"C-Captain! The enemy is altering their formation!" the urgent cry of Raul echoed.
The other cultists, previously content to wait behind the waves of monsters, now joined the assault on the strongholds.
"So Valletta's chosen a head-on attack, just as I suspected she would!"
Finn squinted down at the streets, where he could see for himself how the battle was unfolding. "Raul!" he cried.
"Send a message to the Central Park! The enemy is on their way; stick to the plan!"
"Y-yes, sir!" Raul, immediately responded.
Raul ran over to the magic-stone beacon installed on the rooftop and began operating the signaling mechanism as fast as he could.
The beacon flickered in several different colors, and before long, a flashing light on the thirtieth floor of Babel issued a response.
This system allowed messages to be transmitted almost instantly across large distances, with pre-agreed codes.
Shortly after Finn's order was sent out, the other strongholds responded as well.
Messengers ran to and fro, shouting over each other to be heard, and at this present moment, the rooftop of Guild HQ was much busier than any normal day within its walls.
"I knew it was too much to hope that this gambit would stump our foe," muttered Finn to himself.
"The situation hasn't changed, and we're still at a heavy disadvantage."
Finn had hoped that the bait would at least trip Valletta up for a moment, but it seemed the enemy commander was every bit as smart as Finn had suspected.
The cultists and the monsters were still battering the strongholds and their attacks had not eased up at all.
Instead, the strongest piece on the board was headed for Babel alone.
"I'm sorry, Ottar. It looks like we're counting on you after all."
His voice carried on the wind, ferried toward the ring of ice that surrounded Babel's base.
...............
The ruined plaza near the city's south gate stood as a peculiar anomaly, eerily untouched by the relentless tides of battle that raged across Orario.
Here, the clamor of conflict was a distant murmur, the violent clash of steel merely a faint, echoing whisper carried on the bone-dry wind.
It was a pocket of unsettling calm amidst the storm, perhaps proof to some forgotten pact or simply an overlooked corner in the grand design of destruction.
A battle-worn banner, its colors faded but still discernible, lay discarded on the ground, snagged on a pile of rubble.
It belonged to a forgotten familia, its cloth fluttering listlessly, a silent lament in the smoky air. Beneath the suffocating canopy of ash and soot, the surrounding ruins towered like gaunt tombstones, marking the gravestones of the city's dreams, each shattered stone a memory lost.
Zald, a figure of menacing might even in repose, stood alone amidst this desolation.
His gaze was comprehensive, taking in every fragment of the wreckage, every shadow cast by the dying light.
He absorbed it all with an intensity that seemed almost obsessed, as if dissecting the very essence of ruin.
"What are you doing, Lord Zald?"
A voice, sudden and sharp, cut through the oppressive stillness.
From seemingly nowhere, a man with hair the color of spilled blood materialized.
It was Vito, a lieutenant of the evilus, known among their ranks as Faceless.
Yet, Zald showed no flicker of surprise, his posture unperturbed, as though he had anticipated this intrusion all along.
"Gazing upon the fruits of my efforts," Zald answered, his voice a low rumble, devoid of emotion.
"Burning them into my mind. As mortals, we forget things. Not just what we had for lunch, but even the streets we grew up in. This is something I don't want to forget."
Vito snickered, a high-pitched, mocking sound that scraped against the quiet.
"And what, pray tell, is the value in remembering a doomed city? I never took you for a man of sentiment, child of Zeus."
The title, "child of Zeus," carried the weight of ages.
Zald and Alfia were the last vestiges of the Zeus and Hera familias, two forces that had, for a thousand years, reigned unchallenged over Orario.
To speak of "conquerors" was to speak of them alone.
Vito's remark, imprudent to the point of blasphemy, seemed lost on him, or perhaps he simply did not care.
He merely continued to snicker, as if privy to a cosmic joke.
Zald did not turn, his gaze fixed on the broken cityscape.
