Chapter 252: The Crown of Bedrock
The Enforcer kicked in Lucien’s hand.
The hyper-compressed bullet crossed the courtyard and struck the Demon Lord’s descending arm. It found the narrow gap Samantha had opened in the Demon Lord’s right wrist. The abyssal armor held, but the localized kinetic impact jerked the entity’s forearm.
The heavy iron halberd shifted its angle. It missed Kael’s chest by inches and buried itself deep into the cobblestones beside his head.
"Bordon!" Lucien ordered. "Pull him!"
Bordon planted his jagged rebar crutch. Leaning heavily on his uninjured leg, he grabbed the collar of Kael’s ruined uniform with his free hand and dragged him backward across the broken stone. He hauled Kael back toward the crater’s edge, where Celestia, Mariella, and Elisha were huddled behind the broken rebar.
Across the courtyard, Samantha remained buried in the rubble of the alchemy building, bleeding heavily but temporarily out of the halberd’s immediate reach.
Kael tried to push himself up from the dirt, but his arm folded beneath him. His eyes found Lucien across the courtyard. There was no gratitude in them yet—only disbelief that the man he had once treated as academy filth had spent one of his precious rounds saving his life.
Lucien lowered the Enforcer. Every intact section of armor had ignored Alicia’s Level 9 fire. Bullets were finished as an answer.
His eyes dropped to the shattered courtyard.
He opened his inventory. A circlet of rough, unpolished stone materialized in his palm.
Lucien placed the Primordial Earth Crown on his head.
The connection formed immediately. The earth beneath his boots felt like an extension of his own nervous system. Lucien dropped to one knee and placed both palms flat against the ruined pavement.
The Crown seized the wreckage already covering the courtyard. Slabs of shattered bedrock and broken masonry tore free around the wounded squad. The stone fused together, forming a heavy, angled barricade that shielded Kael and the cadets from the Demon Lord’s line of sight.
Above them, the remaining swarm reacted. Dozens of gargoyles and shadow stalkers abandoned the faculty evacuation lines and dove toward Lucien.
He pushed his mana through the Crown.
Several dense waves of jagged spikes shot upward from the loose cobblestones. Some of the faster gargoyles managed to dodge, peeling away from the assault, but the dense net of stone caught the rest. The spikes impaled them mid-air, tearing through their corrupted flesh and clearing the immediate airspace.
In the center of the crater, the Demon Lord wrenched its halberd free from the ground. Its visor locked onto Lucien.
The black wound in its right wrist was already pulling shut, dark metal knitting over the gap Samantha had created. The creature was regenerating, and Lucien’s only useful firearm target was disappearing.
The Demon Lord stepped forward and swung its halberd through the remains of a faculty wall, aiming a massive horizontal sweep directly at Lucien.
Lucien pushed off the ground and threw his hands upward. A massive slab of the courtyard snapped into a steep ramp. The halberd struck the ramp of bedrock, shrieking against the stone, and was forcefully redirected over Lucien’s head. The passing shockwave hammered Lucien’s skull and left both ears ringing beneath a high, piercing whine.
Lucien raised his hands again.
Thick bands of reinforced bedrock surged upward, wrapping tightly around the entity’s boots and its weapon arm.
The Demon Lord broke the first restraint with one step. Lucien replaced it before the creature’s boot landed. A second band shattered around its knee. A third caught the halberd shaft and dragged it six feet off course.
Lucien didn’t try to crush the Calamity. He manipulated the shattered environment to bleed its momentum. Whenever the Demon Lord tried to close the distance, bedrock walls rose to block its path or stone anchors dragged at its limbs.
Lucien kept forcing it back toward the crater’s center. Fifty meters. No farther. That was the reach of Divine Judgement—assuming the Rosary ever reached him.
The backlash struck without warning. The Crown tore through the last of his mana, sending burning pain through every channel in his body. Blood ran from his nose and trickled from his ears.
His vision blurred, but he forced out one final command. A wedge of bedrock slammed beneath the Demon Lord’s advancing foot, throwing its stance off for a precious second.
Lucien tore the Crown from his head before the artifact could drag him into unconsciousness.
Lucien slumped forward, gasping for air.
At the edge of the courtyard, a soft, pulsating light pushed back the abyssal darkness.
Ariana had remained with the final evacuation group, distributing healing potions while the professors carried the most severely wounded students into the vault. Now, with the last group safely underground, she stepped out from behind the faculty building barricade.
She held the Rosary of the Weeping Saintess tightly between both hands. Lucien had entrusted it to her before joining the strike team underground.
Keep the others alive if I don’t come back.
Now, Ariana was bringing it back to him.
Ariana moved into the courtyard. The sheer density of the Demon Lord’s gravity field hit her immediately. Her knees buckled under the impossible pressure. The glass lenses of her spectacles cracked. She wasn’t a frontline fighter, but she refused to stop. Ariana pulled a high-tier alchemical stimulant from her belt, bit off the cork, and downed the burning liquid, forcing her trembling body to keep moving.
The Rosary’s light pushed against the Demon Lord’s oppressive aura, giving the wounded cadets enough air to breathe. Ariana used the opening to throw two healing vials behind Lucien’s barricade. One shattered beside Kael, coating his open wounds in restorative mist. The other burst across Bordon’s ruined leg. The bleeding slowed, and the damaged muscles tightened around his shattered knee, preventing the joint from collapsing any further.
"Ariana, stay back!" Lucien barked, his voice hoarse.
She ignored him. Ariana did not know what Lucien intended to do with the Rosary. She only knew that the artifact had answered him before—and that he had reached the limit of what the Crown could accomplish alone. Ariana stopped at the edge of the crater, pulled her arm back, and threw the Rosary across the battlefield.
The wooden beads sailed through the ash-filled air. Lucien reached out and caught the silver cross.
The moment the metal touched his palm, the System interface exploded across his vision.
[Absolute Evil confirmed.]
[Belief in Protection confirmed.]
[Divine Force confirmed.]
[Sanctuary conditions fulfilled.]
A pillar of pure golden light erupted from Lucien’s hand. The heavy, suffocating gravity of the Demon Lord was violently repelled.
Golden force slammed through his empty channels—too much, too fast. It burned through every limb, forcing his damaged mana pathways to carry power they had never been built to contain.
The prompt for his supreme active skill illuminated his HUD.
[Skill Available: Divine Judgement]
Beneath the glowing letters, a red warning text flashed rapidly.
[Warning: Divine Judgement can destroy the Demon Lord’s vessel.]
[The core binding it to the Abyss will survive.]
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