Witch, Fireball and Steam Evil God

Chapter 277: The unjust have little help

As Ethan stepped out the gate, the capital of Sivarantin became unprecedentedly lively. Looking around, people wearing golden masks were heading towards Duke Stan's manor like a tide. They swayed their bodies like a zombie horde in a movie. Countless "javelin soldiers" moved through the crowd, making sharp and piercing noises.

The whole city came.

Ethan had no doubt that if the mental link to the Golden Mask had not been severed, the entire population of West Valantine would have marched toward the capital in the same manner at the command of the Council of Six.

Vivian fearfully hid behind Ethan. Although she already knew that Sivarantin had completely fallen, her fear still reached its peak when these walking dead came out into the street and walked towards her wearing the same masks.

Perhaps there are people she knows among them; they were originally residents of Sivarantin.

As a princess of Sivaranthine, it was her duty to maintain the stability of the kingdom and protect the safety of the people of Sivaranthine, but now...

Vivian looked up at the back of the figure blocking her way, her feelings a complex mix of emotions.

This is a master of peddling, who was once angrily pelted with rotten eggs, yet now there is no one more trustworthy than him. This is truly a disconcerting situation.

If, she meant, Ethan's act of rewriting history were disregarded, this man perfectly fit her image of a "hero."

She is the heir to the Garlog bloodline and has read countless stories about Merlin since childhood. He is a towering hero and remains a hero in the eyes of many people in Westwaran to this day. Those books record one war after another. Vivian can't help but imagine whether Merlin, when facing thousands of enemy troops, giant dragons that blot out the sky, and the twisted creations left behind by evil gods, felt the same way as Ethan does now.
However, even heroes get tired and sometimes let their guard down.

Merlin is an example of this.

He had won countless victories, but in the end, he was also pierced through the heart by a cursed spear. Vivian didn't like the ending of the story. She still remembered that when she was a child, she was sad for a long time after reading the chapter about Merlin's death, and she couldn't eat for several days.

Now, what she sees is a thousand times more real than what is described in books.

There was a strange movement at their feet. The disassembled "Hunter" started operating again, supporting its massive body with its sharp limbs and shakily standing upright.

The sound of bells came from the clouds, making the radiance of the sky even more intense.

Will they, like Merlin, eventually be enveloped by the endless sea of ​​people and submerged in the glory of the Golden Kingdom?

"That's the effect of the Resurrection Branch."

Ethan introduced Vivian to the artifact Cynthia had mentioned, which was also the source of eternal life for the inhabitants of the Golden Kingdom. The Golden King had discovered a strange plane during his early conquests, a plane devoid of any life, except for a giant tree that reached to the clouds. Everything in this plane would become nourishment for the giant tree.

The artifact was a branch that the Golden King extracted from the divine tree.

Wherever the will of the Golden King reaches, the souls of the fallen will rise from hell and return to the battlefield until they utterly crush their enemies.

The mind control device's brainwashing ability is close to the swarm's coordination ability. Even if a small number of people survive the first wave of the Golden King's offensive, these Golden Kingdom soldiers who can resurrect infinitely will become their nightmare.

Ethan was beginning to understand Cynthia's decision.

Even normal planes could not withstand the invasion of the Golden Kingdom.

Fortunately, he is not a normal person.

Teacher Cat said that the anthropomorphic form of elemental spirits is the result of meditation. Theoretically speaking, in a meditative state, a powerful elemental sculptor already has the ability to communicate with elemental spirits. However, if you find that the elemental spirits in meditation appear in the real world, and you can not only see them but also interact with them, this is a sign of going astray.

Some of the academy’s research bibliographies on magic addiction indicate that many elemental shapers experienced similar hallucinations before they went completely insane.

However, Ethan felt that his "mental illness" was much more serious than that of any other drug addict.

It has become so serious that not only can he see it, but those around him can also see it.

