The Avarans had only sent out a group of five thousand warriors to confront the Balaran army that was made up of well over five million soldiers! The Balaran army filled the battlefield like ants, and the Avarans barely covered a small portion of the battlefield opposite them! Anyone who saw the difference in numbers would think that victory was already assured for the Balaran army since there was so much more of them! And in truth, Alex had also thought the same thing.
But then the actual battle began, and on that day, Alex learned the true meaning of power. The Avarans were an unyielding force of pure destruction, unlike anything Alex had ever seen! They killed with a brutality and sheer bloodthirst that terrified the young slime, and even after so many years on the battlefield, Alex felt fear in his heart as he watched the scene unfolding in front of him! The Avaran king, Richard Marc, led the charge against the Balarans, and each swing of his sword saw thousands of people dying left and right! His skills with the elements were unmatched, and it was almost like he had eyes on the back of his head since no one was capable of sneaking up on him! A massacre was the only way you could describe what was happening here! The Avarans possessed a diverse number of skills and abilities that prevented the Balarans from knowing exactly what any Avaran could really do! The Balarans never bothered to form a proper strategy to face the Avarans because the difference in numbers had been so vast that they didn’t think they would need any complex strategies! But even if the Balarans had known the skills of the Avarans and the Balarans managed to form a strategy to counter those skills, Alex knew that the Balarans would have still lost! The Avarans were just too formidable and relentless!
That day, the Balaran army was eradicated, and the Avarans barely lost any men in the process! All this time, the Avarans had been hailed as the strongest race in the Primordial Expanse, and Alex always thought that the stories people told about the Avarans were too exaggerated to be true. But Alex realised right then that none of the stories had been a lie and there had been no exaggerations at all! These Avarans were fucking terrifying!
Alex had done things the same way he always did. He waited for the battle to be over and for the victors to leave the battlefield before he came out to consume the bodies of the dead Balaran army. But he had miscalculated the sensory abilities of King Richard. King Richard had figured out that there was someone hiding outside the battlefield, so he had waited at a far distance and watched to see who would appear! And the moment Alex exposed himself, he felt every instinct in his body scream at him to dodge! Alex jumped out of the way as a powerful mana arrow tore through the left side of his body, and he quickly began to run in fear as more arrows followed behind him! Thankfully, Alex wasn’t pursued by King Richard, but the single attack that hit Alex had been enough to incapacitate him for a very long time! Alex lost more than thirty percent of his body from that attack, and he had to consume multiple small animals and absorb their mana before he began to heal! For the next decade after that encounter, Alex was far too scared to go near any Avaran ever again. The Avarans were just too fierce and dangerous, and Alex decided it was best to avoid any Avaran battlefields so he never had to run into King Richard again!
Things settled into a routine afterwards, and Alex began to gain back some of his confidence as he continued making his way across battlefields. At this time, Alex had managed to become a TITAN Rank I after he consumed the body of a TITAN Rank Mage that was killed in a battle, but no matter how many low-ranking soldiers he consumed, Alex was just never able to cross into TITAN Rank II. Alex remained in this level for more than fifty years, and the frustration began to get to him after some time. So when Alex just so happened to stumble into a battle between the Queen of the Vympire, Gillian, and the Overlord of the Machina, Rubik, Alex felt a strange excitement beginning to build up in his heart. Alex had heard about these two powerhouses! Queen Gillian was hailed as the strongest Dead Apostle in existence! She had enough power to be regarded as a TITAN Rank III, and even the Primordials were wary about angering her! And the Overlord was also someone who possessed extraordinary abilities! Even though he was only a TITAN Rank II, he had insane firepower and an arsenal of weapons that allowed him to keep up with the much stronger Queen Gillian! Their battle shook the world to its foundation and destroyed entire landscapes in the process! Since it was daytime, Gillian was not at her full strength, and this allowed the Overlord to keep up with her fearsome attacks!
After a while, the battle began to cut across multiple worlds, and Alex followed after the two powerhouses until they ended up on a world known as Riyad. On Riyad, the two fighters ended up in the middle of a ritual, and the intensity of their power interfered with the ritual and made the entire city begin to float! Alex noticed that both Gillian and the Overlord were very exhausted at this point, and neither of them would be able to defend themselves against him if he were to attack them! If Alex allowed the city to float out of his reach, then there was every chance that he wouldn’t be able to claim either of the fighters, so for the first time ever, Alex abandoned his hiding place, and he launched an attack on the distracted fighters before the battle was over!
Alex managed to catch the Overlord off guard, and he struggled to consume him before he could fight back properly! Since the Overlord was so exhausted, it was impossible to fight back against Alex’s power, and it wasn’t long before he was eaten! But Gillian was a lot more tenacious, and she decided that she would rather trap herself behind the [Cage of Eternity] rune than to allow Alex have his way with her! That day, Alex felt the sting of defeat for only the second time since he was reborn, and he roared in anger as he tried to break through the rune! But no matter what he did, there was no way he could reach Gillian, and he was forced to accept this new failure!
Over the next few years, Alex would integrate himself into the Machina army as their Overlord. His ability to assume the identity of anyone he consumed was extremely useful since it allowed him to also take on the personality and mana signature of his victims, so there was no one who could prove that he wasn’t the Overlord! Alex split himself into two distinct identities so he could rule the Machina properly. The first identity was the Overlord, who possessed the bulk of Alex’s power, and then there was the Grand General who possessed most of Alex’s mental capacity and served as the right hand man to the Overlord! The Overlord was the one who stood on the frontlines, but it was the Grand General who was in charge of making every decision during their time as the rulers of the Machina.
But it would appear that Alex’s time as the Overlord was quickly coming to an end.