Chapter 249: The Demon’s Stride
The collapse of the grand underground hall tore the campus apart.
Thousands of tons of bedrock, dirt, and shattered glass from the botanical gardens plummeted into the subterranean cavern. The sheer kinetic impact sent a localized earthquake rippling across the Academy grounds.
When the dust finally settled, the underground bunker was gone. It was replaced by a massive, jagged crater completely exposed to the pitch-black dome covering the campus.
In the dead center of the crater stood the Demon Lord.
The twenty-meter-tall entity stood perfectly still as the rubble rained down upon its jagged, starlight-forged armor. Huge slabs of concrete shattered harmlessly against its shoulders. Its abyssal red eyes scanned the ruins of the Academy above.
The air warped around it. The gravitational pressure it emitted slammed the falling dust directly into the ground.
Buried near the edge of the crater, a pile of shattered stone shifted.
Bordon roared, tearing his muscles as he violently shoved a massive slab of masonry off the buried students.
They were barely alive. Celestia’s shattered ice dome had absorbed the brunt of the crushing weight, leaving the Princess completely unconscious and bleeding heavily from her eyes and nose. Kael dragged her limp body out of the debris. His armor was stripped down to the padding. Mariella and Elisha stumbled out behind him, covered in gray dust and blood.
Lucien stepped out from the shadows of a collapsed pillar and shook the dirt from his Shadow-Weave Suit. He locked his cold eyes entirely on the towering behemoth in the center of the crater.
"Get Celestia back," Lucien ordered, his voice cutting through the ringing in their ears. "Do not engage the demon. You are ants to it."
The crater temperature spiked violently.
Alicia Valemont rose from the rubble on the opposite side of the destroyed altar.
She hovered. The dense, dark mana violently repelled away from her as her Level 9 Fire Magic bent the laws of physics. Her crimson hair whipped around her face. Her pupil-less, white-hot eyes locked onto the twenty-meter demon that had crushed her brother’s ashes.
Alicia raised both her hands. The air between her palms instantly condensed into a sphere of blinding white plasma. The ambient heat melted the stone beneath her, vaporizing it into toxic gas.
She thrust her hands forward.
A continuous, hyper-concentrated beam of Level 9 white fire shot across the crater, aimed dead-center at the Demon Lord’s chest. The sheer concussive force of the beam carved a deep trench into the earth.
It struck the demon point-blank.
The explosion illuminated the entire pitch-black campus. The white fire enveloped the top half of the giant, burning with enough intensity to instantly incinerate a Platinum-Rank knight.
Kael shielded his eyes against the glare, tightening his grip on his sword. "She hit it. The armor is taking a direct blast."
"No," Lucien stated.
The blinding white flames parted.
The Demon Lord stood unfazed. Its jagged armor absorbed the blast without a single scorch mark.
The entity slowly lowered its massive head and stared down at the floating girl with mild annoyance.
The Demon Lord raised its left gauntlet and backhanded the air.
The physical force of the swing created a localized vacuum. A shockwave of condensed, abyssal gravity violently slapped away the beam of Level 9 plasma, extinguishing it instantly.
The invisible shockwave continued forward and slammed directly into Alicia.
Her magical barrier shattered like cheap glass. The impact sent her rocketing backward like a cannonball, burying her twenty feet deep into the crater’s bedrock wall.
The crater went dead silent.
Alicia Valemont, wielding the absolute pinnacle of human fire magic, had been casually swatted away.
The Demon Lord turned its massive, horned head toward the rim of the crater to look at the Academy buildings above.
The behemoth took a step. The earth violently shook.
The hundreds of high-tier gargoyles and shadow stalkers detached from the crater walls. Following a silent command, the swarm dove directly toward Kael’s squad.
"Incoming!" Bordon roared.
Lacking his tower shield, Bordon grabbed a jagged, six-foot slab of reinforced steel rebar from the rubble and stepped directly in front of the unconscious Princess.
Three obsidian gargoyles hit him simultaneously.
The kinetic force shattered Bordon’s left kneecap. The heavy tank dropped to one knee but refused to yield. He swung the rebar like a baseball bat, caving in the skull of the first beast, while the second one sank its razor-sharp teeth directly into his shoulder.
