100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 688: Chapter 687- Balls of Steel

The vines continued. The spears continued. The two forces — Helena’s ground-level crushing and Mira’s sky-level piercing — worked in tandem. The barbarians were caught between them. The ones the vines didn’t crush, the spears pierced. The ones the spears didn’t pierce, the vines crushed.

The camp became a slaughterhouse. Not a battlefield — a ’slaughterhouse.’ There was no battle. No resistance. No fighting back. The demonified barbarians — the men who had been ready to conquer a kingdom — were reduced to screaming, bleeding, dying meat.

Gharuk — the Bull, the tribe leader, the seven-foot demonified brute — stood in the center of the camp. His black skin was pierced. A dozen spears had punched through his body — through his arms, his legs, his torso. The holes leaked red-black blood. His red eyes — the berserk eyes — were wide. Not with rage. With ’understanding.’

The understanding that he was going to die.

He looked up. At the sky. At the two women — two figures, hovering in the air, surrounded by light and magic and vines. Two goddesses. Two ’somethings’ that he had no word for, no concept of, no framework to understand.

"Gods," he whispered. The word was not Eldorian. It was the old tongue. The word that meant ’beings-beyond-us.’ "We have angered the gods."

A vine — three feet thick, the bark steaming — found him. Coiled. Squeezed.

CRACK.

His spine broke. His legs gave out. He fell. To his knees. The position — the ’I-am-kneeling-before-you’ position that he had never taken in his life — was the last position he would ever take.

The vine tightened. His chest collapsed. His ribs — the dense, demonified ribs — shattered. His lungs compressed. His heart stopped.

The Bull died. Kneeling. In the dirt. Of a grassland that would never know his name.

The light faded. Slowly. The spears — the millions of burning constructs — dissolved. The mana dispersed. The magic circles — the millions of geometric, spinning mandalas — faded from the sky. The brilliance dimmed. The shadows returned. The night reasserted itself.

The grassland was silent.

Not the silence of peace. The silence of ’nothing-left-alive.’ The silence of a battlefield where every combatant — every man, every brute, every demonified warrior — was dead. The silence of a camp where the only sounds were the creaking of vines and the settling of corpses.

Mira hovered. Looking down. At the carnage. At the thousands of bodies — pierced, crushed, pulped — that littered the grassland. At the ruined camp — the flattened tents, the scattered bones, the extinguished fires.

Helena hovered beside her. The violet-and-gold eyes — the Demon Sovereign’s mark — surveyed the same landscape. The vines — the demonified tendrils, still coiled around the remains of the barbarians — slowly retracted. Slid back into the ground. Disappeared.

The two women — the wives, the mothers, the ’goddesses-of-war’ — hovered in the sky. Above the dead. Above the silence. Above the message.

The message that was already traveling.

In the barbarian camp — in the ruins, in the carnage — a pendant lay. Small. Wooden. The kind of amulet that barbarian shamans wore — the ’I-can-see-what-others-cannot’ talisman that contained a recording crystal. A device — crude, barbarian-made, but functional — that captured images and transmitted them through the magical network.

The crystal — activated by the shaman before his death, set to record the ’battle-with-the-gods’ — had captured everything.

The two women. Hovering. Naked power. The magic circles. The spears. The vines. The screams. The light that had illuminated the sky like a second sun.

The transmission — the crude, barbarian-crystal-based broadcast — was not powerful enough to reach the capital directly. But it didn’t need to. The crystal transmitted to the network — the magical communication network that the Eldoria kingdom maintained, the system of relay crystals that connected every major city and fortress and faction stronghold.

The signal bounced. From relay to relay. From crystal to crystal. The data — compressed, the images grainy but recognizable — traveled at the speed of magic.

In the Royal Palace of Eldoria, the Arch Sorcerer — an old man, thin, his robes covered in arcane symbols, his office filled with crystals and scrolls — sat at his desk. The relay crystal on his desk — the one connected to the kingdom’s network — pulsed.

He touched it. The image appeared. Holographic. Floating above the crystal. Two women. In the sky. Above a ruined barbarian camp. Millions of magic circles. Millions of spears. Vines — demonified vines — crushing men.

The Arch Sorcerer’s face went white.

"Impossible," he whispered. His voice trembled. "That’s — that’s ninth-circle magic. No. Beyond ninth-circle. That’s—"

He leaned forward. His old eyes — sharp, despite his age, the eyes of a man who had studied magic for sixty years — focused on the image. On the women. On the faces.

"That’s the Ktorian grandson’s town," he said. The recognition was instant. The geography. The location. "Millbrook."

His hand moved. Not to the crystal — to the communication device. The direct line. The ’I-need-to-speak-to-the-king-immediately’ channel.

He didn’t get the king. He got the prince. Crown Prince Leo — the faction leader, the man who had been maneuvering for the throne since the civil war began.

