Chapter 53: 053. The Eighth Demon King, Malakor
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Sparks flew like a fireworks display as Eternia was forced to rapidly cross her twin daggers, frantically parrying and deflecting the heavy glowing blade.
Eternia was vastly faster with her beastkin reflexes operating on a level Lyra couldn’t comprehend, but the blue-gold aura made the longsword incredibly dense and fast.
Every time Eternia tried to slip inside the guard to land a counter, Lyra’s enhanced instincts forced her to pull back and swing wider, creating a punishing wall of glowing steel.
Up on the balcony, Astrid let out a low whistle of appreciation.
"That is not just standard mana coating... Her mana density is incredible for someone without a class... At least that’s what she told me."
’And not even one ounce of Plot armor...’ Ren thought while wiping a tear from his eye and sniffling. ’These girls are truly growing so much...’
Down in the yard, the intense exchange raged on for another ten seconds.
Lyra swung, parried, and thrust with everything she had with her blue-gold aura flaring brilliantly against the stone.
But a latent bloodline was not a substitute for stamina.
As Lyra swung the sword in another heavy horizontal sweep, the bright blue-gold aura flickered and the intense burning heat in her veins began to cool rapidly as her untrained mana core struggled to sustain the massive output.
Her arms suddenly felt incredibly heavy and her swing slowed by a fraction of a second.
To an ordinary fighter, that micro-second delay would mean nothing. To Eternia, it was a massive glowing invitation.
Eternia didn’t backpedal this time... instead she leaned backward, letting the decelerating steel blade pass harmlessly over her chest by a millimeter.
In the same fluid motion, Eternia pivoted on her heel, her silent boots gripping the stone perfectly.
She stepped deep into Lyra’s exposed guard.
With her left hand, she brought the flat of her dagger up, striking the crossguard of Lyra’s sword with a sharp precise twist that sent a numbing shock through the girl’s wrists.
Lyra’s grip failed as the masterwork sword slipped from her hands, clattering onto the stone.
Before Lyra could even attempt to step back, Eternia’s right hand whipped forward.
The cold wicked edge of her second dagger came to a flawless dead stop resting directly against the fragile skin of Lyra’s throat.
The spar was over...
The yard fell completely silent, save for the sound of Lyra’s desperate, ragged breathing. Her chest heaved, sweat pouring down her face.
She stared at the deadly steel resting against her neck with the adrenaline slowly crashing out of her system.
She had lost.
Even with her mana, even with the new sword, she had been dismantled the moment her stamina failed.
A wave of frustration and inadequacy washed over her.
She lowered her head, expecting the assassin to coldly lecture her on her poor stamina or her sloppy footwork but the cold lecture never came.
Eternia smoothly pulled the dagger away, twirling the blades expertly before sliding them back into the hidden sheaths on her thighs.
SNICK!
The Snakekin stood there for a moment, looking at the exhausted frustrated human girl.
Eternia remembered exactly how she had felt the day before in the inn’s backyard.
She remembered the crushing weight of feeling useless And she remembered exactly what her Master had done to pull her out of that dark place.
Eternia took a step forward and she reached out with her hand.
Lyra flinched slightly, expecting a reprimand.
Instead, Eternia placed her hand gently on the top of Lyra’s sweat-drenched, auburn hair.
The assassin gave her a soft, incredibly awkward but genuinely reassuring pat on the head.
"You’re getting stronger," Eternia stated.
It was serious, acknowledging the reality of the clash.
"You forced me to defend... Your mana is heavy so next time, don’t stop swinging and try to regulate it more."
Lyra’s eyes went wide. She looked up at the Snakekin, completely stunned by the unexpected display of mercy and encouragement from the usually terrifying woman.
The frustration melted away, replaced by a profound, swelling sense of pride as a bright exhausted smile broke across Lyra’s face.
"Thank you, Eternia. I won’t."
Up on the balcony, Ren let out a soft laugh... he was very amused by the interaction.
"She stole my move."
"They look up to you, Ren," Astrid smiled, bumping her shoulder playfully against his. "They’re adopting your habits. It’s actually very sweet."
Ren turned away from the railing, preparing to head back inside to pour himself another drink.
But before he could take a step, the sound of boots running across the front courtyard caught his attention.
Ren and Astrid both walked over to the opposite side of the balcony, looking down toward the manor’s front gates.
A young man wearing the white enchanted leather armor of the Twilight Guild’s scouting division was sprinting up the pristine cobblestone driveway.
He looked exhausted, his armor covered in dust and a satchel was slung heavily over his shoulder.
He reached the front steps and began pounding urgently on the heavy oak double doors.
