"Surging?"
Uha's hearing was not particularly sharp, especially now that fiends were pouring out from the earth's core. Their shrill laughter was all he could hear.
On the battlefield before him, the surviving guards fought the fiends, while devils and demons tore into one another—even setting foot on entirely new soil did nothing to interrupt the Blood War they had waged for countless millennia.
That left the gathered civilians relatively safe for the moment. They hid in the shadows behind enormous chunks of broken stone in the ruins, doing everything they could to avoid attracting the fiends' attention.
But that would buy them only a few short minutes. As more and more fiends crawled out of the fountain of molten fire, someone would notice those living souls sooner or later.
Uha shook his head.
What surprise? Perhaps that was just some bullshit the Lionheart Lord had fed them for comfort, to make them hold out a little longer so the so-called allied army, which had vanished who knew where, could collect their bodies.
It was like the greatest lie in the desert: whenever people grew hungry and thirsty, their leader would shout that there was an oasis up ahead. In reality, it was either a lie or a mirage.
Remembering how flames had erupted during the last earthquake, Uha nearly panicked at the earth's rumbling tremors. He raised his Great Axe and charged at the fiends with a roar.
The powerful muscles in his legs bulged. He leaped with all his strength, hurtling with his Great Axe toward a little devil's head dozens of meters away.
The little demon tried to fly aside in fright, but an enormous shape burst from the fractured ground—
A magnificent worm surged out of the sand and gravel beneath their feet. It seemed to