Chapter 573

The frontlines between Alvheim and Himell, which had been seesawing back and forth, entered a temporary lull.

Had the fairies and dwarves miraculously achieved peace by breaking their arrogance and stubbornness? Of course not. If they had that much flexibility, they would have already conquered the world long ago.

The reason they stopped fighting was simply because both sides needed time to respond to the sudden anomaly that had occurred.

======[ Himell ]======

“Maintain the fire net! Not a single rat must escape! Annihilate them all! I swear by Regin’s golden beard!”

A deafening roar mercilessly pounded the tunnels of the mine.

The sound of gunfire, amplified and layered repeatedly, had transformed into a monstrous roar. A group of dwarves, who had set up defensive positions, were pouring suppressive fire toward the horde of monsters pouring out from beyond the tunnel.

The small monsters resembled starving rats with sharp, goat-like horns. Their forelimbs were abnormally long, and they had as many as six hind legs.

Dripping green slime from the pus covering their bodies, they screeched incessantly. The stench was so foul that even touching them seemed enough to make one sick and die from disgust.

“Shoot! Keep shooting! Turn them into minced meat!”

With each burst of flame from the gun barrels, thick gunpowder smoke, blood, and screams erupted like a fountain.

The corpses of the monsters, reduced to tattered rags, filled the passageway. Yet, the monsters chewed through the bodies of their fallen kin and surged forward relentlessly, like an endless tidal wave.

“Come at us all you want! Do you really think you can break through?!”

Even the commander of the defensive line, who had boasted confidently, could only tremble his beard in dismay as the enemy numbers began to exceed thousands, reaching tens of thousands.

“What the hell? Are these monsters endless? Did a portal to hell open up inside the mine?!”

“…We did dig pretty deep.”

The machine gunner let out a hollow laugh and cracked a joke, but everyone was too overwhelmed by the scale of the monsters to appreciate his humor. They simply continued firing with grim faces, reloading their magazines.

—

“Seal tunnel number seven! Bring all the explosives we have!”

“Then where are we supposed to mine iron ore?!”

“How should I know? Go find a new vein or something!”

The dwarven nation of Himell had taken a direct hit from the upheaval caused by the destruction of the third Holy Grail. Mines were sealed, underground passages were overrun by monsters, and cities crumbled. Their civilization was far too vulnerable to tectonic shifts.

After Carolus’s burial tactics had pushed the dwarves to the brink of extinction, their underground cities had been designed with meticulous seismic engineering to prevent collapse from similar terrorist acts or natural earthquakes.

However, even the architects of that time had never anticipated the ground rising and sinking on its own, twisting and warping as if mimicking the whimsical nature of the fairies.

The result was this disaster.

The underground cities, crushed and mangled by the rising and sinking earth, were reduced to ruins as if dragons and giants had engaged in a frenzied orgy of destruction.

“Good heavens. Our city, Steelforge…!”

Some dwarves tore at their beards in despair. Their city, Steelforge, had been torn into five pieces, collapsed and jumbled to the point where it was impossible to distinguish between man-made structures and natural debris.

“We told you to build cities above ground like we did. Even after what happened eight hundred years ago, you still stubbornly cling to the underground…”

“Are you telling us, the Steel Hammer Bloodline, to abandon the traditions of our ancestors? Like you Red Copper lot?”

“What good is clinging to outdated traditions? That pile of rubble?”

The Red Copper Bloodline dwarves clicked their tongues as they pointed at the ruins of Steelforge.

The Red Copper Bloodline, who denied tradition and pursued innovation, had been labeled heretics by other bloodlines for advocating further technological exchange and interdependence with the Empire. Yet, once again, they had been proven right.

Their cities, built on solid foundations above ground, had withstood the upheaval that swept through Himell with minimal damage.

Sure, the northern and southern districts had been physically separated, but that could be fixed by installing appropriate transportation between them.

In any case, faced with the sudden catastrophe, Himell maintained an implicit truce with Alvheim and focused all its efforts on recovery.

The losses were far greater than anyone had anticipated, and the ancestral weapons, while useful against fairies, were of little help in this situation.

Natural disasters required construction machinery, not combat military equipment.

At least the Colossus and Piloted Mechanical Armor units were somewhat useful in dealing with the swarms of monsters.