"Bordon!" Mariella shrieked.
Her mana core was completely empty. Mariella bit her own tongue, drawing blood, and forced her internal pathways to cannibalize her own life force.
A sickly, pale green aura erupted from her wooden staff. She slammed it into Bordon’s back.
The healing magic forcefully knitted Bordon’s torn muscles back together in real-time. The severe toll of burning her own lifespan caused Mariella to violently vomit black blood onto the dirt.
Elisha screamed, drawing her bow. Her fingers were already shredded and bleeding from forcing raw wind-mana constructs in the stairwell. She pulled the empty bowstring back anyway, her fingers tearing open further as she condensed the violent wind.
She fired a jagged wind-bolt directly into the eye of the gargoyle biting Bordon. The beast shrieked and dropped off, thrashing on the ground.
Elisha pulled the string back again, her hands slick with her own blood. She fired another raw bolt, blowing the wing off a shadow stalker diving for Kael.
"Formation! Tighten the perimeter!" Kael yelled.
He tried to ignite his Sovereign Aura, but his sword just sparked and died. Completely tapped out, with a deep gash on his chest bleeding heavily, he resorted to pure swordsmanship. He parried the heavy claws of a gargoyle and drove his blade into its throat.
But the swarm was endless.
A shadow stalker slipped past Kael’s guard, its claws raking across his ribs. Kael stumbled hard.
A massive gargoyle vaulted over Bordon and landed directly on top of Elisha.
The archer screamed as the beast pinned her to the ground, its jaws opening to snap her neck.
BANG.
An ethereal, hyper-compressed bullet punched cleanly through the gargoyle’s skull. The beast collapsed dead on top of Elisha.
Lucien lowered the smoking barrel of the Lumeveil Enforcer.
He stood ten feet away, holding exactly ten piercing rounds. He conserved them strictly for surgical executions to keep his meat shields alive.
"Get up, Elisha," Lucien ordered coldly. "Bordon, stop swinging wildly. Plant the rebar and let them impale themselves. Mariella, cut the life-force link before your heart explodes."
The squad obeyed instantly, operating on sheer adrenaline and Lucien’s ruthless tactical commands.
The Demon Lord ignored the slaughter behind it. The twenty-meter giant reached the edge of the crater and planted a massive, starlight-forged boot onto the manicured grass of the central courtyard.
The sheer weight of the entity crushed the stone pathways into powder. The dark mana radiating from its armor rotted the nearby trees, turning them to ash in seconds.
The surviving students barricaded in the nearby faculty buildings looked out the windows. The panic that had gripped them earlier morphed into total paralysis. You could fight cultists. You couldn’t fight a god.
As the Demon Lord took its second step onto the main campus, a blinding pillar of crimson fire erupted directly in its path.
Instructor Samantha stood alone in the center of the ruined courtyard.
She bled from a dozen minor wounds, surrounded by the charred corpses of the fifty elite vanguard operatives she had just slaughtered. Her combat tunic was torn, but her Platinum-Rank aura blazed furiously.
Behind her stood six senior Academy professors, their staffs and grimoires glowing with high-tier magic.
"Evacuate the faculty buildings!" Samantha ordered over her shoulder. "Get the students to the subterranean vaults! Now!"
The professors broke formation and rushed toward the barricaded buildings to lead the terrified cadets underground.
Samantha gripped the hilt of her massive greatsword with both hands. The crimson flames wreathed around the blade condensed, turning white-hot at the edges.
"I don’t care what Abyss you crawled out of," Samantha said, stepping directly into the path of the Demon Lord. "You are trespassing on my campus."
The Demon Lord stopped and looked down at the human standing in its way.
Samantha triggered her Platinum-Rank kinetic enhancement. She moved faster than the human eye could track, launching herself directly at the Demon Lord’s massive, rusted halberd.
She swung her flaming greatsword with everything she had.
CLANG.
The collision of Platinum-Rank steel and abyssal iron sent a shockwave echoing across the entire campus, shattering every remaining glass window in a half-mile radius.
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