312 Chapter 312: Brothers’ War

Allow me to rewind a few minutes before Troy's apparent defeat. And yes, I'm going to maintain first person perspective because of my ability to break the fourth wall. Got a problem with that? Too bad. I don't care if I break immersion.

Anyway…the two brothers actually broke out of the shelter, and were battling in the streets, even as Tyrant's tyrannical horses roamed free inside the ruined shelter, trying to slaughter the fleeing civilians. Only the mercenaries and students held them at bay, their heroic efforts denying the nightmarish horses any bloodshed.

But we weren't gods. While I was distracted by the gigantic Trojan horse, and my allies were tied up in fighting the other smaller horses, there were still plenty of other smaller horses that often broke free of the herd and rained down fiery death on the sceaming refugees, immolating them. A good number of innocents died that day, to our regret.

What did you expect? We weren't gods. Collateral damage was inevitable. We were already trying our best. If you think you could do better, then go ahead and become a mercenary. A soldier. Throw yourself into a warzone and see if you could save everyone. The mercenaries and my friends did their utmost best, and I refused to allow the readers to call them weak, pathetic and useless. Especially since almost all of these readers had never been in an actual battle in their lives. They think it was so fucking easy, but they had never experienced having bullets scream over their heads, their squad mates blown into bloody bits by a grenade, dodging shrapnel when a tank was hit by a missile…they evidently had never been in a real firefight before, and they thought they had the right to judge professional soldiers as useless or pathetic?

Those keyboard warriors were the ones who were pathetic scum.

Troy was aware of the casualties we were sustaining. The innocent civilians weren't the only ones who were dying in droves. Mercenaries were succumbing to hideous burns and grievous injuries, incinerated by the nightmarish horses or kicked across the building. With great effort, he dove at Tyrant with a roar.

A gigantic rock fist manifested over him and pummeled Tyrant to the ground. Or tried to, but the slippery villain vanished in a burst of smoke and embers before re-materializing elsewhere. His fingers ignited and he mischievously pointed both hands at Troy, mimicking a pair of guns.

"Flaming Bullets!"

A series of tiny fireballs blasted out of his fingers and detonated against the ground where Troy was standing a few seconds ago. He dove to the side, trying his best to avoid the volley of fireballs that trailed and tracked him, Tyrant almost lazily shifting his aim too continue firing at him. Rolling on the ground, he took cover behind a battered two-story house.

"Heh!" Tyrant smirked. "Hide all you want, little bro! Do you think that little house can protect you?"

"Ugh…!"

His muscles bulging and popping from the strenuous effort, Troy actually grabbed the two-story building and tore it from its foundation. Using both hands, he lifted up the entire structure with a determined roar before hurling it at the flaming Tyrant.

"!!"

Tyrant glanced up at the flying house for a second before he dropped to his knees. His right hand blazed furiously with flames, but he decided to slam both hands into the ground and ignite them, creating an inferno around him.

"Flame Commandment," he intoned, flooding the entire area with fire as he crouched down. "Fire Pillar!"

A torrent of flames erupted from his body, turning into a literal pillar of fire that pierced the heavens and even dispelled the clouds. The building that Troy tossed at him was no match for such a destructive spell, disintegrating instantly from the sheer heat.

"Whoa!"

Troy dove to the side again, doing his best to avoid the flaming debris that rained down upon him. He jumped up to maintain his distance, but the bloodthirsty Tyrant was too eager to continue the battle to allow his younger brother to withdraw to safety.

"Fire Fist!"

"!!?"

Troy tried to conjure an earth barrier, but even the solid wall of dirt was obliterated in little more than an instant. The funnel of flames washed over the crumbling barrier and engulfed the earth mage, scorching a trail of molten rock in the ground.

"Ugh!"

Smoldering, Troy crashed onto the ground and rolled about frantically, using a combination of his own mana and the soil to extinguish the flames that immolated his body. Even as he put out the flames, fumes continued to pour upward.

"Hot! Ouch! This hurts!"