======[ Alvheim ]======

Unlike the dwarves, who were facing a catastrophe, the fairies’ situation was somewhat better.

The roots of the World Tree, a real deity, firmly gripped the bedrock of the Great Forest, minimizing the damage from the tectonic shifts. Moreover, the monsters that had fallen through dimensional rifts and returned to the mortal realm were no match for the fairies in the forest.

In other words, the fairies had not stopped their advance because of the damage caused by the anomaly.

【Break the Chains of the Sky and the Wedge of Order, and unleash the Swallowing Wolf upon the world.】

The leaves of the World Tree delivered an oracle to the fairies, who were bewildered by the trembling forest and the screams of the earth. As oracles often are, the message was filled with difficult-to-interpret metaphors.

It was the first time in eight hundred years that the World Tree’s will had been conveyed in such a clear form, so the Elders, filled with excitement and shock, convened a council to discuss the meaning of the oracle.

All the Elders attended the meeting. From the relatively young Elders, around eight hundred years old, to the ancient Elders who had lived for about fifteen hundred years through repeated long sleeps.

Even the five Elders who had been receiving the “apology” of Pailandria, the defeated one who had returned alone after losing Guardian Carbios, handed the exhausted Pailandria over to the maids and made their way to the council chamber.

Pailandria, drained of all strength, could only tremble as two maids carried her like a sack out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She couldn’t even muster the words to refuse.

“Look at her. Guardian-sama must have been exhausted from ‘protecting’ the Elders.”

“Keh keh. No wonder. Didn’t she fight all night yesterday with all the ‘gates’ wide open?”

The servants roaming the mansion corridors licked their lips as they stared at her naked body and sneered, but Pailandria could neither express her anger nor cover herself.

After all, these servants were in league with the Elders, so they already knew everything. There was no point in hiding.

She could only offer a sarcastic thanks for the sudden oracle from the World Tree.

Originally, she would have had to endure at least ten more days of torment, but thanks to the council meeting, she was freed from being the Elders’ plaything after just four days.

—

In the council chamber, where all the Elders had gathered, debates raged for days.

Though the oracle was just a single sentence, every word was a metaphor, so careful interpretation was necessary.

The expressions “sky” and “order” were somewhat understandable.

If only one of the two had been mentioned, countless interpretations would have poured forth, but with both mentioned simultaneously, there was only one plausible answer.

“Isn’t it referring to the human gods, Elpinel of the Sky and Astraea of Order?”

Most of the Elders agreed with this assertion. Except for a few oddballs.

“No, the World Tree said ‘Chains of the Sky’ and ‘Wedge of Order.’ Chains are meant to bind, and wedges are meant to fix. Considering this, the sky must refer to the World Tree itself, and order must refer to the flow of the current world!”

“Hmm…”

The other Elders neither agreed nor disagreed with the passionate argument of the Elder, who was over twelve hundred years old, and simply waited for him to finish.

“In other words, after the cursed era of Carolus, the World Tree’s ancient powers were sealed. We must break those chains, destroy the human-centered international order, and unleash the ‘Swallowing Wolf’—that is, start a Great War!”

“…A Great War?”

“Exactly. In the past, wars were called the season of the wolf. Do you understand? This oracle is telling us that the time has come for Alvheim to regain its former glory through a Great War!”

The Elder, who had proposed this bizarre interpretation, passionately argued that they should wage war against the entire world.

Of course, the other Elders simply gave him skeptical looks instead of agreeing.

‘This is why elders over a thousand years old are…’

‘A Great War? We couldn’t even defeat Himell, and now we’re supposed to win against the world?’

Even among the fairies, who were among the longest-lived, there was a generational gap.

The Elders from before Carolus’s era were mostly war hawks who constantly boasted about Alvheim’s glory and insisted that humans, who were originally nothing but slaves, should be enslaved again.

On the other hand, the younger Elders, who had been children during Carolus’s era or were born after it, agreed with the greatness of the fairies but believed it was unrealistic for Alvheim to conquer the world.

Of course, as the saying goes, “Age is a tyrant,” the older Elders always held more sway, so the younger ones couldn’t openly refute them.

They could only hope that the other senior Elders would rein in this one.