Perhaps before the Creation Goddess directly brought this matter up, few people had realized the greatest threat posed by the Destruction Goddess joining forces with the Lord of Madness. But after she said it, everyone present felt their hearts skip a few beats—of course, the few who had no heartbeat didn't count.
Hao Ren was one of the few whose expression remained unchanged. In fact, he had noticed this from the very beginning, but he had refrained from saying it outright on the battlefield for the sake of morale. Now that he heard the Creation Goddess say it for him, he merely sighed softly. "Sigh... This is the most troublesome part..."
All this time, everything the Lord of Madness did had been driven by instinct. Although the power of this "instinctive creature" was strong enough to sweep across practically the entire universe, this flaw meant that all its actions followed discernible patterns. That left room to formulate countermeasures based on those patterns—the Ancient Ones of the dark chaos Era had relied on them to avoid disaster, while the Creation Goddess of the ancient War Era had used them to defeat and seal the Lord of Madness. But now, someone who had broken those patterns had appeared.
The Destruction Goddess clearly possessed a high level of intelligence. Once she entered the Abyss cage and completely mastered the power within, that meant the Lord of Madness... had finally begun to think.
And a monster capable of thought was the most terrifying thing of all.
"I suddenly feel that compared to this awful situation, the gains we made today are already insignificant," Izax said in his deep voice. "Even if we weakened the Lord of Madness's power overall, its breakthrough in 'thinking ability' is enough to offset those losses."
"If we didn't know