Coughing, he rose to his feet and glared at the smirking Tyrant, while waving his hands and putting out the last few embers that continued to dance atop his arms. Sucking a deep breath, he steeled himself, hatred visible in his dark eyes.

"Fuck!" he cursed hoarsely, trrying to draw breath through his raw throat. He seethed and gritted his teeth, enduring the pain. Then he smiled bitterly. "Well…this isn't any different from back when we were still children."

"Heh? You still remember our childhood?" Tyrant scoffed. Troy's eyes sparkled with resentment and a deep-sated grudge.

"How can I forget? You're the one who carved those bitter memories into my body." Boulders began rising around him. "Ever since we were toddlers…you were a sadistic bastard who did nothing but beat me up, just to indulge your own sick hobbies. You would take a knife and carve it across my skin, trying to draw patterns on my body and call it art. You treated me like your own personal punching bag, claiming that you wanted to experiment with new techiques and skills, but all you did was beat me up so brutally that I often got hospitalized. And after I was treated with healing magic, you repeated that as soon as possible. You never saw me as a brother…you treated me like nothing more than a guinea pig…a punching bag…a toy you culd torture to your heart's content."

"But that's exactly what you are!" Tyrant let out a peal of gleeful laughter. Troy's lip curled.

"I knew it. You're still the same sick bastard that you've always been."

"Come now," Tyrant sneered. "You honestly don't think that you are any different? You share the same blood as I do…from our old man. You know as well as I do that he raised us to be the ultimate warriors. That the reason why we end up being so strong today is all because of our old man!"

"Don't you dare talk to me about that fucker!" Troy bellowed, his face contorted with rage. "He has no right to call himself a parent! Not after what he did to Mom! His bullshit logic about the strong eat the weak and survival of the fittest!"

That was why Troy and Tyrant's father did absolutely nothing even when Tyrant was bullying his younger brother in the most horrific way imaginable. He justified it as "strong eat the weak" and if Troy was too weak to fight back, then he deserved to be bullied. Troy's father valued strength above everything else.

Ironically, he ended up being killed by the sadistic and twisted Tyrant, who one day wanted to find out if he had surpassed his old man. And he did…not to mention, he enjoyed conducting certain heinous experiments on his dying father before he finally expired. Troy shed no tears over his father's demise, not after the abuse he had suffered during the King Patriarch's reign, and especially after Tyler King abandoned his wife because she was too "weak" to accomplish a mission, leaving her to die on foregin soil, surrounded by enemies.

A fitting end, so far as Troy was concerned. And now, he wanted to erase the insanity that Tyrant was unleashing upon the world, once and for all. That one last person who was related to him by blood. And as a member of that sick, twisted family (his mother being the exception), Troy felt that it was his responsibility to clean up after his evil brother.

"This ends here, Tyrant," he declared resolutely. "I will ensure you never commit another atrocity again from today onward."

"Try it if you can, little bro!" Tyrant mocked him. "I know you don't have the balls!"

Troy responded with a grim grin. "I don't have the balls, you say?"

All around him, massive boulders rose, each of them vibrating violently, and each of them the embodiment of his fury. Infused with mana, they were being charged by geomagnetic forces similar to my Golden Kirin's gauss rifle spells. Those hovering gigantic boulders dwarfed Tyrant's fireballs, practically several dozen times bigger than the latter.

"My balls are a lot bigger than yours, Tyrant."

"…!"

Tyrant craned his head to look at the floating boulders, but he showed no sign of fear. Instead, he cocked his head to the side.

"You've got me beat there, little bro," he admitted, raising both of his hands. "I forgot that among the members of our family, you're the one person closest to mom…of course you would have inherited her affinity to the earth element."

He then grinned.

"So what? What of it? Did you think that you could beat me just because you take after mom? Just because your balls are bigger than mine?"

Troy didn't even bother responding. He hurled the boulders at his brother, obliterating his position. Tyrant merely stood there calmly, his flames enveloping him in a protective inferno. The smaller fireballs swerved forward to meet the boulders, colliding and exploding, but smaller flaming meteors continued to rain down upon the tyrannical fire mage, disintegrating when they ran into his inferno force field.

