My Living Shadow System Devours To Make Me Stronger - Chapter 1042 - 1044: He Cometh

Damon was beyond impressed. The power of the goddess races working together could shift the world to this level. In this very land there were hundreds of siege engines and thousands of troops.

And new ones were streaming in.

The whole forest had been cut down, burned, and battled into submission to create this area. Large structures were being constructed with hundreds of barriers and seals carved all over the place. Rune specialists and mages moved in hurried clusters, assistants trailing behind them under the weight of materials, tools, and engraved plates.

Evangeline went into a fortified building with Damon and Leona where they reported their arrival. They were given a five hour rest period before resuming their duties.

Of course Damon knew this was not a rest period. It was simply time given for them to familiarize themselves with the war headquarters.

Damon did just that. He walked through the growing fortress, observing the different structures being built, and the more he saw the more unnerved he felt.

Fire and magic resistant metals were being smelted into hundreds of projectiles. The walls and buildings were layered with fire and magic resistant runes. Water runes, cooling runes, ice runes were etched into stone and metal alike.

They were preparing for something that breathed fire and devastation.

Damon spotted a few magical airships bearing the crest of Lazarak. These were clearly made by his organization.

There were eight of those airships, state of the art, built in the same fashion as Lysithara with a hint of Valtheron magical technology woven into their frames.

Damon began forming a plan in his head.

All these things were clearly made to ward off Ashergon. However, for what Damon intended, Ashergon was too powerful and too fast for him to succeed under normal circumstances. He needed the dragon’s speed to be relatively slowed down.

He needed Ashergon to be in a state of attack.

And there needed to be a clear shadow.

That was why he needed Evangeline. But Damon also could not put her at risk. He could not handle losing her to a dragon’s fangs.

So Damon got to work.

The fact of the matter was he needed to create the perfect kill area, and to do that he was prepared to use all of these military structures as bait. By a conservative estimate, a few hundred thousand to a million people might die, but he did not see any other option.

They would die either way.

After three days at the war headquarters Damon had completed half of his trap.

He figured he had a few more days before Ashergon showed up.

Just as he was thinking that, while pulling a giant chain and hooking it onto a ballista, he heard the sky rumble far beyond the mana anomaly.

He raised his head toward a distant region where the mana anomaly known as the Severing Wind raged and noticed a ripple in the air.

The Severing Wind was unique in the sense that it was not active all the time. Depending on the rise and fall of mana frequencies, it could be safe to pass through. Most times, however, it would turn a human body into thin ribbons and then into a mist of blood. It was dire natural phenomena like this that made the world of Aetherus so terrifying.

And today Damon saw a vast shadow in the distance.

His scalp tingled but he did not panic. The mana anomaly was at its peak, tearing away even space itself into thin invisible strands.

Then Damon saw something that made him remember the fear of god.

The vast wings of a dragon flared like a hurricane in the sky, moving clouds and warping the weather itself. Those wings touched the mana anomaly.

And then the world felt like it had broken.

A huge chunk of the anomaly was ripped off and tossed toward them from the sky as if it were a physical object. Like a pebble a child could pick from the road and throw on a whim. That was what it felt like, seeing such a powerful natural phenomenon treated so casually.

But to Damon and the rest of the ants below, it felt like god had come.

And he had sent them a devil wreathed in flames to punish them for their wrongdoings.

A knight fell to his knees and muttered in fear.

“Goddess.”

Damon was not about to wait and get shredded to bits by magical winds invisible to the naked eye.

He raised his hand as countless shadows rose around him. His skill Shadow Manifesting was pushed to its limits. Countless invisible wind blades compressed into a single massive fragment of death that rained down toward them, and Damon responded with all the shadows he could summon.

“Domain. Dominion of Shadows.”

When Damon said those words, countless shadows were born from the ones he had taken. They filled the world with inky darkness, rising like a tide. The world around them was consumed by a domain of tyrannical shadows. Each shadow was filled with Damon’s will.

It was silent, yet no one dared to defy that will.

All who stood within this domain were overcome with a presence that forced submission. A will that sought domination. Yet beneath it was a strange silence that carved out a sense of peace.

It was as if a shadowed hell had covered the entire war headquarters.

Those shadows rose to the sky. Anything that met their path would either submit or be consumed.

The sky let out a deafening screech as the shadows met the sharp winds.

The Severing Winds did what they did best. They severed, or at least they attempted to.

Yet the shadows met them head on.

When they clashed, countless fragments of shadow and wind scattered through the air, falling in all directions. But the ground itself was shadow, and under this domain the Severing Winds were pulled into the shadow’s embrace and disappeared into realms unknown.

The massive fragment of the Severing Wind broke apart and was dragged into the shadows as well.

And when that happened, those within the domain felt it.

The shadows had gained a severing characteristic.

Blood dried from Damon’s nose and ears. He swayed slightly, struggling to breathe, but he could feel it.

His domain was sharper than before.

However, he could not rejoice.

The sky began to buzz with a deep vibrating drone.

Except it was not a drone.

It was a voice.

The voice of Ashergon.

“Death and fire. I am fire. I am death.”