our power."
As Bashi spoke, Kabur nodded in agreement. He also felt shame for retire despite being alive, but since Alrein gave them the option, it was wiser to take it.
If they were needed to win, Alrein wouldn't have told them that they could retire.
"We will try to avoid battles from now on. Only if it is unavoidable, we will battle again."
That was Kabur final statement about the future of the group in the Second Calamity, and no one complained about it.
Some months after that group retired from the war, Shiba, Eini, and Lina finally met their targets.
They had already been informed that their targets moved in a group of three like them.
That was a strange group formed by three members of the rebels that weren't used to be together, but they ended up being together anyway.
One of them was Shiba's target and also who the group had been told to be the main target of the group, Lesta's disciple, Pavel.
The other two weren't that important compared to Pavel based on what they heard, but they were far more famous than Pavel.
One of them was one of the original gods, the Ice Goddess. Yale purposely set her as Lina's target since both seemed to have a similar specialty.
The last was a former investigator who retired from the investigator team before Pavel joined it, but he was quite famous as an incompetent in that field. However, he was really good when it came to battling, so he was shifted to the battle division despite him being more inclined to investigate.
He was Eini's target, but she didn't like it because the targets of Shiba and Lina fit well with them due to their specialties and positions, but she was completely unrelated to her target.
Of course, she knew that asking for an opponent that fit her better wasn't reasonable, so she just accepted it. She knew that she and Lina were just battling those two because they were with Pavel, who, despite being the less famous of the group, was Lesta's disciple, so he was more important.
"You should be the famous best disciple of Master Liye. I always wanted to battle against you properly, but I am following orders, so I am sorry that this won't be a proper one versus one battle."
Shiba's group was targeting Pavel's group, but Pavel's group was also targeting Shiba's group.
"Stop the chitchat and let's kill them. I don't like being your babysitter just because Lesta ordered it."
The Ice Goddess didn't like to be grouped with someone like Pavel and that former investigator, so she wanted to finish quickly and leave on her own.
"Couldn't we capture them? Even if I use them as experiment subjects, no one should be able to complain when they die, right?"
The former investigator knew that he was useless in that field, but he still loved to find experiment subjects that would suffer the failures.