Chapter 328: Episode 328

In the end, a second attack force was launched, notably excluding Supreme Commander Yusin. Hunters from various nations returned to their homelands via teleportation, scrambling to finalize their preparations. Given the sheer urgency of the crisis, the Alliance chose not to interfere with the individual deployments from each country. They had no choice but to trust the sovereign nations and leave the matter in their hands.

“President! We have an incoming transmission from the Magic Tower.”

“Speak,” Phil growled, aggressively flipping through the mountain of documents piled on his desk. His face burned with barely contained rage as he reviewed the paperwork.

“In the event of an emergency, the Magic Tower has requested permission to install warp gate magic circles on every ship in the attack fleet.”

Phil slowly lowered the document, glaring up at the officer. “Is that it? Not a single word of regret for failing to trust their Supreme Commander until the bitter end?”

“The request was all they sent, sir.”

Rubbing his throbbing temples, Phil let out a harsh breath. “Authorize the installations. Tell the Magic Tower they can do whatever the hell they want.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the officer hurried out, Phil ripped open the next dossier. This one detailed the United Kingdom’s attack force roster. A fresh wave of fury flared in his eyes as he scanned the abysmal numbers.

Are these bastards seriously joking right now?

The second attack force consisted of the countries that had cowardly opted out of the first—such as the United States and China. Yet despite the influx of new nations, the overall troop count hadn’t increased significantly at all compared to the first deployment. This was because the original participating countries had actually slashed their deployed troop numbers. Everyone eagerly agreed on the necessity of raiding Nemesis, but only if their own borders were secured first.

How can we be this divided when the world is ending?

The deep wrinkles lining Phil’s face seemed to age him a decade as he tossed the report aside.

“President! We have a massive problem!”

The heavy doors to the command control room slammed open, and another officer sprinted inside, pale and breathless.

“What is it now?”

“I apologize, sir, but you need to look at the sky!”

Sensing imminent disaster, Phil bolted from his desk and hurried to the reinforced window.

A massive, bloody-red countdown was projected across the heavens.

[6,000,000,000 : 5,000,000,000]

[15:22:48]

Isn’t it the same as usual? Phil thought, before a sudden chill ran down his spine.

The numbers in the ’minutes’ slot were hemorrhaging, vanishing almost by the second. The ’seconds’ themselves were ticking down so fast they blurred into a solid line of crimson light.

If it’s moving like this, then surely…

The officer checked his wristwatch, his voice entirely devoid of hope. “President. We only have fifteen minutes left until the third total offensive.”

Unable to contain his explosive rage, Phil delivered a brutal kick to his desk, splintering the thick wood and sending the towering stacks of documents scattering across the floor.

“How?! Why!”

Mid-tirade, Phil froze, a horrifying realization dawning on him. That red countdown had begun alongside the apocalypse itself. If that anomaly was truly a timer orchestrated by Nemesis… why had they assumed it was honest?

A disaster had no reason to keep its promises to humanity.

The countdown was a deliberate deception.

They never should have treated those numbers as absolute law. With a face carved from stone, Phil barked his orders. “Tell the attack fleets that are already prepared to move to the assembly point immediately!”

“President! The UK has just notified us that they are suspending their deployment!”

“Peru is requesting to halt their deployment entirely…!”

Phil’s blood pressure spiked to dangerous levels as the so-called allied nations instantly tucked their tails between their legs.

“I’ve been going entirely too easy on these cowards, and now they think the Alliance is a pushover. Get them on the phone with me! Now!”

Phil fought tooth and nail for the remainder of their rapidly vanishing time. Through sheer intimidation and desperate bargaining, he succeeded in forcing the fully prepped fleets to the assembly point, but he couldn’t stem the bleeding of widespread desertion. Faced with a sudden, unpredictable crisis, the member nations instinctively hoarded their remaining strength to protect themselves.

“Haaah.”

It was suffocating. The sheer weight of their collective selfishness was crushing him.

Loosening his tie, Phil gazed up at the sky outside the window.

[6,000,000,000 : 5,000,000,000]

[00:12:27]

“It’s starting.”

“Twelve seconds left.”

The Alliance officers gathered around the glass, their faces tight with dread. Soon, the countdown hit zero.

“…Huh?”

“W-What the…?”

Phil’s eyes turned bloodshot as he stared at the shifting digits in the sky.

[6,000,000,000 > 1,000,000,000]

[00:00:00]

From 7 billion, to 6 billion… and then a sheer drop straight down to 1 billion.

