Above the ruins of the Goddess statue, Balthazar’s dark red vertical pupils slowly swept over the figures groveling and trembling below.
The villagers knelt on the cold ground, mixed with mud and blood, their bodies shaking violently from fear, each breath seeming as if it were being squeezed with difficulty from their chests.
The crisp sound of bones being crushed still echoed in their ears, and their nostrils were filled with the rust-like scent of blood and a faint sulfurous odor originating from a mythical behemoth.
Time seemed to have frozen here, leaving only the wailing of the wind blowing through ruined roofs and the irrepressible, faint sobbing of the villagers.
Then, that voice from the abyss sounded once more.
“Go… tell…”
The voice was not loud; one could even say it was deep.
But it pierced through the wind, pierced through the weeping, and echoed directly in the depths of everyone’s minds.
It was the common language, yet it lacked any timbre they had ever heard; instead, it was an older sound, a mixture of grinding rocks and metallic resonance.
The young girl who had been grabbed by the mercenary leader earlier was now being held tightly in her mother’s arms.
She lifted her head, her tear-stained face filled with terror, but even more so with a sense of bewilderment.
She looked at that black behemoth standing upon the statue of the Goddess, as if it had stepped out of a nightmare, and looked into those lava-like eyes that held no warmth.
“…Tell… everyone… what you have seen…”
The villagers were stunned.
They had originally thought that this “Savior” who had descended from the sky would make more terrifying demands, such as devouring them or claiming their souls.
But it…
only asked them to “tell”?
The elderly village chief, leaning on his cane, tremblingly lifted his head.
In his cloudy old eyes, the dragon’s massive head, sharp teeth, and majestic horns were reflected.
He opened his mouth, his cracked lips moving a few times, but he could not utter a sound.
“…This is… the reward… for saving you…”
The deep voice made its final declaration.
Reward?
The villagers could not understand the meaning of this word.
What had they given?
Was it their fear?
Their despair?
Or was it their…
kneeling?
Balthazar paid no further attention to the confusion of these tiny creatures.
The seeds of establishing rule had been planted, the nutrients for constructing order had been watered, and what remained was to wait for the rumors to ferment.
The next moment, his pair of massive black dragon wings that eclipsed the sky suddenly flapped downward!
Boom—!
A visible shockwave, mixed with dust and gravel, suddenly spread in all directions!
The villagers kneeling on the ground were blown off balance by this sudden hurricane, and some frail elderly people were even knocked directly to the ground.
They could only close their eyes, shield their heads with their arms, and scream in the gale.
When they finally managed to open their eyes again, that black figure, like a mountain, had already ascended into the dim sky.
He did not fly away immediately but circled the village once, like a monarch inspecting the territory he had just conquered.
After doing all this, Balthazar seemed to snort in satisfaction, exhaling a small puff of black smoke carrying sparks.
He did not look at the village below again; the massive black figure flicked its tail, flapped its wings, and turned into a streak of black light, disappearing into the eastern horizon completely engulfed by the night.
In the village, a deathly silence descended once more.
After a long while, a child let out the first faint cry.
Subsequently, suppressed weeping spread like a plague.
But this time, the crying was no longer filled only with despair and fear; it was also mixed with a faint sense of relief from having survived the ordeal.
The old village chief struggled to climb up from the ground and walked over to the ruins of the Goddess statue, which had been trampled by the dragon’s claws and stained with blood.
He reached out his wrinkled, dirt-covered hand and gently stroked the cold stone statue, a light flickering in his cloudy eyes that was too complex to describe.
“Go…” he said in a hoarse voice to the villagers behind him who were still weeping, “tell everyone you can see about what happened today…”
“Tell them… a black dragon… saved us…”
“And tell them… the demon… ate the monsters.”
Without glancing at the village again, Balthazar flew through the air.
The high-altitude airflow scraped across Balthazar’s hard dragon scales like countless cold blades, but he was completely indifferent to it.
At this moment, he was thousands of meters high, silently slicing through the clouds in a near-gliding posture.
The brief slaughter and feeding just now had not calmed the restlessness within him; instead, it was like an appetizer, awakening some ancient longing sleeping deep within his genes.
The taste of that mercenary leader…
was not good.
It was a piece of low-quality meat mixed with the smell of cheap alcohol, sweat, and the sour taste of fear.
But the iron armor wrapping the corpse was decomposed by strong acid the moment it entered his stomach, turning into a warm current that merged into his bones and scales.
And recalling the gazes of those villagers…
[This feeling… is not bad.]
Balthazar narrowed his eyes slightly, then spread his wings and dove toward the next hunting ground.
As time passed, the night gradually set in.
Balthazar’s massive black shadow, like a moving dark cloud, silently cut through the pitch-black night sky.
Below him, the vast territory of the Seven Shield Alliance was like a giant chessboard, and the scattered villages and towns were the fragile pieces on this board.
The wisps of cooking smoke that rose during the day turned into unsettling, thin black smoke at night.
