Abyssborn: Sovereign of Sin and Ruin

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{Chapter: 181: Retreat}

Through gritted teeth, Henry sent a mental signal through the relic, activating its emergency broadcast.

"All demigods, all racial envoys," he said, voice ragged, "begin immediate evacuation. Gather all uninfected personnel and retreat via emergency teleportation arrays. This is not a drill. Prioritize survival. Abandon the front. Save who you can."

He lowered his hand, exhaled deeply, and closed his eyes.

There was no shame in retreat.

Only strategy.

Because remaining would mean only one thing: a death with no legacy, a sacrifice feeding the enemy.

---

In the war rooms and shattered halls across the city, his order rang out.

Men and women—heroes, champions, and elders—stood still for a moment.

Then, one by one, they moved.

Their teeth clenched in fury.

Their fists bled from how tightly they gripped their weapons.

But they moved.

For they knew this was no longer a war they could win.

To remain would be to throw their lives into a bottomless pit, gaining nothing.

Still, the humiliation of retreat stung like venom in their veins.

Some cursed the heavens.

Some wept silently.

Some merely looked down at the corpses of comrades they could no longer bury.

But they obeyed.

Because Henry was right.

The defense line had become a graveyard.

And the demon tide… was just beginning.

---

Henry Moore remained on the balcony for a long time.

Watching.

Listening.

Monsters roared.

Towers fell.

Soldiers died.

He let out one final breath and murmured quietly to himself:

"…I had hoped for a month… just one more month…"

But hope was a fragile thing.

And now, the era of fortresses and barricades had ended.

Only blood would remain.

And the sudden shift in the battlefield's momentum caught Henry Moore completely off guard—again.

He had expected a war of attrition, a slow grind across months where every inch of ground gained or lost would be weighed in blood. But no. The true mastermind lurking behind the abyss had evidently reached the same conclusion: there was no merit in dragging this conflict out any longer. No drawn-out siege, no diplomatic posturing—just a swift, brutal extermination.

A clean sweep.

Looking across the shattered horizon, Henry's gaze locked on the massive, coiling monsters wreaking absolute havoc in the distance—giant serpents of corrupted flesh and stone, their scales glistening like blackened oil and their maws wide enough to swallow entire squads whole.

With grim determination, he reached for the ancient weapon strapped to his waist. It had rested untouched for decades, its edge dulled only by time and not by battle. Yet, in his grip, it hummed with rekindled purpose.

In a blur of motion, Henry vanished from the balcony, reappearing mid-air like a phantom, his blade cleaving downward with merciless precision.

The colossal snake had no time to react. With a flash of steel and a thunderclap of rupturing flesh, its head was split open like a rotting melon, chunks of dark stone meat and steaming brain matter splattering across the charred ground below.

The beast thrashed once—convulsing in its death throes—before crashing into the ruins like a toppled tower, its blood hissing as it ate into stone.

But Henry didn't pause. His heart didn't lift. His dread only deepened.

Because in every direction, as far as his eyes could see, the land writhed.

Hundreds—no, thousands—of similar abominations slithered and rampaged. They smashed bunkers like children kicking over sandcastles, shattered walls with lashing tails, and skewered survivors with snapping jaws. It was a massacre.

Henry's expression darkened as he assessed them.

Their anatomy was crude, an amalgam of corrupted flesh stone and condensed abyssal energy, barely held together by blasphemous stitching. Yet each one radiated power bordering on legendary. They weren't born of nature. They hadn't trained, grown, or evolved. No. These things had been made. Grown. Cooked like foul crops in some unholy soil.

The realization hit him like ice in the gut.

They were mass-produced.

In ten days. Maybe less.

Creatures that should take decades of training, countless battles, and brutal trial to reach such strength—churned out like common fodder beneath his feet.

"How?" he murmured, the question bitter on his tongue. "What are you, Demon?"

He remembered the past centuries well—how demons came in waves, tearing into cities, only to fall in droves to the coordinated defenses. They had always returned, yes, but never like this. Never into their lines and homes. And never so uniformly powerful.

Looking back over the past hundreds of years, those monsters died in batches, and not only died at their hands, but they also often fought among themselves, but there has never been a situation where they were short of manpower.

His mind, now racing, tried to explain what his heart already knew.

"Are they really… growing out of the ground?"

He had some random guesses: 'Could it be that they really grew out of the ground? Is this why I can't kill them all?'

It sounded insane. Yet the truth was even worse.

The abyssal demons didn't grow like plants—but from the Styx—the river that threaded through dimensions like a festering wound. The birthplace of endless horrors. And like a factory with no end, the Styx kept producing.

Unless that river dried up—a miracle on the scale of unimaginative power—demons would continue to flood the worlds like an eternal tide of death.

Cut one down? Ten more would crawl from the dark.

Unless the Styx dried up, they would grow faster than leeks, and even faster than an assembly line. No matter how hard they tried to kill themselves, there would always be a lot of them around.

---

What Henry could never have anticipated, however, was how these particular monsters had been born.

Though they matured in mere days, the energy they devoured during their growth was anything but cheap.

They fed on the ancient reserves.

The underground barrier nodes—repositories that had stored magical energy for centuries—were drained dry. A safeguard meant to defend the line… had instead become the womb for its destruction.

In a grotesque metaphor come to life, the defenders had been milked dry like livestock, their lifeblood repurposed.

They were nothing but hens to Dex. Laying eggs.

Without their unwitting sacrifice, even Dex, genius, and abyssal engineer—couldn't have conjured this scale of monstrosity. His strength alone wasn't enough to birth an entire legion of nightmare serpents.

He might have managed some low-tier infestations—zombies shambling like those from Resident Evil, flesh blobs from Prototype, grotesque mutants like Gene Stellar, or fungus-choked creatures from The Last of Us—just enough to wear the enemy thin.

Disgusting the residents inside the Disgusting Line of Defense and constantly reducing their combat effectiveness.

But this?

This mythical-level anaconda army?

There's no way he can play some magical version of Anaconda.

This apocalyptic horror show of black-scaled serpents and bone stone-armored giants?

This was something else entirely.

Dex had stumbled into godhood through theft.

He saw the barrier nodes, realized they couldn't detect his plague, and then…

"Since these outdated wards can't sense my corruption," he whispered in mad glee, "why not go big?"

And so, he did.

He let his twisted imagination run wild—summoning the blueprint of monsters from nightmares, then giving them shape using the defense lime's own defenses barrier as fuel.

The result?

Not just destruction.

Desecration.

It can be said that being able to take down this line of defense in one go was somewhat of a surprise to Dex, because his initial expectation was just to play a trick of internal and external cooperation.

Dex hadn't merely broken through the defense line. He'd gutted it from the inside, drained its lifeblood, and birthed a generation of monsters that even legends would fear.

And as Henry Moore stood, blade dripping with abyssal ichor, staring out across a world dying in slow motion, he understood something chilling:

This wasn't just a war anymore.

It was extinction.

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