The surface was filled with them.
The royal soldiers, the guards, the leaders… everyone who was there, without exception...
burned.
Charred bodies, smoke rising from them, some still with fading sparks of lightning...
Weapons scattered, armor shattered...
The beasts stared at the scene, in silence.
As if they themselves couldn't believe it…
The piled-up corpses, the bodies barely retaining their shape, the soldiers who moments ago were screaming in the face of death, now nothing but ash emitting smoke.
There was no more fighting.
The guards who hadn't yet climbed… stood in their tracks, looking at the scene, their hearts frozen in their chests.
This wasn't just a defeat... it was annihilation..
Just staying here would make them meet the same fate.
"The leaders… the soldiers… all of them…"
No one could finish the sentence.
Because they saw the answer before them.
The king… the master of the massacre.
Amidst all this…
The King of Vardisia stood.
He didn't move from his spot, he didn't show any reaction except for calmly turning his eyes across the field of death spread before him.
Then… he smiled.
A slow, small smile… but terrifying.
He raised his head slightly, as if savoring the moment.
Then… he laughed.
At first softly, then louder… and louder.
Until his laugh became a hysterical scream in the face of the massacre he himself had created.
The guards gasped, afraid to even look at him... to look up.
A beast that didn't leave behind a battlefield… but a crematorium.
Amidst the dust… amidst the charred corpses, the scattered blood, the rising smoke… a man who death couldn't kill rose...
Smoke was still rising from him, his skin bore the marks of the deadly lightning, red cracks running across his body as if the lightning had tried to turn him to ash… but it couldn't.
Valeras….
He spat out a mass of blood, his body momentarily recoiled as if struggling to hold together, then he raised his head, and his blazing eyes hadn't changed.
There was only anger.
Living anger, breathing, expanding, materializing before them.
And in a moment, he leaped.
The air shook.
The sky split under his force.
As he rose, he roared, "Wretched creatures…!!"
The air itself trembled with his voice, "You played with your doom…"
He spread his arms to their full extent, like wings,
"Nothing will stop me… and nothing ever has!"
Then, his aura exploded.
The aura of Maga [Maga-Meteor]
Black energy tinged with silver spectrums, and with a single motion—
He fell.
Or rather, he collided with the surface… it was annihilation.
A strike from no mercy, who refuses to perish.
Eighty beasts?
Eighty entities of chaos, of fangs, of inhuman cruelty?
All of them?!
All of them turned into shreds in a single moment.
He opened his hands, and charged toward the rest of the beasts, his eyes didn't see creatures, didn't see opponents…
He saw only targets.
His fingers tore through the air like invisible claws, and as he passed by the first beast, he didn't even touch it, but he saw its organs explode from within…..
Entrails in the sky.
The scene turned into a massacre, he was erasing.
There was no one to withstand.
With another leap, he raised his hand, and struck the air.
But the air wasn't just air.
Valeras forced it to become something else.
He created land in the sky.
As if his hand carved the earth from nothingness, turned the void into destructive shards, made the sky itself hurl its hell upon those below.
They were meteors... his punches turned reality into meteors of air... then rained down on them.
There was no salvation, there wasn't even a chance to scream.
Only entrails.
Those who tried to evade, but… how do you evade something that doesn't follow the rules of reality?
How do you block someone who tore reality itself?
How can you block an attack that wasn't even real to begin with?
How can you face something that wasn't logical?
Their bodies were deforming before the strike reached them, turning into shreds before the torment fell upon them, as if the pain preceded the event itself.
Their entrails flew into the sky, their voices.. their screams like creatures tortured in hell itself.
The king was watching, no, trembling... his wide eyes didn't reflect anger, nor fear, nor shock.
But something else.
Questioning.
'Who is he?'
'Is he the king?'
He swallowed his saliva as he tried to analyze the scene, but he found no explanation except two words..
'The King of Humans'
Below, the guards stood like statues.
What they witnessed wasn't just a victory.
They had seen war, they had seen massacres, they had watched beasts tearing men alive, they had seen lightning burning soldiers, they had seen leaders kneeling before death.
But they had never seen anything like this.
They had never seen a man completely rewrite the rules of battle.
They remained hanging..
"The vice-commander of the royal soldiers.. Valeras.. so the rumor is true."
"He defeated the Alpha, alone"
"The strongest human, without a doubt"
"Who… who can stop this man?"
Then the king's narrowed eyes stared at the leaders who were still trying to rise...
"Humans?!"
The king's voice cut through the destruction around him, he wasn't just surprised, he wasn't angry...
As if he was watching an unsolvable puzzle.
"What are your limits?"
From his body, a deep blue aura erupted, a cold… dark color…
It surrounded him, then began to flow, as if his body itself could no longer contain its power.
His face became sharper, his limbs broke then reformed in a way resembling soft ice, black hair began to grow in crystalline strands, as if the ancient kings of the ocean had returned to life through him.
Then… he raised his hand, a wave of frost erupted, it was a flood.
A storm of cold doom, frost carrying nothing but the end of everything.
"Only doom for you, humans."
His voice echoed through the storm, "And let the name of the ocean rise… my name… the king of everything!"
Everything before him froze, bodies fading into crystals.