The Villain's Story

Chapter 942: Project Alpha.(2).

The Demonic Beasts rushed at the fleet hidden in the darkness. The Sage, Oliver Olsfer, closed his eyes and lowered his hand, towards Terra Damnum.

The Demonic beasts roared, the sound of hundreds of thousands of them roaring at once would instill fear into anyone, but not this fleet.

Boom.

The first detonation came from the sea.

A single bloom of fire on the horizon… there and then enormous, expanding outward in a perfect circle of light that turned the ocean orange for miles in every direction and threw the silhouettes of a thousand ships into sharp relief for a single, suspended moment. In that moment the true scale of what had come became visible all at once.

The fleet revealed by the fire it had started. The darkness weaponized and then split open by the thing it had been hiding.

Then the second detonation. Then the third.

And then, far too many to count.

The sea erupted. Not in one place, everywhere. Simultaneously and without pause, as though the continent itself had been wired and someone had thrown a single switch. The ground of Terra Damnum shook not in isolated tremors but in a continuous, rolling violence that made the earth feel suddenly unreliable, as though the fundamental promise of solid ground had been quietly revoked.

If it did not hit the demonic beasts coming at them, it hit the coastline of Terra Damnum. The shockwaves from each detonation overlapped with the next before the first had finished, creating a pressure that had no rhythm, no pattern, no mercy.

As for the night? The Dark Night which hid both the demonic beasts and the grand fleet of humanity? Gone.

It did not end, but was abolished.

What replaced it was not daylight but something harsher and more honest than daylight had ever been. The light of burning things. The light of explosions stacked so densely across the landscape that shadows no longer existed, there was nowhere for darkness to hide because fire was coming from every direction at once.

The sky above the continent glowed a deep, furious orange red that was visible from hundreds of miles away, a false dawn that had nothing of dawn’s gentleness and everything of its totality.

From above, from the cockpits of the aircraft banking and climbing and diving through the smoke filled air, the coastline of the continent below looked like the surface of something volcanic. A landscape of fire and ruin and the moving shapes of things still burning, still collapsing, still becoming something other than what they had been hours before.

In the Sky, the Mighty Mothership watched silently as the fleet annihilated hundreds of thousands of Demonic Beasts, burning them with crimson fire and smashing them with cold steel. The Two dragons flanking it silently looked on, Kazikato, disturbed by the bright light, hid in the shadows of the Mighty Mothership, while Elijah looked at the beautiful fire with a heavy heart.

In the deep waters, Alan closed his eyes and ears as the underwater vessels behind him unleased all kinds of torpedoes, each decimating the demonic creatures within the sea. The shockwaves pushed his massive body back, and for a single second.

Alan wondered.

Could he survive this?

Perhaps, perhaps he could, with his durability and the power of the Phoenix, but Alan wasn’t willing to try it. He was afraid, slightly. Not because of the assault under the sea, but above it as well. He could view it all even with his eyes closed. Mana was crying, as human steel showed it’s dominance.

The World itself ached as the laws of the world, of day and night were defied. Alan wasn’t confident he could survive this, not at all, if he was ever on the opposite end.

‘So this is it, huh. The military might of an entire planet…’

He thought, as the realization dawned upon him. This wasn’t even all of it, the Mothership had yet to act, and furthermore…

‘A nuke hasn’t been used yet.’

He had never seen one in action, well… of course he hadn’t. But he hadn’t seen any video of it at as well, not in any movie or show. Of course, in his memories, those that belonged to James did have some of a nuclear weapon, but even then, it was old test videos back on his Earth.

Alan wondered, what was a nuke really like? What power was it like? Although a continuous barrage like this was an issue, he was somewhat confident in surviving a nuclear warhead. If he prepared for it, of course. He had survived Aranus’s endless barrage of chaos magic. He could do it… even if he failed, his heart was quite durable, it could still survive, and then, his regeneration would help him.

But then again, this was all conjecture. He hadn’t really seen a nuclear warhead in action, but when he thought about all he had experienced, he didn’t think he would lose to it.

Alan got rid of those thoughts quickly, focusing on protecting his body and the ships behind him from the blood and guts of the demonic beasts. This was something he was doing on his own, purely because he didn’t want to get covered in disgusting guts and other things, the dirty sea filled with sludge was enough…

The underwater vessels behind him were simply getting a free service. Alan focused on maintaining the barrier he created for about an hour, that was when the endless barrage of fire and steel ended.

And when the sky was filled with nothing but smoke and bloody mist, when the dirty sea had turned pure red from blood, and when the coastline of Terra Damnum burned like hell itself, the order to retreat finally came.

The Fleet began to retreat, it began to fall back. But this did not mean the attack was over.

It was simply a safety measure, against the nuclear onslaught that was about to follow. They were just retreating to watch the strongest, most destructive weapon be unleashed on the shameful mark on Earth.