CHAPTER 26: CHAPTER 26- GLIMPSE OF THE DAMNED PIGMAN EMPIRE

Yuuta kept walking with a lazy bounce to his steps, his wide frog feet slapping the packed dirt path as he followed the trail of dried pigman footprints. The canyon had long since receded behind him, swallowed by the winding paths and sparse trees of the open world ahead. The sky above was a deep blue, wide and cloudless, the sun casting a golden hue that shimmered across the sand and made every damn rock sparkle like it was part of some grand magical prophecy. Yuuta didn’t care. He was humming some half-remembered anime OP, maybe from a trashy isekai or a harem show—something catchy enough to keep his mind busy while he imagined all the ways he would make those bacon-faced bastards suffer.

As he walked, Yuuta squinted forward, following the footprints that trailed deeper into the wild. His thoughts wandered.

"Bet their houses are just oversized pigsties," he muttered to himself, voice dripping with that signature salty contempt. "Probably some sad mud hut with a piss-soaked roof and leaves slapped on the walls like they invented architecture."

He snorted.

"Or maybe they live inside hollowed-out beasts. Real smart, huh? Just carve out some rhino ass and call it home."

The insults kept coming, each one more creative and unwarranted than the last—Yuuta was already dunking on the pigs’ homes without even seeing them. But little did he know that the trail he was on wasn’t leading to some backwater village or savage pit of tents.

No.

Yuuta was about to stumble into something so absurdly huge, so cosmically ridiculous, it would make his smooth little frog brain cramp.

Because nestled beyond the almost path he was approaching the pigmen’s empire—and calling it an "empire" was an insult to its scale.

From a bird’s-eye view, the settlement stretched across the land like mold across rotting bread. Rows upon rows of houses packed tighter than sardines in heat, not a mud hut in sight. Every home was forged from bricks, stacked with cemented precision, some even flaunting rooftops tiled in polished stone. It was a fucking nightmare of urban planning.

The entire sprawl looked like it had been assembled by some insane pig architect with a fetish for scale and a vendetta against minimalism.

The roads alone could kill a man. Or ten. Massive highways sliced across the pigman continent—because let’s be real, this wasn’t just a city, it was its own landmass. The roads twisted and overlapped in such complex, spiraling patterns they resembled a spider web drawn by a drunk spider on meth. And the width? Each road looked wide enough to host a stadium, maybe three. The sidewalks? As wide as streets back on Earth.

Yuuta, of course, hadn’t seen it yet. Not the twisted highways. Not the buildings packed like bricks in a fever dream. Not even the absurd magnitude of what lay ahead. He was still talking shit while following footprints.

But the trail? It was leading him straight into the heart of that chaos. Into a world that made zero sense. A world built by pigs with a suspiciously advanced understanding of infrastructure, city planning, and civil engineering.

But the most unbelievable thing about this pigman empire — the one thing that would probably make Yuuta’s frog brain melt and sizzle like bacon on a skillet — was how goddamn civilized these pork-faced bastards were.

Yuuta still hadn’t seen the empire himself. Not yet. But it was there, sprawling somewhere past the treeline, at the end of the trail of footprints he was doggedly following. The closer he got, the more details he could infer. And if he had any idea of what lay ahead, he’d probably collapse right there, face-down in the dirt, twitching.

These damn pigs had a functioning currency system.

Yes. Currency. Not shiny rocks. Not carved bones. Not boar tusks tied together with twine. Real. Fucking. Coins.

They used gold coins. Silver coins. Copper coins. All embossed with the smug, squint-eyed face of a pigman wearing a circlet that was somehow both regal and idiotic. The kind of face that screamed, "Taxation is the right of kings!" And speaking of taxes — they had those too. The pigmen had a structured tax system. Organized collection. Civic funding. Public infrastructure. The whole shebang. Just no banks. Thank fuck for small mercies, at least.

As if that wasn’t insulting enough, they weren’t just walking around barefoot like clueless savages. No, these porky bastards had carriages. Proper, four-wheeled carriages with circular wheels. Not logs. Not stone sleds. Wheels.

And the roads? Oh, you mean the literal highways? Yeah. They had those. Made of polished dark stone, wide enough to fit an entire cavalry regiment side-by-side. And those were just the main roads. The pigman empire had an entire road system so intricately laid out, it looked like a spider web on a full rage bender. Sidewalks were as wide as the main roads of some kingdoms, and all of it was clean. Organized. Efficient.

Yuuta wouldn’t know it yet, but these pigs were more advanced than half the medieval fantasy kingdoms he read about back on Earth.

And if the infrastructure wasn’t enough to make a frog scream, the architecture sure as shit would be.

Sure, some houses looked standard enough. Brick and cement. Sturdy walls. Roofs made of clay tiles or even cement shingles. But some of them—some of them—looked like a mad architect had downed a gallon of mushroom tea and snorted chalk dust.

Curves everywhere. No columns, no visible support structures. Just surreal-looking homes with spiraling walls, floating terraces, and windows shaped like cracked eggs. Yuuta, if he ever saw it, would probably wonder how the fuck they weren’t all dead from ceiling collapses.

They wore clothes, too. Actual clothes. Robes, tunics, pants. Shoes. Some even wore glasses.

Yes. Fucking glasses.

And these weren’t basic-ass spectacles either. Some had gold-rimmed monocles, double-lens contraptions, even tinted eyewear. These pigs weren’t just walking around naked and snorting mud. They were stylin’. In their own dumbass, porky way.

