Chapter 340: The Descent of the Demon King (1)

Caliste did not take the blow in silence. He twisted as far as the gate at his back allowed and bled as much force as he could from Ketal’s fist. However, it was not enough. With the door hard against his spine, he could not roll through the impact. The shock forced its way into his body in a brutal wave.

Caliste coughed up blood. The strike tore through him. Even for a Demon Lord, Caliste’s body was only a demon’s vessel rather than the true source of his authority. Against Ketal’s strength, that vessel had no chance to endure. He clenched his jaw and drew a dagger from his breast with a sharp motion. The blade darted for Ketal’s throat.

Ketal shook his forearm and turned his wrist in a smooth, pulley-like rotation that carried the dagger away from its line. The blade skimmed past. He brought his fist up again and drove it forward. His knuckles met Caliste’s chest.

The gate could not bear it. With a low thunder that shook the stones, the great doors of the Demon King’s castle shattered into a spray of iron and splinters. Caliste tumbled through the wreckage, rolled once, and sprawled amid the fragments.

He coughed again and again while red spattered the floor. Ketal extended his hand. The bracelet on his wrist flashed. The axe leapt from where it had fallen and settled into his palm, as if the weapon had simply remembered its proper place. However, Ketal did not swing it. More precisely, there was no need. Caliste was already dying.

He tried to rise, but his body would not obey. The strike had smashed his organs; every breath dragged pain through him; strength refused to gather in his limbs. His thoughts began to drift and darken at the edges.

“I lost,” Caliste murmured, his voice steady. The defeat was clean and absolute. He exhaled a breath that carried the faintest hint of a laugh. “You are stronger than I am. Stronger than all of us.”

The Four Pillars of Hell were said to rival the gods. Those who knew more would say that they stood above many of them. Against Ketal, that light had dimmed. This had never been a winnable duel.

“If there is anyone in Hell who can face you, it is only him,” Caliste said.

Ketal understood whom he spoke of—the Demon King, mightier than the Demon Lords, the true master of Hell.

“Unfortunately for you, stopping that descent is the very reason I am here,” Ketal said, shaking his head.

“I wonder how that will end. No matter. The rest is not for me to see.”

Caliste pushed himself upright. He did not move by strength; he forced the broken body to answer the will that still held him. Ketal watched without hurry. Caliste found his sword where it had fallen, took it in his hand, and set the point against the floor. He drew himself into a knight’s posture on one knee and looked up at Ketal with clear eyes.

“The victory is yours, Ketal. I enjoyed this,” he said.

A brittle crack split the air. The blade did not break in halves—it disintegrated, turning to dust in a single breath and sifting away. Caliste’s sword had been the outward shape of his will, and a will once broken could no longer hold its form. The instant the blade crumbled, Caliste’s life came to its end. Yet, he remained upright, as if still kneeling in salute. Ketal regarded him for a moment.

“I enjoyed it as well. Truly.”

It had been a long time since he fought on technique and body alone. It filled him in a way that raw force never did.

Caliste’s death did not stop at the broken gate. Its shock ran through Hell like a bell. Demons who felt the loss of their Lord keened in disbelief and dread.

“N-no...!”

“Lord Caliste! Lord Caliste!”

Their morale collapsed. A battle that had balanced on a knife’s edge shifted at once. The defenders surged. Ramparts that had held for days cracked as demons faltered and gave ground.

“We won,” the Tower Master said as he reached Ketal with a margin to spare.

“We did,” Ketal replied, nodding.

“You have defeated two Demon Lords. You truly did it. By the gods...”

It was a deed even the gods had failed to accomplish, and the Tower Master had watched it with his own hollow eyes, yet belief still came slowly. There was no time to linger over the feat. Their goal was not the deaths of the Demon Lords.

“We go in now. I will guide you,” the Tower Master ordered.

“Got it.”

Ketal followed the Tower Master through the ruin of the doors and into the Demon King’s castle. They moved quickly, covering corridors in long strides and slipping through inner arches in an urgent blur.