From this point on, elemental spirits were no longer abstract concepts that could only be understood through the mind. The literary girl, the electric element senior, the yellow potato, and the cold ice element senior all truly existed.

However, Ethan never understood the significance of this war.

He felt that perhaps the residents of the Golden Kingdom were unaware that the Council of Six was simply carrying out the orders left by the Golden King before his departure, and even if they realized that the upcoming battle might be unfavorable to them, they would stubbornly send all their troops away in one fell swoop.

Upon noticing his arrival, the members of the Council of Six unsurprisingly opted for the most common "F2A" tactic.

Everything that is happening right now seems to be a pre-programmed sequence, and the Council of Six is ​​the faithful executor of that sequence.

"Be careful, it might get a little cold."

Ethan turned his head and said to Vivian.

Summer season suddenly brought heavy snow. Red snowflakes fell on the capital of Sivarandin, landing on the golden residents in motion, as well as the war machines that were constantly approaching.

Vivian reached out and curiously caught a few red snowflakes.

She had never seen snowflakes like this before; they were eerie, yet somewhat...evil.

After staring at it for a while, a nameless sense of unease welled up in my heart.

The next moment, Vivian understood the source of her fear—the "Jackal" that had been shrieking and lunging at Ethan suddenly stopped. Its forelimbs hovered above the two of them, and what stopped it was another tentacle with a similar structure. It writhed like flesh and blood and grew out of the "Jackal's" body.

The same body seemed to possess two different souls at this moment, wrestling together for control of the body.

But when applied to the inhabitants of the Golden Country, it becomes even more chilling.

Vivian saw people with four arms, the proliferating arms exposing their muscle tissue, and they did not stop growing there, more and more parts of them emerging from the chests of those people. They had no facial features, only flesh and blood that maintained the outline of humans. Some of them were choking the throats of the Golden Country residents, while others were pulling on their hands and feet.

The inhabitants of the Golden Kingdom wrestled with themselves, and a part of their bodies became their enemy at that moment.

This transformation occurred equally to every resident of the Golden Kingdom. The hellish scene made Vivian want to vomit, and even the parts of her palms stained with red snowflakes became unbearably itchy. It felt as if something was growing beneath her skin, about to burst out and turn her into the chaotic monster not far away.

The golden light that filled the sky was stained with an unclean red.

"W-what did you do?"

Vivian's voice trembled.

She felt she had just had a hallucination; Ethan was never a great hero, and his methods of solving problems were always more like those of an evil god.

Now, even if Ethan's eyes suddenly turned into six, or if he grew non-human tentacles, it wouldn't surprise her anymore.

"I tried to solve the problem of the disparity in troop strength."

Ethan said.

The arrival of the Golden King accelerated the world's understanding of "rules" and "causality," forcing him to adapt, and so far, the results have been quite good. "As you can see, no matter how many enemies there are, no matter how many times they die and are resurrected, we now possess the same number of troops as them."

Vivian looked up at Ethan, and she felt that the smile on the man's face was no different from that of a devil. "In this way, the problem of not having enough manpower will be completely solved."

After three months of training, Ethan's skill panel has finally changed:

Ice Element (Demon)

There were no proficiency indicators or skill descriptions; instead, there was a beautiful illustration of a woman with white hair and red eyes standing under a blood moon. She turned to the side, gazing at the person who had opened the card with a half-smile, while red snowflakes drifted down onto her shoulder.

She was in a forest, and if she looked more closely, she would find that the branches of the trees were made up of human limbs, the leaves had eyes, and the rough texture of the bark looked like a cracked mouth.

"Barzatos..."

She pointed at Ethan, speechless. In that moment, she finally understood: "You are Barzatos!"

........................

Meanwhile, the woman wearing a mask of worry also noticed the changes in the city.

After the heavy snow fell, the windows of the palace were covered with a thin layer of frost, but her intuition told her that it was not only the "Hunters" and the residents of the Golden Kingdom that had changed; the houses they lived in and the land beneath their feet had all become strange at this moment.

