The army of the Kingdom of Thunder saw their only chance of victory against the superior Arvosa army in launching a pincer attack, but when they heard that the besieged Arvosa capital was already celebrating victory, their morale fell, and their land was conquered soon after.
The Arvosa troops marched on, eventually clashing with the united armies of the three remaining kingdoms. A day passed, then another, and another. After ten days, when the Arvosa civilians were becoming quite weary, the situation on the battlefield changed dramatically. The war would finish three days later.
The enemy army besieging the castle town started shouting animatedly.
“Open the gates, tyrant!” they called out to Gallarus. “The long war between giants is over! Come out and see what we brought you!”
The enemy general presented the corpses of the ministers who had been acting as commanders of various Arvosa troops.
“Our entire army has been defeated…?”
People started screaming in alarm, but Gallarus remained calm. He looked from one corpse to another, until he found the body of the young general of his army.
“Agni…”
They weren’t related by blood, but to Gallarus, Agni had been both the finest warrior he had and like a son. And now, Agni lay dead in front of him.
“Hyeh-hyeh-hyeh…!”
Gallarus heard malicious cackling behind him.
“This is what happens when you have an incompetent king with an army whose only merit is its strength. Oh, what a grave mistake you made, benevolently taking in defeated enemy soldiers to fight for you!”
It was Gallarus’s adviser, the former army general of the Kingdom of Wind and the oldest tactician in the country.
“You produced your own defeat by putting me at the center of your government. The best strategy carried out by the finest army is bound to fail when the enemy already knows every detail of it.”
Soldiers began to line up behind the minister—traitors who’d been waiting for that moment. The civilians shed tears for their defeated nation and their poor betrayed king.
It was true that Arvosa’s defeat had been in the making since they started incorporating defeated soldiers from other lands into their own army. Gallarus, who’d assumed a hands-off approach to building up the nation and left it to his minsters, was to blame.
The traitors took out their weapons, but Gallarus stood unmoving, still looking at the dead.
“This is the end of the Kingdom of Fire! And the end of you, a king isolated from his nation!”
At that call, the soldiers rushed to attack Gallarus to the accompaniment of the civilians’ screaming.
I tried to trust my ministers, and this is what happened. I was right from the beginning.
Gallarus heard something snap inside his head. The swords and spears aimed at him bounced off before they even reached his body. Some force pushed the attackers back and squashed them.
“What…?!”
The elderly minister looked on in shock, not understanding what had happened.
Gallarus was born with an invincible body. And now his unique skill manifested.
“Archers! Attack! Kill hiiim!”
Arrows rained down on Gallarus, but again, before reaching him, they turned around and flew back at the archers who had loosed them. They struck them with such force that they broke the ground around them, destroying anything nearby.
This was the unique skill Adamantine Body.
It negated damage from opponents whose attack power was lower than Gallarus’s defense. The damage was then reflected back at the opponents, amplified by Gallarus’s attack power.
“…Embracing diversity was a mistake.”
Gallarus slowly turned. The backstabbing minister had no soldiers left.
“I should’ve trusted only my own judgment. Done as I see fit. Make the world mine as it should be.”
He felt as if his chest was on fire. The wild ambition that giants were known for had finally awoken in his heart.
“Everything will be mine. Everything!”
He brought down his fist on the minister’s head, crushing him into the ground. The impact broke the stone paving, opening up a crater to the volcano below. The dead bodies began sliding into it.
“What a waste of time.”
Gallarus picked up what was left of the minister and chucked it into the volcano, unwittingly mimicking the motions of his predecessor who had cast the weak into the fire.
The thousands of enemy soldiers waiting outside the Arvosa castle all turned as one when they noticed someone walking out of the castle gate.
“It’s…their king!”
Gallarus didn’t have a single soldier with him. He walked to where his dead commanders had been laid for him to see…and he erupted in deafening, raging laughter like water bursting through a dam. It rumbled through the battlefield as if it were coming from the depths of hell.
“In the end, there was nobody in the world strong enough to kill me.”
He kept laughing, looking down at Agni’s dead body. He’d been raising Agni so that one day, the boy might slay him, but Agni had ended up dying to the losers’ army. Gallarus found it irresistibly funny.
“The tyrant’s lost the last of his sanity. It’s time I put him to the sword!” said the enemy general.
He raised his weapon and brought it down on Gallarus’s neck. His soldiers heard the blade cleanly slicing through flesh and bone, and they looked up when a head flew up into the air…but it was their general’s head. This didn’t make sense.
“He…he killed our general!”
“Kill him! Kill the tyrant!”
The confused soldiers drew their weapons and charged at Gallarus, but it was as if an invisible barrier was protecting him from all attacks. Every strike was immediately parried, destroying the soldier who’d attempted it. Blood rained on the battlefield.
“What a dull world I’ve been born into.”
Gallarus stormed through the battlefield, slicing through soldiers who matched him in size as if they were made of paper.
All his life, he’d had one desire—to find someone powerful enough to kill him. He didn’t seek death; he was simply starved for a worthy rival. The ministers he’d trained—and even Agni, who had once managed to hurt him—turned out to be disappointments.