Outside, groups of soldiers and mages were already lying scattered everywhere, without even signs of resistance appearing.
Clearly, they had not expected things to happen so suddenly.
Even though security had been strengthened, the enemy's strength was far beyond what they could handle.
The fleeing group was also startled the moment they saw the barrier disappear. Though leaving the city obviously required opening the barrier.
Normally, they would just go to the control room and open a small gap. But directly dismantling the entire barrier, they would definitely become everyone's target, right?
"Kill them!"
With no other choice, the priest steeled himself and pulled out the holy scripture.
Golden light instantly bloomed atop the city wall.
Cries immediately erupted near the walls, and the assassination squad blasted open the city wall with a loud explosion.
Ash, who had returned near the gate, watched from afar as they slaughtered the soldiers. He had no intention of helping at all, and soon saw, the moment the gate was blasted open, the ground outside the city suddenly began to shake, as though the whole world were violently trembling.
Most of the imperial capital's houses also shook along with it.
BOOM!
Amid a deafening roar, a giant hand emerged from the mountain outside the city and slammed into the ground beside it, causing a massive body to rise from the earth and slowly crawl out of the mountain itself.
Huge rocks rolled down, dust filled the air, blotting out the sky, creating a scene like the end of the world. The birds and beasts in the distant forest instinctively fled.
As for the beasts living within the mountain, they did not even get a chance to run before being killed by the collapsing earth.
The giant golem displayed an overwhelming presence. It stood over a hundred meters tall, its entire body carved from solid stone.
Its body was covered with complex magic circles and ancient script, containing the life's work of the Empire's holy teacher and her disciples from a thousand years ago.
When the giant looked toward the assassination squad breaking out of the city, time itself seemed to freeze. Everything fell silent, with only the distant echoes of falling rocks remaining.
"So this is.... the national guardian golem Flamme left for the Empire? Something like this still exists?"
The priest's hands trembled slightly as he stared at the giant monster in horror.
Normally this thing should not have appeared. A more mobile force should have been used to chase them down. But, clearly, the destruction of the gate and barrier had triggered some mechanism, making the giant mistakenly think the imperial capital had fallen, waking it up to save the nation.
"Enemies of the Empire! Accept judgment!"
The rock giant's mechanical roar shook the entire land as it violently stomped the ground.
In an instant, countless stones flew into the air, and cracks spread outward at terrifying speed.
As the earth shook violently, the assassination squad lost their footing and hurriedly fled again, but... how could their speed compare to the giant's?
The rock giant took heavy strides and charged toward them like a moving mountain, far faster than they were.
Each step made the earth tremble. Every stomp carried endless power. Whether it was matter-control magic, goddess magic, or ordinary attack magic, no matter what kind of spell hit the rock surface, it only turned into scattered light and vanished.
"HAAAH!"
The blacksmith, a top-class warrior, saw he was about to be caught and swung his greatsword with all his strength.
Blinding white light gathered on the blade. It was easily strong enough to split mountains and rocks apart. Even city walls without magical reinforcement could be cut in two, and weak dragons like the Red Mirror Dragon could be killed in a single strike, yet...
BANG!
The greatsword struck the rock giant's ankle, but only produced a burst of sparks. It failed to even chip off a single piece of stone, while the sword itself was knocked flying away.
"Y-You're kidding me!"
The weaponless blacksmith blankly looked at his split plam. Before he could react, a dull thud sounded, and he was kicked away with a scream.
At an absurd speed, his body became a cannonball and smashed into the soldiers chasing behind him.
The excessive speed caused the blacksmith to tear through a bloody path like a cannon shell, exploding many soldiers into mangled flesh.
Ironically, his durable warrior body allowed him to barely survive. He rolled across the ground covered in blood and chunks of flesh, and by the time the momentum faded, he lay among the crowd unable to stand, immediately surrounded by groups of soldiers.
Not long after, even the poster girl and the mercenary, who had tried to coordinate an attack, were slapped away before they could even climb onto the giant. They crashed into the crowd below, kicking up clouds of dust and blood mist.
"This is bad..."
"H-Haha... Are we going to die?"
"The Empire was hiding a monster like this?"
The blacksmith, the poster girl, and the mercenary were all warriors considered powerful among humans. Though their sturdy bodies kept them from dying immediately, they were still heavily injured.
Now, facing the soldiers closing in around them, despair appeared on their faces.
At the very front were numerous knights in silver armor, surrounding each of them inside circles less than ten meters wide.