“So this is the Demon King’s seat,” Ketal said, observing his surroundings.

The place was not gaudy. There were no chandeliers dripping crystal or gilded trophies to proclaim conquered realms. However, it was not plain either. It held a spare beauty and an oppressive gravity that could be felt in the quiet between footsteps. Once they stepped fully within, a deeper truth pressed against the skin. Something terrible had awakened below.

“The source is under us,” Ketal said.

“Give me a moment.” The Tower Master flicked his finger bones. Waves of mana rushed outward and traced the halls, floors, and shafts with a surveyor’s patience. “There are traps everywhere. They are not common tricks. Even a Hero could die from a single misstep. We must move carefully or—”

“There is no need.”

Ketal lifted his axe. Myst gathered along the metal in a cold shimmer. He drove the weapon into the floor. The citadel groaned. The stone beneath their feet fractured in a widening ring and fell away. The ground dropped, and they dropped with it, plunging into the dark.

“We can break our way down,” Ketal said.

“The scan told me this floor was too dense to scar. To you, that density is a suggestion rather than a rule.” The Tower Master let out a voiceless sound that might have been a laugh if a skull could laugh. “No matter, this works too. Let us keep moving.”

They descended through the hole and into the first layer of the undercroft. Traps answered in swarms, snapping awake by design or springing in a mad chain as if their makers had foreseen this path. The Tower Master’s magic crushed sigils and dissolved bindings; Ketal’s strength simply refused them the right to exist. Together, they forced a straight line through the heart of the defenses.

At the end of that line, in the deepest chamber, they tore a final set of doors from their hinges. They entered a ritual room.

Devices for rites stood in ranks along benches and shelves. Circles crawled with symbols across the floor. Candles the color of old bone guttered without smoke. At the center lay Materia. Her body had wasted to sharp angles as if she had not eaten in days.

“So, you came,” Materia said, raising her head with effort and smiling faintly.

“You look poor in health,” Ketal replied.

“It could not be helped. Even for me, this work takes its toll.” Her voice carried a worn humor.

The Tower Master drew breath through a hollow throat. “This is...”

It was an abomination of a ritual. Even he could not fully read the structure. It operated on a tier of summoning that stepped beyond the schools he had mastered. As for what stood at the far end of the circle, there was no need to ask.

“Dispel!” the Tower Master chanted, gathering magic on reflex.

He aimed to tear the ritual apart through brute negation. Ketal did not stand idle. He wrapped Myst around the axe and lifted it.

“I would not mind seeing your king with my own eyes. Unfortunately for you, my role is to stop him,” Ketal said. He put his weight behind the strike and brought the axe down on the nearest ring of the magic circle.

Metal rang against force like a bell struck by a storm. However, the circle did not break. Ketal slid backward as if the room itself had shrugged. The rejection was total and perfect. He glanced at the Tower Master with a question ready.

“Is this something only magic or holy power can shatter?”

It was the reasonable conclusion. Complex, delicate rites could be fragile to very specific pressures while blithe to others. Ketal looked again and understood from the Tower Master’s face that this was not the answer. The lich’s posture had become rigid in a way that anyone could read.

“No. There is no reason this should hold against that strike,” the Tower Master replied.

The more intricate a ritual became, the more easily an outside shock could mar it. There were rites so finicky that a month’s labor dissolved because a servant sneezed in the wrong room. One treated such work like a crystal. Yet the circle before them had met Ketal’s blow without a scratch. This could mean only one thing.

“The summoning is finished...,” the Tower Master concluded.

Helia, late to the descent and breathless from battle, took in the rising power and went still.

Then the ritual erupted. Power screamed upward, ripping through the undercroft, the castle, and the roof above before lancing toward the sky like a thrown spear. The summoning had succeeded. Because it had already crossed the threshold, there was nothing to interrupt. They could only stand and endure the end of the working.

Helia forced her eyes wide and cried out, “This cannot be! How. How did it finish so soon?”

To an outsider, it sounded like a denial of the obvious, yet there was a reason behind the protest.