A moment later, the doors opened. Mandy stood there, looking highly displeased at the aggressive knocking.
"State your business," the butler demanded haughtily, dusting imaginary lint off his pristine suit. "This is the private residence of Lady Astrid... Use the bell like a civilized person."
"I have an urgent perimeter report for the Vice Guild Leader!" the scout gasped while leaning his hands on his knees to catch his breath. "From the Razorback Ridge outpost!"
Up on the balcony, Astrid’s relaxed domestic demeanor vanished in an instant.
The playful woman reading romance novels was replaced entirely by the commanding A-rank Twilight Witch.
"Bring it up here!" Astrid called down.
The scout jumped, looking up at the balcony. "Yes, ma’am!"
Two minutes later, the scout was standing in the master guest suite, looking incredibly intimidated.
He glanced nervously at the massive, luxurious bed, and then at Ren who was casually leaning against the fireplace mantle holding a glass of liquor.
The scout had an idea who this terrifyingly calm handsome man was since he had helped out the Guild... but lounging in the Vice Guild Leader’s private quarters spoke volumes about his authority.
Astrid took the sealed scroll from the scout.
She broke the heavy wax seal with her thumb and unrolled the document with her blue eyes scanning the hastily scrawled ink.
Ren took a sip of his drink. "Trouble?"
"I’m not sure," Astrid frowned, her brow furrowing. She looked up from the parchment. "The outpost rangers stationed near the Razorback Ridge... the far borders of the valley are reporting massive unexplained spikes in mana."
"Monster sightings?" Ren asked, his pragmatic mind immediately jumping to the most obvious threat.
"No," Astrid shook her head, tracing a line on the paper. "That’s the strange part... There are no beast tracks and no visual sightings. It’s just aggressive atmospheric pressure drops and spatial distortions near the highest peaks. The mana concentration is thick enough to cause nausea in the lower-rank rangers."
Astrid rolled the paper back up, tapping it thoughtfully against her chin.
"It is likely just a severe seasonal ley-line shift," Astrid deduced, relying on her years of geographical experience. "The mana currents in the mountain ranges sometimes bottleneck and violently release pressure... It causes spatial warping, but it usually dissipates in a day or two."
She turned to the scout. "Return to headquarters. Tell the logistics captain to prepare a specialized magical investigation team, I will personally lead them up to the ridge tomorrow morning to secure the area."
"Yes, Vice Guild Leader!" The scout bowed deeply, visibly relieved to be dismissing the responsibility and hurried out of the room.
Astrid sighed, tossing the rolled scroll onto the table. "So much for my day off... It seems I have a mountain to climb tomorrow."
She looked over at Ren, expecting him to make a witty remark about the bureaucratic headaches of guild leadership but Ren wasn’t smiling.
He was standing perfectly still near the fireplace with his head tilted slightly toward the open balcony doors.
His crimson eyes were narrowed, staring intensely out at the late afternoon sky.
"Ren?" Astrid asked, noticing his sudden intense silence. "Is something wrong?"
Ren blinked with the intense focus fading from his eyes as he turned back to look at her.
He forced a smooth reassuring smile onto his face masking the cold realization settling in his gut.
"Nothing," Ren said smoothly, taking another sip of his drink to wash away the stress. "Just thinking about the weather... Let’s hope it’s just a ley-line shift."
Astrid smiled, walking over and wrapping her arms comfortably around his waist.
"I’m sure it is. Now, where were we? I believe you were analyzing the economic ruin of my fictional Duke."
Ren chuckled, resting a hand on the small of her back as he allowed himself to be pulled back into the domestic warmth of the afternoon but as the sun began to dip lower over the horizon, casting long dark shadows across the town of Astelvern, Ren couldn’t shake the creeping certainty settling in his chest.
His chill vacation was about to come to a very violent end...
...
The night air at the apex of the Razorback Ridge was thin, suffocating and bitterly cold.
Located several dozen miles away from the warm, glowing, and heavily populated commercial hubs of the Kingdom, this desolate mountain range was a place completely devoid of life.
The jagged, obsidian-black peaks pierced the heavy grey clouds like the teeth of a dead god, offering nothing but sheer drops, frozen stone and a howling relentless wind that stripped the warmth from the bones of any foolish enough to trespass.
Far below the ridge, nestled in the sweeping fertile valley, the distant lights of Astelvern Town twinkled innocently in the darkness.
It looked peaceful and it looked entirely unaware of the absolute calamity currently gathering in the clouds above it.
Hovering exactly one foot off the frozen jagged stone of the highest peak was Malakor, the Eighth Demon King.
He did not look like the terrifying hulking behemoths that humanity usually associated with the title of Demon King.
