Invasion (Volume Seventeen)

Two in a row

Valinor

Twelve days had passed since the end of the Age, and the entire world had welcomed a new Era.

The sky was a vast expanse of gray. The only difference between day and night was that daytime had a faint, hazy glow.

But from the sky, whether day or night, one could see bright red glows flickering across many parts of the world.

They were the light of volcanoes and molten lava...

A terrifying volcano rose thousands of meters from the ground. Its surface still flowed with magma, black smoke billowed outward, and scorching red lava occasionally boiled and surged forth. It continued to radiate astonishing heat.

Without witnessing it with their own eyes, no one would have imagined that this magnificent volcano, thousands of meters tall, had once been merely a dormant volcano less than a thousand meters high.

On the day of the End, its interior had been violently compressed, causing magma to erupt straight from the crater into the stratosphere like a pillar connecting heaven and earth. That scene had been forever etched into the eyes of the Horn People who lived nearby and whose generations had dwelled there.

If the gods and the various Demigods had not used their mighty power to suppress and calm the aftershocks, the nearby races would probably all have been swallowed by that sea of molten lava.

Yet even so, even though relatively few people had died directly as a result, the ruined environment and falling ash had made every member of the Horn People feel an endless sorrow.

After more than ten days of reorganizing, a long line of ostrich-like beasts, carrying large and small bundles, embarked on their migration.

The oppressive sky seemed as though the sun would never appear again. Thunder flickered from