By the eighth day of the battle, both Elizabeth and Raziel were more or less accustomed to the grotesque horrors of pseudo-medieval combat. It was actually quite scary how well and how quickly they adapted to the scenes of violence and brutality, but then again, they had no choice up till now but to look at undead monstrosities and, more recently, the horrible truths of warfare. They occasionally had to hold back their lunch and would sometimes turn away, but they were more malleable than anyone gave them credit for.

In fact, Kain was just about ready to let them participate in their first battle, despite their age and inexperience. He could not afford to coddle them forever, as soon they too would have to lead military forces and wade through the gore-filled mire that was ‘modern’ warfare. If he had one concern about sending them in to the fray, it could be summed up with but a single sentence.

“Where the god-damned fuck are the Ruskians getting so many people from?!”

Yes, by all accounts the People’s Union of Rusk was a very large nation, but its population should not have been this ridiculously high. According to reports, the united Darksol-aligned armies had ended the lives of over 5.9 million people in Rusk alone. However, by even the most liberal intelligence reports, before the Holy War started the combined numbers of all living humans in the Confederacy, which included Rusk, Ititlis AND Dorado, was under 3.2 million. So, then, where the hell were all these people coming from?! That was the question Kain had for the intel teams, and so far, they had yet to provide an answer.

Best they could tell, either someone could summon in living humans or there were other nations and/or groups of nations beyond the Confederacy that were sending absolutely absurd numbers of volunteers. As they could not enter the nation of Ititlis to confirm any suspicions, they had no way of knowing where the manpower was coming from, only that it seemingly appeared from out of nowhere and was trying to defeat their eastern front with human wave tactics.

Despite crushing army after army, there seemed to always be another force that would just pop up from nowhere and force the victors into another series of battles. In fact, it was making Kain very suspicious that some other power player, perhaps as strong as he himself, was interfering with his goals.

Still, he had an idea of how to determine where these people came from and how they got where they were. If he could eradicate every last enemy on the current field, all while heavily surveilling the surrounding area, he had a good chance of spotting the army or armies when they popped into existence. So it was that he decided to give his troops a break while he ordered the Fel Bats, Hell Bats and Pluton the Black Dragon to swarm the skies a good distance away from the enemy camp, all while his own forces made a retreat into a Dungeon Entrance he had made Zero Noir establish nearby.

It was time to bring the sun to the surface once again.

…

“Raz, what do you think father is up to, having everyone retreat into the Dungeon?”

“Why would you ask me, Liz?”

“Because,” Elizabeth said with an aggravated tone, “you’re the one with more book smarts and who has a better grasp on tactics and strategy. While father could easy just waltz into their camp and butcher everyone there, he probably would not be fast enough to kill everyone before more appeared. So, what is he going to do?”

Raziel turned a page of his book and sighed audibly.

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“The answer should be obvious, sis. He intends to wipe them all out all at once. How he intends to do so is something I don’t know. It may be why the perverted trash can set up that screen for us all. I doubt it is there to let us see the ‘scenic Ruskian landscape’, which in and of itself is an oxymoron.”

“A what?”

Sighing again, Raziel tossed his sister a dictionary.

“If you don’t know a word, look it up.”

“Just tell me what an oxymoron is!”

“Wait. Look!”

Raziel, the normally collected one of the twins, suddenly sat up in his chair. On the screen, Kain was flying towards the center of the Ruskian camp. As the figure of their father grew more distant, they could barely see him land in the center of the soldiers’ resting place. A few seconds passed. Something was going to happen, and it would be something big. Every single person watching the feed held their breath and the world seemed to stand still. Then…

The sun manifested on the surface of the planet.

It was only for the briefest of moments, but the flash was akin to staring into the morning star itself. The light was blinding, but it eventually faded and was replaced with a scene out of hell. The land outside the Dungeon Entrance was molten, if not completely ablaze, all while ash and dust choked the air and made the skies dark with death. None who were watching the feed spoke a word, but all felt the same primal fear.

“I am become death; destroyer of worlds…”

Raziel’s words carried through the entire room, filling the terrified mass of people with that much more anxiety. They wanted to believe that, despite being their enemy, the Ruskians had survived. They wanted to believe that this was all just a bad dream; that their ruler could not simply unleash such devastation whenever he wanted; that they were not ruled by a being who could easily just reduce their homes and families to ash and ruin.

They wanted to believe, but they knew that what they had seen was reality.

A few tried to make a break for the surface, perhaps to see for themselves that maybe, just maybe, they were seeing a lie on the screen. But the Undead stopped them in their tracks, forbidding them from going outside. Only Raziel, Elizabeth and the perverted trash can by the name of Zero Noir knew why the undead stood in the way of the living.

“If that is what I think it is… If he did what I think he did… then he really is as monstrous as the Confederacy makes him out to be…” Elizabeth said in a whisper.

“Yeah… who would have thought that he could replicate a nuke? Did he turn the ground into uranium or plutonium, and was it a fission or fusion explosion? How did he do it, and what are the parameters that need to be met before it can be done?”

Raziel, rather than being as mortified by Kain’s flagrant lack of common sense and his grievous use of such a terrible power as everyone else, was seemingly mesmerized by how the feat he had seen preformed was done. Then again, of the two children, Raziel was by far the more studious and introverted. He was always the one who was less concerned with the morality of something and instead concerned with how it could be done, while Elizabeth was less concerned with how something could be achieved and merely sought to achieve it without compromising her morals too much.

The two watched the burning cloud of dust and debris billow around, each with different things on their mind. Meanwhile, Kain had long since regenerated his burnt epidermis and was using his flying monsters to search for the soon-to-be-materializing army. His eyes, closed and his mind focused on the task at hand, he watched and waited for something to change in the unaffected area.

One minute. Five minutes. Thirty minutes. One hour.

“There!”

His eyes shot open and he rocketed off towards the glowing distortion that was manifesting (relatively) nearby. Arriving just as the massive portal was opening, Kain focused as much magical power as he possibly could between his two hands. Power built up for what felt to him like an eternity as the portal began to reach its final size and the first people began to move through.

“Fuck OFF!” Kain roared as he unleashed a torrent of pure magical energy from his two hands in what a fan of Classic Shonen would recognize as a copywrite-free version of Ve*ta’s F*nal Fl*sh.

The blast instantly evaporated the incoming people and forced its way through the portal. The magical gate shuddered and quaked as Kain forced more and more of his power reserves into making sure that whatever was on the other side of the gate knew not to fuck with him, his nation and his objectives. As Kain used up the last bits of his reserves, the gate began to shrink while making a piercing whine. Kain cut off power to his little ‘gift’ and collapsed to the ground as the gate rapidly shrunk and finally vanished with a small pinging noise.

Kain gasped for air as he fought off exhaustion, raising his hand at the now vanished gate and giving a final word before passing out in the snow.

“Take it, take it all, and don’t come back.”