Parallel Memory

Chapter 699 699: Unision Raid: Pre-phase

The moment the Emperor shifted his stance, the world shuddered.

Zero exhaled once—slow, controlled—and frost spiraled from his fingertips like a living thing responding to its master. His mana base screamed under the pressure, but he ignored the strain. Aamon's twisted aura surged violently in front of him, but Zero wasn't looking at the devil anymore. His focus locked onto the Emperor of Destruction beside him.

They didn't speak.

They didn't need to.

The Emperor tilted his hand, and the sphere of Cataclysmic Destruction rippled like the surface of a dark ocean, pulling everything nearby into its gravity. Zero raised his right hand, frost swirling upward in a vortex of white-blue energy, cold enough to distort the air. A thin streak of pale light formed, sharpening as if reality itself were being carved open.

Then—impact.

The two forces collided.

The contact point between frost and destruction did not simply merge—they erupted.

A thunderous shockwave blasted outward, tearing across the battlefield in a spiraling burst of cold, dark aura. The sky cracked open, clouds ripping apart under the pressure. The earth convulsed with a deafening boom that drowned out screams, steel, and magic alike. A wall of roaring energy—half pitch-black, half white-blue—surged outward in a sweeping arc.

Every human on the battlefield froze.

At first, they thought the ground was collapsing beneath them. Then came the weight. The pressure. The suffocating cold threaded with annihilating darkness. It wasn't the oppressive aura of a devil general—it was worse, deeper, older. A primal instinct shot through them:

We shouldn't be here.

We weren't meant to see this.

This is not the Devil King.

This is… something else.

Veteran captains who had fought at the borders for decades felt their knees weaken. Elite squads who had faced demon beasts and corrupted giants found their breaths stolen. Even the strongest of the SS-rank soldiers, scattered across the frontline, felt their limbs stiffen momentarily.

A commander near the eastern ridge dropped his spear entirely.

"W–What monster…? That's not devil energy—no, not fully—what the hell is that!?"

Nearby, a group of high-grade mages stumbled backward, eyes wide.

"That… that isn't human mana output!"

"Wasn't the intel that the Devil King was manifesting!? Why does this pressure feel—this is wrong!"

"DID WE JUST WALK INTO SOMETHING WE SHOULDN'T HAVE!?"

The wind whipped violently, freezing in midair before shattering into glittering shards. Craters spread beneath Zero and the Emperor's joint aura like blossoming storms.

Human morale did not break—it simply vanished.

They no longer believed they were fighting the devil king.

Now they feared they had accidentally stepped into a battlefield with a being beyond devil lords… and that being, terrifyingly, was standing on their side.

Or was it?

None of them could tell. The aura was nothing like human techniques, nothing like known magic systems. It carried the crushing sense of oblivion—the kind only true calamity beings emitted.

Fear spread faster than the shockwave.

"Are we sure we should be here… fighting… whatever that thing is?" whispered a trembling knight.

"It's human," his vice-captain muttered, voice cracking. "It has to be. Doesn't it?"

"You tell me," the knight said, voice trembling as frost crept along his gauntlet even from this distance. "Since when could humans radiate that?"

The only answer they received was the echoing roar of the merged aura hammering the world.

On the Devil Side

For the devils, the reaction was far more primal.

Cold.

A type of cold they had not felt in centuries—not since the Dark Age, when the world nearly froze beneath an entity that existed before recorded history.

Thousands of devils involuntarily shivered.

Even the elite commanders—those with several lives' worth of battle instincts—were struck speechless. They stared across the battlefield at the rising pillar of frost-dark energy and felt their blood chill.

"This aura… this isn't the Emperor of Destruction alone," one devil captain whispered, trembling. "This is something else."

"But how—how can a human produce such mana output?! We collected every scrap of information from the devil contractors. There was no record—nothing—about this monster!"

Another devil backed up, eyes dilating.

"If humans had someone like this… that entire war fifty years ago would have ended in a month! This doesn't make sense!"

"It's impossible," one of the mid-commanders stammered. "Humans don't possess this caliber of destructive essence. Not even their Saints or High Regents."

"That boy…" another muttered, staring at Zero's silhouette through the storming aura. "Is he truly human?"

The devils, for one of the first times since the war began, felt something familiar and yet rare:

fear.