“…They’re going to kill everyone until only one billion of us are left?”

Nemesis had finally revealed its true colors. The final disaster had no intention of engaging in a prolonged war; it intended to eradicate humanity right down to its bedrock, right here and now.

“President! We’ve detected multiple towers entering the atmosphere!”

“There are too many to count!”

Phil shoved his way to the radar monitors. The screens were choked with an endless swarm of descending black lines.

“Are these all Towers of Judgment?”

“Yes! The estimated count is already exceeding five hundred!”

Phil tore at his hair. This wasn’t a battle. It was a slaughter.

“Excuse me for a moment!”

A heavily armored hunter stormed into the command control room. Moving with superhuman speed, he snatched the critical encrypted USB drives from the supercomputer, abruptly hoisted Phil over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and bolted for the perimeter.

“W-What! Put me down! What are you doing—!”

“I’m sorry! Please hold on tight!”

In the blink of an eye, the hunter sprinted across the room and launched them both straight through the reinforced glass window.

Suspended in freefall amid a glittering storm of broken glass, Phil finally saw it.

A colossal, monochromatic tower was plummeting straight out of the clouds, aimed directly at the headquarters building.

It smashed through the roof with catastrophic force. The reinforced concrete and steel crumpled like wet paper, and the control room Phil had been standing in seconds ago was utterly obliterated beneath the tower’s sheer mass.

An instant later, a deafening explosion engulfed the entire structure, and the shockwave knocked Phil out cold.

Even as darkness claimed him, endless, frantic reports poured from the emergency radio strapped to his chest.

—”A Tower of Judgment has landed on the Hexagon in the US! Estimated casualties exceed at least three thousand!”

—”A tower has crashed into the Royal Palace of Madrid! Full evacuation order issued for three million residents!”

—”London’s Tower Bridge has collapsed!”

*

Far removed from the destruction, Yusin was still walking, enveloped in the serene isolation of his eighth-order Alternate Dimension.

He had long since given up on keeping track of how many days or hours had passed. Deeply immersed in his World of Consciousness, he moved forward in a state of absolute Zen, devoid of all unnecessary thought.

The only times he briefly resurfaced were to eat, haphazardly shoving chocolate bars or nutritional supplements into his mouth before sinking right back into his trance. The more he conserved his mana and mental fortitude, the better.

“Alright, the foundational formula goes like this!”

Within his World of Consciousness, Yusin was casually teaching magic to his imaginary companions just to pass the time. A chubby baby and a man with a vertically split body were awkwardly attempting to trace magic circles in the dirt.

“If you lay it out like that, it’ll create friction when the mana flows later. You need to disperse the circuits here, like this…”

Suddenly, his surroundings violently convulsed, and his World of Consciousness blurred at the edges. His bizarre companions jumped in fright, clutching each other.

“What’s going on?”

-Tower Master! We have a serious problem!

Ea’s voice pierced his mind.

-You are under attack! Please come out immediately! Right now!

Given the sheer panic in Ea’s tone, Yusin instantly deactivated Instance Requiem and forcefully pulled himself back into reality.

His vision snapped into focus, revealing nothing but a pitch-black void.

I was cloaked in the eighth-order… how the hell did someone attack me?

First, he tore open a rift in the dimensional barrier enveloping him to secure a line of sight to the outside world.

Someone was waiting for him.

“I found you.”

A creature sporting a human body with the grotesque head of a dragon stood before him. Though his physical size had severely shrunk, leaving him dwarfish and withered, Yusin recognized him immediately.

“…I chopped your damn head off. How are you still breathing?”

“Pathetic. Do not attempt to judge me by your fragile human common sense.”

The Führer. He wielded dark magic. While no physical force could interfere with an Exclusive World, a dark attribute imbued with spatial power could at least deliver a disruptive shockwave into an alternate dimension.

“Well, fine.”

Yusin obediently stepped out of his alternate dimension and planted his boots on the soil of the New Continent. He had been planning to re-emerge soon anyway; he was getting perilously close to Nemesis. Glancing around, he noted that he seemed to have successfully bypassed the most densely packed monster zones. The beasts wandering the immediate vicinity were sparse—a highly favorable condition.

“I certainly didn’t expect you to come out so easily.”

Seeing the Führer smirk, Yusin casually noted that the man still had a profoundly punchable face, dragon or not.

“Come at me. I lowered my guard last time, but this time will be different.”

