Chapter 106: Descent
Evan gave a cold laugh. A thin wisp of black smoke flickered at his side, and three walls of bone shot up from the ground with a roar. All three weapons crashed into them at once — the bone walls flickered and shattered under the impact, but the three attackers flickered as well, and vanished on the spot.
Evan drew his blade with a ring of steel and struck out sideways. Sword-force surged out to more than ten cubits in an instant. Something clashed against it in the empty air, and a figure flickered into view — caught by the force of the blow, unsteady, tumbling backward through space before vanishing again.
The man was clearly experienced, Evan noted. Those three figures had been illusions, but each had carried a real edge of sword-force capable of doing harm — no ordinary phantoms. The man himself had been striking from stealth the whole time. Fortunately, none of it escaped Evan's spiritual awareness.
Evan didn't pursue when the man vanished again. Instead, a faint light stirred around him, and an invisible Terror Aura spread outward. The aura carried no offensive power of its own, but any creature caught inside it felt fear rising unbidden from somewhere deep within. Mindless creatures would instinctively flee it. Even skilled humans, once caught inside, couldn't help but feel its pull — and anyone with a weaker will might turn and run outright.
Evan wasn't only dealing with Fiat. He had to manage the whole battlefield at once. The skeletons and ghouls acted with a measure of independence, but he could issue mental commands to them at any time, and in the meantime, they served as a kind of sensory network, feeding information back to him. Most of the time, he simply let them act on their own and ignored the flow.
But when a stronger enemy appeared, Evan could step in and redirect them. Elsewhere in the compound, a man wielding a single-handed axe had just cut down a skeleton and felled a ghoul. Sensing his own momentum building, more enemies drew toward him. Evan gave a cold laugh and sent two skeletons and a ghoul peeling away from their original targets, charging straight at the man instead.
Light flickered along his axe as he swung it in a wide arc, cleaving a skeleton in half at the waist with a crash. He brought the axe down again, splitting a skull clean open — the soulfire behind its eye sockets flickering out at once. The second skeleton and the ghoul closed in regardless. Just as his axe came down again, wind screamed overhead — a gargoyle already dropping on him from above, claws reaching. There was no time left to change his stance. He tried to dodge, but the skeleton and ghoul had him tangled. In the space of a breath, there was a wet crack, and his head burst apart. The gargoyle shot upward, its strike landed clean.
The men nearby had only just started moving to help when his skull came apart like a melon. The sight drained the fight out of all of them at once, and two of them turned and fled outright.
While Fiat had been retreating, Evan hadn't pressed the attack — he'd used the time instead to direct the gargoyles and skeletons together, cutting down anyone dangerous enough to threaten his undead. Fiat launched another attack, but the moment he came within a few cubits of Evan, an unbidden dread rose up from somewhere deep inside him. He froze for a moment, recognizing it as some kind of fear effect, and forced it down through sheer will.
That instant of hesitation was all Evan needed. He flicked a hand, and a spray of wind blades tore into being out of nothing, shrieking through the air as they came down on Fiat. He threw himself backward and swung his greatsword hard, deflecting them in a rapid clatter of steel — but two of the blades still grazed his arm, drawing two thin lines of blood.
He grunted and vanished again. Evan ignored him once more — as long as the man kept his distance, he posed no real threat — and sent a gargoyle diving down to claim another life.
The moment the gargoyle took flight, an arrow flashed toward it, glowing with an anti-magic light — a Bane Arrow. Evan's eyes snapped to the archer at once. The gargoyle twisted desperately in the air, but two more arrows followed, glowing the same way, and this time it couldn't dodge in time. A burst of light flared, and the gargoyle came apart in a rain of shattered stone.
The archer had barely turned to find his next target when Evan struck. He raised a finger, aimed across the empty dark, and released a Yin-Chill Strike. Though more than forty cubits separated them, nothing marked its passage through the night air but the faint whistle of its flight. The archer felt a wave of cold wash over him and knew at once something was wrong. He swung his bow and snapped the bowstring, sending out a rippling shockwave even without an arrow nocked.
It didn't matter. He could guard against a physical strike, but not one aimed at the soul. His awareness dropped away all at once, and he collapsed where he stood.
"You're dead!" Fiat's fury broke loose entirely, seeing Evan pick off one of his best men in a moment of distraction. "Die!"
In an instant, the shapes around Evan blurred and shifted, and everything seemed to change at once. Evan tensed, then steadied himself as he felt a will descend from somewhere above — cold, malevolent, unfamiliar, and yet somehow split into pieces while still carrying a strange sense of familiarity. A devil's will. He hadn't expected this man to be a devil-worshipper too.
