Pitch-black smoke rose into the sky.
After countless towers broke apart, the Rusted Tower Forest, its storm clouds dispersed, did not welcome clear skies. Instead, it was shrouded in an even denser darkness.
A scorching wind laced with a pungent stench billowed through the sky, carrying thick smoke in every direction.
Skull Cluster had long since become a scorched earth.
Now, upon that burnt land, enormous furnaces released rolling heat like pitch-black beasts crouching on the ground.
The terrifying blaze had been burning for two days and nights.
Countless steel birds circled overhead, landing and taking off in groups. They tugged ropes and dumped cartload after cartload of materials into the furnaces.
Roars rang out continuously from the factory formed of massive machinery.
The dog-headed men in gas masks had long been smoked black from head to toe. They moved through the thick smoke, carrying cart after cart of iron ingots that had not yet fully cooled from the assembly line and feeding them into processing equipment at the other end. Before long, finished products emerged from the machines and traveled along conveyor belts toward the next processing station.
Smelting, forging, stamping, welding... Those massive, crude old models had long been completely phased out in the Present Realm, yet they were now useful again in Hell.
At the end of the assembly line, several hundred artificial humans worked frantically. Following Beelzebub's orders, they hurriedly assembled the large-scale equipment.
These artificial humans, with ram horns and the ability to bleat, were all Gregory's reserve disposable workers.
They had been forged through a composite smelting of the miracles of the Golden Fleece and Dragon Tooth Soldiers, granting them considerable adaptability to the depths.
Their names were written upon scrolls woven from wool and golden thread, transcribed in ashes. They had been endowed