Chapter 341: The Descent of the Demon King (2)

A chill rippled through the air as presence spilled out of the rift. The weight of it pressed on the lungs and spine. The Tower Master’s breath hitched. Helia’s chest seized as if cold hands had closed around her ribs. Had they not steadied their minds on reflex, the pressure alone would have snuffed their awareness like a candle.

Ketal stepped forward, letting his own presence rise to meet that crushing force. He placed himself between the two and the widening tear in space.

“Fall back,” he said. “Warn the others outside. Tell them to clear the field and return to the Mortal Realm at once.”

Helia’s lips parted. “What about you?”

“If I leave this place now, what do you think will happen?”

She closed her mouth. There was only one answer. The Demon King would walk free, and everyone nearby would die. It would not matter if they were Transcendents or Heroes. It would not matter if they had names known across nations. They would die in an instant without even understanding how the end had arrived.

Ketal closed his hand around the axe. “I will do my part. Do yours.”

“We will leave the Demon King to you, Ketal,” the Tower Master said.

“I am sorry,” Helia said, her voice low. “Please hold him.”

They knew they would be of no help here. The Tower Master and Helia turned and ran, slipping through shattered halls and shouting to those still fighting their way toward the castle.

“Everyone, pull back! Put distance between yourselves and the castle!” the Tower Master shouted. “Retreat. Now!”

The air crackled. The tear in reality widened like cloth ripped by invisible hands. Presence swelled again, deeper and nearer.

“Aaah.” A voice rolled out.

It was faint, like the first breath a climber draws upon reaching the summit, yet that single exhalation sent a tremor through Hell itself. The ground began to hum, the walls quivered as though alive, and in the silence that followed, countless minds fractured along invisible seams.

Screams answered in a dozen places. Some were human. Some were demons whose ranks had not been swallowed by the ritual. Many were voices that should never have made such weak sounds and yet did.

The voice alone fractured the spirit. Anyone who had not reached the upper heights of the Transcendent realm felt their reason lurch. Warriors who could split stone with their hands went slack and fell where they stood like dolls whose strings had been cut. Even those who remained conscious were names of renown from the Mortal Realm. That strength did not shield them from fear.

“To the abyss with this!” the Tower Master muttered, and power flared along the circuits etched in his bones. Mana wrapped survivors in nets of force and wrenched them through seams the lich tore open in space, sending them upward toward the Mortal Realm in ragged groups.

The tear in the castle yawned wider. Cracks webbed outward until a man could have stepped through without turning his shoulders. With every span of growth, the pressure increased.

Ketal exhaled a short laugh. “Greater than I imagined.”

Space tore open with a sound like a bell being pulled apart, and the prison shattered. From within, the being surged free. The first thing Ketal saw was hair and eyes the color of night as a man took form—bare, unadorned—and stepped into Hell.

Hell answered like a hound that had felt a master’s hand return to its head. The demonic energy saturating the land rose up and rushed toward him as if eager to serve. Ketal let a breath slip out that might have been wonder. The world itself was greeting its ruler. That was the kind of homecoming this was.

Materia, wan and near death, watched with fever-bright eyes.

“My king,” she whispered. “My king...”

The man crossed the floor in unhurried steps. The tide of demonic energy followed behind him like the train of a cloak. Ketal stood his ground and studied him.

When the man reached Materia, he laid a hand on her hair.

“You did well,” he said.

The voice held the kindness of a parent who has just gathered a child from a long road. Materia smiled, complete at last, and died with the look still on her mouth.

The Demon King watched her for a moment in silence and then turned his head toward Ketal.

“Thank you for not interrupting.”

“I do not make a habit of troubling a person’s last moments,” Ketal said, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “It is good to meet you, Demon King. Lord of all demons.”

The Demon King stood before him. The first impression was simple. He was large. He wore the form of a human and carried a body built for violence, heavy with muscle. Even standing beside Ketal, he did not appear small. Black demonic energy clung to him like smoke that respected its shape.

He straightened and looked Ketal over. “Ketal, is it? I have been watching.”

“So you could see.”

“My children are my eyes. Even inside a prison, I watched everything through them.” The black gaze fixed on Ketal. “Especially you.”

“I am flattered.” Ketal smiled again. “What do you think now that we have met?”

“You should not exist in this world.”

