Antagonist Protection Service

Chapter 232: War

Ascending a wide foothill of dark stone and dead grass, the Imperial Armed Forces continued further into territory said to be ruled by Demons.

The surroundings, sparsely decorated with lifeless, black trees, was almost perfectly barren, and despite having arrived around the peak of noon, where the sun should ordinarily be reaching its zenith in the sky, it was unseen, concealed behind a sea of ashen clouds and bleak, chilling winds.

Compared to the idyllic climate over in the mainland of the empire, this place was desolate, nothing more than dreary and dismal.

It was more than just ‘soulless’―it portended something unfathomably sinister.

In such a frankly gloomy environment, those present couldn’t help but begin to feel the same, and before anyone realised it, the marching force had drowned in silence.

Included in this army of a main force were a mix of adventurers and knights alongside the usual soldiers, but regardless of their background or merit, there was not a single soul seeming to carry a smile on their face at the anomalous tension they could all feel floating around in the atmosphere.

The scouts had already returned from their advance reconnaissance, bearing nothing but the expected news that there were no signs of any life all the way until the base of the mountain range further ahead, the snowy peak of which was visible in the distance even now.

Soon, the vanguard of the armed forces reached the summit of the foothill, a plateaued stretch of land enough to contain perhaps a small town’s worth of people.

From there, they paused their march. They had already heard it from the scouting party, but on the other side of the foothill, a deep valley ran between it and the mountains ahead, rounded, like an immeasurable basin naturally carved into the earth.

Strangely, it was all utterly empty, vacant of any signs of life just as the scouts had claimed, the area at least being far too desiccated to support the sorts of life they were familiar with.