Fear of the cold.

Fear of the annihilation woven into that frost.

Fear of the fact that whatever power Zero was drawing from was nowhere in their recorded data.

They had trained for every possibility their contractors warned them of.

Except this.

A monster they had never accounted for.

A human who was not supposed to exist.

The battlefield fell silent.

Everyone—human and devil alike—stopped moving for a full breath.

All except one group.

Mia Frostine

Mia felt the ground tremble beneath her feet, her boots sliding half a step over ruined stone as she steadied herself. The gauntlet on her left arm vibrated violently from the pressure. A normal human would have been thrown halfway across the outpost by now.

But Mia's eyes did not widen in fear. Nor did she flinch.

Her heartbeat—already loud from the chaos of battle—skipped once, then steadied with a fierce calm she hadn't felt in years.

She knew this aura.

She knew this cold.

She had felt it in the Elven Kingdom.

She had felt it in the Tower.

She had felt it whenever Zero pushed past what should have been possible.

And just like the first time she witnessed it, her chest tightened—not with terror, but with something inexplicably grounding.

"…Zero," she whispered under her breath.

Seraphine, standing nearby with blood trailing down her cheek, shielded her eyes from the blinding frost-blast.

"What the—Mia! Do you know what's happening up there? Is that really a human?"

Nock Fletcher steadied his staff, his robes flapping wildly in the spiraling wind.

"That boy…" Nock murmured, watching the battlefield distort under the merged aura. "He's finally showing it, isn't he?"

Mia didn't answer, but her eyes said everything.

Shock?

No.

Recognition.

And something close to—relief.

Saintess Amelia

Not far away, Amelia knelt at the center of a glowing barrier, her hands trembling as she infused more mana into her large-scale support skill. Sweat streamed down her neck. Her vision blurred at the edges.

Light radiated from her fingertips in a wide web of healing, bolstering the injured across the battlefield.

She was barely holding the spell together.

But the moment she felt that surge—Zero's aura mixing with the Emperor's—her concentration steadied. The exhaustion in her bones didn't vanish, but something within her stirred.

She knew the source.

Saints were sensitive to mana signatures—especially ones they had once subconsciously clung to.

And this one…

This one made her lips curve upward into the faintest smile.

"…You," she whispered, eyes soft. "I knew you were still holding back."

Her attendants looked alarmed.

"Saintess, should we fall back?!"

"Should we strengthen the barrier—?!"

"Are we under attack from another devil general—?!"

"No." Amelia's voice was calm—too calm for the chaos around her.

"That is not the enemy."

She closed her eyes for a brief moment as the frost-dark wave rolled over the land.

"That is Zero."

Her smile deepened, subtle and fleeting.

She was the only one who did not panic.

The only one who did not fear.

The only one who understood—deeply, unquestionably—that the battlefield had just shifted because he had stepped forward.

Back at the Center of the Battlefield

Aamon recoiled violently as the merged aura carved across the ground toward him. His wings convulsed, his pupils shrinking into sharp slits. Even a devil of his caliber felt his instincts scream.

He slashed out with raw mana, but his own energy was swallowed—devoured—by the merging frost-destruction force.

"This—this cannot be!" he roared, backing away despite himself. "You two… combined?!"

Zero didn't answer.

The Emperor didn't even bother acknowledging him.

Their energies continued to fuse.

Where the Emperor's destruction touched Zero's frost, the world distorted. Reality wavered as if forced to bow. The icy-cold annihilation rose into the sky like a pillar reaching toward the heavens.

The air itself froze.

The battlefield dimmed.

The pressure deepened.

Zero felt his bones shake.

The Emperor felt the remnants of his ancient pride stir.

And Aamon finally understood—

He might die here.

Not from one or the other.

But from them together.

The merged aura grew sharper, heavier, rolling like a forming tidal wave ready to collapse on everything in its path. The two energies spiraled around each other in a tight ring, preparing for the final convergence.

Zero gritted his teeth, frost aura intensifying.

The Emperor's voice rumbled like distant thunder:

"On my signal."

Zero nodded once.

Their powers tilted inward—

Preparing to collide fully.

The world held its breath.

Humans and devils alike froze.

The battlefield went silent.

And just before the two forces locked into final unity—