This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Evan knew little of demonology himself. Charlemagne Roland came to mind — if Roland were here, he might have recognized whatever this was immediately. The thought crossed his mind and left again just as fast. What people called devils now was itself a term born only after the Creationist Church's rise; before that, such beings had simply been called evil gods or dark spirits, and the place they came from was what the Church now called Hell — a name that had stuck widely, though the devils themselves called it the Inferno Plane. It was said to be a place where all the negative emotion of the mortal plane gathered and pooled. Mages had always been curious about it, but even at legendary rank, none could reach it — no one had ever found its entrance.
Fortunately, devils could only descend through their believers, their power dropping sharply in the process. That was the only reason the mortal world could keep functioning at all.
Evan realized he was surrounded now by several figures — though looking closer, they were all really one person, existing through some strange method. A dim understanding surfaced in his mind: some form of clone technique, relying on a mirror-like illusion, sustained through the will's manipulation of how space itself refracted and reflected.
"Surrender! Or die where you stand!" a voice rang out — clearly not Fiat's.
Evan felt himself grow even calmer at that. This was plainly a devil's will speaking, not Fiat's own. Demanding his surrender — was it trying to recruit a new believer, or did it simply lack confidence in itself?
"Who are you?" Evan asked.
"I am Ant. A true and great god," the voice answered.
Evan understood then — Ant, one of Solomon's seventy-two demon lords, whose power surged when angered. It was said that any believer, in a fit of rage, could call him down to possess their body.
"So you're Ant. Calling yourself a true god — that's almost funny. Let's see what you're actually capable of, beyond simply descending," Evan said with a smile, though inwardly he was cursing his own luck. He hadn't expected his opponent to be a devil-worshipper at all. This might have been a serious miscalculation on his part.
"You dare mock me? Filthy vermin." The voice roared, and black mist gathered faintly around the figures surrounding him, the devil's formless true shape beginning to surface as all the figures converged toward the center.
Evan dropped the Terror Aura around himself without hesitation, releasing it entirely. White light bloomed across his body, faintly threaded with grey. His sword rang out as blade and body became one, his movements flowing like a centaur at full gallop. He fixed his focus on a single one of the figures — Fiat's true form. Sword-force surged, the phantom images dissolving into a single blade of light. In this moment of life and death, Evan abandoned every technique he knew and simply poured everything he had into the raw core of his swordsmanship. High-output spells took time to cast — even the fastest ones, and Evan could cast quickly — but nothing was faster than a blade. And where magic excelled at reaching distant targets, refined swordsmanship and will excelled at breaking through a single point. So Evan set his magic aside without hesitation and put everything into one strike.
Under that pressure, his focus narrowed to a single point, and he felt his will bleed into the sword-force itself. Something shifted in it — the force became an extension of his own body, and Sword Intent surged upward, carrying with it a faint sense of what it might feel like to stand as a Great Knight. He understood, in that instant: if will and sword-force ever fused completely, Sword Intent would reach its full form, and that fusion was what defined a Great Knight. But knightly cultivation wasn't simply a matter of understanding — reaching that stage required relentless refinement built on top of the insight itself.
He was nowhere near a true Great Knight yet, but the power behind this strike still far exceeded an ordinary knight's. The blade of light cut through the dark like lightning, and just as the devil's phantom form began converging at the center, a startled cry rang out. "That's impossible!"
The light of the blade rose, blinding and brilliant, and the devil's phantom form seemed to freeze in place for an instant. Fiat vanished from within it at that very moment. His body had been under the devil's control all along, his own consciousness reduced to a helpless bystander — but the instant the blade-light flared, some instinct drove him to slip away on his own, without even realizing what he'd done. His own body, possessed by the devil, had somehow pushed the devil itself back out. The phantom form was left entirely exposed in the open air. Ant had never anticipated anything like this — as though caught between two forces at once, he found himself abruptly ejected from Fiat's body.
Suddenly stripped of anything to anchor itself to, the devil's projection let out a shriek, its form flickering — and every illusion it had woven around Fiat vanished at once. But that very shriek gave Fiat's true position away; he'd only just managed to slip out of sight when the sound betrayed him, snapping him back into visibility more than ten cubits away, his face stunned. And there, right beside him, the shadow of Ant reappeared, already reaching to merge back into him.
A devil descending through projection couldn't survive long without something to anchor it, which was why Ant tried to reclaim Fiat's body at once. But Evan's blade-light had already arrived. Though the devil existed only as a phantom, the will behind that strike shook through it and knocked it loose again in an instant.
Ant roared in fury and shock, while Fiat seized the moment to bolt, his form fading once more. Ant turned back, casting one vicious glare at Evan, then made to chase after Fiat again. Fiat had summoned him of his own free will in the first place — Ant had never expected this many complications, and possessing an ability-user who no longer wanted him was nearly impossible without consent. His safest option now was still Fiat. If this dragged on any longer, the fabric of this world itself would start pushing back.
Evan shifted his stance. Grand Disintegration was already primed. A flash of light, and the air around them shattered into chaos, descending straight down over Ant's head.