Chapter 405 : Holy War (5)

"Gulp."

A soldier stationed near the command platform swallowed the dry lump in his throat without even realizing it.

He hadn't even been in a combat yet, but his uniform was already soaked through with sweat.

That wasn't exactly surprising, given what was happening right in front of him.

Whatever was going on up near that platform was so far beyond anything he could comprehend that his mind had simply stopped trying to keep up.

And right at that moment.

Slick.

The enemy's sword punched clean through the Commander's side.

‘When did he even...?’

To the eyes of someone who was nothing more than an ordinary soldier, the actual sequence of attacks didn't even exist.

One second there were streaks of light flashing back and forth, and the next second, the Commander was standing there with a sword buried in his ribs.

He wasn't ashamed of that. He'd served on the frontier long enough to learn the basics of martial arts, enough that back in the martial world, he might've scraped together a Second Rate reputation.

But this?

This was a clash his eyes couldn't even dream of following.

The young man who'd just run the Commander through stepped back and gave a casual flick of his wrist, and the sword that had been lodged in the Commander's side tore itself free and flew back into his hand like it was on a string.

It was so bizarre that he wondered if he was seeing sorceries in action.

Maybe that was why, even though their highest commander had just been dealt a lethal blow right in front of them, the soldier couldn't do anything but stare blankly in shock.

He wasn't the only one, either.

Every single guard who had surrounded the platform to cut off the man's escape was standing completely paralyzed, looking like their souls had just left their bodies.

It was a faint groan that snapped them back.

"Ugh..."

The Western Military Commander’s groans.

The moment the sword was ripped out of him, the pain hit all at once and he coughed up a mouthful of blood. And then, blood started seeping out from the wound in his side.

"Commander!!"

"S-Sir, stay with us!!"

"Someone get a physician, NOW!!"

The surviving elite officers surrounding the Commander all started screaming in panic, and the soldier watched them with something that felt almost like pity.

‘Even if the Hua Tuo rose from the grave right now, there's no way he could save him.’

Even to a grunt who had only worked on the borders for five years, it was painfully obvious that the Commander was already a dead man.

So why were these veteran officers screaming such delusional nonsense?

It was a strangely clear-headed thought to be having, given that their Commander was dying right in front of him.

And yet his mind had never felt colder and more rational. It felt like his brain was doing everything it could to not think about the looming reality that he was about to face.

The thing he wasn't letting himself think about.

But as he watched the officers panic, a new sound pierced through the chaos and caught his ear. 

It’s the sound of footsteps.

The soldier felt like his neck was strangled and his head could only stay still while his eyes actively rolled over the source of the sound.

The young monster who had just killed the Commander was starting to walk.

His blade was still shrouded in a red haze, coiling and shifting like something alive.

And for some reason unknown to him, the soldier intuitively knew in his gut that the red haze around that sword was made from the Commander's blood.

The moment his brain finally processed that information.

SWISH!

The young man was gone again.

And then—

Slick.

The gruesome sound of flesh being carved apart began to echo across the platform.

"K-Kill him!"

"Take him down, NOW!!"

The surviving officers shrieked from every direction, but the soldier found his legs completely cemented to the ground. 

It wasn't long before silence settled over everything.

Within a span of less than ten breaths, there aren’t any living things near the command platform.

Well, except for one.

The man who had personally butchered every officer standing there.

The young man who was now bathed head-to-toe in a thick layer of gore.

But in an eerie contrast to its bloodied wielder, there isn’t a single drop of blood around the blade of that cursed sword.

The soldier had seen why.

When the last officer's neck was severed, the blood had just disappeared into the sword.

Absorbed.

Sucked up without a trace.

What the fuck are you supposed to call something like this?

A monster who hadn't just slaughtered hundreds of men alone, but also completely wiped out the Commander and his entire elite staff.

A monster wielding a cursed demonic sword that drank human blood. 

Could a thing like that really be called human?

No.

And that was why no one was left alive nearby.

Because the thing in front of him wasn't human.

And if it wasn't human, then what was it?

The eerie hymn that had been drifting over from the enemy ranks suddenly came back to him.

“GLO~RY! GLORY! O ’ DIVINE CULT!!”

Those people were fanatics chasing their god. Which meant the thing standing in front of him right now was the god they were chasing.

‘An Evil God? A Demonic God? A God of Death?’

While his brain desperately scrambled to put a label on the monster, the soldier suddenly flinched.

The thing had finished dealing with its prey. And now it was looking straight at him.

That was the moment the soldier finally understood one truth.

‘I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead.’

It was the one truth his primal instincts had been forcibly trying to suppress.

‘Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.’

The terror of standing in front of something you had no hope of fighting.

A fear that didn't have a name.

