In the next second, the smile on the bald strongman's face froze.
His dark red eyes bulged, his mouth opened and closed, and a muffled sound squeezed out of his throat.
"Good lord, what kind of monster is this?"
Across the battlefield, almost every apprentice pushing for the rankings uttered a similar exclamation at the exact same moment.
Some cursed as they closed the Battle Merit Ranking, some double-checked the numbers three times before falling silent, and others simply gave up on the rankings altogether, turning their attention to more valuable prey.
Even Ella in second place and Malfoy in third fell silent after seeing that number.
"Ethan Leo." Malfoy muttered the name once as he pulled his broken sword from the corpse of a fallen magical beast. "Interesting."
He hoisted the broken sword onto his shoulder and walked deeper into the battlefield.
War Fortress Command.
On the giant battlefield map on the dome, the blue and green blocks were still colliding wildly.
New data refreshed on every front, and new casualty numbers popped up for every sector.
Wizard Azhan stared at the small light screen in front of him, which was locked onto the name with the abnormal battle merit.
"Ethan Leo. Blood Bone Tower Academy, Third-Tier Apprentice." He read the name again.
Wizard Geyang, standing nearby, tilted her head. "Still staring? I thought you said you didn't care much?"
Azhan clicked his tongue. "No, I know Black Wizards produce freaks, but I've never seen battle merit this ridiculous. A million merit in just a few minutes. This kid is truly a beast."
Wizard Wusha, sitting in the corner, leaned over and glanced at the data on the screen. "I checked; it wasn't a one-time burst. After that large-scale wizardry of his spread out, it has been continuously killing. The merit accumulated gradually. He even killed a First-Tier lifeform in the middle of it."
"A First-Tier lifeform?" Wizard Geyang raised an eyebrow. "A Third-Tier Apprentice killing a First-Tier lifeform?"
"Yeah, it's clearly marked in the battle merit logs: Killer, Ethan Leo." Wusha swiped his finger across the screen, pulling up the records.
Geyang was silent for two seconds. "Fine. He's a Black Wizard, after all."
"Exactly." Wusha retracted his hand. "Back when Jade Blood was still a Third-Tier Apprentice, she was even more outrageous. She slaughtered an entire legion of natives by herself. This is nothing compared to that."
Azhan was about to say something when Wizard Thousand Eyes, sitting at the very front of the circular command console, suddenly spoke.
"Blood Bone really did pick up a gem, didn't he?"
The attention of several white-robed wizards was immediately drawn to him.
Wizard Thousand Eyes leaned back in his chair, his graying hair glinting silver under the light of the dome crystals.
His gaze did not leave the giant 3D battlefield map in front of him, but a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"But compared to the first time Blood Bone participated in a World War twenty-seven hundred years ago, this is still a bit lacking."
The hall fell silent for a moment. Several white-robed wizards looked up simultaneously, their gazes landing on Wizard Thousand Eyes.
Geyang was the first to speak. "Lord Thousand Eyes, did you participate in a World War alongside Wizard Blood Bone?"
Wizard Thousand Eyes didn't answer directly; he simply pointed a finger at the battlefield map. "I was also participating in my first World War back then. That bastard Blood Bone summoned thirty million Undead creatures all by himself. He was only a Third-Tier Apprentice at the time."
"Thirty... million?" Wusha's eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
"Thirteen of which were First-Tier Undead," Wizard Thousand Eyes added.
The hall became even quieter.
Azhan swallowed hard. "Wait, Lord. Where did he get the mental power to control thirty million Undead? And those First-Tier Undead—how could they possibly obey the commands of a Third-Tier Apprentice?"
Wizard Thousand Eyes turned his head, his cloudy eyes resting on Azhan's face for a moment.
"Indeed. None of the apprentices in our batch understood it either."
He leaned back against the chair, his gaze returning to the battlefield map. "Why First-Tier Undead obeyed a Third-Tier Apprentice, how he signed contracts for a thirty-million-strong Undead legion, and how his mental power supported it—none of it was understood. But it was a fact. He tore right through the left-wing battlefield of the Silia World back then. Single-handedly."
The white-robed wizards looked at each other in disbelief.
Geyang opened her mouth to say something but then swallowed her words.
Just then, a young white-robed wizard at the control console responsible for monitoring the Battle Merit Ranking suddenly let out a surprised sound.
"Someone else is surging up. 1.53 million battle merit—they've overtaken Ethan Leo."
Azhan immediately turned around. "Who?"
"Malfoy Broken-Blade, Ashen Academy, Third-Tier Apprentice. He just killed a Tier 1 magical beast."
Before he could finish, a voice came from another direction.
"Ella Gray-Spear, 1.71 million battle merit. She also killed three First-Tier lifeforms. Her strength is incredibly fierce."
The atmosphere in the hall shifted subtly. Azhan watched the ranking numbers jumping on the screen, his mouth twitching repeatedly.
Ethan's first place had already been pushed down to third.
At that moment, the sky suddenly darkened.
It was as if a basin of thick ink had been splashed across the firmament from the top, and the light itself was being sucked away by something.
Everyone on the battlefield, whether from the Wizard World or the Amons World, instinctively looked up.
High in the heavens, a cluster of emerald light was extinguishing.
That light had originally been the brightest among all Third-Tier lifeforms in the Amons World, but now it was like a punctured bladder, collapsing inward from the center.
Tiny green motes of light constantly dissipated from the edges. Once they separated from the main body, they dimmed rapidly, turning into gray-white powder that drifted down from the high altitude.
Immediately following that, a piercing screech exploded from the depths of the sky.
A giant bird over five thousand meters in length fell from the heavens.
The giant bird's frame was so massive that its descent cast a moving shadow across the battlefield.
The shadow began spreading from the west side of the battlefield and slowly pushed east. Wherever it passed, whether they were the cannon fodder legions of the Wizard World or the warriors of the Amons World, everyone instinctively looked up.
The giant bird's left wing was torn from the root, the surface of the wound jagged and uneven. Pale gold blood gushed from the tear, trailing a bloody waterfall that stretched for thousands of meters in the air.
When the blood splashed onto the battlefield, the moment it touched the ground, the soil, rock, and corpse remains were all corroded into deep, bottomless holes, with white smoke rising from them.
Its right wing was still flapping instinctively, each beat stirring up violent air currents that blew away everything on the battlefield below.
Slaves, contract beasts, Amons warriors, and magical beasts were scattered in all directions like scraps of paper by the rushing air.
The giant bird let out a piercing screech.
The sound pressed down from thousands of meters above, making the very soil on the ground jump.
The cannon fodder legions closest to the impact had their internal organs shattered by the sound waves. Blood poured from their noses and mouths as they fell over in massive swathes.
Its body began disintegrating.
Starting from the edges of the wounds, its flesh and blood were stripped away as if by invisible blades, peeling off the skeleton layer by layer.
Pale gold blood mixed with shattered feathers poured down from the sky, forming a rain of blood over the battlefield.
Rate on N.U.
