Mastermind

Immediately, Merlin decided not to Disperse the mana, and instead instructed all available Hokori to put everything they had into crushing the partial souls, while leaving the mana in the ball.

Immediately, the speed of destroying souls doubled, and outpaced the amount of soul-mana entering the bowl.

Time passed as the evil grin mixed in with ridicule and anger became increasingly vivid.

After nearly 20 minutes, Merlin had fully destroyed all the soul fragments. He then ordered,

"Gaia, open the barrier to allow this gift outside."

Merlin pushed at the ginormous ball of mana, which had reached a size almost equivalent to Zero's Earth-ending disaster-bringing annihilation level spell that he had casted at the end of Merlin's last life.

Cracks appeared in space as the planer laws tore away at the planer barrier to perfectly fit the mana, while not letting the corruption of the void enter the plane.

…

In the void, the two 'gods' who were actually nothing more than Tier 11 beings, barely anything stronger than Zero was, were stunned at the outcome.

Since they were in the void, most of their powers were used to supress the corruption, leaving them with little strength to fend off the mana attack that a Tier 10 would have launched at near full strength.

Looking at each other, they both saw the haggard state each of them were in. Shem had an arm missing, while Krog had two of his four lizard-like limbs missing, along with most of his long snout.

Although these injuries were not fatal, they would take a long time to recover from, and the two would be out of service for at least a thousand years, maybe a hundred years if they were willing to pay an exorbitant price and go to one of the extremely rare time-displaced planes.

The two quickly contacted their superiors to deliver the situation to them before retiring from their post before that human could pull any more tricks on them.

Unknowingly, the two creatures, who called themselves 'gods of this world' due to their super-inflated egos, had stopped calling Merlin as 'lowly mortal' and were now calling him 'human'.

…

Back on Earth, Merlin was sighing after taking care of such a troublesome task.

'Whether it was them who did this or was not, they should at least know that I can hurt them.'

Even Merlin himself was beside himself with the sheer power of that attack. It was just pure chaotic mana, and not a mana storm. In fact, Merlin could not make it into a mana storm, because if he could have, its power would have increased tenfold! Naturally, that was not possible, since it was not his own mana to begin with, and would only cause him to die a gruesome death if he tried to absorb it.

Merlin had vented quite a lot of his anger in that blast, and was getting a feeling of emptiness after that outburst.

However, that was quickly covered up the a few voices in his mind.

[Merlin! What happened?]

[Master! I will have your enemies! They will all be mine!]

[Stop trying to take everything you glutton!!]

[None of your business you mutt!]

[Master… It appears I was blind sighted by power and misplaced my trust in my children. I will increase the efficiency of the procreation of the Hokori and balance the network to be able to work in my absence]

[My Liege!!!! Are you alright!!!]

'Kuku, you guys are as noisy as always it seems.' Thought merlin when he suddenly realised something and backtracked the conversation in his mind.

'Wait a second! Mecha? Did you learn to roast others?'

[Master! All the insults shall belong to me!!]

'Sigh'

Merlin sighed and moved on. While he was waiting for the others to wake up, Phillip assumed control over all the puppets and began putting out the fires and cleaning up the debris while rescuing people.

Naturally, he left some work to his children, since all the ones that had fainted to evolve, awoken at the same time as Phillip.

On the other hand, Merlin was receiving a preliminary report of the losses.

[Confirmed Deaths: 200,000 citizens]

[Est. Missing: 600,000 citizens]

[Damage: $19.1 billion]

[Reduction in battle capacity: 52%]

[Est. time to rebuild: 4 months]

[Est. cost to rebuild: $31.9 billion]

Seeing the enormous amounts of damage and deaths, Merlin's calmed nerves ignited with the flames of anger once more as he cursed whoever the mastermind was in his heart.