Chapter 314: The Four Pillars of Hell—Necrobix (3)

“K-Ketal?” Serena flinched at his reaction, startled by the quick gleam that crossed his eyes before he mastered his expression and called to her in a steady voice.

“Fall back for now. It is dangerous here,” he ordered.

“Okay!”

Serena hurried behind him, breath tight in her chest, while Ketal regarded Necrobix in silence. It did not expand its presence or spill murderous intent across the land, and yet the air still tingled against the skin as if a storm were brewing beneath it. The sensation alone said enough. The demon was strong, likely the strongest existence he had ever faced on the Mortal Realm, and even among the beings beyond this world, only a handful could match the pressure now standing before him.

Necrobix sensed the measure of Ketal as well.

“Barbarian...,” it said, and there was no attempt to hide the caution in its gaze. It tightened every thread of its being so it could answer the instant Ketal moved, a posture entirely different from how it had treated others. It now recognized Ketal as a genuine threat.

“You must know who I am,” Ketal said.

“How could I not?” it replied. “Ketal, the barbarian of the White Snowfield.”

“And you are Necrobix, I presume. Will you introduce yourself properly?”

“That is not difficult.” It inclined its head with cold courtesy. “I am the founder of dark magic, one of the Four Pillars of Hell. I am called Necrobix. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

Ketal’s eyes brightened. One of the Four Pillars, a being spoken of in the same breath as the Demon King’s power, stood here in its true body. Necrobix spoke again, voice low and even.

“Materia once had bowed to you,” it said.

“That did happen,” Ketal answered with a light smile.

Materia, the Mother of All Demons, had descended by borrowing Floris’s body and had crossed blades with him here on the Mortal Realm.

“Are you here with the same goal as Materia?” Ketal asked the demon, tilting his head.

Materia had sought Ketal’s seed. Necrobix shook its head.

“I am not so conceited. My reason for coming is simple.” Its calm voice rolled over the stone. “I came to kill you.”

The hair across Ketal’s body prickled as that plain sentence filled the world with murderous intent. It was so absolute that even Serena, who was not the target, went pale as she began to tremble like a leaf in winter. Trees withered by inches and grasses dulled in a widening ring as the intent pressed down upon creation itself.

Ketal laughed, unable to hold it back. The Four Pillars, those who stood just beneath the Demon King, were in truth no different from gods, and the being in front of him did not even wear a vessel. This was Necrobix’s original body. However, the realization did not chill him. It delighted him. His teeth bared in an unforced grin as the raw surge of his own battle joy met the demon’s killing will and struck against it until the air itself seemed to coil.

Serena stumbled another step away, gulping hard as space wavered between the two forces like heat haze.

“You want to kill me?” Ketal’s lips curved into a sharp grin. “I like the sound of that. Go ahead—try.”

“Darkness creeps along the ground and seizes my enemy,” Necrobix chanted.

The earth burst open, and hands of shadow clawed upward to snare his ankles. Ketal had no need for further words. He drew Myst, and power wrapped him from head to heel. He stamped once.

In an instant, he vanished. Even Serena, who could track the fastest warriors of the Mortal Realm with ease, missed the movement for a heartbeat. The grasping shadows clutched empty air.

Necrobix spoke as the world rewrote itself. The speed Ketal now displayed exceeded sound, and there should not have been a breath to spare for speech, yet Necrobix finished the sentence as if it had condensed the flow of time before Ketal’s arrival.

“Thick and darkest shade permits nothing to pass,” it chanted.

A slab of blackness appeared before Necrobix. Ketal’s axe fell. The strike rang like a struck gong, the trees around them snapped, and Mantamia shuddered on its roots.

Ketal bared his teeth. His blow had been stopped. Cracks spidered through the black shade, yet it did not break. The failure raised his spirit rather than dimmed it, and he did not give ground. He pressed forward with the axe still locked against the conjured wall.

Necrobix’s guard slid back despite holding firm.

“You intend to drive me away,” the demon observed, realizing Ketal’s plan.

“This place is too close to the people. Let’s move farther away.”

In the blink of an eye, their surroundings changed. They crossed the mountain spine and landed in a wild basin where no hand had set stones or paths. Necrobix flicked its fingers.

“A heavy pillar descends,” it chanted.