However, Troy would not be denied. A few of the boulders actually breached Tyrant's inferno and slammed into him.

"!!!"

Tyrant's eyes widened in shock for a moment, but he managed to punch the meteors with his flaming fists before they could crush him, pulverizing the solid rock and shattering them. Debris crashed down on him, grazing his cheeks and arms and leaving countless scrapes and cuts. Blood leaked from his cuts and dripped onto the ground, only to vaporize from the intense heat before they could leave any trace.

"Looks like I managed to scratch you, at the very least," Troy remarked with an amused grin. "I bet you never would have expected that, eh?"

"…whatever."

For the first time, Tyrant was scowling. He folded his arms, ignoring the multiple cuts on his face and arms.

"Are you really so pathetic that you're happy from just scratching me?"

"You really are a fool, aren't you?" Troy couldn't help but scoff. "You think that's all I'm capable of?"

Tyrant was about to retort, but something else caught his attention and he spun around in disbelief.

His main familiar, Nightmare, had been slain, and vanquished back to wherever it resided before he summoned it to do his bidding. Back inside the shelter he had just attacked, Tyrant watched as the smaller clones of Nightmare began vanishing as well.

"?!"

He froze for a moment, and was forced to duck when Troy punched him. Even though he avoided getting a fist in his face, Troy's attack caught him in the shoulder when he proved too slow in completely evading it and he was sent spinning to the ground.

"My Nightmare has been defeated?" he growled in disbelief. Troy stomped on him, forcing him to roll away.

"You underestimate my friends, Tyrant," Troy sneered. "And it won't be just your stupid horse. You're going down too, big brother."

Tyrant chuckled as he hurled himself away, and back to his feet.

"We'll see about that, little bro."

"We will, indeed."

Troy made no move to close in on Tyrant. Instead, he maintained his distance and finished his spell.

"?!"

Tyrant realized something was wrong. While he was busily defending against Troy's boulder bombardment and physical attacks, the latter had already started casting another spell. And he had just completed it. With a raised of his hand, he enveloped the entire area outside in darkness, taking care not to swallow up the fleeing civilians. It wasn't difficult – his only target was Tyrant, after all.

"What is this?"

Troy didn't reply. He wasn't stupid enough to give away information on his own spells and techniques. Insead, he focused on amplifying the gravitiy within the space caught within the darkness that he had engulfing the area around Tyrant.

Gravity was one of the most powerful forces in the universe. When strong enough, not even light could escape from it.

"…ugh!"

Tyrant fell to his knees when he felt the immense weight weighing down on him, crushing him down to the ground. He threw his hands out to support himself, but was unable to rise to his feet. Tremendous gravitational forces sought to squash him flat, but through some miracle he maintained his kneeling posture.

"Don't think something like this can…!" he snarled, only to glance up in shock when he saw boulders crashing down on him.

"You experienced getting struck by my boulders earlier, didn't you?" Troy asked with a smirk. "Now…what do you think will happen when those same boulders fall upon you again…but this time, they are under the influence of much stronger gravitational forces?"

"…?!"

Above the two brothers, a swarm of boulders had materialized and hovered unsteadily, vibrating as they fought desperately to resist the tremendous gravitational forces that now permeated the area. Troy's face contorted as he kept up the effort to maintain the boulders' current elevated position. He was just summoning as many boulders as possible. Once he reached his limit, he then let go of the boulders and allowed them to descend upon the person who had been the target of his hatred for so long.

Tyrant desperately tried to throw himself to the side, but he found himself completely unable to move…his body refused to budge even a millimeter. The gravity that was weighing down on his body was far too much for him to resist.

"Ugh…! No way…!"

"I'll be paying you back all the pain you've inflicted upon me all these years…several fold."

With that statement, Troy mercilessly obliterated the howling Tyrant's position with a boulder bombardment, razing the entire ground and engulfing the site in a gigantic explosion of dust and utter darkness.