At the moment, Lloyd was nothing more than a floating head suspended in the air, slowly making its way to the ground as it fell. He pondered on what made his conscience stretch across the battlefield, and now, he seemed to have found his answer.
Although he didn't understand what was before him, even though he was a man without a complex, he could sense the nigh boundless energy that this object held. Its form seemed incorporeal, like an ethereal ghost screen of energy emerging from a higher dimension.
{Do you wish to live?}
That was the single question that appeared on its glitching screen. Under that question lay two answers.
{Yes} and {No}
Apart from these things, there wasn't anything else on the screen that Lloyd could understand. The moment he saw these words, he seemed to stop falling, like the screen was giving him all the time in the world to make his decision.
Lloyd pondered for a few seconds, but the answer was obvious. If he could live, he could find a way to kill the owl monster. Besides that, he also wished to give his squadmates a proper burial, so this question wasn't difficult in the slightest.
In his mind, Lloyd picked the first answer, moving his eyes to land on the {Yes}.
The moment he did this, a dark puddle of thick black smoke appeared on the spot his head was meant to land.
From the pool of smoke, a pair of black, gloved hands emerged from it, catching Lloyd's head as they arose, one hand supporting the base of his skull, and the other steadily mounted beneath his jaw, both hands gently cradling Lloyd's head in their grip.
From the pool of smoky darkness, a man with an obsidian wide-brimmed Gat and black layered Hanfu stepped out from the darkness.
His Gat was wide-brimmed and perfectly circular, made of matte black materials that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. Its crown was straightly structured, sitting low enough to hide his eyes completely in darkness.
The outer robe of his Hanfu was long, thick, and heavy, black from top to bottom with sharp silver embroidery running across the chest and sleeves. These silver patterns were cleanly placed, as if they were sewn for high-ranking nobility of a cultivation world. The sleeves of the outer robe were wide and extended past his wrists, their edges lined with soft, pale, silver fur that contrasted with the black fabric.
Bellow his waist, the robe separated into layered sheets, and his trousers, loose but gathered at the ankles, were tucked neatly into fitted black boots that rose just above them.
Dark smoke drifted up from the pool beneath his feet, curling around his legs and waist. As he fully appeared, the dark, smoky pool spread outwards, expanding across the snow-filled ground like a corruptive force, swallowing the drops of rain as they fell.
From the expanse of the now large smoke pool, figures began rising behind him. One after another, twelve figures stepped out of the same pool, each dressed in the exact same attire as him.
At this moment, time had resumed its normal course. But even though the flow of time persisted normally, Lloyd was still alive.
Out of the same dark, smoky pool came a large one-meter-long ceramic urn. The urn was completely silver with light lines of black streaking around it like dark lightning. The rain created clicking sounds as they hit the ceramic urn, the sounds emphasizing that the urn was empty.
Without giving Lloyd any time to react, the first man of darkness stepped forward to the silver ern. As he faced the urn, two of the twelve men behind him walked forward and lifted the top of the urn, revealing a dark, endless abyss within it.
In an instant. The dark man who held Lloyd dropped him into the urn without saying a word, and the two dark men of the twelve, who held the urn's lid, placed it back, covering the urn in a light pang.
As all this happened, the owl monster stood motionless, almost as if it were terrified of the creatures that rose from the darkness.
Inside the urn, Lloyd floated, suspended in strange, smoky darkness. There was nothing to be seen for a while, but after spending a few seconds alone in the void, he could hear strange chants being sung from the outside of the urn.
The thirteen men of darkness that stood outside the urn sang strange songs of eldritch incantations.
Within seconds, the pitch and intensity of their voices increased, and their deep voices seemed to shake the cold ground with every word they released, their language bending sound in ways the human tongue could not comprehend.
Within the urn, Lloyd no longer felt reduced to a severed head of himself. His awareness stretched outward, grafting his conscience into human form, creating a pseudo body he could control at will.
Lloyd existed in suspension, held within a vast formless, smoky darkness that offered no sense of direction or distance. He tried to look into the distance of the void by expanding his consciousness throughout the emptiness, but even after doing so, he couldn't sense any other bodies besides his own.
Outside the urn, the black, smoky pool of darkness rapidly expanded across the battlefield as the men clad in black sang, growing wider and wider with every verse.
Soon, the black pit had covered the entire battlefield, seemingly covering all the corpses of both humans and monsters alike. For a brief moment, all soldiers who were still alive paused as they saw the darkness spread beneath them.
…
About a kilometer from the warzone, Brigadier General Rocko sat cross-legged behind a massively long desk. Although the Brigadier General had held his position for over twenty years, he didn't look a year over thirty.