“Different?”

In a flash, Yusin stepped on a Devastar and dug straight into the Führer’s blind spot. Faster than the dark mage could even process, Yusin’s leg whipped out, connecting brutally with the back of the Führer’s skull.

Blood and teeth splattered across the dirt with a sickening crunch.

“Ugh!”

“What’s different?” Yusin sneered.

Trampling the back of the collapsed Führer’s head into the mud, Yusin effortlessly cast a sequence of overlapping magic circles onto his right foot.

<Devastar> ×5

Massive, overlapping craters violently caved into the earth. Coughing up thick globs of black blood, the Führer went entirely limp.

“Acting so cocky when you’re nothing but trash.”

Yusin dug his heel into the Führer’s face one last time before stepping back.

“…I drew you out, so my role here is complete.”

Lifting his broken snout from the dirt, the Führer chuckled, the sound wet and sinister.

“You’re still miles away from Nemesis, and there are over five million Rank 7 monsters swarming this continent. I don’t know what arrogant tricks you have up your sleeve, but your grand plan ends here!”

“Are you ready, Ea?” Yusin asked aloud.

-Yes, Tower Master. I will execute it immediately.

Yusin turned his head to glare down at his bleeding enemy. “Watch closely.”

Using remote casting, Yusin scorched a sealing magic circle directly onto the Führer’s chest, utterly paralyzing him. Then, Yusin forcefully drew the immense reserves of mana inside his body to the surface.

Yusin possessed three distinct alternate dimensions.

Of those three, he expanded the barrier forged by the first: the Eighth Floor Alternate Dimension Garden.

Reality warped. The desolate wasteland seamlessly transformed into a pristine white-sand beach, complete with towering palm trees swaying in a gentle, phantom breeze. The soothing sound of waves washing ashore filled the air.

It was a realm of absolute peace, completely detached from the apocalyptic horrors of the war raging outside. And as the Alternate Dimension Garden bloomed across the New Continent, it aggressively pushed back the thick, poisonous purple atmosphere smothering the continent.

“…What is this parlor trick supposed to accomplish?”

Yusin ignored him, calmly sketching a massive guidance magic circle into the pristine sand. “This world utilizes location coordinates written with a highly specialized formula.”

It was the exact same principle Jeong Seojin had used when extracting coordinates from the Grand Library based on Erendel’s records, translating them into mana coordinates, and anchoring them to Earth.

Yusin instantly calculated the absolute spatial coordinates of his current location within this garden and relayed them directly to Ea. Ea, in turn, fed those coordinates to the fifth-floor tactical team.

-Tower Master. Due to the extreme distance from the Magic Tower, maintaining the Alternate Dimension Garden for five minutes is our absolute limit.

That’s more than enough, Yusin replied.

He raised both arms toward the sky. The sprawling magic circle etched into the sand erupted with a blindingly brilliant, celestial light.

-Magic Tower transfer, commencing.

Soon, a colossal, wavering shadow began to rise from the very center of the glowing circle.

“You… don’t tell me…!”

It was the unmistakable silhouette of an unimaginably massive tower.

Like an imperious conqueror planting a flag into the heart of enemy territory, the majestic Magic Tower materialized onto the New Continent, radiating overwhelming arcane power.

With the anchor secured, Yusin intentionally broke his concentration. The white-sand beach instantly dissolved into nothingness, allowing the suffocating purple atmosphere to violently rush back in.

But the Magic Tower remained, standing proud and immovable exactly where it had been summoned.

“Hahahahaha!”

The Führer burst into manic, mocking laughter.

“Yes, of course! Summoning your direct subordinates must be your absolute limit! But there are five million monsters in the New Continent! The Magic Tower’s forces alone can’t do a damn thing against those numbers!”

“You’re awfully impatient for a dead man,” Yusin said coldly. “This is just the groundwork.”

Without missing a beat, Yusin activated his second world.

The ’World of Time,’ an exclusive dimension strictly applied to the interior of the Magic Tower, aggressively expanded outward. A shimmering blue barrier rippled across the wasteland, violently repelling the New Continent’s toxic purple atmosphere as it carved out a massive safe zone.

It was the most stable and enduring world in Yusin’s arsenal. This entire localized expanse was now fully under the sovereign influence of the Magic Tower.

With the spatial anchor stabilized, the preparations for a large-scale warp were flawlessly complete. Yusin tapped his earpiece.

“Samia. Begin.”

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