The lips of the entity, who was gazing at him with eyes devoid of any human emotion, slowly parted.

To the soldier, it felt like standing in front of the King of Hell while waiting for his sentence to be handed down.

The world had slowed to a crawl, making the simple act of the monster parting his lips feel agonizingly slow. 

But in direct contrast to the crawling world, his mind was doing its best to race through every memory he had ever accumulated at a blinding speed.

That was what they said happened at the end, wasn't it?

Your life flashing before your eyes.

The phenomenon of your life flashing before your eyes was actually humanity's ultimate survival instinct.

In the microsecond between life and death, the brain forcibly scans through every single experience you've ever had to search for a way to survive.

But no matter how many times it cycled through, the brain found zero solutions for surviving the entity standing in front of him.

No memory, skills, or tricks were going to get him out of this.

So it just kept going faster.

‘Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.’

A searing pain ripped through his skull, making him feel like his brain was on fire.

But the survival instinct didn't just stop at his mind. His body's muscular system completely hijacked his physical limiters in a desperate bid to stay alive. Every single muscle fiber locked up to its maximum tension, making his joints literally scream under the pressure. 

His heart started slamming against his ribs like a jackhammer, desperately trying to pump enough adrenaline to break past his human limits.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

Trapped in a world where time had practically frozen, only the deafening sound of his own heartbeat echoed in his ears.

He was seconds away from his own heart and brain tearing themselves apart when the world finally caught up to itself, and the monster's voice finally shattered the frozen world.

"Those who discard their weapons and surrender shall be spared!"

For a few seconds, the soldier couldn't process the words.

Because those weren't the words of something that was about to kill him.

It was an offer of mercy that defied the logic of the situation.

But his survival-starved brain latched onto the meaning almost immediately.

‘Ahhh. The god is showing us mercy...’

But that wave of overwhelming relief lasted for one second.

‘S-Shit, I need to drop my weapon and surrender! Now!’

Panic seized his mind once again. However, there was no need for him to worry about that.

Thump.

Because the second the tension snapped, the completely fried muscles and nerves had given out and plunged his unconscious body onto the dirt.

***

"Those who discard their weapons and surrender shall be spared!"

A beat of heavy silence blanketed the area right after Il-mok's qi-infused shout echoed across the platform.

Thud.

Similar sounds began echoing consecutively from all directions.

A good portion of the soldiers who'd had him surrounded were now sinking to their knees, weapons clattering to the ground as they gave themselves up.

‘Hm. Faster than I expected.’

Il-mok had honestly anticipated at least a little bit of pushback, so he was genuinely surprised by how fast they surrendered.

Though there was a small misunderstanding on his part.

They hadn't exactly made a conscious choice to surrender.

Their legs had just given out and their hands had followed. Their grips went slack, and the weapons they'd been holding simply fell.

"Mm?"

Immediately after, a highly repulsive stench hit Il-mok's nose. 

Even though his sense of smell had already gone numb from the heavy stench of blood after butchering hundreds of men, Il-mok instantly recognized the odor. 

Someone had pissed themselves.

More than one person, actually.

And by the smell of it, at least one of them had done considerably worse than that.

"Tsk."

The second Il-mok clicked his tongue, and a synchronized chorus of terrified hiccups echoed across the entire platform.

Every single one of them was staring at him with expressions stricken by terror.

"NOOOO!!!!"

"Please spare me! Please spare me! Please spare me! Oh God! Oh God! Pleeaaase!"

A handful of soldiers had already completely lost their minds, screaming and babbling in a full-blown panic. A few others appeared to have actually died from pure fright.

Il-mok couldn't quite wrap his head around why they were reacting like this, so he stopped trying and got moving.

He didn't have time to sit around analyzing a bunch of weirdos.

He swept his sword through the air, and an arc of blood-red Sword Force cut clean through the already-dead Commander's neck.

He then used the Hand-Controlled Sword and pulled a spear that one of the surrendering soldiers had dropped, and drove it forward to skewer the Commander's severed head.

‘I'm really not a fan of doing this, but it is what it is.’

He hoisted the spear with the Commander's head mounted on it across his back and bellowed again.

"Your Commander is dead!! Drop your weapons and surrender right now!! Mercy will be granted to all those who yield!!"

Since all the soldiers nearby had already given up, Il-mok took off with his lightness skill and continuously bellowed his ultimatum. 

Il-mok despised seeing innocent people bleed. 

And the harsh truth was that the vast majority of the men dying on this battlefield were innocent, regardless of whose flag they fought under.

At the end of the day, there was only one way to minimize the body count and bring this meat grinder of a war to a screeching halt.

Take out the Commander as fast as possible and force a mass surrender.

