Chapter 116: Demon
Deep within the pitch-black, cavernous expanse of the subterranean corridors, Lucia and his two companion demigods stepped heavily across stone flagstones buried beneath a stagnant, thin layer of running waste. The dark water splashed beneath their iron greaves to release a thick, sickening stench of rot, dead river silt, and long-accumulated waste. Apart from the deep, hollow echoes of their own rhythmic footprints bouncing against the monumental vaulted masonry, the vast wilderness of the under-realm registered absolute zero sound.
Prince Radahn un-latched his visor by a fraction, his voice dropping into a puzzled baritone. "When measured against the active parameters guarding Tolisha's clinic... the environment surrounding this primary descent shaft scores as exceptionally quiet. The perimeter houses zero wildlife entries."
"The layout must comprise a calculated, deliberate arrangement engineered by the high masters managing the festival," Lucia analyzed, his silver eyes narrowing through his helmet slits. "The primary anchorage points connecting the public amphitheaters straight into the central waterways are fixed nodes across the map. Whether their strategies are chasing a high-value entertainment spectacle or merely securing the fundamental infrastructure of the arena estates, the ministries are conformed to fortify these entry zones with extensive defensive arrays—implying this specific sector operates as a temporary, semi-safe perimeter."
He smoothly channeled a subtle thread of internal mana directly into the core of the Dark Moon Talisman Ranni had hand-delivered to his breast pocket. Instantly, a faint, completely translucent ripple of anti-magic energy spread outward like a silent wave. At the precise markers of ten, three hundred, and five hundred paces across the darkness, a sequence of brief, microscopic flashes illuminated the masonry, un-veiling the floating silhouettes of three scrying crystal spheres hovering within the void. Concurrently, a dense, intricate geometric grid of defensive runic lines materialized across the damp floorboards before fading back into the gray stone.
A low, quiet chuckle escaped his lips. "The calculation balances. Operating under a runic density of this altitude, even those rabid, giant-blooded Icefield Trolls lack the raw thermodynamic voltage to forcefully breach the perimeter. Furthermore, observe the sparse, un-optimized placement mapping those scrying crystal spheres; the Association recorders possess absolute zero intention to broadcast our warband executing a match within these boundary lanes."
Knight Kristoff offered a slow nod of agreement, his heavy gauntlet resting against his heater shield. "Your Royal Highness's deduction stands text-perfect. The other nineteen warbands registered to the brackets have been deployed at geographic starting coordinates vastly removed from our current sector. It scores as mathematically improbable for an intersection or a high-fatality conflict to fracture this quadrant across the opening watches of the festival."
"Our vanguard will advance directly to link our shields with Lord Morgott's outpost according to the blueprint," Lucia commanded, his gaze piercing the absolute, unbroken darkness stretching into the farther warrens. "Along the transit routes, our steel will systematically neutralize every independent mercenary squad intersecting our tracking lines—omitting the private proxies representing the houses of Duolis and Osarion. We must ensure those common mortal operators lack the capacity to penetrate the core zones simply to throw their lives away across the deeper pits. Across a strategic battlefield where monsters are conformed to tear at monsters... the census preserves zero vacancies for common men."
Concurrently, exactly sixty leagues removed across the twisting labyrinth of the central aqueducts, a three-man mercenary warband stood locked in a brutal, high-friction melee, their boots submerged waist-deep within a roaring, toxic flood torrent to contest a lone Icefield Troll.
The target rose as a colossal, mountain-faced abomination standing well over seven meters in physical height. The rushing black water, which rose high enough to choke the breath from a standard human citizen, barely crested the thick ankles of the giant. Its massive frame was entirely draped in a heavy, grease-choked coat of grayish-white arctic fur, and its feral, jaw-split countenance housed a pair of immense, copper-bell-shaped eyes that gleamed with a rabid, bloodshot crimson luminescence across the gloom.
A horrific, jagged historical laceration had violently torn a massive cavity straight through the center of its abdomen. Nested deep within the exposed, hollow muscle walls sat a monumental wooden plague carved from ancient Erdtree roots, its face intricately engraved with dozens of binding liturgical runes. Millions of sickly, pale alchemical tendrils sprouted from the borders of the wood, weaving their fibers directly into the withered, necrotic tissue of the giant's vital tracts; its surface periodically released a blinding flash of golden light that carried the un-yielding, crushing weight of imperial divine grace.