The sky parted, and a pillar of shadow fell, carrying weight and speed that promised to punch through layers of the world. Ketal tightened his grip and swept his axe. The blow shattered the pillar. Its fragments flung outward, carving deep scallops into the ground as they fell. Ketal laughed, the sound bright with recognition.

“I remember that authority as Ashetiaar’s,” Ketal commented.

“The demons’ authorities are wrought of demonic energy, and dark magic is the art that governs such force. It is not difficult to learn other demons’ authorities.” Necrobix spoke lightly and manifested fresh sorcery. “The surging shadow plows the earth.”

Waves of darkness grated across the ground like a millstone. Ketal kicked off the scar he had just cut and left the shadow’s reach in a breath. Necrobix’s eyes narrowed.

“I knew you could handle Myst, yet you are more practiced now than when you fought Materia.”

Ketal was growing, which was a problem the Pillars of Hell could not afford to ignore.

“You will have to die quickly,” Necrobix decided. It leveled a finger at him and concentrated a demonic charge at the tip until the air thrummed. “Piercing Round.”

The bullet tore loose and howled. Ketal gathered strength in the hand that held his axe and cut. Steel met the unseen projectile with a shower of sparks.

However, the round did not buckle. It drove harder, seeking purchase through the axe edge. Ketal’s smile only widened. He poured more force into the blade. The bullet burst and fell, powerless.

“You wield a curious power,” he said, giving the axe an appreciative swing. Not a chip marred the edge.

Necrobix clicked its tongue. The Piercing Round was a result-based spell, an attack that embodied the very fact of penetration, leaving no room for defense. And yet Ketal had stopped it—not with an external shield, but with the axe in his hand.

“The Abomination’s axe...,” it murmured. “Even as a shell, it persists. It was vexing before, and it remains so now.”

It narrowed its eyes further. Something within Ketal called to it—a thread of familiarity wrapped in revulsion. It was terrible and alien, yet somehow known. Necrobix could not name it immediately. The Abomination had been stirred into Ketal and twisted beyond recognition, making it difficult to discern even for a Pillar of Hell.

One thing, however, was certain: it would be troublesome.

Ketal stepped, and the land broke under his heel as he crossed the gap. Necrobix buried itself in shadow and jumped through space.

“The line of darkness traces a spiral and races forth,” Necrobix chanted.

A high-speed spiral of demonic energy screamed toward Ketal. He slid aside in a motion barely wider than his shoulders. Necrobix spoke again in the same instant.

“There, it blooms!”

The spiraling line erupted. A thousand spines burst outward like a sea urchin tearing reality. There should have been no room to evade such a net, and any ordinary Hero would have been torn to a husk.

However, Ketal came through without a mark. He had read the gaps as the bloom unfolded and threaded them with the smallest movements possible. He smashed the last of the spines and showed his teeth.

“You are very strong,” Ketal said.

He was not holding back. He was drawing on what he possessed in earnest to kill Necrobix. Raphael, who had once stood as a measure to him, would not have mustered even a token resistance against the Ketal who moved now. He had attained Myst at a Transcendent level; his speed and his body’s force had both climbed far beyond what they had been, and even so, he had yet to land a telling blow on Necrobix. The realization did not dampen him. It delighted him.

“Unlike Materia, you use a strange power,” Ketal said, his eyes alive. “For the founder of dark magic, your incantations feel close to a scripture! You are profoundly dangerous. I approve!”

“If you have that much to say, I would prefer you gave me a scratch or two,” Necrobix replied.

“The same applies to you!” Ketal laughed. “What do you say we end this probing match here? It doesn’t seem to hold much meaning anyway.”

For any ordinary Hero, the exchanges to this point would have been instant death. For these two, it had been a simple test.

Necrobix’s gaze cooled. It had been probing for the force Ketal used when he faced Materia, the power that left scars on the world and had gone beyond an avatar to wound the true body itself. Ketal, as if aware of the aim, refused to show it easily.

“Then I will attack first.”

Necrobix made its choice. It gathered strength from its other bodies. Reality flexed beneath the concentration alone, and the mountain basin seemed to tilt on an unseen axis.

This would be the true beginning. Ketal settled his stance and bared his teeth in answer.

“The world becomes night, for that place is my domain,” Necrobix chanted.

Darkness flowed outward like ink dropped into water. Serena, watching from a distance with a face tight with worry, caught her breath. A portion of the world itself had been replaced by shadow. A black box swallowed the landscape as if someone had laid a brush of deepest pigment across the canvas of reality.

