Arboriel's surface was shaking. The Castle Lords and Rangers who'd returned ahead of the army were already gathered, watching the tremors roll through the ground with the expressions of people who had done something extremely significant and were waiting to find out exactly what.
"The whole planet's shaking. What did Lord Haru do down there?"
"He probably dug up the core."
"That's not how these giant planets with magic work. They don't have cores."
"So… did he do something to the planet's Laws?"
"If it's Lord Haru, I wouldn't be surprised if he absorbed them and became the Laws himself!"
"Bruh, he has all those beautiful Angels and Elves. Would he really give that up to become a planet's Laws?"
"…Fair point. He wouldn't."
"Makes sense."
The Gods who'd been hunting the escaped Demonic Gods returned not long after. Under Lysandra, Mary, Sylvana, Eveline, Aureole, Auriel, and the other High God Tier Angels command, every Demon that had tried to flee Arboriel had been run down. Not even a single one had escaped back to the Abyss. Arboriel was finally clean now. Every Demon and Demonized Creature on the planet was dead.
…
Suddenly at this time, an announcement came, simultaneously, into the mind of every Castle Lord and Ranger present at Arboriel.
[World Announcement!]
[The Demons at Arboriel have been eliminated. The Demon Slayer Tournament has ended ahead of schedule.]
[The Demon Slayer Leaderboard is now locked.]
[Castle Lords and Rangers ranked in the top 100 will receive generous rewards. The first ranked person would receive a unique special reward.]
[Rewards will be distributed shortly.]
[Congratulations to all Castle Lords and Rangers. You stood together and saved Arboriel. That is something to be proud of. The Divine War is coming. The Dimensional Demons will invade the Endless Continent with their full strength. Prepare yourselves.]
[The Demon Slayer Tournament is officially over. Countdown to return: 2:59:59.]
[All Castle Lords and Rangers who do not return to the Endless Continent within the allotted time will be automatically transported back.]
The surface kept shaking and nobody cared. Two days and two nights of continuous combat had left every castle faction creature running on empty.
The tremors rolling through Arboriel's crust were background noise compared to the bone-deep exhaustion of fighting Dimensional Demons for forty-eight hours straight without a single moment of slack, because slack, against an enemy like that, got you killed.
Some Castle Lords didn't even wait for the three-hour window. They activated their teleportation marks, returned to the Endless Continent, and straight up went to sleep.
The teleportation mark had been the contest's one mercy: an infinite-use lifeline that pulled you back to the Endless Continent the moment death became imminent. Every Castle Lord and Ranger had carried one.
The ones who'd used it to flee early rather than fight through the danger were already being discussed in past tense by the ones who'd stayed. The Divine War would have no such insurance. Die there and you were truly dead.
Those who hadn't pushed themselves here, in the one contest where death was optional, were going to face the real thing underleveled and unprepared. Although nobody said this out loud, everyone was thinking about it.
The ones who stayed for the three-hour window had treasure hunting in mind. Arboriel's surface had been a war zone since the moment they arrived. Now the Demons were gone, the Demonized Monsters were also gone, and somewhere under the ruins of a planet that had been dying for a hundred thousand years, there were still Divine Artifacts and Godhead Fragments waiting to be found.
Three hours was three hours.
…
Then the leaderboard unlocked, and the treasure hunting stopped.
"Everyone, look at the leaderboard!"
The crowd that had been dispersing came back together. Castle Lords and Rangers opened the leaderboard simultaneously, read the top name simultaneously, and went quiet simultaneously.
_____________
[Demon Slayer Leaderboard]
1. Aetherium Empire: 26 Trillion Points
2. Aelith Kingdom: 145 Billion Points
3. Nightreign Kingdom: 108 Billion Points
.
.
.
100. Silver Wolf Kingdom: 19 Billion Points
_____________
The second ranked Aelith Kingdom's points were less than one percent of Haru's. The entire top hundred, added together, didn't reach his total. Even Haru looked at his own score with mild interest. He'd expected a lot, but twenty-six trillion was still a lot more than that.
The arithmetic wasn't complicated, once you understood what he'd actually killed: two Supreme God Tier Demon Lords, each alone worth points that dwarfed anything a normal Castle Lord could accumulate. Next were a hundred thousand elite legion of Demonic Gods, dozens of which were High Gods, tens of thousands were Intermediate Gods.
This still wasn't the end. There were still hundreds of millions killed by his Imperial Army. Nobody had touched the third layer and no Castle Lords had even faced anything above Intermediate God Tier. The scoreboard was simply reflecting what had happened.
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