During the past hours they kept fighting like hell, never got the chance to rest or even take potions to heal themselves. After healing the most serious wounds, replenishing the almost depleted spirit power of many, they started to focus on strengthening the ground with lots of arrays.
Right now, the two pieces of land they secured didn't experience any deep or serious looking cracks, not to mention having pieces of the ground fall or something. But there were still many small cracks appearing from time to time. And so, they started to strengthen the ground again.
As things kept growing intense like this, no one really minded the fall of the world at this point. To them, they just wanted to get rid of all these monsters, get rid of such deadly situations once and for all.
In less than one more hour, the entire world suddenly shook like it was going to end. And with it, thick tongues of dust rose high in the air with the fall of the ground.
The entire zone fell, and that wasn't something trivial. It was a shocking scene to behold. Against what William thought, such falling started to expand outwards, without any stopping.
The ground around this zone seemed to get negatively affected by all the shaking and trembling that happened for long hours. And with the fall of the entire zone, it seemed like the ground around it got more weakened and started to fall.
Seeing this made all the masters drop what they were doing and started to retreat fast. At many points, masters ran like their lives depended on this, and that was a true statement.
The ground fell down like something was eating it from deep within and kept racing after the masters and monsters for long stressful minutes.
With the fall of more lands, the nearby ones started to crack and fall as well. It felt like the entire region was built over a thin layer of eggshell or something.
After an hour or so, the entire thing started to calm down, while lots of masters and monsters got killed. Even the Winged Crocs didn't escape the aftermath of such grand events, got hit severely by the rising tongues of dust and fell to the ground.
Once fell, they vanished into the deep looking abyss that appeared instead off the ground. When everything got settled, only three thick pillars stood high and tall in the middle of all this, looking really weird.
"Only my land, the other team's land, and the academy survived this…" William scanned the entire zone, seeing a grand and deep hole that looked as if a meteorite just hit this area or something.
Deep below, the vapour layer vanished. And with it, all of the Wrathers and almost all of the Winged Crocs got removed from the picture as well.
This was all great, and it happened just as William envisioned it. But he wasn't happy, not even close. By the time everything settled, weird gloomy darkness prevailed over the world. It was more suffocating and pressuring than the silence that dominated everything.
This came from the thick layer of black clouds that appeared over the entire region. William was too busy watching and following the development of everything, yet he couldn't get how these clouds appeared in the first place.
The scattered black spots now got unified and thickened as more black clouds appeared up there. The cloud layer expanded and covered a colossal circular layer, one that demarcated the borders of this region.
Even if the ground outside fell and expanded the hole even further, the black cloud layer didn't follow suit. And that made William sure that these clouds weren't normal and came by the making of that monster, and they got laid in this region only.
As for the purpose of it, William couldn't tell. Yet he felt bad warning bells ringing inside his head like loud police sirens.
William had no other option but to forget about these black clouds and started to scan the entire area, looking for new traps that would appear from the hell layer.
He didn't find anything out of normal. And that meant the trap that got released from the fall of the ground was these black clouds.
"For a reason, I feel like the way to activate the deadly effect of these clouds lay in that damn place," William couldn't help but focus his eyes over the dark academy.
It was still covered with that dome shaped thing all this time. Even with the falling of the ground everywhere, the academy stood erect and tall, without showing a single crack or anything at this dome.
At the same time, the ground around the academy was intact for several tens of kilometres. And that made the dark masters who sought asylum there still alive.
Seeing the new look of this place and the areas around made William realise how hard it was going to be to assault this place now. The ground was now deeper than the level of the academy for hundreds of metres, even thousands of metres. It'd make attacking this place like trying to hit a fort on top of a grand mountain peak.
The task wasn't going to be easy. Not to mention he and others had to think of a way to mobilise the grand army of masters they got towards the academy, how to prepare the assault plan, and on top of all, how to deal with the mysterious black clouds.
While he was looking around, he didn't find a single trace of that Scarlet Bear monster. It wasn't in the area nearby, wasn't in any area around actually.
In William's eyes, it simply vanished or perhaps got buried under tons of rocks. It was something expected, but at least he believed to find any trace of it anywhere.
As he didn't get anything new aside from these clouds, he turned his attention towards the masters outside.