“That is harsh,” Ketal said lightly. “Do you say that because I am a being from the Demon Realm? I have been trying to behave with some courtesy.”

The gods had rejected him because he was from the White Snowfield. The words sounded like the same judgment wearing a different face.

The Demon King shook his head. “Those, too, are beings that cannot be left loose. But you are different even among them. You are not a being of

here

.”

His eyes lowered and settled, and that simple act carried a pressure that would have killed a mortal outright. “You belong to neither the Inside nor the Outside. You are an Anomaly.”

The Abomination within Ketal spoke at last. “So he is the Demon King after all. He recognized your true identity just from gazing at you.”

The Abomination’s voice carried a color Ketal rarely heard in it—surprise cut with caution. This was a target even the Abomination did not dismiss. Ketal felt the same. His nerves hummed as if the body had stepped into a winter river.

Ketal knew the being before him could kill him, but that understanding was not fear. It was clarity.

The Demon King raised his head and looked up at the roof that had once been above them. “The state of things is poor. My children sacrificed themselves to call me. They must be in dire straits.”

To tear him free, they had burned their Demon Lords, their ranked demons, and a third of Hell itself. It was destruction in everything but name.

“What I must do is simple,” the Demon King murmured.

He was the Demon King. He existed to drown worlds in demonic energy and bring them to his order. He existed to turn this sky dark.

“As a first step, I should remove the Anomaly that stands on our land.”

He raised his arm and pointed a single finger toward Ketal. At its tip, a small, flawless bud of black light bloomed. A chill like death traced the back of Ketal’s neck, and instinct turned his head before thought could. The light fired, ripping a thin line through the air where his throat had been moments before.

It punched through the castle and speared the sky. The world shivered. In the path it carved, beings died without ever forming a thought about why. Fine hairs along Ketal’s nape charred to ash. The Demon King drew his finger in a line. The light followed it and curved, as if the world itself had been scored and the mark could be moved with a pen.

So it is not a single stroke

, Ketal thought, eyes narrowing.

Black radiance screamed through the air as it hurtled toward him. He lifted his axe, Aura surging to meet his call, and the blade clashed against the oncoming light.

The clash screamed across stone. The force poured through Ketal’s arms and shoulders and drove him backward in a savage slide that left a raw stripe on the floor. It felt like bracing against a charging engine with nothing but bare hands and a heartbeat’s worth of steadiness. The density of the power was that obscene.

Ketal shook his forearm and tore the light aside. It snapped past and went on.

He exhaled slowly, the sound lost beneath the ringing that echoed through his bones. His hands trembled with a sharp, electric numbness. Even the Abomination’s authority had failed to snuff out the light; its force had been too immense, driving straight through that divine resistance as though it were nothing more than mist.

Far away, the arc it traced planed away a section of Hell and left a canyon in its wake. Ketal gave a short, disbelieving laugh.

“You treat your own realm roughly for a king.”

“Your death matters more.” The Demon King’s tone did not change. “The Abomination sits inside you. I can see that much. With it, perhaps you can claw upward. Killing you will not be easy.”

The presence of the Abomination earned only that dry assessment. The Demon King lifted his arm again. Demonic Energy gathered above him, pulling itself into a perfect sphere the size of a hill. He pitched it forward without ceremony. Ketal planted a foot and sprang.

The sphere hit the ground and burst. A crater opened like a mouth and swallowed everything near it. Ketal skirted the blast by a span and still felt parts of his body compress under the trailing shock.

The Demon King crossed the space in a single step that was more like a leap. His fist came up. Ketal brought the axe across his body and took the blow on steel. The sound rolled like a mountain sliding. Ketal spun away, a streak that a human eye would have failed to follow, and slammed the axe into the ground to bleed off the thrust.

He skidded across the stone for a while before he could set his feet again. His boots left a raw groove behind him.

“So this is what it costs to block a punch,” he said, almost amused. “He is stronger than you, Abomination.”

The Abomination said nothing for a moment. It tasted like pride forced to swallow an unpleasant truth.

“He is the Demon King. He is closer to a device that was made to be this. He is the strongest among the young ones. Even the Primarchs would struggle to crush him.” The Abomination rose in him like a tide finally deciding to join the shore. “Then I will cooperate. Kill him.”

Myst that had refused the hand a moment before settled of its own will into Ketal’s flesh, as if it had been waiting for an opponent who justified its attention.