"Value is not something that is found, but created," he said, his words cutting through the air like honed steel.
"What you refer to as sentiment, I simply call… my payment."
His statement was delivered as a simple matter of fact, yet the depths of its meaning remained unfathomable.
No one, not Alfia, nor Mors, nor even the gods themselves, could truly comprehend the tempest brewing within his mind as he surveyed the ruins of his former home.
"Payment, you say? Payment for what, I wonder?" Vito pressed, his voice dripping with an insatiable curiosity, a quality that seemed to grate on Zald.
"You are much like Freya's mewling brat. You ask too many questions. I'm starting to see why Alfia detests this world so."
Zald's brow furrowed, a rare display of irritation.
For the first time, he glanced over his shoulder, his eyes locking with Vito's.
"You are… Faceless, if I am not mistaken. Are you sure you should be here?"
"Oh, but it matters very little where I stand, sire. Our victory ultimately hinges upon you."
There was not a sliver of doubt in Vito's words.
Many of the evilus cultists, their faith in Mors shaken by his embarrassing loss to Draco, had begun to look solely to Zald and Alfia, their undefeated champions.
"A few isolated losses here and there hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things," he went on.
"Why should it matter if I'm a little late to the party?"
"Then why have you come?"
"Because I have a question, sire. A question I've been meaning to ask a hero like yourself for a long, long time."
A subtle shift occurred in Vito's tone, an undercurrent of fervor replacing his earlier flippancy. "Because, make no mistake, you are a hero! You see, I've always found heroes fascinating! They aren't content to live in an imperfect world! They rise up against absurdity! They fight against the irrational! How noble they are! How sublime! They are the ones worthy of my praise, not the gods!"
Vito's disdain for divinity was palpable, a venomous current beneath his words.
He opened his eye a crack, spreading his arms wide, as if embracing an invisible audience.
His voice, now sweet as melted sugar, belied a gaze like that of a child who had known only betrayal.
"What I want to ask you, sire, is this: How could such a noble man as yourself turn your blade to evil?"
Zald remained unmoving, his expression a mask of stone as he looked over his shoulder.
"I see," he muttered, his voice devoid of judgment.
"You are a broken man; that much is clear. You fail to even realize your own contradictions."
Vito's puzzled look was immediate, but Zald continued, relentless in his observation.
"What you feel for heroes is not respect… it is scorn. Forgive me, but I must ask: Is this because you are blind to color?"
"Hrk!" Zald's question struck Vito's heart like a physical blow, his eyes flying open in shock. But Zald wasn't finished.
"No… that's not all, is it? Your hearing, your smell, your taste; none of them work as they should. The only sense of yours that functions properly… is touch."
"H-how did you…?" Vito stammered, his bravado utterly shattered.
"Because I have eaten a great deal," Zald answered, the statement carrying an astonishing weight.
"And my senses have grown sharp. Your defects are clear to me from sight and smell alone." This bold claim was no simple boast; it was the foundation of Zald's fearsome title, 'Glutton,' and a glimpse into his incalculable might.
"Imagine a slab of meat placed before you," he explained, his voice even.
"Before it even passes your lips, most can imagine how it must taste. The smell, the crispness of the edges, the texture as your teeth bites down… those are all harbingers of the flavor yet to come. In the same way, your defect was obvious the moment I set eyes on you."
Vito was aghast, his former frivolity stripped away, replaced by a mask of anxiety and cold sweat.
Zald, meanwhile, spoke without pity or ridicule, but the casual ease with which he flayed Vito's core caused the red-haired man to twitch uncontrollably.
"It is that defect that births your hatred," Zald continued, his voice resonating with wisdom. "And it is your obstinacy that sustains it. Have you tired of playing with morality already?"
"Grh…! You're a monster…!!" Vito scowled, his voice a raw snarl.
Zald did not rise to the insult.
He simply chuckled, a low, guttural sound, at the ineffectual retaliation of a man so utterly powerless before him.
