Chapter 404: The Blue Sky Is Dead
Levis Ann, the elf rapist.
The group hit hardest by the scandal surrounding her, publicly branded as the [Witch], was the Goddess Church, and within it, the Holy Knights she had personally led.
Called back from the central front, the Holy Knights gathered one by one in the Leo Marquisate in response to Levis Ann’s summons.
At the highest tier of orders, a mobilization on par with a [Holy War], the Holy Knights dropped everything and assembled in the Leo Marquisate. The moment the Holy Knights finish rallying, advance to the Barony of Virgo and join the subjugation force. That was the last order Levis Ann had left behind.
But Levis Ann had been captured by the enemy. The barony had become the Demon King’s Army’s territory.
That couldn’t be true.
The Holy Knights believed in Levis Ann. They believed in their comrade-in-arms. To them, Levis Ann was the most trustworthy and dependable person in the world, second only to the Goddess and their own parents.
Therefore, what the elves were saying had to be lies. They must have been bewitched by wicked devils and demon trickery, unlawfully holding Levis Ann prisoner.
"The elves must have been brainwashed!! We have to capture them and break the spell!!"
No one could stop their fanatical conviction.
And so, a chase between the Demon King’s Army and the Holy Knights erupted along the main road from the Leo Marquisate to the Barony of Virgo.
***
"This is troublesome. At this rate, they’ll catch up to us any moment."
Arthur, the captain of the orc unit that had come along to escort the elves, clicked his tongue at the rapidly closing distance. The elves had dismounted from their palanquins, and the unicorns had returned to horse form, carrying the elves as they galloped.
"Those orcs are controlling the elves!! After them!!"
But the Holy Knights’ pursuit, bordering on madness, drew ever closer. They were practically within arm’s reach now, and the situation would become dire if they didn’t fight back.
"Even if we did declare war against the Goddess Church, they came after us way too quickly."
"I don’t think the declaration of war had anything to do with it. It seems like they just impulsively rushed out on their own. All the better for us, though. This is the perfect chance to crush the enemy’s morale."
The orcs began swelling the muscles throughout their bodies, one after another.
"Grrr...!"
Horns began sprouting from the orcs’ heads. Massive wings began unfurling from their backs. The dozens of orcs who had come to retrieve the elves spread their dragon wings one by one and scooped up the elves and unicorns in their arms.
Flap, flap.
The orcs, the dragonians, soared into the sky. Nifela, cradled in Arthur’s arms, looked down at the Holy Knights and spoke.
"Trying to destroy the evidence? Fat chance! We’ve already seen through your wicked schemes, you rapists who falsely invoke the Goddess!"
"You bitch! You dare run your mouth when your brain’s been violated by monsters, wearing the skin of an elf!!"
A Holy Knight jabbed a finger at them and shouted.
"The Goddess follows us! The Goddess is with us!!"
"What a joke! The Goddess supports US!"
An elf dangling from an orc’s tail as they flew lifted up her top. The Holy Knights gulped at the sudden exposure of her lower abdomen.
"Th, that’s?!"
On the elf’s lower abdomen, the Goddess’s stigmata was shining brilliantly. Because the Holy Knights were practitioners of divine power and nothing else, they had no way to deny the existence of the stigmata.
"Divine punishment upon those who distort and falsely claim the Goddess’s will!!"
Whooom.
A massive amount of silver light began gathering at the elf’s lower abdomen. The Holy Knights frantically wheeled their horses around and fled toward the marquisate.
"Luna Cannon, fire!!"
KABOOOOM!!
A colossal line was carved across the earth. The Holy Knights were left dumbfounded by the divine power laser that had gouged an enormous canyon into the vast landscape.
"What the hell...."
The Holy Knights were shaken to their core. Before such overwhelming divine power, they instinctively realized the truth: that elf was an apostle of the Goddess, wielding more divine power than Levis Ann, perhaps even more than the Saintess herself.
"B, but."
"Could it really be true...?"
Seeds of doubt began to spread among the Holy Knights.
"Did our commander really commit something forbidden... and the Goddess sent her power to the elves because of it?"
The truth remained shrouded in mystery.
