The Demon Against the Heavens 217 The first year

"AHHHHH!" emptying his lungs, Xen lunged at Pseudonym, bringing with him the magnitude of his attack.

Somehow, that confrontation proved to be liberating for Xen. No grudge or hatred towards Pseudonym dominated the General's heart, but only a deep frustration at the sad outcome of the battle that had just ended. Fortunately, not all the men in the Sect of the Worthy were as treacherous as Comodo and Medusa. Despite his arrogance, Xen had no murderous intent towards his opponent.

In a clash of such intensity, if both had given everything they had, one of them would surely have ended up dying.

Not everyone in Orma was willing to put his live at risk, as if it meant nothing.

Helial looked at Pseudonym's moves in silence and with interest.

As Iblis had suggested, Helial watched the fight without speaking. Iblis had instilled an iron discipline in his bones by beating him. Thanks to the Devil's supernatural abilities, Helial could die several times on the same day and be brought back to life, without the 24-hours limit.

Some would have called it a miracle, for Helial it was his own personal hell.

Following the two contenders flying in the sky, Helial met the fierce rays of the sun. He raised his hand to shield himself and slowly closed his eyes.

Pseudonym defeated Xen after a few minutes. The General of the Sect of the Worthy ruined the ground, falling heavily on his back.

With slow and measured steps, which did not allow even a touch of tiredness to be perceived, the black armour moved towards Xen and approached him. The General was almost sure that Pseudonym would kill him. And indeed, an iron-gloved hand was about to reach and hit him in the chest ... but it stopped. The Champion's hand stopped a few centimetres from Xen's chest to help the General get up. Pseudonym was not attempting to kill him, but showing him respect.

Xen accepted his help and the two grabbed each other's forearms, as if they hadn't fought until seconds before.

Helial turned to Iblis and looked at him, waiting for a sign. The Devil nodded and the boy approached the two contenders.

"Not knowing how to lose a simple clash is impossible if you want to learn how to win a war," he also held out his hand to Xen as a sign of alliance. "I don't want to occupy your place, but I guarantee you that by following me even in one battle, you will realize that mine are not empty words."

Xen hesitated, but then grabbed Helial's slender forearm.

With that gesture, the General of the Sect of the Worthy had chosen to trust the Human boy.

Orma historians remembered the clash between Xen and Pseudonym, for millennia, as the clash that changed the fate of the Goblin City-State.

In fact, if Pseudonym had not knocked Xen down, of Orma's immense and living army would have remained only cold bodies marching between the ranks of the Undead.

When Helial and his team joined the fight, the Goblins had recovered and managed to win one battle after another. The contribution of those boys had completely changed the fate of the clash. But despite everything, the war had long since stalled.

Undead and Troll had suffered devastating losses from the First to the Sixth Phase and only the battle from the Seventh to the Tenth Phase was still going on.

Glaucus and Xen, who had initially proved sceptical of Helial's proposal to take the lead, had to reconsider the extraordinary potential of that Human boy. Helial's skills as a commander far exceeded any other General, trained for decades with rigid military methods. It was as if Helial had grown up in a military Elite. No other military campaign had gone as well as the one they were carrying on thanks to the boy.

Every enemy move had already been planned and turned against them. Each fortification built allowed the Goblins to revenge ten times the lives of their fallen warriors.

Even the monstrous Ghoul and Troll on the front lines had been expertly managed by Helial's countermeasures.

On the first day of battle under the young man's command, Helial had ordered the frontline soldiers to take as many buckets of Holy Water with them as they could.

All those litres of Holy Water had been thrown over the eyes of Trolls and Ghouls who, being creatures of the deepest part of the Destruction, had been partially blinded by that Holy Water.

At the same time, Troll pheromones and blood essences had been poured onto the enemy front row, causing it to collapse without even one Goblin soldier perishing.

At some point, Ghoul and Troll had also begun to bite each other, until the intervention of the Generals of the respective races became necessary to end their dispute. But, at that point, the fate of that clash had already been decided.

Although it was impossible for Helial and his soldiers to hope to completely wipe out their enemies as they had done during the battle against the warriors at the Third Phase, the superiority of the Goblin army was stark.

The giant warrior-shaped formations were controlled by the most talented of Helial's friends and members of Circe's group. Pseudonym kept going through the lines, charring the Lich and the Trolls that launched huge boulders from the rear thanks to Flame of the Black Phoenix.

Battle after battle, Xen, Glaucus and Totus were increasingly shocked by the feat of the legend of Orma.

The numbers of Undead and Troll had been halved.

Generally, the Undead had always been the most feared enemies on the battlefield. Their ability to summon fallen comrades was simply terrifying. Still, thanks to long-range bursts of Flame of the Qilin, most of the Skills that required the use of Black Lich Magic did not work. Although Helial was only in the Second Phase, Flame of Qilin was an Ability that took shape from the purest Mana of Life. The attributes of that flame far exceeded the filthy Lich techniques.

Unable to resurrect their army and cornered by Helial's tricks, the enemy generals had a huge problem. They had tried hard to think of every possible formation that could counteract the action of those filthy Goblins, but to no avail.

Although Undead and Troll joined forces, Orma's big shots could not be underestimated. There was a reason why those loathsome beings had never won a conflict against Cesar's army.

Without even talking about the huge gap of forces that existed between Cesar and the other Immortals: even among the warriors in the Tenth Phase, Crispio was by far the strongest.

The initial strategy of the Undead was to carry out a massacre between the low-Phase warriors, but they never expected that their warriors would be torn to pieces by a simple Human.

The more they fought, the more the Undead and Trolls were decimated. The losses were huge, but it seemed that their resources, in terms of soldiers, were infinite. After each defeat they suffered, they returned to the attack again with an army as numerous as the previous ones. And, every time, regularly, they lost.

During one of those terrible battles, some Ghouls managed to find a weak spot in the ranks of the Goblins and broke through the testudo. It was only two or three monsters that slipped between the Goblins, while the gash was being closed. The intruding Ghouls were easily eliminated, but one was particularly obstinate. Despite the blows inflicted, he showed no sign of collapsing and hurled himself with ever greater violence against whatever Goblin was in front of him.

The monster must have been very strong, since not one of the Goblin soldiers could repel, weaken or annihilate it.

Suddenly, Glaucus, feeling the presence of the Ghoul among his men, rushed to defeat him; but the monster, enraged by the violent blows he had received just before, threw himself against him and hit him in the throat, without leaving him time to react.

The monster must have been very strong, if not even Glaucus, the General of the Guild of Life and Death, who was in the Sixth Phase, had managed to survive his attack.

Shortly thereafter, that Ghoul was also eliminated, but, at the end of the battle, the soldiers realized that the General's body had disappeared.

With this mournful event, which deeply affected the whole city of Orma, the first year of war between Goblin and Undead and Troll ended.

Chapter end