The Demon King’s shadow loomed over him as a fist came down like a falling hammer. There was no time to evade, and meeting it head-on would have been a waste. So Ketal let the blow flow past. He raised his axe to make brief contact, redirecting the impact with a smooth turn of his wrists—like guiding a cartwheel through motion. The redirected force struck the ground, splitting it open beneath the Demon King’s hand.

The earth sank and tore. A crater opened that showed the broken plates beneath the mantle. Ketal used the recoil that ran through his weapon to draw a cut back across the Demon King’s chest. The King reached for the blade with bare fingers, ready to catch and hold the edge. Ketal loosened the line at the last instant and flowed the bite toward flesh.

The Demon King struck back with his legs. His foot snapped upward from below, slamming into the axe with such force that it nearly wrenched the weapon from Ketal’s grip. The power behind it was pure and merciless. A follow-up punch came for Ketal’s face, but he had already shifted half a step aside, his movement slipping just beyond the attack’s reach.

The gust from the passing strike still staggered him, forcing his balance to falter for an instant. The Demon King raised two fingers, and a thread of black radiance curved through the air in a graceful arc before slicing toward Ketal. He brought his axe up to meet it, steel colliding with light.

The land convulsed. A fault line ripped downward and carved a cliff that split upper and lower layers of Hell. Ketal glanced at his shoulder.

Heat crackled through the air. His defense had been a fraction too slow. The edge of the light grazed past, searing his shoulder where it brushed against him. The radiance had pierced through the Myst enveloping his body, burning the flesh beneath. That kind of wound, from nothing more than a passing touch, spoke to the sheer, terrifying power behind it.

“What a monstrous force,” Ketal said, and he shook his head to clear the static from his thoughts.

There was no time to savor the words. Above him, the Demon King brought both hands together and struck downward. His demonic energy fell like a continent.

The ground buckled. The castle collapsed in on itself. If he had stayed where he was, Ketal would have been driven into the deepest reaches and pinned there like an insect under a stone. He crossed the space in a sharp line instead and swung for the King’s throat.

The Demon King’s arm rose, and steel met bone with a sharp, resonant clash. He drove forward with a short, crushing punch, but Ketal twisted the axe head to deflect it, redirecting the force and breaking the line of attack. The fist carved through empty air instead—and the air itself split apart. Space ruptured, leaving gaping holes where the unseen bones of the world should have held firm.

As they traded, Ketal let his thoughts run. The Demon King’s power was simpler than he had expected. There was no labyrinth of tricks or a secret that changed the rules of the earth. It was pure demonic energy pressed into a density that defied words and then thrown with unkind economy at whatever the King wished to end.

And that alone was enough. Power of that magnitude crushed technique beneath it. No amount of skill could evade a planet swung on a chain—and the Demon King’s blows were of that very kind.

By the measure of Ketal’s experience, that strength stood like a mountain. The White Snowfield was home to the three Primarchs. Ketal weighed the Demon King against each of them in turn. The scales tipped, if only slightly. The King stood a little higher. The difference was not vast, yet it was unmistakable.

That made the Demon King the strongest being Ketal had met in this world. His mouth peeled back in a grin he did not try to smooth. Laughter broke free from his chest. It rang across the ruins.

The Demon King paused despite himself. “Why do you laugh?”

“How could I not?” Ketal replied.

Do you hear me, White Snowfield? You are not the measure of all things. You were surpassed long ago. What is greatest lies on the Outside!

In his head, he heard a voice that had mocked him on a night of iron cold.

“Why do you yearn for such a fragile world?”

one of the Primarchs had said.

“There is nothing there. There is only emptiness and weakness and the quick fade of things. Your wish will never be granted.”

And yet something had come from the Outside that exceeded even them.

“Let’s keep on fighting!” Ketal said, and he pulled the axe back into guard.

Aura thickened along the metal until it looked as if the head had been forged again on a different anvil. Myst layered itself through the weave and made the air taste like lightning.

Ketal swung, and the land itself split along the arc of his strike, sliding apart in jagged silence. The Demon King met the blow with a surge of demonic energy that rose like a tide and shattered it head-on. The recoil thundered through the world, and the sky of Hell rippled as though painted on glass struck by a careless hand. Each clash between them unmade the realm a little more, every exchange tearing at the fabric of Hell itself.