Fate's Choice: Livestream at the Start Summoning Billions of Ravens

For the first time, cracks appeared in the Eden Barrier surrounding Joan of Arc. The originally perfect platinum patterns began to twist and shatter under the pressure of some invisible force.

Her climbing speed inevitably slowed down.

Fine beads of sweat seeped from her fair forehead, and her breathing became somewhat heavy. Each step she took felt like she was fighting against the collapse of an entire world.

When she stepped onto the 999th step.

The fog above dissipated.

A figure stood silently in the middle of the road.

That's not Arjuna.

She was a young girl dressed in a rough linen dress and with her hair in a simple bun. She held a pitchfork covered in mud in her hand, her face flushed from the sun, and her eyes were filled with the most simple longing for rural life.

That was Joan of Arc.

That was the little girl who herded sheep in the rural village of Domrémi before she became a saint.

That village girl who didn't need to bear the burden of human survival, didn't need to face the world-destroying demon king, and only needed to worry about whether it would rain tomorrow.

The phantom Joan of Arc looked at the lofty savior before her, her eyes filled with no hostility, only a deep, heart-wrenching pity.

"How much longer are you going to walk?" The village girl's voice was clear and crisp, carrying the scent of the countryside.

Savage Joan of Arc stopped in her tracks, her divine eyes trembling slightly.

"Are you really still yourself now?" The village girl raised a pitchfork and pointed it at Joan of Arc's divine white and gold battle dress. "You killed your anger, you killed your fear, you killed everything that allowed you to be called human."

"You have turned yourself into this empty shell called the Savior. If you win, the world will be saved, but Joan of Arc, who would smile when she drank hot soup, will never come back."

"Is this the victory you wanted?"

The questioning echoed from the top of the empty bone pillar.

This is the most extreme form of torture. Under Arjuna's absolute malice, the self that was stripped from the deepest part of Joan of Arc's soul also negated itself.

If the previous seven deadly sins were foreign garbage, then the current illusion is the true self that Joan of Arc herself buried.

Joan of Arc remained silent for a long time.

The cold wind high in the sky tousled her blonde hair, and those gray eyes continued to stare intently at her.

"Is it worth it?" Phantom Jeanne asked again.

The saint slowly raised her head.

There was no emotion in those pure golden eyes. That thing called emotion had already been sacrificed to the Holy Grail the moment she transformed into the Saver class.

"worth."

Joan of Arc's voice was soft, yet it carried an unshakeable will.

"If someone has to become a monster in order to save this land, then Arjuna chose the demon king, and I chose the god. There is no essential difference between them."

"As for that village girl..."

Joan of Arc took a step forward; she did not attack.

With an almost indifferent composure, she walked straight toward the phantom.

At the moment the two figures overlapped.

The phantom Jeanne d'Arc let out a final, almost imperceptible sigh.

Then, the linen skirt, the pitchfork, and the fragrance of the fields all silently melted away in the platinum-gold holy light.

She traversed her own past.

It also killed its last self.

.......

At that moment, the abyss eye hanging in the sky above New Delhi, which had been mockingly watching Li Bai and Newton struggle, began to rotate without warning.

That's not just a physical deflection of the eyeball, but a displacement of the entire high-dimensional malicious projection anchor point.

Its enormous pupils weren't even fully focused on the two desperately resisting ants in front of it; its gaze pierced through the murky atmosphere, crossed thousands of kilometers of geographical barriers, and locked onto the distant East.

That's a mirror image of Tokyo Bay.

Suspended there is what it desires most—the true Holy Grail that was transferred by Saver Joan of Arc.

"Buzz—"

A low-frequency vibration that made your teeth ache resounded throughout the Ganges Plain.

Beneath that colossal white bone pillar that stretched straight into the sky, the black mud land within a radius of several kilometers suddenly collapsed in a strange, fluid-like manner, as if it had lost its supporting structure.

Countless ruins, skeletons, and unformed monster embryos slid down into the center of the enormous vortex.

It was as if the place had become a funnel leading to the Earth's core.

Immediately afterwards, a jet-black beam of energy, so dark that even light could not escape it, accompanied by a whooshing sound like the screams of a million wronged souls, rose upstream from the center of the vortex.

However, this beam of light did not attack anyone on the ground. It exploded instantly when it touched the law barrier at the top of the stratosphere of the mirror world.

It's like a balloon filled with ink bursting in the sky.

The black energy did not dissipate, but instead condensed into tens of thousands of meteors burning with dark purple flames.

Under the combined influence of gravity and the will of the abyss, they traced parabolic arcs, shooting towards all corners of the globe like a torrential downpour.

The densest and strongest meteor shower was headed straight for Tokyo Bay.

……

Tokyo Bay, the front-line command post of the Human Union Expeditionary Force.

The piercing alarm instantly shattered the previously orderly atmosphere in the command center.

"High-energy reaction detected!"

A Russian major in charge of radar monitoring suddenly shouted, "My God... what is that? Is it a missile?"

The image on the main screen instantly switched to a wide-area satellite image.

The once gray map of Asia was now covered by a dense swarm of red dots, like locusts swarming across the sky.

According to the ballistic computer's predicted trajectories given within four seconds, these objects would impact all land within a 50-kilometer radius of the Tokyo defense perimeter.

This is carpet bombing.

Moreover, it was a carpet bombing with an unknown yield.

"It's not a missile."

Sitting in the commander-in-chief's seat, Jiang Mingjing No. 1 raised his head. His gaze was frighteningly calm. He gently pressed down on the red and blue pencil in his hand, which he used to mark the map, and broke off the lead.

"That's a recruitment drive."

Without him needing to explain further, all the officers present understood what this meant.

"Activate air defense interception procedures."

"All Aegis systems are operating at full power. Standard-3 and Standard-6 missiles, no need to conserve ammunition. Tear this curtain of rain apart in the sky."

"Whether it's a rock or a monster, I don't want them to fall intact into my defense zone."

At this command, the massive Combined Fleet anchored in Tokyo Bay instantly came to life.

The vertical launch system covers of the USS Ford carrier strike group and the surrounding dozen or so Arleigh Burke-class destroyers simultaneously popped open.

A white column of smoke rose into the air from the sea, and hundreds of anti-aircraft missiles, trailing long plumes of flame, intertwined in the air to form a deadly fire net, crashing head-on into the falling black meteors.

The first round of interception took place at an altitude of 20,000 meters.

There was no earth-shattering explosion or fire.

When those expensive kinetic interceptor warheads struck the black meteor, the latter did not disintegrate like rock or metal.

They exploded.

But it wasn't fragments, it was liquid.

Those enormous black clumps disintegrated in mid-air, turning into a thick, black rain that poured down from the sky.

The fragmentation damage from the missile had no effect on the liquid; aside from making the rain fall in smaller, denser pieces, it did almost no hindering effect.

"Interception...ineffective."

The monitor's voice trembled slightly. "The target is accelerating downwards and is expected to hit the ground in thirty seconds."