Chapter 1151

The moment he activated the secret device that only one person in the world was permitted to use, Vladimir Furin thought:

This is as far as I go.

Was he reluctant to let go of life? Afraid of death?

Of course he was.

The more a person had, the harder it was to let go. That was human nature. And for a man who had ruled as a dictator for nearly half a century, there was no need to ask.

He wanted to live.

He had to live.

He had to raise the name Vladimir Furin to the level of a god.

He had to become greater than the tsars, who had ruled this land for generations by virtue of their noble blood, and greater even than the Iron Marshal,¹ against whom no one had dared rebel.

But if that proved impossible—

If someone else appeared and tried to take everything he had built—

I’ll burn it all down. With my own hands, so no one else can have it.

The old dictator, who had dreamed of immortality, smiled faintly.

Or rather, he tried to.

Time slowed, stretching out like a passing life flashing before his eyes. Then he saw the looter wearing a vivid smile.

“You really are an interesting human.”

“…!”

Furin’s shrewd eyes widened.

Rrrrrumble.

The enormous rumble, as if it would swallow the Kremlin—or Moscow itself—drew closer.

Slowly. Deliberately.

As though it moved at someone’s will.

At last, Vladimir Furin saw the source of this unexpected phenomenon with his own eyes.

Wooooom.

Would thousands—tens of thousands—of bees swarming together sound like this?

Furin could only stare blankly at the vortex of flames rising through the melting floor of his office.

Everything was red. Everything was hot.

Surrounded by an aura as dark as pitch, it had been compressed into a great sphere that blazed like a tiny sun.

And the old dictator, staring at it in shock, knew better than anyone that “tiny sun” was no exaggeration.

He also knew that a power once great enough to terrify the entire world was now in the grasp of the monster smiling at him.

Tsar Bomba.

The most powerful weapon in human history.

The mother and emperor of all bombs.

Only a handful of people involved knew that the most powerful hydrogen bomb of the Cold War—the one that had frozen the five oceans and six continents with fear—lay sleeping deep beneath the Kremlin.

They also knew that decades of secret experiments, carried out on the dictator’s orders, had given it a new name and destructive power far beyond what it had possessed before.

“Remarkable. Truly remarkable. To think you humans created power like this. What do you call this weapon?”

At Morgoth’s genuine expression of awe, Furin—sensing that everything was over—answered in a hollow voice.

“Vladimir.”

“What?”

Morgoth looked from the old dictator, already all but fallen, to the catastrophic power bearing his name. Then he laughed aloud.

“That’s a masterpiece. Or should I say, very like you?”

Morgoth found it truly amusing.

That a human granted barely a hundred years could harbor such enormous ambitions.

And that these mere mortals had tried to kill him, a being with power close to immortality, using a weapon they had made.

“Did you think this alone could bring me down? With Magic Gems taken from lowly monsters, you dare challenge me?”

At Morgoth’s words, as though he had already seen through everything, Furin quietly swallowed.

He was right. Tsar Bomba—or rather, the weapon now called Vladimir—was not merely a product of science.

The Great Cataclysm.

After that event had overturned the world’s common sense and order, one thought had taken root in the mind of the dictator who had barely survived.

I have to become stronger. So this can never happen again. So we can win any war.

And the means were close at hand.

Magic and Magic Gems. The new knowledge born from them: magical engineering.

And so Tsar Bomba became Vladimir.

As one of the world’s great powers—and a dictatorship at that—Russia had countless ways to obtain Magic Gems for the experiments.

Of course, that meant violating more international treaties than anyone could count and killing even his own scientists and mages to keep everything secret…but what did that matter?

Mother Russia.

Russia—or rather, he—had to become greater still.

Even if a second Demon King descended, he and Russia alone had to survive and rewrite the world order.

Or die together.

Yes.

That was how it had to be.

Plop.

Ash fell away in clumps.

Despite decades of not smoking, Furin had managed only a few drags from the cigar. He stared at it blankly, then spoke.

“What are you going to do now?”

Morgoth didn’t answer.

But Furin immediately understood the meaning behind the gentle curve of his lips.

