At the same time, beings of the Crimson God level were extremely hard to truly kill. Just like how Ham herself had been beaten countless times without fully dying, these ancient beings could reincarnate and start over. Unless their soul was completely devoured, erased, and their Authority seized by another being of the same level, destroying them physically from start to finish barely counted as an injury.
Only beings of the same level could truly kill each other. Otherwise, they could always rely on their Authority and concepts to reappear from unexpected corners. Belial was different, because he had the power to nail everyone's coffins shut, smash them again even if they reanimated, and kill all their smaller incarnations along with the main one.
He would be a literal reaper, forcing all those lingering Crimson God into graves that had been dug long ago. Once the Crimson God realized this, it would trigger the fiercest backlash of their existence. Surface-world plans could wait, and future death by soul starvation was still only the future, but Belial was a blade already pressed against their throats.
So without hesitation, at least some of the Crimson God who did not want to be eaten alive would fight with everything they had. Last time they did that, the world gained a wound that could never heal, and they were reduced to only a few survivors. That concept representing the end of all things, a final road that should not be grasped, might appear again for a second time.
Thinking of this, Ham's face changed drastically. The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed.
"Hurry. Call Belial back. At the very least, warn him to stay alert and keep his strength intact."
"Even if you think I'm being overly cautious, pass this message along. Tell him that something extremely terrifying, something that should not exist, might briefly appear."
"O-okay!"
Seeing Ham clutching her clothes like this, even Bella could feel her tension. She knew more and had seen more of the truth. It was possible that some incredibly frightening Evil God might awaken because of Belial. Just that unknown super-large dark power vortex detected earlier was enough that Bella was not sure Belial could win against it.
Another craft was hurriedly launched, without using normal signals. Inside the Abyss, these craft could move faster than signals, and the priority now was to get the message to Belial as fast as possible. As for what Belial was doing at the moment, he was watching crickets fight.
With just a small nudge and a bait tactic so simple even a child could think of it, Belial easily ignited the fighting among Crimson God who already wanted to clash. With a casual sense, he could detect more than a dozen active battle sites, ranging from probing skirmishes to all-out fights where heads were rolling.
He was not in a hurry to join in himself. First, there were plenty of others quietly observing like him, and second, he wanted to wait until all his Clone returned and his strength recovered. Going in now, when he could only fight four or five at once at best, did not feel safe.
The minimum standard for entering the field was being able to smash everyone present. Once everything returned and he activated his burning state, he could reach close to twenty, which should be enough. Still, one question lingered in his mind.
"But seriously, the ones showing up now are all trash. Where are the strong ones hiding?"
While sensing the battlefield, Belial narrowed his eyes. Several of his Clone were accelerating back, but along the way they did not detect the information he was hoping for. For example, those special and extremely powerful existences that should have been there, such as the unidentified Colossal Dark Vortex vortex he encountered when he first arrived.
And it was very likely that such existences were not limited to just one. As for how he judged this, it was simple. Belial estimated that the earlier Dark Vortex had that level of strength, able to kill one opponent steadily in a one on one fight, handle two without trouble, defeat three with ease, and overwhelm four as well.
In other words, if there were truly only a single individual whose strength far surpassed everyone else, then this place should have long been slaughtered until only a few extremely strong ones remained. It would not look like this, with a wide gap between upper and lower limits and dozens still surviving. This was a basic big fish eats small fish problem, because in a tank with a big fish, small fish usually do not exist unless there are even stronger ones restraining each other.
The reason he was not personally stepping in to eat the small fish was to prevent those stronger old schemers from ambushing him. These things that might actually cause him trouble were what Belial considered worth thinking about. He muttered with a grin, "And if big fish eat small fish, and I eat big fish, then rounding it off, I eat everything anyway. No real difference."
While Belial happily watched the chaos like a cricket fight, the situation on the battlefield inside Abyssal Void continued to escalate. Nearly twenty Crimson God were locked in fierce combat, much like scenes from ancient times. Some were only probing each other, but most had revealed their true forms and were engaged in violent clashes along the edges of their Divine Kingdom.
The surrounding Dark Power within the Void, along with countless surges of Torrent of Resentment, were stirred into chaos once again. They formed countless dark currents where rules and Authority collided nonstop, splashing out smooth, flashing fragments of Shard. These Shard fragments naturally broke down within the Void or were shattered into powder by stray shockwaves, turning into even more resentment that merged into this place as something trivial.
Battles between gods were not simple exchanges of blades and claws. At the edges of their Divine Kingdom, they fought fiercely at the level of Authority, constantly rewriting and overwriting each other's rules. Unimaginable dreamlike scenes and rule chaos capable of breaking cognition appeared one after another, and direct casualties were too many to count.
Some bodies, together with their Divine Kingdom, were evenly sliced in half, only to grow two new selves as if nothing had happened. This cycle of growth and reduction continued, rising at a squared rate. Others forcibly dragged out projections of an opponent's past and future timelines that no longer truly existed, smashing them into fragments or throwing attacks into already shattered timelines to strike at random.
Counterattacks followed immediately. An unnaturally black celestial mass, dragging dense streams of light, slammed down like a black hole that devoured everything. Whatever it touched dissolved into nothingness, even causing the domains of Divine Kingdom to collapse inch by inch, before the object vanished entirely after a fleeting moment, as if it had never existed at all.
Countless illusory scenes from the past briefly manifested as reality, but in the next instant, even visions of galaxies filling the sky turned into bubbles. They shattered at a single tap and were twisted into indescribable forms. Classic dramatic reversals played out over and over, to the point that simple advantages or disadvantages could no longer indicate the direction of the battle.
The abilities tied to rules and concepts were simply too strange, far beyond ordinary imagination. A single insignificant point could overturn the entire battlefield, and such points were countless. The battlefield itself shifted abruptly between macro and micro scales, with one second of shockwaves affecting the entire Earth-Moon System and the next erupting entirely within a single molecule.
A chain reaction triggered from one fulcrum could expand from zero to infinity. Attributes defined by matter, such as time and space, fared no better than clay in the hands of the gods, smashed into scattered Shard fragments everywhere. Every collision between stars sent up blockbuster-like sparks of Shard, along with wails, screams of pain, and helpless whimpers.
A closer look showed that such Shard fragments already filled this dense Void. Battles like this must have happened countless times before. The foundations of matter were easily shaken, mathematical laws were toyed with, and even the meaning of law itself was fragile, with everything shattered into fragments.
So when battles like this reached their end, when The Realm was destroyed beyond further destruction, what would the result be? The answer might only be this Void called Abyss. As for all the mystical nonsense, Belial could not really understand it and only felt that these fights were overly flashy and roundabout.
He thought they were simply not fighting hard enough yet. Once things truly escalated, one or two would turn into the familiar Great Beast forms, blasting beams at each other, and that would be easy to understand. To Belial, all these flashy effects that barely counted as scratching were pointless, far less satisfying than direct blows exchanged head on.
At first it was fairly interesting to watch, but he soon grew bored. He felt an urge to personally jump in and punch these things a few times, but no, he could not rush in and slaughter everything yet. He still needed to keep them around to bait out bigger fish.