The empire had marketplaces — bustling commercial districts with merchant stalls, blacksmiths, armories, and even bookstores. Yes, bookstores. Filled with written language. Written. Fucking. Language. Scrolls. Books. Manuals. There was even a rumor of a grand library located somewhere near the capital. Yuuta, if he were there, might just vomit out of existential frustration.

And if the bookstores weren’t enough to make him bleed from the eyes, the potion shops might. Because, yes — the pigs had discovered alchemy. Not perfectly refined, not as sleek as high-tier fantasy elixirs, but they had healing potions. Mana potions. Stamina tonics. Even pig-sized aphrodisiacs, probably.

And at the dead center of this landmass-sized empire was the crown jewel of swine ingenuity:

The Emperor’s Palace.

A fucking fortress the size of a mountain. No, scratch that. Bigger. Designed like some absurd temple-castle hybrid, its outer walls alone towered 200 meters tall. Why? Because the Pig Emperor himself was 200 fucking meters tall. A bipedal, porcine colossus wearing layered imperial armor and a velvet cape probably made from an entire ecosystem.

And fifty kilometers from that overcompensating castle stood a school.

Yes. A school.

An academic institution so ludicrously massive, it took up the size of an entire country. Not a town. Not a city. A country. Dedicated solely to educating the new generation of piglets. There were departments, faculty towers, spell-casting arenas, training fields, dormitories, libraries, potion labs, and possibly a theatre club. Yuuta would absolutely implode if he laid eyes on it.

All of this, all of this ridiculous, infuriating swine innovation, was safely protected by outer walls. Not just any walls. These were mountains in disguise.

Three hundred meters high. One hundred meters thick. Walls that could take a meteor strike and ask for seconds. Reinforced with god-knows-what and built with enough material to bankrupt a human empire ten times over.

And the craziest part?

Most pig citizens were just 2 to 3 meters tall. Meaning 99.9999% of the population lived like normal folks in the shadow of these absurd structures.

Oh... and yes, they had a proper sewage system too.

Fucking pigs.

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The wide, monstrous roads of the pigman empire stretched out like a woven net of polished stone, shining faintly under the early midday sun. Towering walls—three hundred meters high and a hundred meters thick—rose like cliffs around the entire nation, casting a long, cool shadow on the bustling outskirts.

And now, approaching from the southern border gate—the one connected to the isolated canyon route—a wounded column of survivors staggered forward in slow, uneven steps.

A unit of roughly two hundred pigmen—most of them mages and archers—walked in formation, or what remained of it. Their once-vibrant uniforms were torn, scorched, and caked with dried blood and dust. Their snouts were dark with soot, eyes heavy with exhaustion, and their once-polished weapons either missing or dulled to shit. The sounds of armor clinking and dragging boots against stone echoed faintly as they neared the massive southern gate.

At their head stood the towering figure of their battalion leader—a massive, muscular pigman nearly twice the height of the rest. His weapon, an absurdly thick tree trunk club, rested across his back, cracked and darkened with soot from the earlier battle. His tusks were chipped. One ear was missing. And though he said nothing, his pace alone was enough to signal command.

This was the only unit that had survived the failed canyon pursuit.

Or rather, what was left of it.

The bulk of their force—the frontline axe-wielders, the brute enforcers, and most of the sword-bearing scouts—had been buried alive when the cliffs collapsed. Others had been blasted apart by merciless lightning and exploding magic. What remained now was a half-shattered spine of the once-proud patrol, returning home not in triumph... but in disgrace.

As the towering gates of the empire loomed ahead, the squad finally halted. The commander raised his left hand, signaling the column to stop. His gesture was slow, heavy. Tired.

Two dozen gate guards—heavily armored pigmen standing beneath the massive archway—watched the unit’s approach with confused eyes. Their polished weapons glinted in the sun, and behind them, the intricate mechanisms of the gate—powered by pulleys, stone gears, and glowing runes—hummed faintly with readiness.

The commander stepped forward alone, dragging his feet as if each step weighed a hundred pounds. He approached the nearest guard, a younger pigman with golden armor and a rigid back, who blinked as he registered the commander’s battered state.

"Open the gate," the commander grunted, his voice hoarse and deep. "We’re back."

The guard furrowed his thick brow. "Where’s the rest of your unit? What happened? You were chasing... what, a beast?"

The commander’s bloodshot eyes met his. There was a moment of silence—brief but heavy. Then he simply muttered, "I don’t know what it was, but it was strong, very, very, strong."

The guards exchanged uneasy glances.

That made one of the guards choke on air. "You don’t know?"

The commander didn’t respond. He just lowered his head, lips pressed into a tight line. The weight of shame, disbelief, and bitter confusion was clear in his body language.

The guards looked again at the returning army—mangled, drained, humiliated—and their expressions softened. None of them could had anticipated this kind of result.

And yet... here was the proof.

No fanfare welcomed them. No victory horn. No cheers. Only the slow groan of gears turning as the towering gates creaked open, allowing the tattered unit to reenter their homeland. They walked in silence, one bruised boot after another, returning not as champions—but as survivors of something no one could yet explain.

Whatever had happened in that canyon... it wasn’t over.

And deep within the heart of the empire, word of this return would soon reach much higher ears.

The empire would remember the name of the one who made an army crawl home.

Even if they didn’t yet know it.