"If the Burning Legion can be annihilated in this Divine War, the Abyss' Laws will be at their weakest." Haru said, "That's when we infiltrate, use the Eye, and I become the new Lord of the Abyss."
Svetlana was quiet for a moment that was longer than her usual pauses.
"Every planet in the universe would resist you." She said finally, "What you're describing is what the Dimensional Demons do. The moment you move against another planet's laws, every faction in the universe becomes your enemy, including the Gods of the Endless Continent, before you've even consolidated your rule there."
"That's why the Divine War comes first." Haru said, "And the Endless Continent is the second step. Relax, I'm not doing this tomorrow."
Svetlana absorbed this information. The Endless Continent was strong by the standards of the known universe, but even it couldn't fight every planet at once. This plan required Haru to win the Divine War, rule the Endless Continent completely, destroy the Burning Legion, and then strike into the Abyss before it recovered.
Each step was a mountain. Together they were an entire range, but the Eye of the Abyss was in his Godhead, and she had seen his future in more detail than she'd told anyone.
She said carefully, "If you manage it, that would be the best thing that ever happened to the intelligent races of the universe. The Abyss has been the nightmare of a thousand planets for hundreds of thousands of years. A Lord of the Abyss who doesn't slaughter everything in sight would be—" She paused, "Transformative."
Haru smiled slightly. What Svetlana didn't know was that his ultimate ambition and the Demon Emperor's was actually the same, that is, to conquer the entire universe. The difference was purely procedural. He didn't intend to slaughter the natives and make those planets a part of the Abyss.
"Anyway." He said, "That's the future. We should leave."
…
The second layer was almost quiet by the time they returned through the Blood Lake. It had taken a few more hours, but the demons on the major battlefields had been ground down by sheer numbers.
The strongest among them were only peak Demigods as the Demonic Gods had fled to the surface the moment Tenebris fell. 1.7 trillion creatures from the Castle Faction had fought them and fewer than 800 billion had survived. Over 900 billion died, killed by a Demonic Force that numbered only in the tens of billions.
The math was staggering. A force outnumbered a hundred times over had inflicted that kind of toll. Even in defeat, the Dimensional Demons have demonstrated exactly why the entire universe feared them.
But the battlefield belonged to the Castle Forces now. Across tens of thousands of combat zones, the surviving Castle Lords and rangers were moving fast, stripping the loot, but leaving the demon corpses where they lay. Nobody touched the bodies as they could infect whoever touched them. That was a lesson they learned early.
Among the dead, the Rangers were disproportionately represented. It was a structural problem: Castle Lords gained experience passively through their troops' kills even when not personally involved in the fight, while Rangers had no troops.
Every level they'd gained here had been earned by personally standing in the middle of the battlefield. More exposure meant more casualties. The survivors had earned every bit of strength they'd gotten.
Haru's Imperial Army had accounted for at least seventy legions, hundreds of millions of kills and even more when the God Tier Angels were included.
Nora alone had swept through entire formations. Their efforts showed in the aftermath: the 750,000 members of the Imperial Army had almost universally become Demigods, and 100,000 of them had ascended to Godhood.
A hundred thousand Gods in his standing army, most of them being Angels, while the rest drawn from the finest specialized top-level troops from the various races like the Nature Elves, Dragons, Phoenix, Golden Beamons, Paladins, Cardinals, etc.
These were the troops whose natural growth ceiling was at the Saint Tier, but who have pushed past that limit by relying on the bloodline evolution blueprints. The Imperial Army hadn't started this campaign with numbers like that.
Their transformation was quite evident. They came as a subpar army when compared to the other native empires, they were leaving as comparable or even surpassing the elite units of the strongest native empires.
------------------
Become A Member At My Patreon For Access To Bonus Chapters Or Even Multiple Chapters A Day!
» Patreon.com/LordArchduke
Member Shoutouts (Mythril Tier and above):
Shinto (Adamantite)
MagnusA (Adamantite)
PetMeSenpai8 (Orichalcum)