Chapter 117: The Tyrant’s Breakdown
Lucifer plummeted through the freezing night sky.
The wind roared past his dark leather armor as he fell toward the exposed glowing white marble of the Royal Palace.
He was seconds away from landing on the King’s balcony. He was ready to finalize his absolute conquest of the human kingdoms.
Then, his system interface flashed. It was not a calm blue notification. It was a pulsing red warning that covered his entire field of vision!
[System Alert: Unauthorized Entity Detected.]
[Location: Zephyria - Exterior Lower Promenade.]
[Entity: Lord Vorian of Iron-Heart (Level 42 - Royal Commander)]
[Status: True Biological Form Verified.]
Lucifer’s void-swirling eyes narrowed sharply.
But I thought I killed him, what is happening. Lucifer said to himself with shock in his eyes.
A split second later, Elara’s voice crackled furiously over his private comms rune.
"Grand Marshal!" the Eclipse Valkyrie hissed. The sound of heavy metal scraping against stone echoed in the background. "He is on the outer ring! The coward didn’t die in the forge!"
Lucifer processed the information instantly.
He remembered the execution in the Aether-Forge. Vexia had used her Blood Tethers to physically dismember the undead Revenant Lord. The system had confirmed the kill of the Abyssal Knight.
But the system relied on the physical parameters of the target presented to it!
"An Abyssal Simulacrum," Lucifer stated smoothly. His voice remained a calm resonant hum despite his terminal velocity.
"A flawless decoy," Elara agreed, her voice tight with fierce frustration. "He sacrificed a massive piece of his own soul to forge it.
He let his undead puppet draw our attention in the basement while the real Lord Vorian hid on the lower exterior decks, waiting for the Warlock to blow the reactor. When Xoroth died, Vorian tried to jump off the city with a levitation scroll."
"Is he airborne?" Lucifer asked.
"No," Elara replied with grim satisfaction. "The Sanguine Grid jammed his escape magic.
He is backed against the edge of the floating city. I have him cornered, Lucifer. He is out of tricks."
Lucifer looked down at the rapidly approaching Royal Palace. King Carlos was alone, broken, and helpless. The monarch was not going anywhere.
But leaving the true Lord of Iron-Heart alive on his fortress was unacceptable! Vorian had orchestrated the betrayal in the Scourgelands, commanded the Coalition, and repeatedly tried to sabotage the floating city from within.
He was a rat that refused to drown.
"Hold him," Lucifer commanded.
"Void Step," Lucifer whispered.
He channeled a massive surge of his Archmage-level mana into the Gauntlet of the Void King. The black lightning flared brilliantly against the dark night sky! He grabbed the spatial fabric around his falling body and violently inverted his coordinates.
Lucifer vanished from the sky above the capital.
He materialized instantly ten thousand feet higher! He landed flawlessly on the freezing black-stone perimeter walkway of Zephyria.
The wind howling across the absolute edge of the floating city was fierce and carried the biting thin chill of the stratosphere.
The massive glowing blue ring of the Cryo-Pylons hummed ominously a few dozen yards below the promenade and projected their absolute zero fields outward into the dark.
Lucifer stood up. He drew his ruby-red longsword. The Blade of Ruin pulsed with a heavy sentient hunger.
Fifty yards away, the standoff was locked in place.
Elara stood with her Twilight wings fully extended and her violet-flaming spear leveled directly at the traitor’s chest!
A dozen sub-adult Glacial Wyrms clung to the black-stone walls above with their jaws open. They hissed freezing mist into the air and were eager for the command to strike.
And trapped against the absolute edge of the floating city was the real Lord Vorian!
The noble looked horrific, but he was undeniably human. He was alive, and he was completely utterly exhausted.
The elegant iron-gray plate armor of House Iron-Heart was heavily dented and scorched from his desperate flight through the Citadel’s lower defenses.
The sheer magical strain of casting a Mythic-tier Abyssal Simulacrum had taken a massive toll on his mortal body. He was bleeding from his nose and ears and his face was pale, gaunt, and haggard.
Vorian panted heavily. He clutched his enchanted broadsword with both hands, but his thick muscular arms shook uncontrollably.
He looked over his shoulder.
There was no railing here. The smooth black stone simply ended. Beyond the edge of his iron boots was a sheer ten-thousand-foot drop into the dark empty sky!
He was completely out of options. His vanguard was dead. The Warlock was dead. His decoys were expended. His massive army was paralyzed on the plains far below.
Lucifer walked slowly down the promenade. His heavy iron boots clicked rhythmically against the stone.
