Reynaud had once been convinced that the mortal races were going to lose this war. The power unleashed by the Great Demon King during the first stages of the war was something mortals couldn’t combat, no matter how desperately they tried, and the only reason they hadn’t been wiped out yet was simply because the Great Demon King had been slow to take action. As a great mage, Reynaud understood that, but he still fought back because the idea of simply sitting quietly and waiting to die was aggravating. Many other people felt the same. Although they knew that they would die in the demon army’s massive offensive, most of them fought to escape reality, just hoping that things would somehow work out.
However, there had been a turning point. A young man leading a small group, which included Reynaud’s apprentice Lara, kept defeating the dreadful Great Demon King’s forces. At some point, he’d started being called the “Hero,” a man of courage, and his group became known as the “Hero’s party.”
“Light, come forth!” Ferd the Hero emitted light that illuminated the entire battlefield.
“Rooooar!”
“Graaaaah!”
At the summit of the sky, the transcendent and most powerful dragons clashed, unleashing thunderous sounds and aftereffects of their authority all across the battlefield.
“Everywhere I look, all I see are annoying monkeys!”
“Don’t tell me that’s the only reason you sided with the darkness!”
“What’s wrong with that?! We dragons walked the world before those inferior races spread!”
“Enough, you fool! Make way for the next generation!”
“You are the fools! You should have just stayed asleep!”
“And whose fault was it we awakened?!”
A jet-black dragon and a deep crimson dragon with bloodshot eyes were trying to kill each other. Although they belonged to the same species and were more or less acquaintances, their positions and ways of thinking were completely different.
The dragons who’d joined the Great Demon King had various motives, but this black dragon specifically was displeased with the mortal races who had multiplied in the blink of an eye, and so he’d become their enemy. On the other hand, the crimson dragon had previously gone into hibernation, believing that it was no longer his generation’s era, but had woken up to stop the chaos caused by his own kind and the Great Demon King. The dragon race tended to prioritize the individual over their own blood kin, so in the end, even if they were all related, they would readily kill each other if they became enemies. For that reason, during the early stages of the great war, the mortal races had managed to hold out thanks to their dragon allies.
“Gyaaah!”
“We don’t have enough archers!”
“Stand firm, brothers of the earth!”
Four-legged creatures, a horribly twisted mix of insects, reptiles, and furry animals, charged forward, clashing with the allied forces of humans, elves, and dwarves.
“I’m borrowing your back for a bit! Do you know anything useful?!” Max, clad in equipment with patterns of various animals, asked the crimson dragon, having been launched into the sky by Lara’s magic. Upon landing on the dragon’s back, he asked about the enemy’s weaknesses.
“Dragonsbane Knight! He’s even been called the immortal dragon! He once said that one of his scales was responsible for his immortality, and it would be pointless to assault him unless that scale was precisely attacked, but he was very much drunk at the time! Even if that is true, I can’t begin to guess which one it is!” the crimson dragon replied.
“I have to find one scale out of over a thousand and stab it?! Is there a trick to it?!”
“Probably not! Even an ancient god, millennia old, couldn’t kill him! And though it’s vexing, he’s stronger than me!”
“Anything goes when it comes to dragons’ authority, huh?! Sorry, but please be my foothold! I’ll take him down!”
“All right!”
“You damn monkeyyy!” the black dragon roared.
The Dragonsbane Knight danced in the middle of the clash between the almighty crimson and black dragons while massive boulders started to fall from the sky. The four-legged monsters below were smashed to bits. Their strong outer skins and resistance to fire, ice, and magic were all meaningless. They were pulverized under the overwhelming mass of stone. Thunder roared, lightning charring the monsters black. A continuous downpour of lightning and boulders swirled into a natural disaster.
“Hmm. That seems to be their main camp.” Lara, the Witch of Annihilation, had caused that destruction all by herself. She calmly observed a part of the enemy camp that had somehow blocked the onslaught of lightning and boulders, trying to grasp the enemy general’s position.