“Right. It has nothing to do with me anymore.”

The cigar trembled.

No—it was Furin himself who was shaking.

“Any last words?”

At Morgoth’s kind offer, Furin raised a hand that shook like a leaf and brought the cigar to his lips.

He drew deeper than he ever had before, then blew the smoke toward the monster before him.

“No. But there’s one thing I have to tell you.”

He spoke the name of the man who had crossed his mind just before he activated the bomb bearing his own name.

“If Jin comes back, you’re finished.”

At that moment—

“I look forward to it. Truly.”

Swoooosh.

With Morgoth’s calm reply, the pitch-black aura restraining the catastrophic power slowly dispersed and enveloped its master.

Like the touch of death announcing the end of this land.

Whoosh.

A blinding flash swallowed the old, wretched dictator’s final sight.

It was warm.

Eight meters² long. Two meters³ in diameter. Twenty-seven tons.⁴

Packed into a volume that could fill a large truck was the destructive power of fifty megatons⁵—fifty million tons of TNT.

Those were the publicly known figures for Tsar Bomba.

It had enough power to make Little Boy, the bomb that turned Hiroshima into a land of death during World War II, seem like a little boy indeed.

But no one had expected it.

No one had expected this monster from a bygone era, born of the Cold War’s displays of power, to awaken again more than eighty years later.

And no one had expected the monster’s first cry after its long sleep to ring out from the Kremlin.

Gooooom.

The air trembled in an instant.

Everyone in the Kremlin—or rather, everyone in Moscow—felt that deep, ominous rumble.

The soldiers and Hunters holding their posts despite their fear. The citizens who had rushed into bomb shelters or out onto the streets when Red Square collapsed.

No one was spared.

Everyone felt it, and everyone instinctively understood.

This was the last moment they would ever draw breath.

And then—

Whoooosh.

There was light.

A terrible heat beyond human perception, atomic power mingled with potent energy drawn from countless Magic Gems—it all spread out, devouring everything in its path.

Endlessly. Greedily.

Kraaaaaash!

In the storm of power, everything melted.

The living died. The lifeless lost their shape.

Underground or aboveground, whatever life they had lived—it didn’t matter.

The blinding light that burst from the Kremlin made everyone equal.

Just as Icarus had lost his wings and fallen when he flew too close to the sun, the tiny sun born of a dictator’s ambition and fear swallowed countless lives, including his own.

All of them, save one.

Rrrrrumble.

At the heart of the rumbling that shook everything around him, Morgoth lifted his head and surveyed the scene he had created.

Nothing remained.

Everything that had surrounded him just minutes earlier was gone.

Molten metal flowed in rivers. Above it rose a massive mushroom cloud, looming over the surface now transformed into a land of death.

It was quite a sight.

“Such power. I didn’t even need to use Breath.”

Morgoth felt both admiration and regret.

How could mortals be so greedy and yet so foolish?

They had saved him a great deal of trouble, but the place now shadowed by calamity was desolate beyond measure.

A city with a long history and a population of over ten million had become a land where nothing could live for hundreds of years.

“But birth awakens from within death.”

The moment Morgoth spread both hands with those quiet words—

Pop.

The air stopped. The wind stopped.

And the Magic Gem energy that had swept across the city with a deadliness greater than radiation changed in response to his will.

Darker than before. Purer still.

Wooooom.

Dragon.

Great beings blessed by mana from the moment of their birth.

Morgoth had been revered as the strongest among them, yet in the end he had chosen corruption of his own accord. At his fingertips, space trembled.

Gathering. Compacting. Rising.

And at last—

Rrrrrumble.

It was built.

A gigantic castle unlike anything ever seen in this world.

His own kingdom.

In place of concrete and marble, it stood upon pitch-black earth amid air saturated with dense magical power. It was overwhelming, yet beautiful. Morgoth smiled as he gazed at its spire piercing the clouds.

Or, more precisely, at the camera lens of the drone hidden in the thick black clouds, watching him.

“Have you seen it, humans?”

That day, people all over the world saw it.

They watched Moscow disappear and a Dragon Lair come into being.

The calamity that had reached their doorstep.