Anger and Calm (13)

When her own life became a burden to her son.

When she already knew that death was not far away.

When she saw that her son's abilities were already enough to seize the glory he longed for.

A person.

A mother.

Someone who had long since exhausted the first half of her life and had no second half left.

Chose the date her life would end.

With her own hands.

Mom? No!!!

As the exhausted man felt the longsword in his hand growing duller and duller, finding it ever harder to hack off the heads of those corpse-madmen, things became even worse.

Strange phantoms began appearing throughout the city. Blades could barely harm them; only weapons with Origin Matter reactions or coated in magical agents could attack them. Yet their attacks struck reality solidly, giving them every advantage.

Beyond that, all kinds of savage beasts crawled out from the city's sewers and countless shadowed alleys at some unknown time, beginning to indiscriminately attack everyone—even slaughtering one another.

Phantoms and aberrant beasts attacked each other. Phantoms assaulted survivor camps, while savage beasts preyed on anything still moving. The Ascenders of Azure City organized a team to protect a group of survivors as they headed south toward Lanternfish City, but even more enormous beasts appeared there and crushed that survivor group outright.

The man even saw people from the Blazing Flame Lands and the Spirit Cognition Institute. As for how he knew, they too were organizing teams to flee the area, transporting instruments and documents that exposed their identities.

But they all died.

Everything was getting worse. Awak Domain had fallen into a destruction nobody had foreseen. The Grand Duke did not know, Viscount Avak did not know, and neither did those from the Spirit Cognition Institute and Blazing Flame Lands hidden