The deafening sounds of battle, the excited shouts of players, and the dazzling flashes of skill effects all faded into distant, distorted background noise.
Faruqir didn’t spare [Shadowfang Warbreaker] another glance.
She had no energy left to comfort a foreigner drowning in the collapse of their own world.
She plunged her ice sword into the ground, using it as a cane to support her trembling body.
She took a deep breath.
Cold, blood-tinged air stabbed into her lungs, forcing down the churning heat and searing pain.
She turned, facing the group of powerful, battle-hardened top players below, and in a hoarse voice, issued her command as battlefield commander.
“Council of Truth,”
She named the leading guild.
“Your control skills are the strongest. Follow my lead—use your strongest binding spells to restrict its movement! Its core is in the chest, right where the humanoid shape is! All ranged units, concentrate fire there!”
[Jingwei Sage]pushed up his glasses, the reflection of the monster’s twisted form flickering on the lenses.
He had no objection to handing over his command.
“Paladin Squad! Chains of Judgment, ready!”
He issued orders calmly on the guild channel.
“Mage Squad, prepare Deep Freeze! Everyone, listen for my three-count. Release the control chains in sync! Three, two, one, go!”
In an instant, dozens of golden chains, brighter than the sun, descended from the sky, wrapping precisely around the giant flesh monster’s massive body and thrashing limbs.
Immediately after, a burst of intense cold erupted, and a thick layer of ice spread rapidly along the chains, trying to freeze the monster’s writhing flesh solid.
“Now! Full power!”
A torrent of attacks, dazzling as fireworks, exploded at the monster’s chest.
All players unleashed their most powerful single-target burst skills at once.
Huge damage numbers cascaded from above the monster like a waterfall, so dense they blurred the eyes.
Yet all of it was in vain.
Skills that could instantly kill ordinary elite monsters landed on the flesh giant, but only made the end of its massive health bar flicker slightly.
Even more terrifying, the monster’s flesh wriggled and regenerated at a speed visible to the naked eye, wounds torn open by magic sealing shut within breaths.
It didn’t even roar in pain.
In the hundreds of eyes of all sizes, there was only cold indifference toward the ants before it.
“Control… we can’t hold it!”
A Paladin player cried out in terror.
The golden chains wrapped around the monster were stretched taut, groaning as they neared their breaking point.
Faruqir’s heart plummeted.
Most of her mana was spent, and the wound on her chest began to bleed again as she forced herself to channel more energy.
She tried to gather strength, attempting to cast her strongest sealing spell—Eternal Ice Coffin.
But without Frost Snow’s guidance, the moment her mental energy touched the complex magic model, a stabbing pain shot through her mind.
No… In this state, forcing it would only lead to mana backlash.
“ROARRRR——!!!”
A thunderous roar shattered the players’ control.
The golden chains snapped inch by inch, dissolving into a rain of light.
Freed from its restraints, the flesh giant seemed finally enraged by the swarm of ants attacking it.
It raised an arm as massive as a siege hammer, swinging it in fury at a landmark of Arslan Royal City—the Grand Library.
That white, spired building, painstakingly crafted by generations of artisans and holding a millennium of the kingdom’s history and wisdom, crumbled under the blow like a child’s stack of blocks.
With a tooth-grinding crash, the tower spire—over thirty meters high—was sheared in half, the immense stone structure tumbling and roaring as it traced a deadly arc over the evacuating civilian district below.
“Scatter!!!”
Eileen screamed herself hoarse, she and the other magic girls frantically unleashing shock spells in an attempt to alter the falling trajectory of the mini-mountain.
But their power was as feeble as mayflies before the sheer mass.
Panic exploded through the crowd like a plague.
People screamed, shoved, and fled from the shadow with desperate abandon.
In the chaos, there were always forgotten corners.
Beside an overturned market stall, a young mother clutched her trembling daughter.
Her ankle had been injured by falling goods in the earlier chaos—she couldn’t run fast.
She looked up in despair, staring at the rapidly growing shadow, at the death-bringing spire descending with the roar of wind and thunder.
Everything was too fast.
So fast she couldn’t even savor the despair.
The daughter in her arms, a seven-year-old girl named Lina, stared blankly at the sky with eyes brimming with tears.
She might not fully understand death, but the crushing pressure from above was enough to make any living thing tremble in instinctive terror.
The mother loosened her grip, spreading her thin body like a mother bird shielding her chick, using her own frail back as a barrier for Lina.
She tried to block the mountain that could crush steel into a thin sheet with her flesh and blood.
Through her mother’s body, Lina could only see her trembling shoulders.
She smelled the familiar scent of sunlight in her mother’s hair.
—
Time seemed to stretch in that moment, thick and endless.
Faruqir’s gaze was locked on the falling stone tower.
Her body, numb and frozen from injuries and mana depletion, throbbed with burning pain near her wounds.
But all of that was eclipsed by a sharper emotion—
Powerlessness.
Her mind raced, calculating the spire’s impact, blast range, the density of the crowd…
But every outcome pointed to the same hellish conclusion: she couldn’t save them.
All she could do was watch as death rained down.
In that chaotic vision, a figure made her ice-blue pupils contract sharply.
A mother, shielding a young girl in her arms.
Her head tilted back, face filled with primal terror in the face of unstoppable disaster, yet her arms remained unyielding as steel, her frail back forming the last and only shield for her child.
And on that child’s terrified face, Faruqir saw a familiar outline.
Lina.
Memory burst forth.
After the expedition returned… outside the palace…
After the battle with the Swarm King, Faruqir had led the remaining magic girls into the palace to confront Bartow, only to be stonewalled by Duraniel’s blatant favoritism.
Afterwards, she sat alone on the palace steps, feeling for the first time disappointment in the kingdom.
That little girl with bright eyes didn’t shy away in fear like the others, but shyly, with hope, handed her a hand-sewn, crookedly-stitched teddy bear.
“Chosen by the gods… sister,”
The girl’s voice was as faint as a mosquito, yet it cut through time and space, echoing in Faruqir’s ears.
“Don’t be sad.”
From that day on, the bear hung from her marching pack, a soft secret beneath her cold armor.
It was this fragile purity she fought to protect.
And now, that beauty was about to be crushed by the giant tower.
Faruqir whipped her head around, eyes locking onto the mother and daughter beyond the chaos of the battlefield.
Her lips moved soundlessly, Lina’s name screaming in her heart, yet no sound escaped.
A despair deeper than any blade piercing her body seized her heart, squeezing tight.
She couldn’t protect her.
She couldn’t protect the child who had once protected her in the most innocent way.