"Didn't you know?" he said.
"Monsters and heroes are two sides of the same coin. It should come as no surprise whatsoever that I stand alongside people like you."
Zald was unperturbed, he was an ascended mortal who had seen it all, heard it all, eaten it all.
The chasm of power between him and most of his fellow mortals was so vast that it was almost meaningless to consider them the same species.
"But to answer your previous question," he said, his gaze once more sweeping over the ruined city.
"I fell to evil… because it was necessary."
And with that, the conversation between the two of them ceased.
All that punctuated the space between them was the soft moan of the wind, a mournful dirge for a dying city.
Vito, still reeling from Zald's brutal insight, couldn't move a muscle.
Zald, meanwhile, simply turned his gaze forward once more.
It was then that a cry came from the southwest, an urgent shout.
An evilus soldier, breathless and covered in dust, came running toward them.
"Lord Zald!" the messenger cried, skidding to a halt.
"I bring orders from Lady Valletta! She requests you advance on the Central Park to eliminate the adventurers lying in wait at Babel!"
"So it is time… Very well. I have said my farewells to this city." Zald said, his brows slightly furrowing.
Zald's voice was calm, resolute.
He reached up, his massive gauntleted hand raising his helmet to his head.
The plate armor, so heavy that its weight would crush an ordinary adventurer, creaked with a rhythmic groan as he began to walk.
He turned and set his gaze on the tower at the city's center, a monument to defiance soon to be extinguished.
"All that remains is to annihilate Orario's disappointments… with my own two hands."
With a sword as large as a pillar strapped to his back, the man clad in all black set off.
The distant cries of battle, once echoes of conflict, now seemed to transform into a grim hymn of praise in his name, or perhaps a song of lament for the despair he would soon unleash.
With his crimson cloak fluttering behind him like a banner of impending doom, Zald left the plaza of quiet desolation behind.
Vito watched him go, dumbstruck, until a maniacal laughter began to claw its way out of him. "Heh… ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! He can't be stopped… Not by us… and certainly not by the adventurers!"
He clenched his fists tightly in a vain attempt to stop their trembling, his eyes wide with a terrifying realization.
"Today might just mark the end… of Orario."
...............…
Finn's thumb trembled, not from fear, but from the immense pressure reverberating through the city, as if the very stone beneath them screamed.
The ground beneath their feet bucked, a seismic warning.
Before the reverberations fully subsided, Raul burst from the signaling device's chamber, breath ragged, eyes wide with alarm.
"It's Zald!" he gasped, the name a chilling whisper.
"He's been spotted engaging our troops!"
"Tell me where!" Finn demanded, his voice tight with urgency.
"South Main Street, Captain! He's heading north!"
Another cataclysmic roar ripped through the air, less than a second after Raul finished speaking. The shockwave of the conqueror's attack rocked the city anew, a physical blow to its very foundations.
On South Main Street, the former hero, Zald, moved with terrifying ease.
Each swing of his colossal blade was a thunderclap, a pulverizing force that scythed through anything foolish enough to stand in its path.
"Weak," he rumbled, the single word an echo of utter disdain amidst the symphony of screams. Nothing could halt its devastating arc.
Scouts quaked, adventurers launched desperate, futile assaults, hoping for a mere scratch.
But Zald simply flattened them.
Weapons and armor shattered like glass, cobblestones beneath his boots turned to dust with every stride.
Nothing – no wall, no warrior – held an answer to his relentless march toward Central Park.
Not far, within the beleaguered Casino in the adjacent pleasure district, Falgar clenched his jaw. "Glutton sighted on South Main Street?!" he barked to a fellow Hermes familia adventurer.
The man, sweat-streaked, nodded.
"Yes, sir! And the general assault is intensifying! Monsters are surging from everywhere, we're nearing our limit!"
"Damn it! Our objective is within reach, yet we're pinned!" Falgar cursed, and slamming his fist against a table.