One thing was certain: the demonstration of divine power by the elves had begun to shake the very justification of the Holy Knights, who had spent roughly a month rallying in the Leo Marquisate.
"D, did she really become a witch...?!"
Perhaps the Holy Knights now found themselves in a situation where they might need to eliminate not the elves, but their own fallen commander.
***
"The blue sky is dead; Ras shall reign supreme."
"What does that even mean?"
"It means the era of blue skies is over, and the world will be filled with Ras. Hehehe, there they come."
I climbed up onto the wall with Lune. From the opposite sky, a group of birdmen arrived carrying elves and unicorns (in humanoid form).
"Good work, Nifela. How did it go?"
"I delivered the message just as you ordered, Legion Commander. That the elves have chosen to side with the Demon King’s Army to bring down the Goddess Church. And to prove our legitimacy, we fired the Luna Cannon."
"Sending her along was the right call after all."
"I did pretty well, didn’t I? Hehe."
The one who had gone along as Nifela’s escort knight was none other than Luna.
Since it was essentially sending Nifela alone into dangerous enemy territory, it was only natural to assign an equally powerful protector as her escort, and choosing Luna turned out to be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate overwhelming divine power to the Holy Knights.
"Fortunately, they didn’t follow us. I was ready to launch a full-scale battle at the barony’s border if it came to that."
"We’re still no match for the entire Holy Knights. Calm down."
2 to 8.
Even if we mobilized every soldier in our legion, the odds were overwhelmingly against us. Of course, the 8 assumed the enemy’s full strength, with the Leo Marquisate’s entire military deployed.
"The Holy Knights account for 3.5, and the Leo Marquisate’s soldiers for 4.5. Either one alone has far more fighting power than we do, so it’s too soon to fight. Damn it, I wish we could stop being the underdog already."
"At least you’ve been beating down the ones staging uprisings from below."
"That’s true."
In addition to the front against the humans, our legion kept facing one new front after another.
The culprits were none other than the masters of the lower dungeons, starting with Andromalius.
No matter how many names we seized, those ranked 65th and below kept spawning naturally like mold, all targeting Flauros’s Dungeon. Separate from the 7th Legion’s reorganization, it seemed the Demon King intended to keep churning out new dungeon masters.
Naturally, we smashed them to pieces. A single swing of Flauros’s tentacles killed them all, and every last one who dared attack our legion was reduced to magic stones.
"I just want to stockpile power for about half a year. Can we buy enough time for that?"
"Considering how the Holy Knights charged at us, it’s going to be tough. Those guys were completely insane, you know? They’re saying the elves have been brainwashed by the orcs."
"A fairly plausible theory. And if you added that the Elf Queen became a slave to the orc chief through his dick, people would eat that right up."
"But that’s the truth, isn’t it?"
"If those outside the legion... meaning humanity... don’t know about it, then it’s not the truth yet."
If that truth came to light, the enemy wouldn’t hesitate to attack the barony. We might have to face the enemy without fully recovering the legion’s strength. I opened the system.
"Shaitan, how much of the legion’s strength has been restored?"
[96% has been restored. The Dragonian Project has also reached nearly 80%. All work should be completed by the end of today.]
One month.
Over the past month, we had invested every material and human resource into resurrecting the soldiers who had died in the war. We scraped together magic stones by every means possible to bring our dead soldiers back.
First. We secured magic stones from the residents of Raspica as payment for selling them foodstuffs, clothing, and other miscellaneous goods.
Building on their experience trading stockings, the residents had come to understand the concept of using magic stones as currency. In the process, they learned the truth behind the black stockings, Meri’s trading company, and the fairies, but since they had already been converted to Ras, they ended up discovering the truth about Avalon as well.
Meri, for her part, still insisted she hadn’t been found out and continued diligently playing the role of the baron’s vassal.
Second. We scraped magic stones from the sub-dungeons and from the dungeons whose masters had staged uprisings against us.
Although the magic stones from the sub-dungeons were few in number, they provided a steady stream to help resurrect soldiers, and we also squeezed stones out of the greenhorn dungeon masters who had dared to stage uprisings against our legion.
Most were low grade stones or lower, but occasionally some of them had one or two mid-grade or even high grade stones on them. Flauros, with three newly recruited subordinates at the center, perfectly crushed the uprisings.