He possessed no massive horns... no rippling impenetrable muscles and no towering intimidating stature.
In fact, Malakor was exceedingly frail.
His physical body was gaunt, almost skeletal, hidden beneath layers of dark, flowing and impeccably clean velvet robes.
His skin was a sickly translucent pale white with a network of dark, pulsing blue veins clearly visible along his neck and the back of his hands.
His face was sharp and aristocratic, his long silver hair tied back neatly, and his eyes were completely solid pools of abyssal black.
He was a being who despised physical exertion.
If forced into a hand-to-hand confrontation with a seasoned Vanguard or a high-tier swordsman, Malakor would likely be overwhelmed and destroyed in a matter of minutes as his physical stats were pitifully low for a Champion of the abyss.
But he had never needed physical strength.
He was a master of the esoteric, the unseen, and the absolute laws of reality.
He commanded the terrifying apex of Spatial Gate Manipulation and ancient, forbidden Blood Magic.
He didn’t need to swing a sword to level a city; he simply needed to snap his fingers and let the universe tear itself apart on his behalf.
"The wind here is truly dreadful..." Malakor murmured, his voice was a soft rasp that seemed to bypass the ears and resonate directly inside the skull.
He pulled the collar of his dark robes slightly tighter, coughing delicately into a silk handkerchief.
Standing behind him, serving as his royal guard, were three of his most trusted lieutenants.
Unlike their master, these creatures were the physical embodiment of nightmares.
To his left stood a massive heavily armored Dread-Minotaur, standing twelve feet tall and wielding an iron greataxe that required the strength of fifty men to lift.
To his right hovered a shifting ethereal mass of living shadows, an entity known as a Void-Stalker, capable of phasing through solid matter to sever the spines of its victims.
And directly behind him was a hulking four-armed troll covered in thick, bone-plated armor with its jaw dripping with acidic saliva.
Despite their overwhelming terrifying physical power, the three lieutenants stood perfectly still with their heads bowed in absolute, trembling reverence to the frail man hovering before them.
"My King," the Dread-Minotaur rumbled. "The vanguard swarms are prepared within the abyssal network. We await your command to march. But... why this provincial town? Astelvern holds no strategic military value. The capital is where the human strength is concentrated."
Malakor did not turn around. He kept his solid black eyes fixed on the distant, twinkling lights of the town in the valley.
"You think like a brute, Gorak..." Malakor sighed, he sounded like a scholar addressing a particularly slow child. "You view warfare entirely through the lens of logistics, troop deployments, and the breaking of stone walls... That is why our forces have been stuck in a perpetual, grinding stalemate with the human race for the last century."
Malakor slowly raised his pale frail hand. From the deep pockets of his velvet robes, he retrieved a small reinforced glass vial.
The vial was sealed with dense dark magical wax but inside the glass, suspended in a localized stasis field, was a single drop of blood.
Despite the freezing temperature of the mountain, the drop of blood was glowing.
It pulsed with a defiant and incredibly dense golden-blue light.
Even contained within the glass, the concentrated essence of the liquid radiated a warmth, humming with the unmistakable aura of a chosen champion of the Gods.
"Do you know what this is?" Malakor asked softly, holding the vial up to the moonlight.
"It reeks of the Heavens..." the Void-Stalker hissed with its shadowy form recoiling slightly from the holy resonance.
"Indeed," Malakor smiled with a thin cruel expression stretching across his pale face. "This is the essence of Jace... The new Hero of the prophecy... The First Demon King managed to secure this singular drop during their initial brief clash near the borderlands a while ago. He would have taken a lot more but you know him, he’s not equipped for these situations..."
Malakor slowly lowered his hand, his black eyes narrowing as he stared at the glowing blood.
"The First King is a fool," Malakor continued. "He relies on his overwhelming brawn, believing he can simply crush the Hero when the time is right but I have studied the histories of this world. I have observed the patterns. Heroes do not simply die in direct combat. The Gods protect them... The narrative of this world protects them... If you back a Hero into a corner, they do not break... they awaken instead. They discover some hidden latent power an they receive a miraculous intervention. To fight a Hero directly is to invite the universe to strike you down."
Malakor tightened his grip on the glass vial.
"The boy is growing too fast... Even if he almost died to the First, His potential is a variable we cannot afford to leave unchecked," Malakor explained, lecturing his lieutenants as the howling wind whipped around them. "But to break a Hero, you must not attack his body... His body will always heal and his body will always grow stronger... You must attack his mind... You must fracture his soul... You must plunge him into a state of absolute irrecoverable psychological despair so profound that his will to fight completely collapses."
