"Total annihilation!?"
"How could this place be even more terrifying than a Cataclysm!?"
Even though he was a Fifth Order, the Petrified Giant was utterly shocked when he first encountered the Stellar Battlefield, his entire body of giant rocks trembling.
You've got to be kidding me!? Weren't individual missions supposed to be much better than Cataclysms and calamities!?
Why was it still so terrifying!?
After all, although their last Cataclysm had been disastrous, it hadn't posed much of a threat to a Fifth Order!
As if he had seen the Petrified Giant's terror, the Long-Eared Elf shook his head and looked at him with some pity.
They were both Fifth Orders. Although intelligence had nothing to do with thinking speed, he had almost immediately guessed what this "big fool" had experienced.
"Think it's too cruel, too difficult?"
"No, it's actually the same."
With the intention of winning him over, the Long-Eared Elf patiently began to explain.
"Disasters like Cataclysms, calamities, and Stellar Crises cause even greater destruction to civilizations themselves."
"If nothing unexpected happened, your civilization lost fifty or sixty percent of its population during the Cataclysm, right? If things went especially badly, seventy or eighty percent was possible too."
"Isn't that equivalent to the death ratio in an individual mission?"
"In the System's eyes, Fifth Orders like us and lower-level beings are all the same. If we can't withstand it, we die. There's nothing special about us."
The Long-Eared Elf shrugged casually, a trace of bitterness flashing through his eyes.
That was how he put it, but it was indeed difficult to accept.
Which of them, these Fifth Orders, wasn't a legend in their own civilization, an existence comparable to a god?
Yet in any random low-difficulty battlefield, they could all die without a trace.
How tragic.
"Sixty percent