“My domain becomes a prison and seizes my enemy,” Necrobix said, and the black box clenched. It closed around Ketal and held fast.

“Oh,” Ketal said, eyes widening a fraction.

“I once looked up at that high sky and thought,” Necrobix continued, its voice even, its cadence like a liturgy, “that if things which pour constant light shine upon the world, then there must also be something deepest and darkest.”

The incantation completed. Power of a different order gathered, qualitatively unlike anything it had used so far. Ketal’s instincts roared a warning. He tightened his grip and slammed the axe into his prison.

The strike shivered the construct, yet it did not break. It kept its form with only a small scar to show for the effort. He realized it would not yield to that alone. He drew Myst to break the cage from the inside just as Necrobix reached the last word.

“I went there myself and beheld that existence. I shall name it... the Black Hole,” Necrobix chanted.

Ketal disappeared.

The Black Hole swallowed him whole. It devoured air and wind, grass and sound, consuming the very weave of phenomena without leaving so much as a single thread behind. Somewhere far beyond mortal sight, in the distant universes, such a phenomenon truly existed—a supernatural event that the mortal world could only describe through analogy. Necrobix’s spell was but an imitation of that reality, a fragment of its essence shaped through dark magic rather than the true law itself.

And that shard was enough.

The mountain range began to pour toward the core as if an unseen mouth had bitten into the world and was chewing. A wound appeared on the face of the land.

Grombir, watching from afar, gulped and could not find more words than a hoarse exhalation. Even for a Hero, the density of that power defied understanding. To imagine Ketal alive in such a thing seemed impossible.

“He will live,” Necrobix said, and it did not relax. It did not believe Ketal would die to this alone. Nor would he escape it easily.

“With what you have shown so far, you cannot break it,” it judged. “You will have to bring out the power you used against Materia, the force that scars the world. That is Myst manifest, Aura.”

By Necrobix’s reckoning, Ketal could not wield Aura freely. He could summon it, but only at a cost, burning it away with each use—a power to call and exhaust rather than a mantle he could wear continuously. Necrobix planned to strike in the very instant Ketal spent his Aura to shatter the Black Hole.

It gathered a new darkness. This was not the force it had been using before. Though made of the same demonic substrate, it felt entirely different. It was death. Necrobix had hidden it to keep Ketal off his guard; now it pulled it forth for a decisive blow.

Cracks raced across the Black Hole. Something that moved like a tide but was not water refused its pull and smashed the core of the spell. The hole shattered, and the swallowed remnants of the world spewed outward in a dirty rush. Ketal stood in the midst of that debris, bleeding from several cuts of varying size, grinning through the dust.

Necrobix did not wait. It hurled death itself. The shadow carried the pure idea of ending, and if it struck Ketal full on, even he would not remain whole. This was death that slew concepts, once the Abomination’s authority that had once slain gods. It was enough to kill Ketal.

Just then, Necrobix’s eyes shook when it saw Ketal’s axe. Aura flowed along the blade, not as a skin but as a living tide.

It met death. The shadow did not devour the light; the light consumed the shadow. A greater concept swallowed the imitation, as an ocean swallows a lake. The death Necrobix had summoned vanished like a handful of ash swept away by the tide.

Ketal laughed aloud and lunged. Necrobix reflexively raised its defenses, lines of protection asserting dominance over the space between them.

However, Ketal’s Aura sliced through them as easily as a knife through cheese. Desperate, Necrobix layered space upon space until hundreds of planes fused into a single, absolute barrier.

Yet, even that could not withstand Ketal’s blow and shattered. The force of impact drove Necrobix into the ground, leaving him groaning.

There were no wounds. The impact had been the equivalent of a shove rather than a gouge. That alone, however, was astonishing. Necrobix could not remember the last time a blow had landed at all. The number of so-called great gods who had marked it was vanishingly small.

However, that wasn’t the part that mattered.

“This is absurd,” it said, and the words were almost a laugh without mirth. It steadied itself and looked at Ketal. Aura unmistakably wreathed the axe, and within that Aura something else had nested, something that unsettled Necrobix in a way few things could.

“Why does that creature’s authority dwell in your Aura?” it asked Ketal, and as its eyes fixed on him, they trembled.

“Abomination...,” it said, and the word was less an accusation than recognition, the name of a thing it had once known and hated, now stirring within the light that had just devoured death.