The pressure was almost killing all the remaining soldiers when suddenly a streak of light, like a flaming meteorite, shot across the sky straight toward the floating devil.
There was a massive collision accompanied by a violent shockwave that uprooted the soldiers from the ground, followed immediately by a thunderous clap.
The deafening sound burst numerous eardrums, causing soldiers to scream in agony, though their cries were drowned out by the thunderous roar.
Graves and the wounded soldier were hurled into the air before crashing back down. Graves screamed as he felt a rib or two snap upon impact, while the soldier screamed beside him. Graves closed his eyes, trying to bear and distract himself from the blinding pain.
After a moment, a realization hit him—and every other surviving soldier: the crushing pressure had been lifted.
Graves groaned, trying to sit up, and turned toward the wounded soldier, who was now sobbing softly after losing his voice from screaming. Graves shook his head. "What caused all of that? Why was there such an overwhelming pressure, and why did it suddenly vanish?" he mumbled to himself.
The wounded soldier seemed to overhear his murmuring and let out a weak chuckle. Graves wondered if the man had gone mad from the suffering or if he was just too stupid to know when not to laugh.
"What's funny?" Graves asked angrily, eyeing the soldier's mocking expression.
By this time, the soldier had regained enough motor control to pull himself up into a sitting position after a series of grunts, groans, and occasional screams.
Now that the nerve blocker or pain killer had completely worn off, he had resumed feeling the full agony of his injury.
"I don't know what's funnier..." the soldier rasped, his voice mocking as his body jerked in a fit of coughing. "...whether it's you not realizing that an A or S-class soldier is here and caused all these, or that you went into battle without your superiors briefing you."
The soldier winced, clutching his stump. "Argh! By the... fucking hell, it's painful!"
Graves shook his head, but what the soldier said was true. They had been briefed—or at least, rumors had circulated—that an A-class devil was leading the horde. Graves sighed. In all his deployments, and based on what he knew the team he had operated witth had never crossed paths with an A or S-class devil. Maybe that was the only reason he was still alive.
Standing up, Graves walked over to the soldier, whose body was vibrating from the intense pain of his severed leg. Helping the man up and placing his arm over his shoulder, they resumed their grueling journey toward the medical camp.
Fortunately, they were much closer to the camp now than to the frontline.
"I heard you've been causing quite a lot of trouble, so I rushed down to see what was going on," a voice echoed through the sky.
The speaker was entirely enveloped in flames—looking every bit like a man made of fire. He was hovering directly across from the devil that had orchestrated the horde and placed the crushing aura on the troops.
Garry smirked inside his shroud of fire. What he said was only partly true. When the military first requested his immediate deployment, they had dispatched a reconnaissance drone to analyze the devil but the drone was destroyed before it could gather actionable intelligence. That was the real reason he had arrived late.
Looking down, Garry realized his delay had cost many lives... crushed soldiers lay flattened across the earth. "Oh, even tanks and APVs too?" Garry mused rhetorically. He smiled at the devil through the flames. "You must be pretty strong."
Turning his head, Garry spotted a familiar figure looking up at him from the ground. Thanks to his augmented senses as an A-class superhuman, he could easily read the officer's face from a vast distance.
"Hey, devil... mind if I talk to an old friend for a second?" Garry asked. The monster merely grunted in response.
Garry turned toward Colonel Greyman and offered a cheerful wave, looking like a happy child greeting his parent. If any ordinary citizen were here to witness an elite A-class powerhouse acting so casually mid-combat, they would have been utterly flabbergasted.
Down on the ground, Colonel Greyman covered his face with his palm, shaking his head in disbelief.
"Hey, Greyman! You look, uh... pretty beaten down! Heard you had your ass handed to you, so you had to call me in!" Garry shouted down, his voice booming so loudly that everyone across the battlefield heard it.
"Damn it, why did they have to send him of all people?" Greyman muttered, gritting his teeth. He shouted back, looking thoroughly annoyed, "I didn't get beaten! I'm as strong as ever! Now can you get back to work and handle what you were called here for?!"
"Only if you tell me I'm the hottest guy alive," the fireman replied nonchalantly.
Greyman knew Garry was shameless enough to actually stall the fight if he didn't indulge him. "For the Church's sake, you are literally on fire! Lives are at stake here!" Greyman yelled back.
"Say it. Just say it," Garry insisted, his ears practically twitching in anticipation.
Colonel Greyman let out a heavy sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Okay... you're the hottest guy alive."
Garry nodded in deep satisfaction, then turned back to face the purple-muscled devil.
"You see that? He said I'm the hottest guy alive," Garry declared, the flames around his body violently erupting as the surrounding temperature spiked. Strangely, the intense heat completely bypassed the human soldiers on the ground, scorching only the remaining devils—a staggering display of control unique to powerhouses "Now, I'm gonna whoop your ass."