This defined the supreme administrative punishment that every single Mountain Demon captured across the northern frontier by the legions of the Golden Dynasty was conformed to undergo. Their ancestral Eye of the Evil God was systematically, surgically gouged out from their bellies, and a solid wooden talisman forged from the living roots of the sacred tree was permanently implanted into the raw bone to completely, absolute freeze the residual primordial fire power festering within the Mountain Demon's marrow.
Nevertheless, even with their divinity castrated by the seals, these Icefield Trolls—who clutched the ancient blood of the Fire Giants within their veins—still commanded a terrifying, world-breaking physical strength that out-registered the caps of common humanity. In a direct, one-on-one field collision, even the most exceptionally powerful, veteran Golden Knights found it an arduous task to withstand the raw kinetic velocity of their charges.
However, on this watch, the isolated Mountain Demon was not facing the shield of a solitary knight; it had intersected an elite mercenary squad whose blades had been meticulously honed across decades of border campaigns and high-fatality arena tournaments.
A massive, steel-clad vanguard warrior standing over two meters in height, a monumental tower shield and a heavy iron spear clutched within his gauntlets, stood anchored like an absolute boulder fronting the giant. He manually absorbed the un-refined, reckless kinetic energy of the troll's sweeps with a flawless defensive posture. Parallel to his anvil, a graceful, shadow-veiled female silhouette weaved effortlessly through the pressurized winds generated by the melee, her serrated daggers executing a sequence of rapid, fluid lacerations directly across the giant's primary tendon bundles and joint ligaments—sending thick sprays of dark blood into the water amidst the demon's furious, agonizing screams of pain.
Elevated upon a ruined limestone aqueduct platform a hundred meters removed from the splash zone, a burly marksman holding a gargantuan composite great-bow narrowed his hawk-like eyes. He gathered the full measure of his physical power, repeatedly drawing the thick sinew string back to his ear to unleash a sequence of massive iron-headed bolts as thick as a warrior's wrist.
WHOOOOOOOSH—!
Accompanied by a violent screech of displaced air, the iron projectiles pierced straight through the dense muscle grouping mapping the Mountain Demon's back, leaving bowl-sized exit wounds surrounding the splintered shafts. The monumental kinetic impact sent the colossal giant staggering forward across the current, and the heavy vanguard warrior seized the precise watch of instability to launch a catastrophic thrust from behind the rim of his tower shield—driving his steel straight through the giant's chest cavity!
"Lilith!" the heavy-clad warrior roared across the spray, calling out to his comrade.
"Seal your maw, Zach! My intellect requires zero reminders from your station!"
The female assassin, her daggers spinning through her fingers, stomped her boot directly onto the Mountain Demon's buckled knee joint. Her silhouette fluttered through the mist exactly like a predatory butterfly, ascending his torso to dominate his shoulder line. With a sudden, explosive release of her internal physical parameters, she forcefully drove both blades straight through the giant's temples from opposing flanks, the steel meeting in the center of the skull.
With a brutal, calculated twist of her wrists, she ensured her steel had thoroughly shredded the target's neural core before executing a smooth withdrawal, flipping her frame gracefully through the air to drop cleanly back into the floodwaters. The Mountain Demon dropped heavily onto its knees against the flags, its jugular gushing a fountain of thick crimson, yet absolute zero drops of the waste managed to splatter against the clean leathers of the female assassin.
"Damn it all to hell, Lilith! Could your movements not calculate a minor bit of caution—the grease of this beast has completely saturated my plate!" the vanguard warrior known as Zach grumbled, shaking his shield.
The female killer rolled her emerald eyes with a seductive, mocking pout. "Why release such a dramatic vocabulary, big boy? Do the operational regulations of the guild not state that the heavy vanguard is permanently responsible for the execution of these dirty, exhausting tasks?"
"But my tongue has told you un-counted times past—your mind commands zero comprehension of how many gold runes this custom plate cost my house stable! Conducting the maintenance and cleansing the blood from these interlocking joints is an absolute nightmare!"
"The argument is balanced; let the line clear," the distant marksman called out, executing a clean drop from his high platform to trudge through the water, a relaxed smile breaking across his features as he approached his warband.
"Zach, her tongue merely projects a minor bit of teasing theater; her heart holds zero genuine intent to insult your armor. And as for your actions, Lilith, your focus genuinely requires a higher level of caution regarding these extra splatters down the timeline. Without Zach's shield anchoring the frontal tracking lines, our twin daggers wouldn't have liquidated a target of this geometric mass with such an elementary expenditure of resources."