"No... It can't be..."

"The Commander... he's actually gone..."

As Il-mok paraded around the battlefield with the spear bearing the Commander's head, a massive commotion began to sweep across the battlefield.

Between the bizarre hymns constantly echoing from the Cultists on the front lines and the terrifying martial artists of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult effortlessly butchering soldiers on all sides, the soldiers of the Imperial Army were already reaching their breaking points.

And now that their highest-ranking officer was dead, their morale took a nosedive.

Il-mok drove the nail in with a different shout this time.

"Anyone who wants to join us in purging the corrupt eunuch trash ruining our nation, drop your weapons and surrender now!!"

A few dozen meters away, the maids amplified their own voices with Qi and joined in.

"Those who discard their weapons and surrender shall be spared!!"

"Surrender if you want to live!!"

From the very beginning, Il-mok had no intention of killing every last one of them.

Wiping out an eighty-thousand-strong army to the last man guaranteed that his own forces would take heavy and unavoidable losses even when the battle resulted in victory.

He had to minimize allied casualties and absorb surrendering troops to bolster his own numbers so that this war with the Imperial Family could be won.

Thankfully, they had a damn solid plan and justification for that.

The entire reason Gansu’s Provincial Military Commander had ridden out to publicly negotiate with the enemy general earlier was to plant that “anti-eunuch” sentiment within the enemy’s soldiers’ heads.

Hearing the shouts from Il-mok and the maids, the soldiers in the vicinity began dropping their weapons one by one and falling to their knees. 

It wasn't because they were moved by the words.

‘M-Monsters.’

‘There's no point fighting. We'll just die for nothing.’

They were completely terrified.

From the very start, they'd never had control of this battle. And all they'd been hearing from the moment it began were the screams of their own comrades.

Their morale wasn't just low. It was buried.

‘Y-Yeah! They're right! The real villains here are those corrupt eunuchs!’

In that state of fear, the justification that Il-mok and the Provincial Military Commander had been hammering home was an almost irresistible lifeline to grab onto.

However, not everyone on the battlefield was ready to throw in the towel.

"Anyone who goes over to those traitors will have their entire family line wiped out!!"

"You lot!! Pick up your weapons and attack them RIGHT NOW!!"

Mid-ranking officers from the Western Military Command scattered throughout the field were screaming at the top of their lungs as their soldiers retreated or threw down their weapons, and a few of them went further than that.

Slick.

Some even went as far as cutting down the soldiers who tried to pull back.

Even for someone of Il-mok's caliber, ten bodies would not be enough to personally track down and kill every single commanding officer scattered throughout an army of tens of thousands. 

And sure enough, another officer was roaring and swinging his blade at a retreating soldier.

"Don't you dare listen to these rebel b—!"

THWACK.

Before the officer's sword could reach the soldier's neck, an arrow materialized out of thin air and buried itself deep into his skull.

It was Jeong Hyeon's work.

"Those who surrender shall be spared!!"

"Discard your weapons and surrender!"

The Heavenly Demon Divine Cult warriors added their voices to the chorus as well, calling for surrender while simultaneously hunting down the enemy officers who kept screaming at their own men.

And if those officers happened to be too far away to stab—

SWOOOOOSH!

THWACK!

Jeong Hyeon, along with the Baek Family’s warriors, was picking them off from a distance with throwing weapons and arrows.

The biggest reason the battle had tilted so drastically was the Commander's death.

The moment Eunuch Gong laid eyes on that head mounted on the spear, he abandoned his pursuit of Baek Un-hak entirely and made a desperate break in the opposite direction.

He'd read the tide and knew the battle was lost.

The other Eastern Depot agents didn't need to be told twice and bolted right behind him.

Baek Un-hak and the Divine Cult warriors had given chase at first, but with mid-ranking officers still screaming and forcing their own soldiers to fight and die throughout the field, Baek Un-hak made a call to give up the pursuit and stabilize the battlefield first.

Ultimately, that was the primary objective Il-mok had tasked them with before the war even started.

Once Baek Un-hak and the Cult warriors were fully committed to pushing for surrender and cutting down the holdout officers, the wave of capitulation spread like wildfire.

Across the entire battlefield, the sounds of weapons hitting the ground and soldiers dropping to their knees rang out in a continuous chorus.

Inevitably, that sound reached the Lanzhou Army as well as the fanatics who had been surrendering themselves to their fervor and their hymns.

"W-We won."

"We actually won!!"

"THANK YOU, GOD!!"

Realizing they had emerged victorious in their Holy War, they raised their bloodied weapons toward the sky and screamed in reverence to their god.

"THE HEAVENLY DEMON DESCENDS!!"

"TEN THOUSAND DEMONS OBEY!!!"