Swords, spears, axes, and all kinds of weapons gleamed under the illumination spells shot into the sky by the mages.
The warriors tried to counterattack with physical force, but their weapons looked tiny and powerless before the rock giant, like praying mantises trying to stop a chariot. And now they had fallen into the encirclement of knights and soldiers.
However.... before the weaponless warriors could make a final desperate struggle with their bare hands, they heard the sound of air being torn apart.
First came a thunderous crash upon landing, followed by an exploding flash and a suddenly expanding dome-shaped shockwave that instantly blew away groups of soldiers and knights.
Immediately after, slashes extending from the blade's tip swept through the fully armed knights and soldiers, cutting them down in groups like harvested wheat.
Ash descended like a demon god. Every swing of his blade was accompanied by enemy screams and spraying blood. Wherever he passed, enemies fell one after another, none spared.
This scene also attracted the giant golem that had still intended to chase the remaining assassination squad.
Blue magical flames lit within the positions of its eyes, radiating anger.
The giant, whose strength and speed were unmatched, clearly possessed self-awareness just like those high-grade golems. It immediately abandoned the others and strode toward Ash.
But Ash did not even look at it. He merely waved for the assassination squad to retreat first. Then, just as the giant staring at him was about to charge...
BOOM!
Abnormal gravity suddenly appeared without warning.
The giant instantly lost balance and violently crashed onto the ground.
For a moment, it was true earth-shaking chaos. The entire imperial capital suffered intense tremors.
No dust even rose. The giant's body sank directly into the ground and could no longer move at all.
Its enormous and overly heavy body still slid forward under the remaining momentum.
Ash, who had effortlessly knocked the giant down, stomped once and shattered the earth beneath him. Completely fearless, he watched the giant body with its overwhelming presence continue "sliding forward" while sinking deeper underground, then raised his leg and stomped directly onto the rock head.
BOOM!
The golem's huge head instantly sank deeper into the earth again, forcefully blasting away the surrounding land.
Whether because the strength beneath Ash's foot was truly terrifying or because the giant's running momentum had finally run out, the massive body really did stop once its head became deeply buried underground.
———
"This guy... really is a monster..."
The assassination squad members, supporting each other as they fled while instinctively looking back, all felt their common sense shattered by him once again.
The Empire's knights and soldiers also wore expressions of indescribable shock, but...
"Flamme really did love this country. But something this big and long... is just trash in front of me."
Ash only coldly looked at the giant trembling underground, unable to move, feeling that this creation desperately trying to protect an uncaring nation was especially pathetic.
With a light jump, he landed on the back of the giant's head and began wondering how to dismantle this overly sturdy stone body when... cracks suddenly spread across its enormous form.
Blue light even shone through the cracks, making him instantly feel a sudden sense of danger and think of one word—
'Self-destruction.'
'If you can't beat someone, you start self-destructing. What kind of villain behavior is this? A proper gentleman wouldn't do something like that, right?', Watching the golem beneath his feet crack apart as ominous light flashed between the fractures, Ash could not help complaining inwardly.
But after thinking seriously about it, he suddenly remembered that the Flamme in his memories was indeed not some upright gentleman. Long ago, she already loved using all kinds of dirty tricks.
This was not slander. Even when sparring with Ash or Frieren, Flamme would avoid direct fights whenever possible. Instead, she was good at pretending to be pitiful, begging for mercy, surrendering, backstabbing, and all kinds of strange tricks.
The first time he met her, she had even said, ("Why fight head-on? Why not run away, hide, or launch sneak attacks?")
While all these thoughts flashed through his mind, Ash rapidly retreated, but the golem's self-destruction happened even faster than expected. The spreading cracks and light expanded faster than anything he had imagined.
This self-destruction was completely different from the slow buildup in movies and TV dramas. It exploded the instant it decided to, without giving anyone time at all.
But with speed beyond sound itself, Ash could not only retreat successfully, but also had enough time to keep his promise and take the assassination squad members away. Even this nearly instant self-destruction could not catch up to him.
On another mountain a thousand meters away, there was also a giant magic-nullifiying crystal. The moment the golem fell, it was thrown over.
This allowed Ash, as the light expanded, to rush back again while dragging along the last remaining poster girl, directly flying into the air together. Then letting inertia accurately carry them onto the magic-nullifiying crystal.
At that very moment, the giant's body was completely swallowed by light. The enormous blue glow illuminated the land, tearing apart the sky, the falling snow, and even the clouds above.
KABOOOOOOM!