Vorian’s bloodshot eyes snapped toward the sound. He saw the Warlord approaching. Lucifer was unharmed, immaculate, and radiating the terrifying biological suppression of the Sovereign’s Eclipse aura.
The sight of Lucifer finally broke the noble’s mind.
The sheer monumental unfairness of the universe crashed down on Lord Vorian! The aristocratic pride that had fueled him for his entire life, the absolute belief in his own superiority, shattered into millions of jagged pathetic pieces.
Vorian dropped his broadsword.
The heavy enchanted blade clattered loudly against the stone. It slid over the edge and tumbled silently into the abyss.
"It wasn’t supposed to happen like this!" Vorian shrieked.
His voice was a horrifying wet rasp that tore through his exhausted vocal cords. He clawed frantically at his own dented breastplate and stumbled backward until his heels were a fraction of an inch away from the colossal drop.
Lucifer did not stop walking. He did not raise his sword. He just watched the breakdown.
"I played the game!" Vorian screamed and spittle flew from his mouth as his composure completely dissolved.
He pointed a trembling gauntleted finger at Lucifer. "I spent forty years mastering the politics of the capital! I bled my own peasants to fund the Iron-Heart Vanguard! I made the dark pacts! I sacrificed pieces of my own soul for the simulacrums just to secure an advantage!"
Vorian gestured wildly at the sprawling magnificent floating city around them.
"This was my destiny!" Vorian roared and tears cut clean lines through the soot and dirt on his face. "I was the one who saw the King’s weakness! I was the one who was supposed to rise from the ashes of the Scourgelands and take the throne! I was the savior of the new age!"
Elara tightened her grip on her spear and felt deeply disgusted by the pathetic display of royal entitlement. She took a step forward to silence him, to end the rambling noise, but Lucifer raised his left hand, signaling her to hold.
Lucifer wanted to hear this.
"And then you appeared," Vorian sobbed and his voice cracked into a high hysterical pitch. He gripped his own hair and pulled at the roots.
"A filthy landless upstart from a ruined border keep. You don’t play the game! You don’t negotiate! You just snap your fingers and the rules of the world change!"
Vorian fell to his knees on the very edge of the precipice. He clutched his head with his mind completely unraveling under the crushing weight of his absolute failure.
"You cheated!" Vorian wailed and stared up at the Warlord with pure unadulterated madness.
"You hoard miracles! You steal angels and forge machines that shouldn’t exist! You aren’t a military commander, you are a glitch! How am I supposed to fight a man who drops a sun on an army?!"
He looked at Lucifer with his bloodshot eyes pleading for some kind of validation. He desperately needed his enemy to acknowledge his struggle.
He needed Lucifer to admit that Vorian had been a worthy adversary. He needed to die as a grand villain in the history of the world.
"I was the Lord of Iron-Heart," Vorian whispered with his voice trembling with pathetic broken vanity. "I was the main player on this board. I was your rival."
Lucifer stopped walking. He stood exactly five feet away from the weeping broken noble.
The Warlord looked down at the man who had betrayed the expedition, fired on his own troops, and sacrificed his own soul just to steal a crown.
Lucifer’s expression was completely blank. There was no anger. There was no triumph. There was no glimmer of respect or rivalry.
There was only absolute freezing indifference.
"You aren’t a hero, Vorian," Lucifer stated.
The words were spoken softly, but the Void magic amplified them and pushed them directly into Vorian’s fractured mind like heavy iron nails.
Lucifer tilted his head slightly and his void-swirling eyes bored straight into the noble’s desperate soul.
"You aren’t even a villain," Lucifer continued smoothly and meticulously stripped away the very last remaining shred of the man’s delusions. "You’re just a background character who lived too long."
The words hit Vorian harder than the True Damage blade ever could!
The absolute dismissal. The complete lack of respect. Lucifer did not view him as a rival. Lucifer viewed him as a logistical annoyance that had finally run out of tricks to hide behind!
The grand narrative Vorian had built in his own head was entirely erased by a single sentence.
Vorian’s jaw trembled.
The manic light in his eyes flickered and nearly died out as the sheer crushing reality of his own utter insignificance overwhelmed him. He had sacrificed everything, only to be told he did not even matter to the story!
He stayed on his knees and teetered on the absolute edge of the ten-thousand-foot drop. The high-altitude wind howled violently around him and pulled at his heavy fur mantle.
He looked down into the dark empty sky. Then, he slowly looked back up at the immovable dark-armored Warlord towering over him.
He opened his mouth to scream a final desperate curse, clinging to the edge of the world.