Yup, we're dead.

Although Alex mentally facepalmed when Raymond boasted about 'not being injured', outwards he still looked as serious as ever when he realised that Raymond could still put up a decent fight against him despite how he looked.

However when he looked behind him, he grinned and spoke to Raymond.

"Looks like your little girlfriend wasn't as lucky as you thought." When Raymond looked behind him, he remembered that Joanne also took the brunt of the shockwave.

She was dead, plain and simple.

When faced with an attack at the proportions Alex had just launched, that could even severely injure someone at the E rank like Raymond, then it was obvious how Joanne fared against it while only being F+ rank.

She looked far worse than Raymond. All her skin had been burned away along with any meat or muscle that lay beneath it.

However Raymond didn't look at all perturbed when he saw her state.

"Meh, she was just another means to an end for me anyway." He plainly stated to Alex, as if her death didn't matter at all to him.

'Why am I not surprised…'

Seeing how Raymond didn't even care about the lives of his own friends, Alex strengthened his resolve to one day kill him.

*Roarrrrr!*

Suddenly, there was a hugely loud sound coming from the distance that shocked both Alex and Raymond to their core

Out of nowhere, their battle was interrupted by the thundering sounds of a much larger and more ferocious battle going on in the distance.

The fight was so far away that even Raymond couldn't catch sight of it with his superior E rank eyesight, but the sounds from the battle still reached their ears.

Whoever or whatever was fighting were clearly much, much stronger than the two of them and neither of them were in the mood to kill each other anymore.

"Tsk. You have some heavenly luck brat." Raymond said with departing words as he attempted to turn around and dart off into the distance to wherever.

He didn't know why such powerful figures were fighting, but he didn't want to be around to find out.

He had a bad feeling in his gut, and he suspected that one of the powerful figures might be Alex's backer.

But unluckily for him, this bad feeling couldn't be any more wrong.

Right as he was mid sprint, he stopped dead in his tracks. Literally dead.

At a speed that surpassed anything Alex thought remotely possible for a living being to reach, a hazy figure pierced came crashing in through the fight between Alex and Raymond.

However while whatever it was narrowly missed Alex, it didn't miss Raymond.

What remained of him was just a bloody mist slowly dissipating into the atmosphere.

"What the fu-" Alex was utterly shocked and terrified to his core.

He hadn't even noticed what had moved through his area before it was gone again, taking Raymond out along with it.

There was no time for Alex to even begin comprehending what just happened though. Just as suddenly as the sounds of battle came, a blaring sound of a horn-like siren went off from within the city which carried its sound across the whole city and the wilderness surrounding it for thousands of kilometres.

Alex might not have been able to spot the figure — or rather figures, that had run through Raymond and popped him like a water balloon, someone else had noticed.

***

10 minutes earlier, in the centre of Valentis city.

Inside a glamorous meeting room sat a serious, stern looking middle aged man. He wore a three piece suit as he exchanged glances with the four other men sitting around the luxurious round table with some exotic food before each man.

It seemed none of the men seemed to have an appetite to eat the food in front of them though as they all wore the same, serious expression as the noble middle aged man at the head of the table.

"I'm assuming you were all alerted to it as well, since you showed up here unannounced." The middle aged man, who everybody knew as the city lord, spoke to the others.

When all four of them nodded, he continued.

"That was clearly a battle between two higher life forms, and with them so close to the city I'm sure all of you are worried." The city lord released a sigh, showing emotion for the first time since the meeting began.

"But I'm just as worried, if not more than all of you."

"I may be the strongest in the room, the whole city in fact, with my C+ tier soul core. But in front of even the weakest of higher life forms I am helpless."

Worry and melancholy showed on the faces of the four C rank men when they heard the city lord's words.

In the entirety of their thousands of years of life, none of them had ever been in contact with a higher life form before, while the city lord had. That's just how rare an encounter with one was.

And the city lord's description of his meeting with one was rather short but to the point.

'We are ants.'

This was all he said, but his point was conveyed very well.

There wasn't even a point in comparing a C+ rank to a B- rank, as the difference was like a small pebble and Mount Everest in terms of power.

"If we are lucky, then these two higher life forms will be two humans taking their anger out on each other. If we are less lucky then it could be a human and a beast fighting, in which case we can only hope the human wins."

'There's no point in even bringing up the third option. If it's two high beasts fighting then we are fucked. At least with the first two cases we have a chance at making it through this alive.'

The city lord spoke a silent prayer for himself and his city in his mind, before he spotted a commotion happening just less than 2 miles out from the city gates.

His senses immediately locked onto Alex, who he immediately disregarded due to how weak he was.

But when he sensed the two figures moving at unimaginable speeds towards the city wall, he stood up from his chair with terror plastered across his face and immediately activated the city's strongest and most expensive defence mechanisms.

'Yup, we're dead.'

A loud siren sounded soon after he did so.