I raised stunning young ladies, but they all wanted to possess me.

Then came the skeletal knights, charging silently, their hooves crushing their companions, shattering the skulls of corpses, leaving burning hoofprints in their wake.

Then came the steel colossi, row upon row, numbering in the hundreds, their dark gold metal shells gleaming eerily in the lightning.

Then came the Gorgons, who emerged from the rift, trailing long snake tails. Wherever their vertical pupils stared, soldiers with low mental resistance immediately knelt on the ground and banged their heads against the earth.

Then there's Cerberus, each head bigger than a tank, with its three heads spewing fire, frost, and venom respectively.

Then came the Abyss Lord, a humanoid figure in black armor, with eerie green flames burning beneath his helmet, and a giant sword taller than a man in his right hand.

Finally, there's the S-class.

The skeletal dragon hovered at the top, its bony wings casting shadows that covered the entire defensive line.

Above the dragon, an even larger silhouette was slowly taking shape deep within the rift. It had not yet fully descended, but with each breath it took, the air on the entire battlefield seemed to freeze a little.

"Millions of calamities" is not a figurative expression, but a literal statement of millions.

Looking down from the sky, the entire land was covered in black, as if someone had turned an entire ocean upside down onto the land.

The commanders on the defensive line stood in the command tower, looking at the boundless black tide on the screen, and no one spoke.

It's not that there are no orders to give, but that all the orders that can be given are meaningless.

The reserves have all been deployed, ammunition reserves have been depleted to the red line, and the mech maintenance crew is still using wrenches to tap the knee joints of the last working mech, trying to make it hold on for a few more minutes.

What can you do in a few minutes?

Enough to kill thousands of people.

Then the order to fire shattered the deathly silence.

It wasn't ordered by a single commander; the entire defensive line opened fire simultaneously at the same instant.

Millions of rifles, tens of thousands of machine guns, thousands of heavy rune cannons, and the main guns of hundreds of air battleships unleashed their ammunition into that black ocean in the same instant.

The flames spewing from the gun barrels formed a winding ribbon of light along the city wall, like a fire dragon lying on the mountain ridge outside Kyoto.

Machine gun shell casings cascaded down like a waterfall, piling up like an ankle-deep metal carpet at the base of the city wall.

Each simultaneous roar of the heavy rune cannons shook the entire section of the city wall backward, and the dark golden rune shells trailed dense parabolas in mid-air before crashing into the densest area of ​​the bone-eating swarm.

What exploded was not fire, but a mental shockwave compressed to the extreme. The nerve centers of the bone-eating worms were shattered, and hundreds and thousands fell to the ground, but many more continued to surge forward, stepping on the remains of their companions.

The main guns of the air battleship began to charge, their light more dazzling than the sun.

A thick beam of energy shot out from the bow of the ship, punching a huge hole in the head of a skeletal dragon.

The dragon roared as it plummeted to the ground, its massive body crushing an entire heavy artillery emplacement. More than a dozen rune cannons, still firing, along with their gunners, were crushed into a bloody pulp.

Before the fleet could even cheer, the other three skeletal dragons simultaneously unleashed their dragon breath at the fleet. Dark red flames engulfed the five escort ships, and the energy shields on the hulls flickered violently before shattering like soap bubbles.

A frigate plummeted from mid-air, trailing thick smoke, and blasted a breach in the city wall.

The heavy mech unit jumped off the maintenance platform.

The shockwave from the landing of the steel giant, which was tens of meters tall, sent all the nearby bone-eating insects flying. They rushed towards the steel giant's formation, and the left-arm sword collided head-on with the giant's fist. The sparks from the explosion could be seen several kilometers away.

The right-arm rotary cannon swept through the charging ranks of skeletal knights, leaving trails of blood, but more skeletal knights surged up from the flanks, piercing the mechs' knee joints with spears and cleaving open the cockpit walls with scimitars.

A mech was grabbed by the steel behemoth and rolled into the burning ruins. Before dying, the pilot activated the self-destruct device, blowing the steel behemoth and himself into pieces.

Another mech was hit by a breath attack from the skeletal dragon. The cockpit was burned red-hot. Before melting, the pilot shouted into the communication channel, his voice hoarse and short.

"mom."

Yuzuru stood at the highest point of the city wall.

She couldn't remember how many times she swung the knife.

With one strike, he cleaved the head of the skeletal dragon; with two strikes, he severed the waist of the steel colossus; and with three strikes, he severed the Abyss Lord's greatsword along with the arm that held it.

Her plain white kimono was soaked with black blood, and she was covered from head to toe in a mixture of black and red blood.

The pheasant sword groaned under its strain in her hands, and the dark red runes on its blade shone brightly.

But she was all alone. The defense line stretched for nearly a hundred kilometers. She plugged one gap, but the other side had already been torn open.

As she turned and charged toward another gap, a skeletal dragon spewed its breath from the side. She barely managed to block it with her pheasant sword, but the force of the impact sent her flying back more than ten meters, her back slamming against the crenellations of the city wall.

She coughed up blood, leaned on her pheasant-shaped sword to stand up, and walked back towards the gap.

Her guards had all been killed in action; the last one lay in a shell crater a dozen paces away, his fingers still gripping his gun, his face turned toward her.

The entire defensive line is collapsing.

On the northern flank, a young platoon leader whose name was unknown led the last few dozen soldiers to guard the breach in the city wall.

When they ran out of ammunition, they scavenged the last few grenades from their fallen comrades and used them to blast off the steel behemoth's ankle.

Then he and his soldiers were overwhelmed by the swarm of bone-eating insects that surged up from behind.

His last voice came through the communication channel intermittently, mixed with the crunching sound of insects gnawing on bones, and it could be vaguely heard that it was in the language of Great Xia.

"Mom, I can't go back."

One hundred thousand.

Yuzuru pulled the pheasant sword from the chest of a fallen steel behemoth.

She looked up at the fissure from which calamity continued to pour forth.

His gaze pierced through the burning wreckage of the fleet, through the colossal skeletal dragons that blotted out the sky, through the mountains of corpses and the torrent of steel rushing toward the breach in the city wall, and landed on the breach at the very front of the defensive line.

A young man was standing there alone.

He took the knife off his waist and glanced back at her.

That look was so calm, so calm it seemed to say, "I'm going out for a bit, I'll be right back."

Then he turned around, facing the surging tide of millions of black stones, and closed his eyes.

When he reopened his eyes, a burst of seven-colored light silently erupted from the depths of his pupils.

It's not a thread, not a ripple, it's a storm.

A spiritual storm, centered on him and covering the entire nearly 100-kilometer-long defense line, swept across the entire line.

How vast was that spiritual power?

All superhumans below S-rank felt their consciousness being gently touched by something at the same instant, as if someone had placed a lamp in their minds.

That lamp was warm, but in Kuroshio's eyes, it was the most terrifying shackle in the world.

The S-class skeletal dragon that was attacking the breach in the city wall suddenly stopped.