Chapter 530 - 515: War
Chapter 530: Chapter 515: War
This wasn’t a true Morning Star at all. It was an inferior product forcibly matured by a massive amount of souls, possessing the energy tier of a Morning Star but lacking the matching realm and combat skills—like a primitive man holding the launch button for a nuclear bomb.
The Demons’ offensive gradually slowed. Tens of thousands of pairs of eyes stared blankly as their supreme Commander was sent flying with a single punch, and the thought of retreat began to take root in their minds.
Allen slowly withdrew his fist. A trace of burnt green blood stained his knuckles.
"Tsk, pretty tough. Two punches and his skull still didn’t crack."
Then, he stepped forward. The ground trembled once more as PX-4 took massive strides toward the direction where Baroque had fallen.
Meanwhile, in another dimension of the battlefield, Thanatos floated silently in the Shadow Realm.
The eerie green flames in the skull’s eye sockets burned calmly, and the pale gray mist of light inside the Soul-Trapping Lantern was several times denser than an hour ago.
The souls of one hundred and ninety thousand Demons were being harvested at a rate of hundreds per minute. The moment the souls of those Demons—killed by the Mad Bee Drones, torn apart by the Spider Slayers, and crushed by the PX-3 formations—left their bodies, they were swept away by an invisible force and cast into the eerie green lantern. Silent, formless, and completely unnoticed.
Inside the Soul Furnace, the Demon Souls were slowly ground down and transformed into pure Curse Power.
[Basic Soul Reserve: 5471/1000000]
The number climbed rapidly and steadily, and consequently, Thanatos’s aura rose to new heights.
Eleven kilometers away.
In a giant, humanoid-shaped crater, Baroque struggled to crawl out of the rubble. His entire right torso was caved in, ribs piercing through his flesh like a broken fence. His left arm was still attached, but it was twisted like a pretzel at the elbow. Evil Energy surged frantically around his wounds, attempting to repair his battered body.
He couldn’t understand why that hunk of iron’s punch hurt so much.
"RUMBLE... RUMBLE..."
Heavy footsteps approached from afar. Baroque had barely lifted his head when he saw the Steel Giant looming before him once again.
Allen looked down at him. "You were having a lot of fun hacking at my Golems earlier, weren’t you?"
PX-4’s left hand clamped around Baroque’s head, lifting him into the air like a little chick.
"Haha—ha!" Baroque actually laughed, his crazed cackles mingling with the green bloody froth spilling from his mouth. "Come on! Kill me! I will just be reborn in Purgatory! And when that happens, I’ll return with an even stronger army to find you!"
The five metal fingers slowly tightened. Baroque felt his skull creaking, but he kept laughing. Demons did not fear death. To them, death was merely a long slumber before their bodies reformed in the Blood Pools of Purgatory.
Allen’s voice was utterly ruthless. "You’re right. That’s why I’m not going to kill you.
"I’m guessing that as long as you’re completely dead, your soul will return to Purgatory for Resurrection?
"So... as long as you don’t die completely, your soul can’t leave, right?"
Baroque’s wild laughter came to an abrupt halt, his expression changing drastically. He let out a roar, frantically releasing all the remaining Evil Energy in his body. His physical form transformed into a mass of burning green fire, desperately attempting to slip through the gaps of those five metal fingers. His soul was abandoning its shell to escape!
PX-4’s fingers did not budge. A ring of faint blue Runes lit up between the crevices of its digits, dead-locking the green fire within its palm.
"Then I’ll just keep your head first.
"You won’t be needing this cumbersome body. It’ll give me the perfect opportunity to study the mechanics behind this ’Resurrection’ of you Demons."
Along the edge of the circular cannon muzzle on PX-4’s chest, a ring of Runes lit up one by one. The ambient Magic Power on the battlefield began to converge toward the muzzle. The air was siphoned dry, forming a vacuum zone centered around PX-4.
Baroque felt the energy accumulating in the cannon. It wasn’t aimed at his head; it was aimed directly at everything below his neck.
He couldn’t laugh anymore. "Wait—!"
The cannon fired.
A pillar of pure white light blasted from PX-4’s chest, instantly vaporizing Baroque’s entire body below the neck. Evil Energy, bones, muscles—not even a speck of dust was left behind. The white light lost none of its momentum. It pierced straight through the atmosphere, tearing a massive circular hole hundreds of meters wide in the Sky Vault, pushing and rolling the clouds aside with its sheer heat.
In PX-4’s left hand, all that remained was a severed head with its eyes still darting wildly. The severed stump was tightly sealed by binding Runes. Both the soul and the Evil Energy were completely locked inside the skull, completely cutting off any possibility of self-destruction.
In those eyes, the pupils were filled with disbelief and terror. He wanted to die but couldn’t.
"Jarvis, notify all combat units," Allen ordered.
[I am here.]
"The battle is entering the second phase. Objective: Capture alive. Prioritize capturing all Demons at the Elite Level and above."
Allen’s command was instantly broadcast across the entire battlefield through the Celestial Net System. The moment the order was issued, the Golems’ behavioral patterns switched in sync.
The Purgatory units stopped their missile salvos. Forming groups of three, the Spider-Killer Type II units continuously fired at the Demons’ limbs from different directions. Six thousand fifteen-meter-tall special armored giants no longer advanced in unison. Instead, they formed groups of twelve to create encirclements, using their massive bodies to divide the Demon horde into isolated "pockets."
Soon after, the Hercules Engineering Golems rushed over from the rear. They carried five-meter-square Demon-Sealing Boxes on their shoulders—specialized containers with internal walls carved full of Suppression Runes, designed specifically for live transport. The Hercules units grabbed the bound Demons, stuffed them into the boxes, shut the lids, and locked them. The entire process was done in one smooth motion.
The entire battlefield was filled with the muffled thuds of clashing metal, the humming of taut binding cables, and the aggrieved howls of Demons being stuffed into the Demon-Sealing Boxes. In the blink of an eye, this brutal war of annihilation transformed into a massive hunt of unprecedented scale.
[Battlefield situation report.]
Jarvis’s voice echoed in Allen’s mind.
[Remaining enemy forces: 12,307. Currently being surrounded and annihilated.]
[Our newly added combat losses: 49 additional PX-3 units destroyed, 1,270 Spider Slayers destroyed, and 8,211 Mad Bee Drones consumed.]
[Special gains: As per your instructions, a total of 114 live Demon samples of various types have been captured. This includes 78 Abyssal Hounds, 15 Hellfires, 12 Flame Demons, 5 Demon Mages, 3 Fear Demon Kings, 2 Lords of Purgatory, and... 1 Dawn Star Level Abyssal Commander.]
Allen nodded in satisfaction. One hundred and fourteen live samples, covering the complete Demon lineage from Low-tier to high-tier, were more than enough for the lab to start several new research projects.
On the battlefield, the final sounds were dying down as the torrent of steel crushed everything in its path. From the moment the Demons breached the realm to their total annihilation, the total time elapsed was four hours and seventeen minutes.
"Withdraw the troops."
Allen’s consciousness returned from PX-4 into the Alchemy Puppet on the bridge of the Ten Thousand Miles of Sunshine. The still frantically struggling head was transferred into a specialized Demon-Sealing Container and sent into the transport channel.
Looking at the "spoils of war" being boxed up and shipped away, he gave an order. "Send all these raw materials back to Biological Laboratory Seven."
Meanwhile, inside the container, Baroque’s sealed head had its eyes wide open. He could feel that he was being sent to a place far more terrifying than Purgatory.