“A ritual for a being of that rank does not conclude this quickly!” Helia continued.

The greater the stature of the summoned, the longer the rite required. For a being like the Demon King, time was measured in long measures. It should have spanned far more than a handful of days. However, this one had completed in a week.

“I thought it would fail, but it did not. Call it a miracle if you want to be poetic,” Materia said, not contradicting Helia.

“What are you saying?”

The Tower Master and Helia both sounded half unmoored. Only Ketal remained steady.

“You lacked sacrifices,” Ketal said. He had watched Hell burn a wealth of life and power to bring Necrobix down. It made no sense that enough remained to call the Demon King.

Materia smiled and lifted a hand with a languid gesture. “The sacrifice is right here.”

“Here?”

“In Hell itself.”

The world that pressed edge to edge with the Mortal Realm warped and split. A third of Hell sheared away, as if sliced by a careless knife. That severed portion turned to tinder for the descent.

“The ranked demons,” Materia said.

Outside, the fighting shuddered and slowed. Demons who bore ranks and titles lost definition as if distance had crept under their skin.

“It begins!” one of the ranked demons cried.

“At last! The rite has succeeded!”

Those chosen as offerings would fade entirely. They would give up not only power but being. Even so, the demons cheered.

“Our king!”

“Take back the Mortal Realm!”

Every ranked demon went out like a candle in the wind. On the walls and plains, soldiers on both sides faltered and stared as enemies vanished into absence.

“And at the last, one of the Demon Lords,” Materia murmured as she touched her chest with two fingers.

Something unseen coiled around her. Everything she had amassed through centuries of predation—the rank, the weight, the name—poured into the circle and burned away. Her body sagged, and she dropped to one knee. The mere fact that she still existed at all was proof of what she had once been, though it offered no promise of endurance. She wavered like a candle on the edge of dying.

“Abyss will die soon. Necrobix and Caliste are already gone. I will follow in a moment. What a failure... What a perfect disaster...”

All four Demon Lords who had outlasted the Divine-Demonic War were dead or dying. For Hell, this was defeat in everything but the last word. Yet, Materia did not look grieved. If anything, she looked elated.

“It does not matter. This is what we should have done from the start. I clung to pride without use.” She spread her arms as if to welcome a master through a door. “Come, my king. Please. Please, appear in this world.”

The room responded. The air split apart as the seams of space fractured, and the power long confined within its prison burst free with a sound like stone cracking beneath ice.

The Tower Master and Helia understood at once. This was not even the being itself. This was the echo that spilled out when the seal first failed and the first fragments slipped free.

𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Even that would kill them. There was no defense in the ordinary sense. It was like a man who lifted his hands to stop an avalanche. The thought simply stopped in the Tower Master’s mind and then in Helia’s.

Ketal was the only one who moved. He shot forward, placed himself between his companions and the coming wave, and raised his axe. Aura rallied along the blade in bright layers.

The world bucked. The burst met the axe and broke. The collision ripped sound from the stone and threw Ketal backward until his boots scraped a burned path across the floor.

Ketal had not caught it all. What slipped by fanned out and reached for the Tower Master and Helia. Ketal’s voice cut the roar.

“Defend yourselves!” he cried.

“Shield of Purity!”

“Celestial Ward of Hephaite!”

They clenched power around their bodies in a panicked weave that held for a heartbeat. However, their defenses shattered.

The Tower Master hit a wall in a spray of bone dust and hairline fractures that ran like frost across his frame. Helia coughed up blood and slid down the stone while her organs threatened to turn over in her body. Even for a lich, those breaks would take months to repair. Even for a Saintess, that shock had left scars that would not fade soon.

“This is only a fragment of his power...,” the Tower Master said.

They had not withstood it, even with both barriers in place. What approached lay beyond the scales that measured gods and demons alike—a being outside the order of ranks, a presence greater than the divine.

“He is coming,” Ketal said, whistling softly.

Space crackled, and an arm thrust through the torn seam.