It wasn't just the barrier.
Relying on their mountainous, colossal bodies, many of the demonic beasts that emerged from the earth were not content with simply appearing—they lashed out with malicious intent, wreaking havoc on the city walls and fortifications.
These structures, made of solid stone and once considered nearly indestructible by ordinary standards—even against siege equipment—were like paper before the hulking monsters mutated by Orsaga. They might as well have been made of straw.
Like adults tearing down a child's playhouse, the beasts smashed through with ease—each step leaving a crater, each sweep of their tail sending thousand-ton objects hurtling skyward.
A single careless charge could shake even the sturdiest walls, splintering them with visible fractures.
They were destruction incarnate—demolition machines with no need for tools. In mere moments, vast sections of the city walls and surrounding buildings were reduced to rubble.
And with those special defensive structures destroyed, there was nothing left to separate the polluted lands from the frontline.
Toxic gas and noxious elements began pouring into the frontline, spreading rapidly and polluting everything in their path.
Faced with such a dire situation, not only did Alison's expression change drastically, but everyone stationed within the front line looked as though they had seen a ghost.
They all knew it: the worst-case scenario had just arrived.
On the balcony of his quarters, Henry stood watching as the snakelike monsters rampaged within the front line and the protective barrier completely vanished.
Caught completely unprepared by this sudden turn of events, even someone as seasoned and steady as Henry was left in a daze—his mind a blank, his face full of disbelief.
After a long silence, and with a visible twitch in his face, he finally let out a sigh. Then, using the artifact he always carried, he issued a retreat order to all demigods and racial representatives still within the zone.
He instructed them to evacuate immediately, using the teleportation arrays to get any uninfected troops out of the area.
There was no longer any point in holding the line.
Without the outer barrier's protection and with most of the defensive structures already in ruins, their current forces were utterly incapable of resisting this wave of demonic assault.
Staying meant only one thing: death.
And for the native factions of this world, this would be a devastating blow.
That was why Henry had no choice but to order the retreat. He could not allow these people to throw their lives away for a hopeless cause.
In the face of this command, the powerful warriors remained silent for a while before finally accepting the order and beginning preparations for withdrawal.
To serve on the frontlines, they had already proven they possessed the courage to risk everything. But even they knew this wasn't the time for reckless heroics.
Such action would only further weaken the already battered native forces—without producing any strategic gain.
So, no matter how humiliating, no matter how bitter, they swallowed their pride and chose to live.
Watching their decision unfold, Henry exhaled slowly, stowing away the communicator in his hand. He muttered to himself,
"I thought we'd be able to hold out for another month or two..."
In his original plan, even a barely maintained defense could have bought the kingdoms behind the line more time—time to reinforce their secondary fortifications, time to call for reinforcements.
Even if the first line collapsed, there would at least be a buffer, a chance to regroup and survive.
But this sudden shift in the situation had caught him completely off guard.
From his perspective, it was clear that the mastermind behind the scenes had also realized that dragging things out would be pointless—and was now going for a swift and decisive kill.
Looking at the monstrous serpents wreaking havoc in the distance, Henry drew the weapon at his waist—and vanished from sight, lunging toward one of the beasts.
Although he had not fought on the frontlines in decades since taking over responsibility for internal affairs, his skills had not dulled much. Within moments, he had gravely wounded a monster whose power neared that of a Legendary-ranked entity.
Yet despite the success, there was no sense of relief in his heart. Instead, a heavy weight settled there.
Because with just a casual glance, he could see thousands more of those giant serpents, slithering across the front line, destroying everything in sight.
In Henry's estimation, though their biological structure was still a bit crude, these monsters had clearly been mass-produced recently. They were fundamentally no different from the other creatures that had previously plagued the front line—monsters formed from mutated races and miscellaneous corpses.
But that only made the situation more alarming—it meant the Abyssal Demons had already developed the capability to mass-produce powerful monsters in a short timeframe.
These beasts might seem weak to someone of Henry's strength, but they were still near-Legendary in essence. Raising such a creature under normal circumstances would take decades of training.
And now the Abyss had managed to spawn an entire army of them in just over a week—right under their noses.
How could he not be shaken by this?
Recalling the past century, Henry thought about the countless demons they had slain—waves upon waves of them, not only killed by human hands but often turning on each other as well. Yet no matter how many fell, their numbers never seemed to dwindle.
A strange thought drifted into his mind:
'Could they really be growing out of the ground? Is that why no matter how many we kill, they never run out?'
Unknowingly, he had come close to the truth.
While demons didn't literally sprout from the earth, they did emerge from the Stygian River—a source that allowed for their near-endless mass production. As long as the river didn't dry up, they grew faster than weeds and more efficiently than a factory assembly line.
No matter how recklessly they threw themselves into battle, there would always be more to take their place.
What Henry didn't know was that the current batch of serpentine monsters had indeed taken only a few days to gestate, but their rapid development had been powered by hundreds of years' worth of accumulated energy stored in the underground barrier nodes.
In other words, Orsaga had piggybacked off the defenders' own preparations—using their resources to breed his army.
If it hadn't been for the defenders' tireless efforts in preserving and maintaining those energy nodes over the centuries, Orsaga would never have had enough power to create such an overwhelming force. At most, he might have managed a low-grade biological outbreak—just enough to harass and whittle down morale.
He could never have unleashed this fantasy-version snake apocalypse without their "help."
In fact, even Orsaga himself hadn't expected this.
Initially, his plan was simply to execute a classic inside-and-outside pincer maneuver—something subtle and strategic.
But the moment he discovered the energy nodes, everything changed.
'If these barriers can't detect my plague, then… what's stopping me from going all out?'
With that single thought, Orsaga threw caution to the wind and unleashed the chaos now consuming the frontline.
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T/N:
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