The Runic Alchemist - Chapter 717 - 717: The War For Malveria 4

Damian looked over the battlefield. Even with their King and the biggest advantage gone, they had only stopped momentarily before continuing the fight. All seven demons were still alive. Damian had instructed his transcendants to at least keep the opponents alive if they could. Sam and Einar had already restrained theirs with the giant steel cuffs he had made. The sacrum was the most useful against their black weapons. Now they were doing flashy moves to scare off the demons as they had discussed before the battle.

All remaining demons were continuously shouting, urging their people to keep going even if they lost all hope. They did not believe that there could be any life worth living if they lost. No one would in their position—through their spies, they knew the hate people had toward their kind, even though most of them had no idea if they were even real or not.

They weren’t dying though; the demons indeed had runic weapons far outclassing the three kingdoms. Chaos was not something to mess around with, but the possibilities in weapon-making using that were huge. The short-range weapons—swords and spears—had a solid rustic black tip and edge, made by somehow hardening the corrosive liquid. It obliterated the steel shields and weapons uncoated in aura like they were made of cheese. Then there were archers with the same black tips, but those landed exploding and splashing the corrosive liquid on target.

Some of them even had a small palm-sized rustic black brick that, on impact, exploded like a grenade—just much more damaging, with dark and green smoke that made people lose vision and balance along with damaging their skin to give irritating itches that some just could not ignore even in the middle of the battle.

The battlefield—or the time of battle—was not fixed; otherwise, they would have made traps too.

Suddenly, Damian sensed thousands of people approaching from the direction of Malveria. They weren’t strong—barely first rankers, and some only mundane. Still, some couple of kilometers away from them, on the other side of the black fortress the demons had erected.

They were women and children holding the simplest of close-range black-tipped weapons. Some didn’t even have the black tips, only normal steel weapons.

‘The civilians!’

All could see them. Suddenly, the emperor flew toward them, transforming into a dragon mid-flight. What was that guy doing now? Damian too followed behind, his speed was slower as he started drifting away, but when he saw the mid-sized red dragon open its mouth, he boosted himself with the black flames, using a wormhole to come ahead of the red dragon.

He already had the golden shield spell—Damian activated it instantly. The massive force of the scorching red flames clashed onto the fancy swirling golden shield, cracking it slightly. Damian was pushed back a few meters, not expecting it to be so powerful—the size of the dragon was truly deceiving.

He did manage to block it completely though. The crowd of demonfolk stopped in their charge, realizing how close they had come to being perished without making any difference on the battlefield.

“What?” the emperor transformed back and asked, his face dark.

“I said only the soldiers die—not the people of the city,” Damian replied in equal seriousness.

“They joined the battlefield. That makes them a threat.”

“They will not join the battlefield. There are easier ways to restrain people,” Damian said while turning back to create a large air shield wall to stop all the thousands of demons.

He had added a tinge of flames in it, so it had a red hue with small flames coming out at places, giving a blurred red, half-translucent solid air shield.

“I can see some men among them,” the emperor said from behind him. The men in question were teenage boys.

“Go away,” Damian said with a bit harsher tone than he probably should have. His anger toward the guy’s actions had just reached such a point—he stopped caring about the pretenses.

“Careful now,” the emperor said in a deep voice. “That sounded awfully similar to an order.”

“It is an order—leave these people alone,” Damian said, turning around.

The emperor stared at him. Damian was past caring too. If the guy had doubts, let them be clear as day. The second stretched with tension, neither blinked. The emperor moved at a speed that was probably beyond peak transcendent level. The guy did not touch his sword—instead, his human mouth started to open wide. Damian’s senses were so heightened he saw the open human mouth starting to turn slightly darker in slow motion as the whole body of the emperor started turning red and scaly, starting from the face.

The distance between them was barely three meters, and in just that, he had already transformed one quarter into the dragon. A big red, sharp-toothed mouth was about to bite onto him when Damian simply adjusted his position a little and pulled his right hand back with as much strength as he could muster.

The second the red thing came under one meter, Damian landed the punch containing all his strength, enhanced by his black aura—the punch landed with a very ugly-sounding crack. The breaking of the shield’s sound came first, then came the violent gust of wind created as the result of the dragon, still in mid-transformation, being shot back with enormous force.

The emperor could not break his speed at all, even after fully transforming into the big red dragon, and crashed right in the middle of the two armies fighting, getting dragged for meters in the land before stopping.

The front head of the Chinese dragon was slightly bent, looking very uncomfortably bad. The dragon had lost vision for a while, but in a few seconds, its eyes had regained focus.

Damian recreated the red air shield and shot through the sky toward the red dragon in the distance.

The people busy fighting around the crashed dragon moved away as the emperor shifted his giant body and got back on his feet, his dented mouth wide open, spitting deep red scorching flames toward the flying Damian.

He did not change his direction at all. Instead, Damian too launched his own hellfire—the clash of the two bright flames mid-air lit up the entire battlefield.