The frail Demon King turned slowly with his velvet robes sweeping over the frozen stone, to face his massive monstrous lieutenants.
"And how do we break the spirit of a boy who believes he is destined to save the world?" Malakor asked rhetorically with a gleam in his eyes. "We destroy his foundations. We burn his sanctuary... We butcher the people he loves most, and we make sure he knows he was entirely powerless to stop it."
The Dread-Minotaur shifted its massive weight. "You intend to target his bloodline?"
"Precisely," Malakor confirmed, turning back toward the valley. "The Hero’s lineage is small, but incredibly potent. His mother, the Matriarch of his house, currently resides in the capital but she is not a viable target. She is a cautious woman... She sits behind walls of enchanted white stone, surrounded day and night by the Royal Guard and a dozen Archmages of the highest order. To breach the capital and assassinate her would require a full-scale demonic invasion which is a mobilization of our entire army that the humans would see coming from a hundred miles away and let’s not forget that the Emperor is there."
Malakor raised the vial again, letting the moonlight catch the golden-blue pulse of the blood.
"But the Hero has an Aunt..." Malakor whispered. "Astrid... The Vice Guild Leader of the Twilight Guild and the famed Twilight Witch."
The Void-Stalker hissed with the shadows swirling violently.
"She is an A-rank anomaly... Her twilight magic has crushed many of our brethren so she is a dangerous variable."
"She is arrogant," Malakor corrected smoothly. "She is a warrior who relies entirely on her own overwhelming personal strength. Her hubris is her greatest vulnerability... Because she is an A-rank mage, because she is a Vice Guild Leader, she believes she is untouchable. She does not surround herself with Royal Guards and she does not live in a military fortress. She resides in a manor in that pathetic provincial town down there entirely unprotected by the Kingdom’s armies."
Malakor’s pale lips curled into a wide terrifying smile.
"She is a sitting duck and tonight, we shall sever her from the Hero’s family tree."
Malakor did not waste another moment. He had monologued enough to satisfy his own intellectual ego.
It was time to begin the ritual.
The Eighth Demon King extended his left arm, holding the glass vial out over the precipice of the mountain peak.
With his right hand, he reached into his robes and produced a long wickedly sharp dagger forged from deep-abyss obsidian.
He didn’t use the dagger to break the glass. He brought the blade to his own left palm, slicing a deep precise cut across his pale flesh.
Dark, viscous, nearly black demonic blood welled up from the wound.
Malakor did not flinch. H
e did not show a single sign of pain... He simply allowed his corrupted blood to drip down his fingers, falling directly onto the wax seal of the vial.
The moment the demonic blood touched the holy, glowing essence contained within the glass, a violent hissing reaction occurred.
The air around Malakor’s hand instantly warped, the temperature plummeting so drastically that frost rapidly crystallized on the robes of his lieutenants twelve feet away.
CRACK!
Malakor closed his fist, violently crushing the glass vial in his palm.
The shards of glass dug into his flesh, mixing his own dark blood directly with the golden-blue essence of Jace’s blood.
"I call upon the ancient, unbroken chains of lineage..." Malakor chanted as his voice vibrated in a frequency that made the very bedrock of the mountain shudder. "Blood seeks blood... The river of ancestry flows backward... Find the resonance... Find the sister of the sire... Find the Twilight Witch..."
Malakor opened his bloody hand.
The mixture of blood did not fall to the ground.
It defied gravity entirely, floating up from his palm and suspending itself in the air directly in front of his chest.
The dark demonic blood aggressively wrapped around the golden-blue drop, suppressing its holy light and twisting it... forcing the Hero’s essence to act as a beacon.
A heavy oppressive wave of crimson magic erupted from the floating sphere of blood.
The magic pulsed outward like the beat of a massive dying heart. It swept over the mountain ridge, plunging down into the valley below.
It was a search matrix of unparalleled complexity. It bypassed physical barriers.
It ignored the standard magical wards of Astelvern Town... It was looking for a specific genetic and spiritual resonance.
Seconds ticked by and the wind howled furiously, as if the natural world itself was violently rejecting the forbidden magic being woven on the peak.
Then, the floating sphere of blood vibrated violently.
A thin razor-sharp beam of concentrated crimson light shot out from the blood cutting through the dark night sky like a physical tether. The beam arced over the valley, plunging directly into the heart of Astelvern’s upper ring.
It locked perfectly... flawlessly onto Astrid’s manor miles away.
"Target acquired," Malakor whispered, his abyssal black eyes glowing with a terrifying red hue as he stared down the length of the crimson tether. "She is there... Sleeping peacefully in her bed..."
The tracking phase was complete... Now, it was time for the execution.