Of all the people present in the war, he was by far the strongest, but he was also the most cautious and selfish. He would rather watch his soldiers die than risk his own life.
Rocko sat in his highchair, slowly sipping a cup of freshly brewed tea. He understood that he alone would be enough to hold back the creatures for at least a few minutes. If he had joined the war, he would have prevented many deaths. But here he was, sipping tea and mercilessly giving commands to the various tech workers that sat around him to bombard the battlefield with heavy artillery.
His strength was made even clearer from his youth. Limitless humans aged more slowly the stronger they became. This explained why a man well into his fifties resembled a guy barely in his thirties.
Rocko watched all sides of the battle from a holographic screen right in front of his desk. The moment he saw the chimeras break through any section of the frontlines, he gave an order, and the land was cleansed.
At the moment, he could clearly see the darkness covering the battleground. Unable to identify what the darkness was, his mind raced for the most optimal response to the unknown existence.
"Launch Lady Veronica." He said with his deep and manly voice while he dropped his cup of tea on the coaster on the table so he could slick back his silver hair.
For a few seconds, the control room, which was deep in conversations, fell completely silent.
Although not comparable to the strength of a nuclear warhead, Lady Veronica was an explosive created by the craftsmen of House Ashholt, one of the four Great God Families, crafted in the depths of the realm of the Scorched Vondel.
Its destructive yield was not even one one-hundredth the power of a nuke, with its maximum blast radius being only seventy meters or so, but it was by far considered to be more terrifying.
A single Veronica warhead had the power to wipe out all life within a kilometer, killing everything in its path. It did this by removing the souls of everything that felt the special energy it emitted.
Hearing Brigadier General Rocko's words, Lieutenant Colonel Axel retorted at him.
"Have you gone mad? We still have thousands of soldiers on the ground. You have already killed a vast number of armed forces with your constant bombardment. Now u want to drop Veronica on them?"
"Colonel Ivan has already laid down his life because of your whims. I will not allow u to kill any more of my soldiers."
After Axel said those words, he smashed his hand down to the ground and pulled out a stone longsword from the shattered rock. Seeing his actions, many other soldiers of the title of Major followed suit, each man and woman activating their complex in the act of a revolt.
Brigadier General Rocko didn't seem afraid of the twenty-plus people who stared at him with animosity, but rather, he was filled with disgust that such insects would even fathom standing before him, Rocko of House Blanks.
Amongst God families, his house was nothing special, but he came from a god family nonetheless.
"Are you prepared for the woes of insubordination?" He asked while a slight smile appeared on his face.
"Shut up," Lieutenant Axel yelled.
"Step off your seat, or we will take your head." He raised his stone sword and pointed it at Rocko as the others stood their ground.
Seeing this show of vigor, Brigadier General Rocko felt his disgust well up in his stomach. He couldn't believe that he, a member of the elite, was being challenged by mere ants.
In a fit of rage, Brigadier General Rocko screamed "Then die."
The moment he said those words, silver fluids escaped from beneath his feet and covered the ground they all stood on, shocking all those who stood against him. A second after this, the silver fluid created numerous tiny bamboo shoots across the silver-covered ground.
In an instant, the bamboo shoots shot forward like spears, piercing the soldiers in one go, and tying up some that slightly dodged the attack with their silver frames, slowly squeezing them till their eyes popped out of their heads, and blood erupted from the veins.
In a single moment, he had already killed fifteen people, leaving only seven people who accurately evaded his attacks.
Seeing his comrades die in an instant, Lieutenant Axel screamed as he pierced his stone longsword at Brigadier General Rocko.
The moment he got close to Brigadier General Rocko's desk, the silver beneath him came together and formed a fully armored silver Oni samurai. The silver samurai stretched out his hand, and a long silver blade erupted from it, swiftly stabbing through Lieutenant Axel's head and extending through the tent that covered the control center.
In that same instant, the silver Oni Samurai waved his hand, quickly bisecting Lieutenant Axel's head and cutting down all the other soldiers that stood against Brigadier General Rocko in a single attack, spraying the various pieces of equipment and workers in a rain of blood, and damaging the tent enough for many streams of rain water to spill into it.
After killing these people he regarded as insects, the samurai melted, transforming into silver fluid with all the bamboo shoots and retreated to Brigadier General Rocko's feet, hiding in his shadow.
Brigadier General Rocko simply picked up his cup of blood-covered tea and took a sip, slowly sighing in joyful moans that shook the souls of the powerless workers.
"The blood of renegades truly does add flavor to tea, don't u think?" he said and then continued after a pause, saying words to the frightened workers.
"What are you worms waiting for? Launch Lady Veronica"