On the summit of a black stone peak more than a thousand meters above the ground, roughly a thousand li from the great lake where Arthur's legion was camped, six demons wrapped from head to toe in black cloaks, black smoke coiling around them, stood atop the mountain and gazed coldly toward the lake.
"Humans from the surface world have invaded. This is the first time those frail humans have entered the Fourth Abyss on such a large scale—our abyss."
"Do they take us for the trash of the three abyssal worlds above? Those half-blooded little imps and little fiends—do they lump us together with that garbage? They actually brought such a huge army into our territory."
"One thing cannot be denied: their commander possesses unshakable resolve. That passage is no broad, level road. Three hundred years ago, I dispatched an elite force of ten thousand men to invade the surface through it, but they lost more than half their numbers before reaching the halfway point."
"That's right. I once had one of my children lead his own troops into that passage, and they never came back. Perhaps they got lost inside it, or perhaps they were wiped out. For so many frail humans to reach this place is no easy feat."
"Then the only question is, what have they come to our abyss for? What in the Fourth Abyss could be worth paying such a price?"
The demon lords all fell silent. They looked at one another, their eyes gleaming with uncanny light.
Unlike those straight-gutted fiend lords, demons were sinister, cunning, and crafty. They would never share any valuable intelligence with their own kind, especially intelligence connected to a target worth the surface humans sacrificing millions to enter the Fourth Abyss in force for. Not a single word