Cthulhu Gonfalon

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

After witnessing what had happened on the battlefield, Sui Xiong gave up the idea of stealing the Three Eagle Artifacts for study. For the whole night, he had been floating in the air above the battlefield and thinking alone.

Having been born in a time of peace and growing up in a stable and harmonious society, his most brutal and horrible memory was probably that a psychopath who had just lost his lover. He was holding a knife on the street, attacking anyone in sight until he was shot to death at last. Sui Xiong had been sitting in a restaurant on that street eating spicy noodles at that time. He was so shocked and impressed that he had even put the noodles to his nose instead of his mouth.

He had certainly watched dreadful news like terrorist attacks, the chaos caused by war, famine, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc., but as he heard such news through TV, computer and newspaper, they had sounded distant.

Living in a peaceful world, he had become gentle and mild. He was always willing to talk and negotiate, share and benefit others, and even compromise in certain cases.

However, he would also react rather drastically when confronting extremely evil incidents to which he could no longer compromise; he would be greatly afflicted when facing brutalities beyond his acceptance.

And the most brutal scene he had ever witnessed in his life was exactly the one in front of him now.

He had fought and killed before. He had killed countless devils in the abyss. He had even joined the battle against Cloud City, and before long, fought and killed lots of angels and Oracles. But their deaths—whether they be devils or angels—hadn't come with blood. Instead, they came with flames; an explosion had taken place to mark their death, similar to the special effects of a video game. For an experienced player like him, it hadn't felt like a real battle but a fierce and rather difficult virtual game instead.

In fact, until now, Sui Xiong had been convincing himself that he had been in a long and ridiculous dream and that after he had woken up, he would be back to reality in his dormitory, guarding the warehouse, painting and playing games.

Maybe he was escaping the fact, but he couldn't really manage to face all the messes of the real world.

But at this very moment, standing in front of the numerous dead bodies of humans and humanoids, he finally had no way to escape again. He had to face this bloody battlefield as well as this brutal world.

As an artist, Sui Xiong was emotional. Compared with in-depth analysis and thinking, he was better at understanding others and feeling the way they feel.

And now he could truly feel the pain and despair of the deceased, the sorrow of the living. He realized the horrible destruction caused by the war and the crisis which would last long afterward.

He was floating above the battlefield; he didn't move at all as he watched the people down there busy clearing away the bodies and processing in different ways day by day. Nobles and knights would be frozen before being sent to their graveyards; junior officers and adventurers would be incinerated, and their remains would be returned to their family in small jars along with their relics. Ordinary soldiers would be incinerated, and their remains would be buried collectively with nothing but their names left on the "deceased list" recorded by the military clerk.

Unlike the more civilized Eagle Kingdom, the Orc Empire was rather rough and ruthless. Bodies of the famous masters would be identified and sent back to their hometowns along with other relics as a clue of the specific clan for their descendants and other clansmen. The ordinary orcs would be burnt directly without any funeral, leaving the remains to be blown away by the wind. And the clerk would just record the death toll of each tribe while not bothering with specific names.

Sui Xiong had been staying above the battlefield for a month to watch both sides clearing up silently and sending their messengers to negotiate and exchange captives. By the end of January, when the temperature had dropped to extreme cold, the last troops of both sides left, leaving all the traces of their battle covered by endless snow.

The number of casualties on both sides was finally released.

On the human side, nearly 200,000 out of the 400,000 soldiers in the direct subordinate units of the Eagle Kingdom had died in battle or of illness and serious injuries; around 20,000 suffered minor injuries and 50,000 had escaped. Out of the more than 4,000 adventurers, over 2,000 of them had died, and the rest had suffered injuries at different levels with very few of them being uninjured. Among the nearly 50,000 volunteers and knights from other countries, almost 45,000 had died in battle, and the other 5,000 were injured severely.

Records of the Orc side were not as detailed. Around 650,000 had been in the battle altogether, and nearly 350,000 of them had died; nearly 100,000 had died of injuries and illnesses with ineffective treatment from shamans, or they had escaped. An additional record of the Orcs was the loss of 150,000 in the elite units and around 300,000 in others.

