Chapter 181: Sympathy For The Devil?
Chapter 181: Sympathy For The Devil?
Leaning his back against the cold, heavy iron of the cell bars, Loki let a sharp smirk cut across his face. Down the stone corridor, the rhythmic, heavy thuds of boots announced the arrival of King Owen Balder.
Loki cleared his throat, locking his gaze onto the approaching king, and began to sing with an absurdly theatrical, echoing flair:
"Please allow me to introduce myself... I’m a man of wealth and taste~♪ I’ve been around for a long, long year... Stole many a man’s soul and faith~♪!"
He snapped open his posture, standing up straight. His smirking eyes remained glued to Owen’s single blue eye as he belted out the iconic track—infusing it with more dramatic, arena-rock energy than a classic frontman.
"Pleased to meet you... Hope you guess my name~♪ But what’s puzzling you~♪ Is the nature of my game!"
Owen stopped just outside the cell. With a tired, authoritative wave of his hand, he dismissed the nearby guards, waiting until their footsteps faded into the depths of the dungeon before lowering his voice.
"Hey Loki," Owen grunted, a brow twitching. "Isn't that the ending song from the movie Interview with the Vampire?!"
Loki leaned his face flush against the iron bars, a wry grin tugging at his lips. "Yeah, but the original version was sung by the Rolling Stones. Anyway, enough about why I’m singing about me being the Devil. What is really going on out there?"
Owen let out a heavy, visible sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire kingdom. "It’s a total FUBAR situation. The good news? You didn’t permanently kill anyone. The bad news? You caused an absolute metric fuck-ton of property damage. The worst news? Thorin went and made himself emotionally involved with a highly erratic Amazon ambassador princess who wants your head on a spike."
Loki chuckled, entirely unbothered. "So, according to the Amazons, I am basically just guilty of breathing. What does this mean for me, the kingdom, and them?"
Owen scratched his head, looking at Loki with a mixture of pity and dark amusement. He decided to just pull the proverbial band-aid off. "Ayala spilled the beans. Now that the truth has been shouted for the world to hear, it turns out she’s your second cousin. Queen Hervor is your great-grandmother, and that crazy Amazon princess, Diana, is your second cousin."
Loki’s jaw dropped. The smug smirk instantly vanished, leaving his face utterly paralyzed with shock. For a long moment, his brain scrambled to process the generational nightmare of his family tree. Finally, he blurted out a line from an old Earth show that perfectly encapsulated his entirely messed-up life:
"Fuck you! Fuck me! What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?!"
Owen burst out laughing, deeply amused by Loki's sheer bewilderment. Ayala had kept that secret locked down tight, hidden snug away from everyone.
"She didn’t tell you because the Amazon Queen naturally isn’t the type of woman to acknowledge she gave birth to a male Amazon Devil," Owen chuckled, shaking his head. "But you are a living, breathing fact, haha. Well, unfortunately, a full-scale war with the Amazons is the highly likely outcome now."
Thud!
Loki let his forehead dead-drop against the iron bars, groaning aloud into the dark cell. "Damn, this sucks balls. Sorry, Owen. I wish I’d known who she was before I acted. But one thing's for sure—I just won’t let them take Ayala and Layla."
Owen’s laughter faded, replaced by a serious, calculating expression as he leaned against the opposite side of the bars. "So, what about you and Thorin? How does this affect our Former God Alliance?"
Loki tilted his eyes upward, looking at the king with an amused shrug. "There is nothing in the rules stating we have to get along all the time. This whole mess started because of my own dumb choices and scams anyway. Thorin actually did the right thing by attacking me, though he's clearly suffering from a serious sidekick complex."
Owen’s single blue eye went wide with a sudden spark of realization. "Oh! Like how Robin got fed up with being Batman’s shadow and went on his own path as Nightwing, but they were still family in the end!"
Loki nodded slowly, though internally he knew absolutely nothing about what happened to Robin after his own stint as the boy wonder. "Yeah... something like that. Well, as long as he doesn’t get pissed about Baihu backslapping him into tomorrow, it’s all good on my end."
Owen shifted his weight, looking Loki up and down with a suspicious squint. "Hey Loki, the arresting Mage explicitly stated you had zero personal belongings or space items on you. Is that true?"
Loki grinned like a maniac. He held up his hand, and with a faint shimmer, one of his Space Rings materialized on his finger, quickly followed by his prized, master-crafted lock-picking set.
"My Hidden Gu completely cloaks all of my trump cards," Loki gloated. "But it seems your famous True Sight Eye can’t see things hidden inside an anti-magic area?!"
Owen froze. A look of genuine shock washed over the ancient king's face. In all of his 973 years of life, he had never once noticed this tiny, critical flaw in his Cursed Eyes.