Amid a roar that seemed to tear apart eardrums, the world was covered in blue light. The light resembled a flower of death, and the deadly shockwave instantly swallowed the army outside the city, along with the city walls behind them and an entire satellite city on the outskirts of the imperial capital, all erased within the light.
Ash simply lay atop the magic-nullifiying crystal, directly using the excessively sturdy stone itself to resist the explosion. He felt the powerful push against his back and the howling wind by his ears, letting himself and the magic-nullifiying crystal be thrown toward the distant sky by the shockwave.
"This kind of feels... like surfing."
He muttered as he slightly turned back, trying to look at the edge of the explosion.
However the blinding light concealed almost everything.
Within the light, trees vanished, mountains were shaved away, and the stone roads, walls outside the city, and buildings inside it all crumbled and evaporated like bubbles.
"This golem was originally made to protect the Empire, but now the damage it caused is greater than mine, isn't it? No, that's not right. This golem was obviously designed for large-scale armies. The expected activation condition should have been the imperial capital falling to an invading army, meaning, this was created to eliminate large-scale enemy forces invading the capital as efficiently as possible. But..."
Just like Flamme never expected the Empire to become like this after a thousand years, she probably never imagined that before the enemy army even arrived, the barrier and city walls would first be destroyed from inside by a small group of people.
And normally, if someone wanted to break out of the imperial capital, there was no need to destroy the barrier. Wasn't that just making things harder and exposing yourself for no reason?
"Is this what they call 'the schemer suffering the consequences of their own schemes'?"
As he accelerated through the sky like a meteor, Ash could not help sighing inwardly, feeling both regret and irony toward Flamme's careful calculations.
———
By the time Ash, who had flown away like a meteor, returned, everything that had existed earlier was already gone, leaving behind only a massive crater, as though nature itself had cast divine punishment upon the Empire.
The explosion's affected area had erased the entire satellite city connected to the main district entrance on the outskirts of the imperial capital, disappearing along the edge of the crater.
The assassination squad that escaped earlier, along with the mages, had unexpectedly not been wiped out directly, but instead, saved by demons.
"Haha! Nice! I knew that sneaky little girl would definitely pull something crazy. Preparing in advance really was the right move."
The Bloodstained War God · Rivale, who had been called over as insurance and was waiting outside the city beforehand, had predicted the situation in advance and thrown the spare magic-nullifiying crystal.
This giant man over two meters tall laughed happily as Ash walked over, casually tossing aside another spare magic-nullifiying crystal as large as a car that had previously been used as a shield.
But what he said left Ash speechless.
"Flamme is a little girl?"
"Isn't she?"
"How old are you exactly?"
"Probably around as old as the old man and Solitar?", Rivale, who called himself an old man despite looking like a middle-aged man, stroked his completely beardless chin and thought for a moment, "I never really counted. Maybe one or two thousand years?"
"Why is Solitar originally a young girl, but you look like a middle-aged man? Wait, no. I remember you saying you already looked like this a thousand years ago."
"None of that matters. More importantly, that explosion just now was pretty good! If you blocked it directly with your body, that'd probably feel great too."
"Do you want to become a naked pervert running around?"
If it were anyone else, he would think they had gone insane. But Rivale was the kind of monster who once took Eisen's full-power axe to the face without even scraping his skin. Eisen needed to use his ultimate move just to leave a flesh wound. Among everyone Ash knew, he probably had the thickest skin, literally thicker than city walls.
Even if this monster jumped into a volcano and swam in lava, the worst consequence would probably just be becoming a naked pervert running around.
'Why do most of the people I know, male or female, all have some kind of flaw in their personalities? Is there nobody normal like me?', Looking at the excited middle-aged man, Ash strangely felt heavy-hearted.
Sometimes he felt that being too normal was exactly why he did not fit in with this group of weirdos.
"Forget about this guy. What do we do next? Charge straight into the imperial capital? Kill them all?"
Solitar, who had directly used Rivale as a shield earlier, walked out smiling from behind him. She glanced at the imperial capital's satellite city that had turned into a giant crater and showed a trace of sympathy that may or may not have been genuine.
"This feels... a little cruel. Things have already reached this point. Solving the problem directly is probably the greatest mercy now, right?"
She was not saying that without confidence.
═❀═❀═❀═❀═❀═❀═
[email protected]/AmbitiousTranslator
🥳Joining P@treon keeps me motivated and eager to work diligently, so please consider joining.🥰 You can access upto 40 advance chapter through P@treon.