Third. There was one party that enabled our legion to restore its forces in just one month.
"Keep a close eye on the Leo Marquisate. I’m heading to the battlefield now. I just need Lune with me."
"Got it. I’ll take the Cookie Elves and head back to basement 1 then."
"The Cream Elves will remain in Raspica to guard the walls."
Luna’s Cookie Elf unit withdrew to basement 1 of the main dungeon, and Nifela’s Cream Elves stayed behind as Raspica’s garrison. As the number of fronts increased, troops had to be constantly redeployed. The stress was building up a bit, but there was no real pressure.
"If it comes down to it, feel free to mobilize the Andras units. If they’re a fighting force that’s bound to be discovered sooner or later anyway, it’s better to just use them right away rather than keeping them hidden for no reason."
The Andras. All of them had reached the ★★ level, and upon becoming dragonians, they advanced to ★★☆☆.
Some Andras that had evolved to 3-star became demi-humans with only the faintest traces of avian features remaining, and they wore their pre-evolution bird heads like helmets to conceal their identities. I deployed the 150 Andras in groups of 50 to Raspica, Ras Vegas, and the main base.
Not to the battlefield.
Our strongest forces were already deployed to the battlefield.
"Let’s go, Lune. To the battlefield."
We couldn’t go to war with House Leo right now.
We were already fighting a war elsewhere, against House Sagittarius.
***
[Wasteland near Allocen’s Dungeon, House Sagittarius’s forward fortress.]
"Ugh, it’s cold."
Torema Jasa, a soldier of the count’s house, hunkered down in the chilly wasteland weather. He had been holed up in the fortress, staring out at the sand-whipped wasteland for more than a few months now.
"I want a vacation."
The constant stream of trolls had already been rough enough, but over the past month, he had gone through absolute hell fighting an actual war against the Demon King’s Army. They had managed to kill all the trolls, but the hordes of orcs and the witch that appeared in their place poured out endlessly, plaguing the count’s forces.
A full hundred soldiers had been killed.
Among them were famous knights.
Even among the mercenaries that House Sagittarius had hired at great expense, roughly half stood little chance of returning alive from the dungeon.
"What’s even the point of keeping this fight going? The enemy just gets stronger and comes back to life the more you fight them."
When a human dies once, that’s the end. But the dungeon monsters came back even after dying, and they were even stronger after each resurrection. Even if their immediate strength dipped, the experience of death made them more powerful than before.
Their physical abilities, in particular, had skyrocketed recently. The orcs had clearly been only slightly stronger than regular soldiers before, but at some point, they had grown strong enough to hold their own in a one-on-one fight against knights.
The enemy was clearly growing stronger through battle. If this kept dragging on, House Sagittarius might end up conquered by the Demon King’s Army, just like the distant Barony of Virgo.
"Tsk.... I heard if you’re unlucky enough to get captured by the Demon King’s Army, the orcs rape you."
Torema shuddered. Even if he had to die, dying with his ass torn open by an orc was where he drew the line.
"I wish this war would just end already... Hm?"
Plunk, plunk plunk.
Something started falling from the sky. Pebbles? Had a sandstorm grazed the fortress?
Thud.
No. Torema was horrified by the fist-sized rock that had grazed his shoulder and fallen. This was clearly an enemy attack.
"How..."
There definitely hadn’t been any enemies in the wasteland capable of lobbing things through the air. The moment Torema raised his head at the eerie presence above him:
"Shh."
A woman with black hair and black angelic wings fluttering behind her was grinning fiercely above Torema. Her eyes were like those of a hawk zeroing in on its prey.
"This is my first fight since being resurrected. Now shut up and die."
The woman plucked a feather from her robe and flung it at Torema’s throat. The feather, which pierced his vocal cords with pinpoint accuracy, was as sharp as a dagger, and Torema collapsed to his knees with a strangled groan.
"Guurk."
"Goodbye, nameless human."
A green gleam flashed through the woman’s slitted eyes.
"I am your death."
Caw, caw.
A massive boulder came crashing down from the sky. Torema was struck on the head by the falling stone and lost consciousness.