If I had to explain it, it would be as if everything around me had come to life.

The ground and houses, these creations of humankind, were given life equally by the sudden heavy snow, while they themselves were swallowed up by some creature.

She could hardly believe her eyes, and she could hardly believe what Cynthia had done.

"You have awakened the ancient gods?"

Her question penetrated through the mask and reached Cynthia's mind.

No one in this world understands the terror of the Old Gods better than Cynthia. The people of this world paid an extremely heavy price to seal them away. They are beings that even the Golden King fears.

Cynthia should also know the consequences of doing so.

Filled with rage because of humanity's betrayal, even if they win the war using the power of the Old Gods, only destruction awaits this plane.

"Come with me. The Golden King's loyal followers should be too preoccupied to pay attention to this place now."

Cynthia simply explained calmly, her figure disappearing into the shadows, the silvery energy guiding the woman wearing the mask of worry forward.

Ethan accomplished this seemingly impossible promise—he severed the mental link, drawing the attention of all the inhabitants of the Golden Country.

After a brief hesitation, the woman followed the silver trail.

At the end of this road, there was another unexpected person.

Following the long-sealed secret passage of the palace downwards, a man seemed to have been waiting there for a long time.

He wore a mask of terror and devoted himself to manipulating the king of Sivarandin.

This clearly disobeyed the orders of the Golden King, who had entered this place alone after his mental link was severed.

The man had been plotting this for a long time; before the mental link was severed, he had never revealed the existence of the palace's secret passage in the mental link.

"Yoda, you've betrayed us too?"

She questioned the other party through the golden mask, a direction that both terrified and bewildered her.

Yoda not only concealed the secret passage to the palace, but he also likely conveyed false information to other members of the council. He was the last person to know the king's whereabouts.

He claimed that the king highly valued the bloodline of Galog, especially Princess Vivian, whose bloodline held special significance for the king's plans.

However, not long after that, the followers of the Old Gods infiltrated the palace and, under the Duke of Stan's scheme, took Princess Vivian away from Sivarantin. Now it seems that the reason why those rebels succeeded so easily was because there was a traitor in the Council of Six.

Faced with her questioning, Yoda did not immediately pay attention to her. He was concentrating on inserting a needle into the skin of the king's neck. The needle was connected to a transparent tube, which was inserted into an inconspicuous groove in the stone wall. Before long, the crimson color was injected into the wall little by little through the tube.

This is the end of the secret passage. If Yoda hadn't personally demonstrated it, even if she had arrived here, she probably wouldn't have noticed the trickery here.

Because of the severed mental link, she could not see through Yoda's heart, nor did she know what he was thinking at that moment.

"Severing the mental link is also part of your plan?"

“This is the plan proposed by Charman,” Yoda finally responded. “Kara, you would know this if you had listened more carefully yesterday.”

Charman, Crowley...

She should have realized long ago that the serious injury was just an excuse they came up with. If Cynthia were included, wouldn't that mean that more than half of the Council of Seven had betrayed their king?

Could this be part of the King's plan?

The noise behind the stone wall interrupted her thoughts; as blood was injected, some kind of mechanism was activated.

The ground began to shake slightly, and an unusual light shone through the left wall.

"You can make your judgment after you have witnessed these secrets."

The king, who was the key, lost his value and was carelessly discarded by Yoda.

Kara's heart pounded. She seemed to understand that Vivian-Galog herself was a smokescreen. Her escape, the betrayal of Duke Stan, and the turmoil in Oakwood were all bait used by Yoda or Charman to distract others. Their real purpose had always been in the palace of Sivarantin.

She saw Yoda walk toward the part of the wall where the light was shining through, and he stepped straight through the faint light.

Kara followed closely behind.

On the other side of the wall was an alchemy room.

Or more accurately, the place where Merlin lived.

(End of this chapter)