Chapter 428: A City
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
"The mad demon king has appeared in Broken Plain?" Hao Ren was shocked hearing the unlikely news. "Is this a joke or what? Let me ask you again; are you sure it's Y'zaks who has appeared in Broken Plain?"
The two demons shivered when they heared the name 'Yzaks; there was only one demon in known history and the one capable of striking fear in them.. obviously there sounded serious. "I've seen it with my own eyes. He emerged from the fire and was surrounded by the osidian colossi and dark dwarfs..."
"Osidian colossi and dark dwarfs were soldiers of the First Batallion," Lanina looked back at Hao Ren. "I'm afraid that's true."
Hao Ren let Lanina asked a few questions, but the two demons which were mere ordinary soldiers knew nothing more; they hadn't a clue about whether the army of Banuklaak and Serathon had come to Broken Plain.
When they finished interrogatiing the two demon guards, Y'zaks pressed his hand directly over their heads, the demons quickly turned into a pile of breeze.
Lily stuck out her tongue and said, "Biggie is really cruel..."
"Why I have the feeling that you're more motivated in killing the demons than the humans?" Hao Ren said as he looked at Y'zaks.
Y'zaks said, "Humph! Nonsense. Because I despise these bastards more than any races in the human world. The earthlings have been antagonistic toward demons for all this while, beating their brains out seems so natural. But they fought for their family and country, I've no qualm even if I lost to them. But Banucklaak and Serathon were bastards who would stab you in the back."
It was true that Y'zaks was defeated by the Allied Army, but the lethal blow came from his fellow demons. The war between him and races of the human world had always been for the sake of ideology on one hand and country in the other. For that matter, an upright person like Y'zaks would have no complaint even if he died in the war. In fact he respected the Seven Heroes who had led an mortal army against the demon king and fought all the way to the Demonic Plane. Even Y'zaks admitted that these guys were tough.
But compared to the Seven Heroes' Allied Army, his fellow demonic compatriots were less vitutous: Banuklaak was only submissive to Y'zaks before he backstabbed the demon king's army during the final battle. Serathon had given Y'zaks a fatal blow and had occupied half of the Seventh Plane since then.
No good tempered person would tolerate such betrayal!
Knowing what the hatred of Y'zaks was, Hao Ren cleverly steered the topic of the conversation. "Well, let's not talk about them—what you do think of your impersonator in Broken Plain?"
"I'm sure as hell I don't have a lost brother." Y'zaks laughed wryly. "I"m also interested to find out who 'resurrected' me."
As the small demonic convoy had been dealt with, those mercenaries and knights who were injured began to turn back while the rest quickly regrouped and continued their journey toward Broken Plain.
And they hadn't been bumping into any more wandering demons since then.
Broken Plain gradually appeared in the horizon. Hao Ren could see its strange landscape and had guessed what the name Broken Plain was all about:
Cracked earth, trenches and rifts were everywhere. Gravity-defying boulders were floating ten metres to as high as several hundred metres in the air as if a great force had smased the plain into pieces.
"Those are 'old stones', a kind of magnetic material. A vortex magnetic field below the surface keeps the boulders afloat. "Y'zaks explained quietly. "How these boulders came about is a mystery. I had sent people investigating and found that the age of the boulders was very different from the geological age of the entire Broken Plain as if he boulders had dropped from the sky. That why the little old man had speculated that the spatial bubble zone wasn't in its current form but a contagious space, which explained the origin of the formation of 'asteriod craters' in different planes.
Suddenly an officer in front of the convoy held the horse and shouted out loudly. "Watch out!"
Hao Ren looked up and saw the Allied Army and the demonic army was figthing not far ahead.
The battle was taking place in a wide open area without without any natural cover. A vast area seemed to have been bombed as pits and craters were left behind by the magic explosions and bullet marks were everywhere. Countless dead bodies of the Allied Army and Banuklaak army, broken armours, weapons and flags strewn all over the place. Blood of the fallen armies had dried by the scorching heat, the air was filled with a turbid, strange smell—the smell of human and demonic blood mixture.
The knight officer commanded. "Team Three, guard the surrounding. Team Four, scout out the rocky hills on the east carefully. The rest, check the battlefield, collect the dead, and take their weapons. We need every weapon we could salvage, they might need them later!"
Hao Ren and his men pretended to be busy like other mercenaries but they were actually examining the dead bodies of the demons and humans—finding out their cause of death.
With just a glance, Lanina knew something was amiss at the scene: though most of the dead appeared to have died from the brutal battle, evidence showed that many of the dead lying on the edge of the battlefield were clearly fleeing the scene and suffering great horror before they were killed. Horror could still be seen on their faces. But comparing to the human, the horror was harder to observe on dead demons as their faces were more rigid.
But upon closer inspection, Lanina could still tell that these demons had also struck by horror before they died.
Both the humans and the demonic soldiers must have been fleeing from a ferocious third force which had appeared during the last battle—the identity of the third force was obvious.
Lanina ripped open a broken piece of armour of a dead body, revealing the scorched wound underneath which was probably the cause of death. The wound was through and through. "It was caused by a rocket-propelled osidian arrow."
Not far away, Y'zaks found some rock-like residue on a dead demon which had been smashed into patty. "It's osidian."
"A typical signature of the First Batallion of demon king's army." Lanina sounded serious. "This weapon is unique to us."
"Looks like some soldiers of the demon king survive." Hao Ren got to his feet and gazed at the empty Broken Plain. "They have a new king which looks exactly like Y'zaks... but where are they now?"
"They shouldn't be far away. There is no place to..."
Before Lanina could finish her sentence, a loud noise like the sound of earth crumbling was heard.
Hao Ren looked up and saw a small group of soldiers running back in their direction. These were the recce force they had send out earlier. The leading soldier shouted in fear. "The demon king's army! Helcrown! Fall back! Fall back!"
The soldiers ran back frantically as a dozen dark colossi of seventy-metre-tall came out from behind the rocks. The colossi had the figure of a human, their bodies glittered with green runes which aided to lessen their weight and propelled their movement. The earth trembled as the colossi ran. The single-eyed colossi gave chase as their singe eyes emitted a light and detected the presence of enemies.
Following the colossi were a group of dark-skinned dwarfs covered in strange body armours, and also the demons which were soldiers of Y'zaks!
The earth-shattering noise and the violent shaking of the earth were just the beginning as Hao Ren saw the earth behind the rocky hills was rising slowly.
It was a city!