The prince’s image appeared. Young. Handsome. His golden hair perfect. His armor polished. The ’I-am-ready-to-rule’ appearance that he maintained at all times.

"Arch Sorcerer," Leo said. "This better be important."

"Your Highness." The Arch Sorcerer’s voice was flat. "Millbrook. The Ktorian grandson’s town. It has — someone there has demonstrated power beyond ninth-circle. Beyond anything I have seen. Beyond anything in the royal records."

Leo’s expression didn’t change. "Show me."

The image transferred. The crystal’s recording — the two women, the magic, the destruction — played. In the prince’s war room. On the large tactical display.

The room went silent.

The generals. The advisors. The strategists. Every man in Crown Prince Leo’s faction stared at the display. At the two women. At the millions of magic circles. At the spears. At the vines. At the screaming, dying barbarians.

"Two women," Leo said. His voice was calm. Controlled. The ’I-will-not-show-fear’ tone of a politician. "Two women destroyed a barbarian army."

"Two women destroyed a ’demonified’ barbarian army, Your Highness," the Arch Sorcerer corrected. "The barbarians were using demonification pills. Their bodies were enhanced beyond human limits. And these women — these two women — destroyed them. One used magic. The other used — I don’t have a word for it. Nature magic combined with demonic authority. The vines were demonified. The power signature was — it was Demon King tier. Or above."

The room was still silent.

Leo’s jaw tightened. His golden eyes — the royal eyes, the ’I-will-rule-this-kingdom’ eyes — narrowed.

"Millbrook," he said. "The small town. The dungeon. The Ktorian grandson."

"The same, Your Highness."

"Who are these women?"

"The Ktorian grandson’s wives, Your Highness. Our intelligence identified them. The dark-haired one is Mira Redwood. The brown-haired one is Helena. Both pregnant. Both — ’were’ pregnant. The dark-haired one gave birth recently."

"Wives," Leo repeated. The word was flat. "His ’wives’ did this."

"Yes, Your Highness."

Another silence. Longer. Heavier. The ’the-world-has-changed’ silence that every man in the room recognized.

"Increase surveillance on Millbrook," Leo said. "I want everything. Every movement. Every visitor. Every merchant. Every message. And find out where those demonification pills came from."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"And Arch Sorcerer."

"Yes?"

"Find out if the Ktorian grandson is still alive. Because if his ’wives’ can do ’this’—" Leo gestured at the display. At the frozen image. At the two women, hovering, surrounded by light, like goddesses. "—then I want to know what ’he’ can do."

In the Black Guild’s underground headquarters — a hidden chamber beneath a merchant’s shop in the capital’s merchant district — the same image played.

The guild master — a woman, middle-aged, her face scarred, her body wrapped in black leather — watched. Her second — a younger man, thin, nervous — stood beside her.

"The northern operation is gone," the second said. "The barbarians we supplied. The pills we gave them. All gone."

"I can see that," the guild master said. Her voice was flat.

"What do we do?"

The guild master looked at the image. At the two women. At the power. At the ’this-is-not-a-town-this-is-a-fortress’ reality that the image represented.

"Nothing," she said. "For now. We do nothing. We watch. We wait."

"And the contract? The one to take Millbrook?"

"Cancel it," the guild master said. "Anyone who takes that contract dies. And I am not in the business of sending my people to die."

In the Ktorian family’s Rivak Duchy — the ancestral home of the Ktorian bloodline, the fortress that had been the family’s seat for generations — Duke Halides Ktorian sat in his study.

The crystal on his desk — the family relay, the private channel — pulsed. He touched it. The image appeared.

Two women. In the sky. Millions of magic circles. Millions of spears. Demonified vines. Destruction.

The old duke — silver-haired, his face lined with decades of political maneuvering, his body still straight despite his age — stared at the image. For a long time. The pipe in his hand — the smoking pipe, the one he had been filling when the crystal pulsed — hung forgotten.

"Viktor," he said. The name was quiet. "My grandson."

He looked at the image. At the women. At the power.

"What have you built?"

He set the pipe down. Picked up a pen. Wrote a single line on a piece of parchment.

’Send an envoy to Millbrook. Diplomatic. Non-aggressive. Find out what my grandson has become.’

He sealed the letter. Handed it to the servant who appeared at his door.

And sat back. Staring at the crystal. At the two women. At the power that his grandson’s wives wielded — the power that made the Royal Arch Sorcerer’s magic look like a child’s trick.

The power that had just been demonstrated — deliberately, publicly, ’come-and-get-it’ demonstratively — to every faction, every power, every hidden force in the Eldoria kingdom.

’He’s not defending Millbrook,’ the old duke realized. ’He’s not hiding. He’s not running. He’s not asking for protection.’

’He’s telling the world: touch my town and die.’

The duke smiled. The expression was thin. Proud. The ’that’s-my-grandson’ smile of a man who had wondered if the boy had inherited the family’s steel.

He had.

’Balls of steel...’