Chapter 210

Chapter 210

People who wandered the desert like duckweed drifting on water.

They had no handful of land where they could take root and settle, so they wandered endlessly over the sand.

Land where one could put down roots was already occupied by other humans, and those people rarely accepted outsiders.

The people rejected that way became desert nomads.

At fewest, they formed groups of dozens. At most, some groups reached several hundred.

They suffered under countless threats.

Monsters, Scavengers, and the desert environment itself, which was hostile to humans. That was why they had no choice but to grow strong.

As they fought everything that threatened their survival, they naturally became vicious and strong. Because of that, desert nomads possessed combat power no weaker than most Scavenger bands.

But before the combat race called Orcs, none of that mattered. The entire group of nomads had been torn apart like sheets of paper.

Not a single survivor remained.

From the Awakened who protected the nomads at the front, to elderly adults, to children who should have been running around playing, every last one had lost their life.

“Damn it!”

“Krrgh!”

At the scene, too wretched to look at, Eloy and the others lost their words.

“Whew!”

Zeon also let out a heavy sigh and approached the victims.

The condition of the corpses was even more horrific up close.

Great-Horned Hyenas had torn away much of them, exposing organs and bones.

Their expressions plainly showed just how much extreme fear they had felt until the moment they died.

“Ugh!”

Briel could not bear to face the sight and turned her head.

Tears had gathered thickly around her eyes.

Zeon closed the corpses’ wide-open eyes and said,

“What a pity. If we’d met just a little earlier, I would’ve sent them to Steel Fortress.”

Steel Fortress would have been able to accept this many people easily. If so, perhaps they would not have lost their lives so pointlessly to the Orcs.

Levin approached Zeon.

“Are there many people wandering around the desert like this?”

“More than you think.”

“Then why have I never heard that these nomads existed?”

“They don’t want to run into Neo Seoul’s raid teams or Awakened.”

“Why?”

“Because they have deep-rooted hatred and fear.”

“I understand the fear, but why hatred?”

“They think those who live in Neo Seoul or Colonies are the chosen, while they’re the abandoned.”

“Ah!”

If he thought of it that way, everything made sense.

The abandoned instinctively avoided the eyes of the world.

The chances of meeting Awakened from Neo Seoul or another Colony in the vast desert were extremely low, but even if such an encounter happened, the nomads discovered them first and avoided them.

The eyesight of nomads tempered in the desert far surpassed that of most Awakened.

Their vision was as sharp as that of Griffins or Wyverns soaring in the sky.

That was why Neo Seoul’s Awakened almost never encountered the nomads.

Naturally, the people of the slums had no way of knowing whether such nomads existed.

It was not strange that Levin did not know. But Levin was deeply shocked.

He had realized that there was too much in this world he did not know.

To him, who had lived thinking Neo Seoul was the entire world, traveling with Zeon was showing him the true face of the world.

A world stained by the struggle for survival.

It was not a matter of Orcs being evil and humans being good.

The Orcs fought to live, and humans struggled to survive as well.

The collision between the two races was inevitable.

It was natural.

Even so, Levin hated the Orcs because he belonged to the human world.

“If we leave the Orcs alive, they’ll kill even more humans, won’t they?”

“Now that the Great Chieftain has been born, they may even target Neo Seoul.”

“Neo Seoul has monster-repelling power, doesn’t it? The Orcs should be too afraid to approach.”

“Neo Seoul’s monster-repelling power has weakened noticeably lately. If it’s the Great Chieftain, he might be able to break through that power and charge into Neo Seoul.”

“Neo Seoul’s monster-repelling power has weakened? No, why?”

“I don’t know the reason either. But it is certain that it has grown noticeably weaker than before.”

“This is driving me crazy. Then the slums are in danger too, aren’t they?”

“If the Orcs invade, the slums will be the first to suffer.”

The reason Neo Seoul left the slums alone was to use them as the first line of resistance when an external enemy invaded.

“This is insane.”

Levin scratched his head roughly.

His friends and acquaintances lived in the slums.

If the Orcs invaded, they would not be safe either.

Zeon said,

“First, we need to deal with their corpses. If we leave them like this, the Great-Horned Hyenas will come back.”

“Yes!”

When Zeon raised his control, the surrounding sand began to churn.

Like a swamp, the sand sucked in the corpses of the people and the Bactrian Camels.

The countless corpses quickly vanished beneath the sand.

In that way, the desert perfectly erased the traces of calamity.

Zeon closed his eyes and murmured,

“May you be born somewhere a little better in your next life......”

Zeon did not believe in the afterlife.

He thought the life one lived now was the only one, and that being reborn was impossible.

If such a thing were possible, there would have been no reason for Kurayan’s nonhuman races to struggle so desperately to cross over to Earth.

Even so, he sincerely wished an afterlife existed. Otherwise, the lives of the people who had died like this would be far too empty.

It was then.

“Brother! Over there!”

“Orcs.”

Suddenly, Levin and Eloy pointed in one direction and shouted.

A thick cloud of dust was rising from the place they pointed at.

What was racing through the dust cloud were orc riders mounted on Blood Wolves.

They were the orc riders who had annihilated the nomads.

For some reason, they were returning to the scene of the massacre.

Hundreds of orc riders and Blood Wolves were charging forward with tremendous force.

They were so overwhelming that most monsters would tuck their tails and flee from the sight alone.

“Snrrk! Humans.”

