Demon Battlefield

The earth was soaked with blood, turning a dark brown.

The air was thick with a nauseating stench.

War cries, the clash of weapons, and agonizing screams rose and fell, shaking the very battlefield.

The human and demon armies were locked in the most brutal of slaughters here.

The demon vanguard consisted of dense swarms of goblins and orcs, brandishing rusty machetes and spiked clubs, roaring as they charged the human lines.

"Slaughter them!"

"For His Highness the Demon King!"

They knew neither pain nor fear; even with severed arms and legs, they would crawl to tear out the throats of the human soldiers with their teeth.

The human paladins formed a sturdy shield wall, their silver armor reflecting a cold light under the sun.

Archers fired relentlessly from behind the shield wall, unleashing dense volleys of arrows that rained down like locusts, felling swaths of demons.

Mages chanted incantations, hurling fireballs, ice spikes, and lightning bolts into the demon army, blooming into flowers of death upon impact.

But the demons' numbers were simply too great.

Like a black tide, they crashed against the human lines wave after wave.

Gaps soon appeared in the shield wall; orcs smashed through the shields with their spiked clubs, bludgeoning the paladins behind them to death.

Blood splattered across the silver armor, a shocking sight.

"Hold the line! Everyone, hold the line!"

A paladin commander shouted hoarsely, swinging his longsword to cut down a lunging orc.

His armor was already riddled with cracks, his body bearing several bone-deep wounds, with blood continuously dripping down his arm.

But just as his words fell, a black claw pierced right through his chest.

A demon general retracted his claw with a sinister grin, crushing the commander's heart.

"Humans. So fragile."

The demon general licked the blood from his claws, his eyes full of disdain.

He swung his claw fiercely, unleashing several black blades of energy that swept outward, instantly slicing over a dozen surrounding human soldiers in half.

The human line began to collapse.

Expressions of despair appeared on the soldiers' faces as they began to retreat involuntarily.

"It's over... We've lost..."

"Run! If we don't run now, it'll be too late!"

"I told you, this battle was a suicide mission from the start."

Panic spread like a plague; more and more soldiers threw down their weapons and turned to flee.

Seeing this, the demon generals grew even more arrogant.

Leading the demon army, they chased down the routed human soldiers like tigers among a flock of sheep. Wherever they passed, corpses littered the fields and blood flowed like rivers.

"Hahaha! Humans are nothing but trash!"

A horned demon general laughed uproariously, crushing a fleeing soldier's head under his foot.

"Once we slaughter all these humans, we'll march up the Holy Mountain and use the Pope's skull as a chamber pot!"

His laughter had not yet faded when he suddenly froze.

The surrounding air instantly became bone-chillingly cold, and even the sunlight seemed to be swallowed up.

A dense black fog had, at some unknown point, begun to permeate the battlefield.

From the black fog, a humanoid silhouette slowly emerged.

It had no facial features and no distinct limbs; it was merely a condensed mass of black fog, yet it exuded a terrifying aura enough to make one's very soul tremble.

An Incarnation of Chaos.

"What... what is that thing?"

The horned demon general's voice carried a hint of a tremor.

No one answered him.

The next second, the black fog silhouette moved.

It appeared before the horned demon general like a phantom, reaching out a hand formed of condensed black fog, and gently pressed it against his head.

"Squellch—"

The horned demon general's head instantly burst like a watermelon.

His body slumped limply to the ground; not even a shred of his soul managed to escape before being utterly devoured by the black fog.

The entire battlefield instantly fell silent.

Everyone stared at this scene, dumbfounded, completely forgetting about the slaughter.

A demon general, instantly killed in a single strike?!

"Monster! That's a monster!"

A demon soldier shrieked, turning around to run.

But he had barely taken two steps when he was entangled by another tentacle extending from the black fog.

The tentacle violently tightened, crushing his entire body into a bloody pulp before he was completely swallowed by the black fog.

And this exact scene was occurring all across the battlefield.

The number of black fog entities wasn't large, but they were like walking reapers of death.

Wherever they passed, all demons were instantly reduced to ash.

Whether low-tier goblins or high-tier demon generals, all were as fragile as ants before them.

Even a Demon Lord who refused to believe it gathered all his magic power, unleashing an apocalyptic black fireball at one of the black fog silhouettes.

The fireball passed right through the black fog silhouette, landing on the ground far away and blasting open a massive crater.

Yet the black fog silhouette remained completely unharmed.

It slowly turned its head, "looking" at the Demon Lord.

The next second, the Demon Lord's body began to shatter inch by inch, from foot to head, slowly turning into black dust that dissipated into the air.

The Demon Lord was dead?

Just like that?

"Run! Run away!"

The demon army collapsed entirely.

They no longer possessed their earlier arrogance and brutality; all that remained was a fear that seeped deep into their bones.

They threw down their weapons and turned to flee, trampling over each other, resulting in countless casualties.

The human soldiers were also dumbfounded.

They stood rooted to the spot, watching those black fog silhouettes hunt down the demon army, momentarily forgetting to react.

"Those... strange... lords, were they sent by Lord Xi Xi?" a young paladin asked softly, his voice tinged with disbelief.

"They must be... Other than Lord Xi Xi, who else possesses such tremendous power..."

"We won? Did we really win?!"

No one knew who shouted it first, but immediately after, deafening cheers erupted.

"We won! We've won!"

"Kill! Kill all these demons!"

The human soldiers' fighting spirit was reignited. They picked up their weapons and followed behind the black fog silhouettes, hunting down the routed demon army.

The black fog silhouettes ignored the human soldiers behind them. They followed a predetermined path, heading toward the human pasture deep within.

Tall walls were built around the pasture, and the gates were guarded by tens of thousands of demon soldiers, each looking vigilant.

But when they saw the overwhelming demon army fleeing toward them from afar, along with the black fog silhouettes pursuing them, they were instantly terrified out of their wits.

"Open the gates! Open the gates! Let us in!"

"The monsters are coming! Run!"

Just as the demon guards were about to open the gates, the black fog silhouettes arrived.

They passed right through the thick walls, as if passing through thin air.

Screams of agony rose and fell within the pasture.

In less than a quarter of an hour, all the demon soldiers inside the pasture had been wiped out.

A black fog silhouette reached out and gave a gentle wave.

The heavy iron gates slowly opened.

Seeing the ground outside littered with demon corpses and those black fog silhouettes standing in the sunlight, the humans inside seemed not to understand what had happened.

"...?"

The humans imprisoned in the pasture did not even comprehend what was going on.

Gazing blankly at everything around them, they inherently lacked an understanding of current human language and thought; their behavior was closer to that of wild beasts.

Merely beasts that looked like humans.

The black mist avatar slowly raised its hand, obliterating the entire ranch in an instant.

There was no pain, as everything was vaporized in a flash.

The souls were then gathered by the avatar.