For the next few hours, Balthazar acted like the coldest executioner.
He rode the night wind, precisely searching for the traces of the Black Dog Mercenary Group’s rampage.
The tracks they left were too obvious; the smell mixed with blood, strong liquor, and inferior tobacco could be easily detected even from a thousand meters in the air.
Just as when Balthazar first appeared before the villagers, he appeared over the other five plundered villages in the same manner.
These villages belonged to different lords under the Seven Shield Alliance, but at this moment, they had all met the same fate.
The second village was “Valley Town” under the Earl of Thunder Fortress.
The mercenaries here were even bolder; not only did they plunder, but they also lit a bonfire in the small square in the center of town, placed barrels of stolen ale on the ground, and while drinking, forced the men of the town to watch them ravage their wives and daughters.
Balthazar descended when they were at their most drunken state.
The gale raised by his dragon wings blew the bonfire apart, and the burning firewood smashed into the nearby fodder shed like meteors, instantly igniting a large fire.
Against the backdrop of the firelight and the desperate wails of the villagers, it took him less than thirty seconds to tear all twenty-plus mercenaries into pieces.
This time, he bit into the severed body of a mercenary captain who was trying to escape, stepped onto the town’s only clock tower, and used his Dragon Might to deeply plant the seeds of fear into everyone’s hearts.
The third was “Shepherd’s Slope” under the Marquis of Green Field.
The fourth was “Stone Bridge Ridge” belonging to the Duke of White Eagle.
The fifth was a free town under the jurisdiction of the Halflings’ Chamber of Commerce. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Each descent was like a precise and efficient surgical operation.
He always appeared when the Black Dogs mercenaries were at their most arrogant and their crimes had reached their peak, instantly obliterating them in the most direct and brutal way.
Then, with a monarch’s posture, he forcibly branded his image and the two contradictory identities of “Savior” and “Destroyer” deep into the souls of the survivors.
He no longer communicated with the villagers, nor did he offer any explanation.
He only killed, displayed, and then left.
He devoured the corpses of those mercenaries, along with their armor and weapons stained with sin.
Hard steel was like dry branches under his sharp teeth, emitting a hair-raising crunching sound.
This was not just to replenish energy, but to make a silent declaration: their resistance was meaningless, and their power was not worth mentioning before him.
The sixth village belonged to the strongest, Grand Duke Golden Lion, and was named “Bounty Valley.”
The mercenaries here were clearly more elite and vigilant; they had set up simple watchtowers at the village entrance and had patrol squads.
But all of this was useless in the face of Balthazar’s perfect [Optical Camouflage].
When his massive shadow silently enveloped the entire village, most of the mercenaries were still counting their “spoils” in the granary.
The slaughter here took a little more time because several mercenaries who looked like squad leaders attempted to organize effective resistance.
They raised heavy tower shields and threw poisoned flying axes.
But all of this was in vain.
Balthazar did not even need to use dragon breath.
He simply used his massive, indestructible body like a battering ram, crushing everything in his path.
The tower shields and the arms behind them were crushed together, and the flying axes could not even leave a single white mark on his hard dragon scales.
When the last mercenary was struck by his tail hammer and flew out like a broken sack, collapsing half the wall of the inn, the entire Bounty Valley fell completely silent.
He still repeated the previous ritual, grabbing the leader’s corpse and flying up to the village’s highest building—a fifteen-meter-tall windmill tower—then released his Dragon Might from above.
This time, he stayed a little longer.
Because among the crowd kneeling below, he saw an old man wearing priest’s robes.
The old man was not scared out of his wits like the others; instead, amidst violent trembling, he stared fixedly at him with eyes mixed with fear, awe, and fanaticism.
He saw the old man’s lips moving silently, as if chanting some ancient scripture or praying.
Balthazar’s cold dragon eyes met the old man’s gaze for an instant.
He could read a message in those cloudy eyes—the “seeds” here seemed to be taking root and sprouting in a way completely different from the previous six places.
“Go… spread… my… prestige…”
This time, he used clearer Common language to drive this command into the priest’s mind like an oracle.
The priest’s body jolted, as if struck by lightning, and then, with an even more pious posture, he buried his entire head deep into the dirt.
Balthazar’s dragon eyes gazed into the distance.
The six different villages he had appeared in this time, besides all being attacked by the Black Dog Mercenary Group, were all villages affiliated with six of the seven fortresses.
Now, only one last fortress remained, a village under the First Fortress, which was governed by Alicia Archons, the only daughter of the noble Aios family, “Archons,” and commander of the Saint Alice Knights.
[I must let them all know of my existence.]
With this thought, Balthazar took off again, flying toward the First Fortress.
On the way, he indeed saw black smoke rising from the looting by the Black Dog Mercenary Group.
However, Balthazar soon noticed that dozens of knights were fighting them.
At the lead was a young female knight with blonde hair and emerald-blue eyes.