"Damn, Loki... that is absolutely nuts," Owen whispered, visibly shaken. "You are completely right. You’re officially the first person to ever crack a vital flaw in these eyes. Let’s keep this locked down strictly between our closest circle, alright?"
For the next hour or so, Loki filled Owen in on his recent exploits, offering a heavily sanitized version of his misadventures at the Sect Summit. He even casually admitted to his torrid affair with the Emperor’s wife, though he was quick to defend himself. "Look, it was totally her own damn fault for drugging herself, and the Succubus Locket didn't help matters either."
Owen looked torn between laughing his ass off, crying over the impending diplomatic fallout, or giving Loki a high-five for successfully bedding Su Mei.
Taking advantage of Owen's stunned mood, Loki pleaded, "See? My luck is historically garbage. Maybe you shouldn’t send me as your stand-in to the Mermaid Kingdom... or at the very least, tell Ariel that I am pretending to be you so she won't get anywhere near me?"
Owen nodded, but he immediately held out an open palm. "Alright, I will send word, don’t worry. Plus, with the Mermaid Curse, she won’t let you touch her anyway. The absolute second your skin contacts hers, she will instantly feel the spiritual hold Opal has over you. But just for safety's sake..." Owen grinned mischieviously, "give me all of those damn cursed pink aphrodisiac pills before you go. You know, just in case. Haha!"
Owen unlocked the cell door, deactivating the heavy wards laced with anti-aura and anti-magic fields. Stepping out into the corridor, Loki gladly handed over the pink pills. He didn't care for them anyway—they were nothing but pure, unadulterated trouble.
"Do these things really work?" Owen asked, examining the pills with a curious glint in his eye.
"Yeah," Loki sighed, shivering slightly at the memory. "But you will completely lose control, and some of your memories will end up totally jumbled and forgotten. If you ever take one, pray to whatever gods are left that you have a partner nearby to help you ride it out."
Loki then paused, pointing back at the open cell. "Want me back in? I know a bunch more sad rock songs about getting locked up. Like, 'I fought the law and the law won'? I can keep singing for a whole week."
Owen, who stood at the exact same height and possessed the identical, broad-shouldered muscular build as Loki, glared at him. "Get out, damn it. The other two have already left the dungeons. Anyways, how are you so sure you can flawlessly fake being me? And can you actually show me this Nether-Ice magic?"
Moving into a deeply fortified, secret subterranean chamber, Loki put on a private show. He demonstrated the terrifying new chilling abilities he could wield while using his Hao Hun persona, explaining the eerie, necromantic side effects that automatically raised the dead from anyone the frost killed.
He then explained his method for copying Owen’s exact mannerisms and physical posture.
"I asked Angelica to help me impersonate your movements," Loki explained.
The immediate look of profound regret and embarrassment on Owen’s face made the old king blush furiously. Loki mentally noted that while he wasn't about to manually adjust his own junk to perfectly match the king's, Owen was actually remarkably well-endowed for a normal human—miles ahead of whatever tragic anatomy he had possessed in his past Earth life.
Before they parted ways, Owen took one final precaution to ensure the upcoming political deception was entirely airtight. Shucking his royal vestments down to his boxers, Owen exposed his exact musculature and bone structure. Loki focused, memorizing every line, scar, and density level, before flawlessly replicating the build down to the millimeter.
They brought in Gondul to perform a strict "no-touching" visual evaluation. After a agonizingly tense inspection, Loki’s physical fabrication passed her test with flying colors.
To seal the deal, Owen handed over a pristine, glowing magical artifact. It was a 9th Circle Death element ring that Owen had used back in his adventurous youth.
"When you wear it," Owen explained, "it will force your passive aura to radiate as a pure, undisputed 9th Circle Death element, regardless of what mode or core you are currently channeling. It'll trick Queen Atlantis into believing you're King Owen Balder."
Loki slipped it on, realizing the sheer utility of the prize. The ring would be a massive asset even when he was acting as Hao Hun, allowing him to seamlessly shift his observable magical core's element right in front of onlookers. Furthermore, the ring acted as the King’s Royal Seal in the event that Loki had to sign official state documents under the sea.
Damn, Loki thought, a sweatdrop forming on the back of his head. Me holding the literal Royal Seal of the kingdom is a phenomenally bad idea.
"While you're down there drawing the eyes of the entire world," Owen said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "I'm going after my real objective. I found a brand-new Secret Realm that absolutely no one else has discovered. I trust no one but our small, core group with this."
