Those Demonkind soldiers had no chance to resist and froze into ice statues on the spot. They were then shattered completely by the raging wind that followed. Nothing remained at all.
The human soldiers and those of other races on the front line stared with chattering teeth at the creature feasting in midair. What they saw was an enormous Black Dragon head. Its mouth seemed to chew on something, then it nodded in satisfaction and melted back into the cloud vortex.
The sky returned to normal, with no trace of black left behind. All that remained on the battlefield was a field of white remains. At most, there were a few unlucky front-line soldiers who caught colds from being frozen, staring at one another in confusion.
This phenomenon occurred all over the world. Sometimes it was on raging front lines, sometimes during troop movements, and sometimes right inside densely packed Demonkind City. At some moment, the sky would darken, and a massive dragon head made of black mist would appear.
What followed was always disaster. The icy breath was only one manifestation. In other places, there were tornadoes mixed with countless tiny wind blades, or spears of thunderfire cast down from the sky, or the ground itself splitting open with floods rushing forth.
Sometimes an invisible wave swept through, turning everything into dust. Sometimes a simple sun rose inside a city and erased everything. A few non-Demonkind witnesses saw that Black Dragon open its mouth to swallow and chew something, then flap its wings and carry the disasters along as it Blink to another place.
It continued to trample and destroy life. The souls and Magic of the slain Demonkind were swallowed by those black mist Great Dragon. After consuming enough, they not only grew larger but even split into new forms.
These endlessly dividing Belial Clone were slaughtering any large Demonkind groups detected across the entirety of The Continent. There was no need to worry about harming innocents, because these were manifestations of God of Destruction's power, and the judgment system could be trusted. Even ordinary thieves or murderers were generally not targeted.
The focus was on Demonkind and on those whose bodies were wrapped in vengeful souls. If it was the latter, then regardless of whether they were Demonkind, they usually had to die. Anyone singled out by the mechanisms of God of Destruction was almost certainly not a good person.
This resentment came from the deepest part of the soul, the final cries of the innocent before death. These grudges drifted across the land of Demonkind. They accumulated through generations of blood and bones, day after day listening to endless screams.
After who knew how many years, a black tide suddenly arrived. It brought an almost unbelievable opportunity, a chance to join in and take revenge. Belial had not expected this at all.
In short, these resentments were like beasts oppressed for countless generations suddenly seeing heavenly troops arrive. They rushed to join in one after another. As a result, the number of these black Clone rose at an exaggerated rate.
When Belial first split them off, there were only a little over a hundred. Now, according to his network perception, they had expanded to over a thousand. He could only blink at this outcome.
"This is something I did not expect," he said. "The level of filth of these things still exceeds my imagination." To feed his Clone to such numbers, just how many monstrous acts had they committed to pile up this much resentment?
Eating like this, Belial even felt a long-lost sense of being overly full. It had been many years since he felt that way, and now his mind felt a bit strange. When he looked back, he found that his small white space was slowly expanding.
The growth was slower than a crawling turtle, but it was real. He did not know what it was for, but it was clearly a good thing. With no hesitation, he kept consuming everything, and under the framework of God of Destruction, the resentments were constantly devoured.
Aside from turning directly into power, they also gave him a vague, indescribable feeling. Even Mephist could not clearly figure out what God of Destruction truly was as a mechanism. It did more than just convert resentment into raw strength.
Because even after swallowing so much, the increase in power was not that large. Since the time of Rodan, he had been looting continuously, yet the growth was still limited. Still, extra experience was extra experience, and there was no reason to refuse it.
Along the way, Belial also checked the Magic accumulated during the slaughter. It was not much, just enough for him to consume for a short while. Unfortunately, at his current level, relying on quantity alone to grow stronger would require an unimaginable amount.
"With my current strength, if I want to grow by just eating, I do not even know what I would need to eat to grow fast," he muttered. His template tied to Space was an enormous energy consumer. It had started at supernova-level output and then fed on planets along the way.
Its limits had still not been fully explored, and there was plenty of potential left. However, his current growth rate was still too slow. Even breathing hard to speed it up felt painfully inefficient.
If he let his strength grow naturally without deliberately feeding, it would take over ten years of sleep just to double it. That was far too slow. Belial could only sigh in dissatisfaction.
Although the Space template was powerful, it still could not compare to the cheating growth of Heisei Era. In that setting, power doubled by the year. What confused him most was how absurd the growth rate of Heisei Era actually was.
In just ten years, what kind of increase was that supposed to be? Not even counting base strength, those stepping-stone systems like mechanical forms or Space-type settings also doubled in absurd fashion. Yet in the story, it was always a burst of cheating, another doubling, and an instant kill.
Then the next installment repeated the same thing. He could not even calculate how many times the power had multiplied. It was no longer numerical growth at all.
By the later stages, a casual Burning Heat Ray could instantly kill any earlier opponent. Yet at the beginning, it could not even pierce the skin of Destoroyah. The gap was absurd beyond belief.
He considered himself a cheater, but the real cheaters were those from Heisei Era. His template was strong, but in the Heisei Era versus series, every monster existed only as a stepping stone. He shook his head at the thought.
"In the end, it is still about eating and continuing to evolve," he said. "As long as I eat enough, one day I will grow into a truly complete and strongest form." On this point, he was confident.
After killing and killing until things were mostly cleared out, Belial suddenly detected a very strange place. On his map view, it was darker than anything he had ever seen. Incredibly dark.
Chloe was dreaming. The dreams kept looping, replaying scenes from when she could still barely be called human, whether good or bad, all repeating without end. No matter how bad they were, they could not be worse than her current state.
In the end, she had overestimated herself. When Clone collapsed, she did not even have a chance to notify her companions, though perhaps part of her had never wanted to tell them at all. Still, it was not a total loss. The Clone had been active on The Continent for a while longer, even if drawing on the power of the Holy Sword in the end had been far too forced.
Blackness surrounded her, a place that could only be described by that single word. After Chloe barely endured the hundred or so years she still remembered, the familiar darkness of the past several thousand years returned. Beneath that crimson Abyss, countless eyes and twisted tentacles stretched toward her, along with endless whispers, curses, and insults.
That corroding darkness poured into Chloe like a tide, then was drawn out by the Crown above her head and the indistinct Throne beneath her body. Even a trace that leaked out dyed everything around her black. She could not tell if this could be called pain, but it was certainly not a good feeling, and after living normally again for a time thanks to Clone, her tolerance had clearly dropped.
How much longer could she endure this? A few years, or a few decades, perhaps. She could not even remember how many years she had already spent here, and the answer never came.
She felt unbearably sleepy and wanted to rest, but she could not. A new Chosen Hero had not yet been born, so she had to wait until the moment she was ended. For someone on the verge of sleep, even a small disturbance could bring sudden clarity, such as a blinding flash of light appearing before her eyes.
Chloe jolted awake. She still could not see her surroundings, but in front of her, or perhaps in some other form of vision, a familiar square window appeared. She muttered, "A friend request?"