"Is there truly no one to stop that brute from parading through our streets like a king?!"
............…
Perched atop a nearby theater, Olivas observed the chaos, a cruel chuckle escaping his lips. "Fools. You've neatly trapped yourselves, and we'll ensure you stay that way!"
Spreading his arms wide, he bellowed down at his soldiers.
"My loyal brothers! Seize the fort before they even find breath to weep!"
Cheers felt too soft a word for the horrendous, primal cries that erupted from the evilus soldiers, a tide of pure malice spreading through the city's arteries.
Seeing his forces electrified, Olivas turned to the silent figure beside him.
"Will you make your move now, Lord Mors?"
Mors didn't stir, his gaze fixed, not on the battle below, but toward the Ganesha familia's distant stronghold.
"Not yet," he replied after a drawn-out pause, his eyes finally snapping to the distant, marching Zald.
Almost coincidentally, their eyes met across the impossible distance.
Mors merely scoffed, a faint curl of his lip, his gaze then settling, with an unsettling possessiveness, on the besieged Casino.
Zald, however, didn't spare it a thought.
Why would he care what a loser thought?…
...............…
"It seems our time has come earlier than I expected."
The cries of evil rang in Basram's ears like a feast being held all across Orario, and the beast-kin priest of the Apate Familia roused his old, yet stout, frame and gazed at the Arena ahead.
He stood atop a building on east main street, surrounded by his fellow familia members as well as the Level 5 spirit warriors he created.
"Still, I would much prefer to be assaulting Finn's location rather than this coliseum"
The Alecto familia and Apate familia made up the bulk of the evilus strike force, and thanks to their preliminary skirmishes, the evilus were confident they had mapped out all the enemy strongholds.
With their combined power, it would only be a matter of time before the Guild HQ fell, and without Finn to lead them, Orario's forces would quickly fold.
And yet, the evilus refrained.
Basram couldn't help but think this was Valletta's ill nature at work.
She always granted her arch nemesis Finn special treatment, even when such behavior bordered on strategic error.
Perhaps she intended to leave him alive until the very end in order to prove her superiority once and for all.
There was always the option of disobeying her orders and marching on Guild HQ regardless, but what Basram was seeing here at the Arena quickly put such thoughts out of his head.
"I never expected them to be able to muster a counteroffensive without opening holes in their defense. This is a threat that cannot be ignored."
The forces of the Freya familia were very close to eliminating their besiegers.
If this happened, they would be able to sally forth and reinforce the other strongholds.
Basram smiled bitterly at the thought.
The Freya familia was being supported by the blacksmiths of the Hephaestus familia and their magic swords.
Their bombardment had prevented the evilus from making much progress on the barricades, a task that was made next to impossible by the presence of Allen.
Allen's speed was nearly unmatched, and he tore through the attackers' ranks like a chariot of war.
If the Arena's garrison were allowed to go on the offensive, the balance of power would shift decisively in Orario's favor.
They would first march south, rescuing the Casino from Olivas's forces, before joining the defense of Twilight Manor in order to liberate the Loki familia.
At that point, Zald's one-man assault would be in peril.
That was why it was Basram's job to keep the Arena locked down and nip that possibility of relief in the bud.
"If we lose the power of our champions, I would place our odds of winning this war at about fifty-fifty… But given the adventurers' knack for seizing fate by the horns, perhaps it is even lower...…Very irritating."
But despite his words, the black-and-violet-swathed priest wore a smile on his lips.
There could be no doubt that the ongoing battle here at the Arena was the pillar of Orario's morale.
Just like pallum hero at the Guild HQ, eliminating this location meant dealing an unrecoverable blow to Orario's forces.
"In which case," said Basram aloud, "I am more than happy to obey Valletta's command. In the name of our goddess, Apate, we shall beat them back."
"Groooooaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!"
With a shake of the beast-man's golden staff, a dozen spirit warriors let out an ear-splitting cry, and marched upon the enemy stronghold.