In total, the battle had involved over a million forces and Oracles led by real gods. It had resulted in the passing of the first human patron saint, the highly reputed God of Knights. Countless casualties of Oracles and followers and more than 750,000 humans had died in the war!

Such dreadful battles had rarely happened in the past. Even the legendary battle between the humans and Orcs had much fewer casualties than this one, though more forces had been involved. More than one million, five hundred thousand forces were in that battle with casualties of around 300,000—less than half of that at this time.

An important reason for a large number of casualties in this battle had been the use of Oracle forces on both sides and the complicated warfare. The Oracle forces of legendary level had been a daunting power for humans but the latter—with the help of strong spells—had been unprecedentedly courageous to fight back though they had usually fled when confronting slaughter. The humans' fearless fight regardless of physical conditions and casualties had dramatically increased the number of dead and injured. Moreover, an additional mass of people had died of the consequent injuries and illnesses after the battle.

Especially when the human forces broke through the Orcs front and slaughtered the less powerful auxiliary Orc soldiers at the back of the Orc troops, they were killing like wheat-harvesting farmers. There was enough blood flowing to form a small lake. But they also paid the price—the humans hardly survived, and most of them died in the Orcs' field.

But things were opposite during the difficult fight. Though all the Orcs elite units had been defeated, they had also killed humans several times over than the humans had killed them.

And it would take time for one to discover the subsequent grave results.

The Eagle Kingdom had a population of around five million. The Duke of Griffin led a semi-independent region in the east. It was not a large land, but it was rather fertile, feeding nearly a million people. The Duke of Griffin sent merely three thousand people to support this battle, and this troop had been quite sly. They had mostly stayed in the more secure corner of the battlefield and avoided as much harm to themselves as possible.

Among the remaining four million people, four hundred thousand were involved in the battle—a show of strength from the Eagle Kingdom. At last, it suffered a direct loss of two hundred thousand and seventy thousand injured or escaped—nearly seventy percent of the force had been lost. Essentially, more than one-fifteenth of the five million people had been sacrificed. For regions which had sent off fewer forces—maybe just five had been sent in a village—only three survived and returned; but for regions that had sent off more, they had to face a more heartbreaking fact. All the families there would no longer be complete; there would be more orphans and widows, and several funerals were taking place at the same time.

The Orc Empire hadn't recorded its real population, assumedly around twelve million to fifteen million. Yet most of the tribes there hadn't really obeyed the emperor though they had claimed to do so. No more than sixty to seventy percent of the population were true supporters of the emperor—seven million to ten million of the population.

To take the median number optimistically, assuming that the emperor could mobilize his forces among nine million apart from the auxiliary ones, then he would have no more than three hundred thousand in the elite units. While one hundred thousand of them died, the emperor's power had already been weakened significantly. Not to mention, the loss of the three hundred thousand auxiliary soldiers could bring about negative impacts to the grass root communities even if not directly to the emperor's rule.

For the Orc Empire, it had been a sign of the fall of many strong tribes and the less strong ones would be annexed. The subsequent internal chaos and slaughter would be unimaginable.

In addition, they should not forget those knights, troops, and adventurers who had come from other states to support the Eagle Kingdom in the name of interests, faith or the king's order. They had suffered a great loss. The elite followers of the God of Knights had all been killed on the main plane, and only one in five volunteers survived and made their way back home. The adventurers, though suffering less loss, still lost half of their numbers.

This was war, an unimaginably dreadful war.

Many people had presumed the result of the war before it even started. Some had bet on a win-win result, and some had bet on a draw. Even the craziest or the most pessimistic people hadn't ever expected the war to be so bloody!

Even the Goddess of War and Death in the War God System had been touched by this furious war. She had long been encouraging furious battles and even planned massacres with the God of Hunting and Holocaust. But this brutal and evil god couldn't help but flinch upon witnessing such a big battle resulting in seventy percent of the fighters dying; her followers who should have applauded the battle stayed silent.

In terms of both scale and number of casualties, this battle, named by later generations as "the Battle of Sun's Death Day," was impressive for humans and gods.

In terms of its influence to later generations, it might be a more profound battle than the war of gods, in which the Human God System had defeated the Sun God System.