“There are still humans left.”

The Orcs seemed to have discovered Zeon’s group, because they shouted excitedly.

The Blood Wolves also let out great howls.

ROOOOAR!

KRAAAH!

The Blood Wolves’ roars echoed loudly across the desert.

“Those fucking bastards......”

“I won’t forgive them.”

“I’ll kill them.”

Levin, Eloy, and Briel prepared for battle, their eyes bloodshot. But Zeon stepped in front of them and blocked their path.

“I’ll handle them.”

“Brother?”

“Leave this one to me.”

The moment Levin heard Zeon’s sunken voice, he felt chills rise across his entire body.

He had been with Zeon for a long time, but this was the first time he had felt this emotion.

“Zeon!”

“Mm!”

Even Briel and Eloy closed their mouths and stepped back.

The current Zeon was not the usual Zeon.

His appearance was the same, but his eyes, his atmosphere, everything was different.

Enough that even they, who saw him every day, felt a shiver and fear.

They did not dare speak to him any further and retreated.

Zeon left them behind and walked toward the Orcs.

“Snrrk! Kill the human.”

“Let’s eat him.”

The orc riders unleashed their ferocity.

The orc riders who had grown together with Orca, the Great Chieftain, were warriors worth a hundred each.

Naturally, even their aura was different.

But there was not the slightest change in Zeon’s expression as he looked at them.

With each step Zeon took, sand grains rose from the ground like clouds.

Before he had taken even ten steps, an enormous amount of sand was floating around him.

Levin, Briel, and Eloy widened their eyes.

That was because the sand moving with Zeon looked exactly like enormous wings.

He did not look human.

He looked like a demon king, or perhaps a demon god.

Whoooong!

At that moment, wind blew.

The sand grains floating in the sky rippled like waves in the wind.

“The human is strange.”

“The sand follows the human.”

Even the Orcs charging fiercely sensed the strange atmosphere. But they could not stop now.

“Just charge. Humans cannot defeat us.”

The captain of the orc riders shouted and stepped forward at the head.

THUDDUDDUD—!

The Blood Wolves charged even more fiercely.

In an instant, the distance between Zeon and the orc riders shrank to several dozen meters.

KRAAAH!

The Blood Wolves roared fiercely with Zeon right before their noses.

The stench and rank breath of the Blood Wolves felt vividly close.

Just as they had done to the nomads, they tried to tear Zeon apart.

At that moment, Zeon murmured,

“A peaceful death doesn’t suit you.”

At that instant, the sand the Blood Wolves were kicking off churned violently.

Like the stomach of a beast.

When the sand moved, the Blood Wolves missed their footing and fell forward in an ugly heap.

Naturally, the orc riders on their backs were thrown headfirst as well.

The orc riders who crashed onto the sand rose in fury.

“Snrrk! What happened?”

“The human used some strange move to make the sand move.”

The Blood Wolves shook their heads, unable to recover from the impact of collapsing to the ground. Then the Orcs abandoned the Blood Wolves and charged in themselves.

Just because the Blood Wolves had fallen, just because they had lost their mounts, did not mean the Orcs’ fighting spirit would break.

They were a race born for battle.

Only, this time, they had chosen the wrong opponent.

Whooooosh!

A wind mixed with sand wrapped around them.

Sand poured into their eyes and ears. Even so, the Orcs ignored the pain and advanced.

Avoiding pain was what the weak did.

They were born strong, and their patience was not so fragile that they would submit to this level of pain.

Trusting in their steel-like bodies, they chose to advance. But they would soon realize just how foolish that choice was.

RUMBLE—!

With each step they advanced, the sand-laden wind grew twice as fierce.

It was as if a gigantic wall of wind blocked the Orcs’ path.

The sand-laden wind became blades and gouged into the Orcs’ flesh. Sand burrowed again into the hollowed-out flesh.

The sand mercilessly dug into the Orcs’ muscles and hides, pushing deeper inside.

“Krrk!”

“Snrrk! It h-hurts.”

At the pain of flesh and hide being separated, the Orcs screamed.

A combat race that did not know pain?

Zeon snorted.

There was no being that could not feel pain. Some were merely so dull that it took a little longer for them to feel it.

The Orcs’ true pain began now.

SHHRAAAK—!

The sand separated hide from flesh and gnawed away at the muscles that exposed red meat.

“Kreeek!”

“Save me!”

Inside the terrifyingly raging sandstorm, the Orcs screamed. But the sandstorm swallowed even the Orcs’ voices.

The sandstorm spun while completely engulfing the Orcs.

RUMBLE, RUMBLE, RUMBLE—!

Briel and Levin could not say a word before the sandstorm’s tremendous majesty.

‘Insane! This is a human’s ability?’

Eloy stared at the sandstorm with wide eyes.

Its diameter was dozens of meters, and its height reached over a hundred meters.

She could not believe that a human had summoned such a tremendous sandstorm. But she had to believe it.

The one who had summoned the sandstorm was none other than Zeon, who was standing right beside them.

A little while later, the sandstorm slowly scattered.

The sky and sun that had been hidden by the storm appeared once more. But the Orcs were nowhere to be seen.

The sand had not covered them, nor had they hidden.

They had literally been ground away completely by the sand.

Not a scrap of flesh or a drop of blood remained where the Orcs had disappeared.

In that way, hundreds of orc riders and Blood Wolves were erased completely from this world.