“Exactly. The main camp is always the toughest.”
The survivors of the enemy army still covered the battlefield, though their ranks were now thinner than paper, when a red light flashed. The enemies’ bodies were cut, sliced, severed, and split. The trail of red light continued through the enemy army in a straight line, slaying all in its wake; Sazaki the Blademaster’s sword allowed no resistance whatsoever.
“Whoa there, we got company, Stein.”
“Yeah.”
“Whoooargh!”
Red creatures tried to stop the red flash of light. It was the red of viscous, boiling lava. These were no imitations; these monsters had almost destroyed the monks’ headquarters on the Boiling Mountain. Side effects of their modifications included high resistance to magic and physical attacks. They had mastered the techniques of all monk schools and also possessed high learning abilities. They were avatars of martial arts with skills further developed specifically against monks and humans. Stein was under attack by ten true monk slayers who’d somehow escaped the decisive battle on the Boiling Mountain, gained more experience, then were reinforced anew by the Great Demon King.
“I’m taking over.”
“Gotcha.”
The crimson avatars of martial arts, who’d traumatized the participants in the decisive battle on the Boiling Mountain, faced off against martial arts incarnate, the one who walked between life and death.
“I made it!” Sazaki slipped past the true monk slayers and marched into the enemy main base.
“Kill him!”
“Dammiiit!” the enemies cried.
“Be engulfed in true darkness.”
“Light, come forth.”
The elite monsters, who were protecting the enemy base against these mortal freaks of nature, were wiped out without a trace by a darkness of a different origin than the Great Demon King’s and Elrica’s light-annihilation magic, though they were powerful enough that if one were to appear in a city, it would destroy everything in sight.
“Curse you, Hero’s partyyy!” the general of the demon army roared with resentment.
The demon army should have been on its way to victory—if it hadn’t been for the Hero’s party, that is. They weren’t simply individuals that rivaled large groups or entire armies; they were the ultimate fighting force that transcended everything and had turned the entire war itself on its head.
“Begin calculations!” A horselike monster, whose entire body was made up of mirrors, chose the optimal solution from the many hypothetical worlds reflected in its mirrors. “Alter reality! Disappear!” He further altered the optimal solution to forcibly create a hypothesis where he was victorious, then tried to force it onto the real world. However...
“Who cares, dumbass?!”
The ultimate light that refuted all crushed everything.
This was but one scene from the great war. The Great Demon King brought darkness to the world and used extreme violence to almost destroy it, but the Hero’s party took him down with even greater violence. At the end of the day, this dark age was a battle of absurdity against absurdity, of violence against violence. However, not everyone was fighting back then, and it would be wrong to say that all mortals were wise.
“Hff! Hff!” A man in his mid-twenties was out of breath as he ran to get as far away from the battlefield as possible.
It was only natural that there were some people who’d rather run away than stand and fight. There were others who would stop the end of all life, so he could just leave it up to them. He didn’t want to die, so he ran. If there was a time after the war, he would nonchalantly live a quiet life. Some people considered this behavior selfish, while others found it normal, but if there were many people like the latter, the Hero’s party wouldn’t be able to support them no matter how much they struggled.
This man named Udo was one of these. Despite his childlike face, his brow was terribly wrinkled, and he kept running without caring about the sweat that ran like a waterfall down his face. He didn’t care about the screams and sounds of battle he could hear in the distance either.
“It’s not my fault... The fault isn’t yours... No, no, no... We must run away...” He kept grumbling something, his speech so jumbled that it was doubtful whether he was even sane. That said, the great war had left many people with emotional scars, and it wasn’t unusual to see people have mental breakdowns in this era.
People who fought to survive. People who were simply alive. People who ran away to survive. All of them existed together. But that was a story from seventy years ago. Life continued because many people fought alongside the Hero’s party. Those who ran away also blended into everyday life as the world continued to exist.
And now they have all grown old.