Age of Adepts

A flock of black shadows rapidly moved down a snowy mountain range.

One of the members of the group suddenly stopped after they had made it beyond one of the shorter mountains. She shouted excitedly.

”Something’s happened!”

A silvery gray metal ball was flashing in her old and wrinkled right hand.

”Protect!”

One of the larger silhouettes took off her black cloak, revealing Sofia’s thick and muscular body beneath. She held a thick, black wooden staff in her hand and stood by Endor like an evil god of calamity.

Mary unfurled her large bat wings and hovered in the air, quickly taking everything around them into view. Bug Adept Billis tossed Tigule away and allowed the goblin to drop headfirst into half a meter of snow. Billis turned into a buzzing cluster of black mist and circled Sofia and Endor.

The thirteen sting scorpions started roaming about underground, looking out for potential enemies.

While the adepts were making their preparations, the metal started glowing intensely. A stinging red light was mixed with the brilliant white, making it hard for any of them to stare directly at the ball.

Spatial flux rippled in the air, and two adepts emerged from nowhere in each other’s embrace, one male and one female. A tide of energy so massive that it was indescribable had also transported through at the same moment they appeared.

Boom!

A terrifying explosion. Everyone around Endor was blown away by the explosion’s shockwaves. Bug Adept Billis was caught off-guard, and he was thrown over a hundred meters away, crashing into the snow.

As the adepts got up from the ground to ask how the plan had gone, an even louder and more fearsome explosion echoed throughout the world.

It felt as if the sky was collapsing, the earth was splitting, and everything was flipping over!

This world was about to be destroyed.

Similar thoughts arose in the minds of every adept.

Pillars of smoke and dirt suddenly rose from the towering Steel Capital ten kilometers away from them. The violent spatial energy seeped into every corner of the Steel Capital and every inch of space. It clashed severely with the planar laws there, both of them wildly neutralizing each other.

The clash between the space energy and the planar laws directly affected the structures on the surface of the Steel Capital. Even the main body of the city, hidden within the belly of the mountain, was caught in the destruction.

The struggle between the two energies occurred almost simultaneously in every corner of the Steel Capital. The chain of explosions caused the mountain itself to tremble, shake, and fall apart.

Large boulders tumbled down the slopes as mountain peaks crumbled and fell.

The towering statues of goblin predecessors that stood in front of the gates of the Steel Capital weren’t much different from the collapsing world around them. They too shattered and fell, sending massive stone blocks rolling down the mountain.

The hundreds of thousands of goblins living inside the Steel Capital had all been slaughtered during the preceding immortality ritual. Thus, they no longer needed to endure another painful death in this disaster.

As such, there were no pained cries and tragic howls of weaklings in this apocalyptic explosion!

The vast stretch of mountains that extended for several dozen kilometers seemed to have its inner structure taken out from beneath it. It started to collapse to the ground. The scattering dust and snow couldn’t even make it to the skies. They were broken down into unrecognizably tiny particles by the intense spatial energy from the mountain’s core.

Then another massive explosion sent all these radioactive particles spreading out in every direction through sheer kinetic force.

For a moment, the entire sky turned crimson as blood.

Mixed within this strange light were tens of thousands of unknown belts of light that cut the horizon into pieces.

The Steel Capital was now history. The once tall and majestic metal structures had sunken into the belly of the mountain as the mountains themselves collapsed. When the thousand meter cliffs slowly fell to the ground, layer by layer, the last traces of the Capital were buried in the thick pile of rubble and dirt. It was a massive pile of destruction that stood a hundred meters tall.

All the snow on the mountain had already been turned into vapor by the savage energies. In fact, the humidity in the air was so high that it started raining in some areas around the collapsed mountains.

The adepts were still within the radius of the energy explosion when it happened. They instantly used their best abilities to escape outward.

Greem had exhausted all of his energy in the underground. It was only thanks to Mary that he was able to fly across the canopy of the forest. Alice had also been shaken unconscious by the shockwaves. She leaned limply upon Endor as they flew across the sky on a broom. Berserk Witch Sofia was sprinting on the ground barefoot. Surprisingly, she was no slower than the rest of the adepts in the air when she ran at full speed.

Tigule had no such ability. He could only be transported through the ground with Bug Adept Billis wrapping around him in mist form. However, the black mist had to emerge from the ground every thirty seconds to give Tigule a chance to breathe.

Otherwise, Tigule would have already suffocated during the fifty-kilometer trip.

The mountain continued to collapse as they ran.

They had personally witnessed a towering mountain crumble into a bottomless abyss behind them. A gigantic pillar of dust chased after the adepts like a tsunami from the ocean, bringing with it tons of debris and dirt.