Loki listened intently as Owen detailed the location. "I am going to be the first person to breach it. It’s an underground passageway that perfectly hides the opening, and like the Dark Garden, it doesn’t seem to be a portal that ever closes. It’s located deep within the Dwarven Mountains. The realm itself is tied directly to the Air elemental plane, which is exactly why its opening is entirely invisible to normal senses."
As for the fallout regarding Thorin and Diana? Loki quickly learned the details. Thorin had acted like a lost, confused puppy; he had only attacked Loki to land a single, symbolic hit in the fight before being immediately de-escalated and released after a long, stern talking-to by Owen. Princess Diana had been cut loose after giving a formal statement. Her status as both a foreign princess and an active ambassador granted her diplomatic immunity, though she was hit with a massive fine to pay for the severe property damage. She was issued a final, scathing warning to stay far away from Loki’s family, under the explicit threat of immediate, permanent deportation from the Balder Kingdom.
Armed with a hoard of fresh intel and a mutual trading of high-level secrets, Loki was officially processed out and walked free from the gloomy dungeons of the Albion capital.
The next few weeks flew by in a chaotic blur.
Loki officially moved his massive household into Marquee Sky’s old, sprawling mansion. Between the unpacking and the daily logistics, he spent his hours locked away with Ayala, intensely studying and mastering the complex Dual Ability skill. It was grueling work, but it paid off, allowing him to simultaneously activate two Vanguard aura skills at once—mirroring the dual-activation combat style that Thorin used to dominate the battlefield.
As this slow, domestic lifestyle settled in, the monumental news of the new Triple Eclipse Holy Son, Hao Hun, finally rippled through the general populace of the Balder Kingdom, sparking endless rumors and political waves.
True to the kingdom's warnings, Loki saw neither hide nor hair of Princess Diana or any other naive, aggressive Amazons. Thorin kept his distance as well, only approaching Loki when it was strictly required by the strict bylaws of the Seven Former God rules. At the very least, the fierce warrior hadn't turned overtly hostile.
Up north, major geopolitical shifts were underway. The Demonic Sect was officially granted ownership of the vast, untamed lands of the Infinite Sky forest—the very same wilderness where Thorin and Loki used to hunt. The territory was designated as the foundation for the brand-new Sister Beastmaster Sect. Ku Mu and Zia Qing spent the bulk of the month working tirelessly alongside Sylvia up north to get the massive construction project off the ground.
Meanwhile, Loki's harem and legacy programs were yielding wildly successful results. Within his specialized Sect Point program, another three of the six Beastmaster women had successfully conceived. They officially graduated from the breeding group, receiving a full refund of their hard-earned 8,888 sect points.
The sensational medical updates regarding Nari also sent shockwaves through the kingdom. Appraised by high-level mages, it was officially confirmed that he was a rare, highly coveted three-element magic baby. The revelation instantly solidified Loki Sky’s reputation across the lands as a certified, miracle-working baby-making machine.
But the most unexpected, borderline absurd development of the month was Loki's recent string of dates. He had been splitting his romantic time between the lovely Zia Qing and, unthinkably, Frigg.
The stoic, intensely analytical Valkyrie had been conducting deep research on how to bind souls closer together. She ultimately deduced that forging deep romantic and intense physical bonds would exponentially raise her compatibility metrics, ensuring her success in permanently becoming one of Loki's active Summons. Because of this, the usually reserved, battlefield-hardened Valkyrie had rigidly insisted that they try dating right before the departure for the Inner Sea. Given that she would be playing the dangerous part of a disguised Gondul at his side under the waves, Loki couldn't exactly say no. He had, quite brilliantly, been completely conned into a romance by his own future summon.
That brought him to his absolute limit. Sitting quietly in his chamber, Loki could feel the profound, pulsing resonance within his spiritual sea. He was right on the precipice of breaking through to his Life core’s 7th Circle Summoner class.
The upcoming itinerary was completely packed, mapping out the next few months of his crazy life:
The next month would be spent deep underwater, completely submerged in the high-stakes politics of pretending to be King Owen. Immediately following his return, the kingdom’s intensive legislation month would begin—the exact same window of time where Sylvia was scheduled to give birth to their very first daughter.
Right after that hectic month concluded, the delivery ward would stay packed; Shade and Yin Meng were both due to give birth to daughters, while Lana would be giving birth to his second—and tightly planned last—son before his impending departure for the dangerous, uncharted lands of the Far East.
Loki exhaled a long, heavy breath, rubbing his temples as he looked out the window. The fourth month of the year was officially drawing to a close. There was exactly one month left until the massive, kingdom-altering Summer Council Meeting would officially commence.
"Phew..." Loki muttered to the empty room, a rogue smirk returning to his lips. "Time to go meet some mermaids."