"Nominal, nominal, Captain. The calculation registers my error; the fault is archived under my name for this watch!" Lilith stated, raising her bloodied palms in a mock gesture of absolute surrender.
Sensing that the female blade had voluntarily stepped back from the friction, Zach desisted from pressing the bureaucratic argument further, tossing his arm through the air to signify the closing of the ledger.
Right at that precise cross of data, a scrying crystal sphere anchored to the high ceiling vaulted out from its cloaking void, projecting a brilliant, shimmering screen of orange light across the water plane: Sharon's Warband has verified the liquidation of Icefield Troll [1] execution tally. Allocation: 1 Hunting Point. Current Tournament Rank: 1st.
The captain-marksman smiled with a deep, professional satisfaction, his quill preparing to update his log. "The statistics verify our velocity out-rates the capabilities clutched by our competitors. Let our line accelerate its pacing to maintain this absolute advantage—"
He had yet to finalize the tactical command when a thick, sudden taste of hot metal violently flooded the back of his throat, rendering his jaws completely incapable of releasing a secondary syllable across the space.
A microsecond later, an immense volume of dark arterial blood came gushing furiously from his lips. He lowered his eyes in absolute, un-comprehending horror to audit his own chassis—discovering that entirely beyond the awareness of his sensory networks, a cold, jagged iron blade had cleanly, systematically pierced straight through the center of his throat from the absolute rear of his neck neck!
"SULLIVAN—!!!" Lilith unleashed a heart-wrenching, agonizing scream of pure panic.
However, the trajectory of her scream was ruthlessly, instantaneously severed the exact watch it cleared her teeth. Moving within an absolute phantom slipstream whose velocity scored multiple tiers beyond the tracking capabilities of a mortal eye, a secondary massive greatsword—its cutting edges completely covered in the jagged, brutal ridges of harvested Omen Horns—sliced cleanly through her neck masonry without a single watch of warning, freezing her facial features into a permanent, horrified expression of total bewilderment as her head loosed from her shoulders.
Years of raw, blood-soaked experience gathered across border battlefields and high-fatality gladiatorial campaigns allowed Zach to forcefully snap his consciousness out from its daze within a brief half-second of runway. Relying strictly on pure, hard-wired muscle memory, his arms instantaneously hoisted his tower shield, locking every vital terminal point dividing his throat from his groin behind an un-bending wall of iron, while concurrently swinging his heavy steel spear through a sweeping, blind circle with the full measure of his muscle—attempting to violently shatter the ghostly figure anchoring his rear quadrant.
BANG—!!!
A heavy, immense kinetic impact resonated from behind his spine. Zach's heart registered a sudden flare of survival joy, his muscles winding to execute a rapid pivot to finish the staggered assassin with a straight frontal thrust.
But the exact microsecond his torso executed the turn, his features froze into an expression of absolute, bone-chilling horror—discovering that his steel spear lacked the capacity to shift its weight by a single millimeter across the space!
Zach stiffly, slowly veered his neck vertebrae around to audit his weapon. The high-purity steel spear tip that should have comfortably shattered the ribs of any mortal assassin was currently locked within an un-yielding, iron-like grip—firmly clutched by a solitary hand encased within a heavy leather perfumer's glove. The tanned hide of the glove was completely saturated in massive, mottled black-and-red stains, looking exactly like the ancient, dried layers of blood left behind by decades of continuous, un-monitored slaughter.
"Hehehe... my house petitions your forgiveness across the dark, mortal. Your vanguard defines the absolute first collection of entities my steel has intersected across this moon... but my heart simply lacked the capacity to resist the harvest!"
A low, dry, and thoroughly hoarse hiss of a laugh resonated from the shadows fronting his chest, and then Zach's processing centers sustained a sudden, terrifying wave of dizziness—his floating vision monitoring the bizarre perspective of his own headless, steel-clad body and the mangled carcasses of his warband collapsing limply into the swirling red water below. Finally, his dying sight settled onto the silhouette anchoring the darkness a few steps removed from his remains.
There stood a hunched, heavily muscled, and thoroughly demonic figure, a permanent, leering, and obscenely ecstatic brass smile cast across a visor plates that were completely ringed by a crown of jagged Omen horns.
"Demon..."
He murmured the terminal syllable within the fading basements of his remaining consciousness, and then the absolute totality of the world was violently plunged into a boundless, silent cosmic darkness.
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