That terrifying tide of energy only exhausted itself after fifty kilometers, and its speed finally started to slow down.

The adepts took the chance to find an unoccupied mountain to rest on. They silently watched the gray tide devour the earth and forest beneath them and continue surging forward.

In the blink of an eye, the mountain that they were on had become an isolated island in the midst of a gray sea. A thick layer of energy dust had engulfed everything around them.

It was no ordinary dust. It was energy dust that formed from the combination of space energy and the material substance of this plane. It possessed fearsome radiation, and ordinary creatures would die to the intense radiation when exposed to the dust, even if they hadn’t suffocated in the first tide of destruction.

No living creature could still exist within this land of gray dust that stretched as far as they could see. It didn’t matter whether it was the powerful jungle predators or some fearsome flying hunters; none of them could escape from the damage of energy radiation.

Several birds that had escaped from the nearby mountains were flying in the distant skies, tragically crying as they did so.

Sadly, there was gray dust all beneath them. They couldn’t afford to come into the slightest contact with this stuff.

Some of the birds with weaker Physiques could no longer hang on after a short flight. They started to fly lower and lower. When their bodies finally touched that layer of radioactive dust that hovered in the air, they let out a bloodcurdling cry.

The fearsome radiation caused their flesh to wither and their bones to melt. Their previously beautiful feathers lost their color at a visible rate. Sloughs of fat and skin fell from their body as if they were being shed off. The red muscles and organs within were exposed.

The birds that had been caught by the radiation could no longer struggle.

They drifted lower and lower, eventually crashing into the gray sea, tragically crying as they sank until everything fell silent.

The adepts couldn’t help but betray solemn expressions when they saw this happen.

The outside was already this bad. The radiation in the core area of the explosion would only be stronger and even more terrifying!

This massive explosion at the Steel Capital had probably significantly affected the entire Goblin Plane.

It was no longer a paradise for goblins!

…………

News of the tragedy that had occurred in the Steel Capital quickly spread throughout the plane.

Everything within five hundred kilometers of the place had been enveloped in a dense cloud of radiation. Any person that walked into it couldn’t walk out alive. The goblin reinforcements could only gather in the cities nearby, anxiously waiting for the radiation clouds to subside.

How did this tragedy happen?

Several different answers to this question spread amongst the goblins.

The most popular amongst them was the Adept Invasion Theory.

Some goblins described in a lifelike manner how the otherworldly evil adepts had invaded the Goblin Plane and how the great Prince Lord Gazlowe had been forced to detonate the space furnace and die alongside the invaders to save the world.

Of course, there were far more chaotic versions of the story out there.

For example, some goblins gossiped that the evil adepts had been invited into the plane by Gazlowe. The purpose of this was so that the Prince Lord could borrow the strength of the adepts to deal with the Royal Family. The three parties had fought in the Steel Capital, and the space furnace had exploded due to accidental shockwaves from the fight itself.

Apart from this version of the story, about twenty or thirty other stories were being spread out there. Almost all of them were described in such vivid detail, almost as if the goblins had witnessed it themselves. However, it didn’t matter which version of the story it was. The evil adepts were always the antagonists, and the goblins would always have obtained the final victory by the end. That was the same conclusion of every version of the story.

One couldn’t help but point out that the Goblin Plane of the present was truly in a bizarre situation with no leadership to speak of.

The Risk Investment Company that Gazlowe had established might claim to be the most significant force within the Goblin Plane, but all of their higher-ups and elite fighting forces had been brought into the Steel Capital to fight against the adepts and the dragonborn.

All of them had turned into dust with that tremendous explosion. The Risk Investment Company was now no more than a headless snake. Even though they still had massive influence and decent military presence in other areas, all of their leaders were dead. Thus, these places were unavoidably caught up in struggles for superiority fought between the local landlords.

The most influential person of the Royal Family–Princess Vanessa–had also ’died’ in the Steel Capital. Her brothers had yet to come of age either. They were still goblin kids sucking on lollipops and riding on toy horses.

Having them step up to lead the chaotic Goblin Empire was a huge joke.

Thus, the wounded goblin God of War who brought Vanessa’s corpse back to the Royal Family became the saving grace of the Goblin Empire. The six otherworldly adepts that Tigule brought back with him also rapidly caused the Empire to fall into internal disagreements.

Some goblins were shouting and calling for war against the adepts, believing that they were the ones who brought this calamity upon the Goblin Plane. Some goblins were already utterly terrified by the tragedy of the Steel Capital. They asked to negotiate with the adepts. These goblins were willing to treat the adepts as their superiors and allow the adepts take what they wanted as long as they themselves retained their status and positions.

For a moment, none of the goblins could agree with each other and fell into an intense round of disagreement and arguments!