Episode-592
Chapter : 1163
The steel serpents, magnificent constructs of a King’s absolute will, crashed against the sphere. And they vanished. They did not shatter. They did not bounce off. The moment they touched the event horizon of that perfect nothingness, their physical, conceptual reality was simply… erased. It was a perfect, absolute defense against a perfect, absolute attack.
“Cute,” Beelzebub murmured, the word a whisper of profound disappointment. A flicker of genuine annoyance crossed his beautiful, terrible face. The human shell, the elegant suit of silk and condescension, was beginning to fray at the edges. The true, ancient, and monstrous nature beneath was stirring. “Is that all? A storm of pointy metal things? I was expecting… more.”
Roy did not answer with words. The remaining nine hundred thousand shards of steel that orbited him suddenly stopped their chaotic swirl. In a single, breathtaking instant, they all aligned, their points facing Beelzebub. They formed a perfect, massive, hollow sphere around the demon’s bubble of nothingness, a cage of a million waiting blades.
Then, Roy clenched his fist.
The sphere imploded. A million steel shards, a million individual vectors of destruction, converged on the single point in space that Beelzebub occupied. It was not an attack; it was a compression of reality, an attempt to crush the demon and his void in a man-made singularity of pure, physical force.
The sound of the impact was not a clang, but a single, pure, universe-shattering GONG that was felt more than heard, a note that vibrated in the very soul. The world went white. A shockwave of pure, kinetic energy erupted outwards, a silent, invisible tsunami that vaporized everything in a hundred-yard radius.
Lloyd and Ben, who had been watching the duel with a mixture of awe and professional analysis, were sent tumbling, their bodies shielded only by a last-second, reflexive wall of Ben’s steel.
When the light faded, the scene was one of stark, terrible simplicity.
The cage of blades was gone. The bubble of nothingness was gone.
The two sovereigns stood twenty feet apart, both of them utterly unharmed. But the game had changed.
A thin trickle of black, viscous blood, a substance that was not blood at all, was running from the corner of Beelzebub’s perfect lips. He touched it with a gloved finger, looked at it, and then a slow, genuinely delighted smile spread across his face. It was not a smile of mockery or condescension. It was a smile of pure, predatory joy. The smile of a hunter who has finally found a worthy prey.
“Oh,” Beelzebub whispered, his voice a purr of genuine, ecstatic surprise. “You actually made me bleed.”
The air around him began to writhe. The elegant suit of black silk seemed to melt and run like hot tar, revealing glimpses of a form beneath that was a blasphemy of chitin, shadow, and a thousand screaming, insectile eyes. His shadow on the ground elongated, twisted, and grew, becoming a monstrous, horned thing that was no longer a shadow, but a second, more honest reflection of his true being.
“It has been centuries since anyone has managed that,” he continued, his voice now a layered, resonant chorus of a hundred whispering voices. “Centuries. I had almost forgotten what it felt like. This is… wonderful.”
He had been toying with them. He had been playing a game. Now, the game was over. He was getting serious.
"In honor of this delightful new sensation," Beelzebub announced, the chorus of voices rising in pitch, "I shall grant you the privilege of witnessing a piece of my true art. A technique I reserve for the truly special occasions. I call it… The Seventh Bell of Sorrow."
He raised a single, pale finger. The world held its breath.
Roy, seeing the shift, knowing that whatever was coming was a power of a different order, reacted instantly. He did not prepare an attack. He prepared a fortress.
He recalled his spirits. The war in the sky ended in an instant. Gog and Magog did not return to their spiritual forms; they dissolved, their colossal, Sovereign-Level energy flowing back towards their master. Gog’s essence of absolute substance, of living mountain, flowed into the ground, turning the very bedrock for a mile around into a single, unbreakable plate of diamond-hard granite. Magog’s essence of absolute storm flowed into the air, creating a swirling, multi-layered vortex of kinetic and atmospheric energy, a hurricane contained within a dome.
And Roy’s own Steel Blood power, the million shards of his blade storm, wove themselves into this new reality, creating a final, interlocking, and perfectly constructed dome of shimmering, self-repairing Ferrum steel.
Chapter : 1164
He had created his ultimate defense. A shield of living mountain, of primordial storm, and of absolute steel, a three-layered bulwark designed to withstand the wrath of a god. He had encased a significant portion of the city, including his two sons and what remained of his army, within this sanctuary.
He stood at its center, a king protecting his kingdom, and waited.
Across the ruin, Beelzebub’s finger twitched. A sound was heard. Not a roar. Not a scream.
A single, soft, and heartbreakingly beautiful chime. The sound of a tiny, silver bell, ringing once.
And from him, a wave of pure, absolute, and silent blackness erupted. It was not darkness. It was not shadow. It was nothing. A wave of conceptual erasure, of soul-eating silence, of the final, cold end of all things.
The wave of absolute nothingness met the shield of absolute reality.
And the world went white.
The silent, conceptual war between the two sovereigns, Roy and Beelzebub, had reached a fragile, terrifying equilibrium. A wave of absolute, soul-eating nothingness met a shield forged from the fundamental realities of mountain, storm, and steel. The world held its breath, caught in the silent scream between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
Down below, in the ruins of the mortal world, Viscount Rubel saw his chance.
The grand, apocalyptic stage upon which he was supposed to be the star performer had been rudely and unceremoniously hijacked. His own magnificent, soul-bartered power had been rendered a pathetic footnote in a war of true gods. The fury and despair that had consumed him were now being eclipsed by a more primal, and far more practical, instinct: survival.
He was a pawn in a game far larger than he had ever imagined, and he knew, with the cold, hard certainty of a lifelong schemer, that pawns were disposable. His new master, Beelzebub, had not intervened out of loyalty; he had intervened to protect an asset. And if that asset became a liability, it would be discarded without a second thought. Rubel’s only path forward was to escape this crucible, to retreat into the shadows where he could lick his wounds, consolidate his power, and wait for a more opportune moment to reclaim his destiny.
He began to pull his own demonic energy inward, preparing to dissolve into the corrupted shadows of Ashworth, to become a ghost in his own ruined kingdom. He took a single, furtive step back, a rat preparing to scurry back into its hole.
But the hole was no longer there.
His path was blocked. Not by a wall of steel or a curtain of fire, but by a new, and profoundly unwelcome, presence. Two of them.
Lloyd and Ben stood before him, two silent, imposing figures who had seemingly materialized from the very air. They were no longer the battered, wounded soldiers he had seen moments before. The cursed wound on Lloyd’s shoulder was gone, sealed by a thin, perfect layer of crystalline ice. Ben’s own injuries were mended, his form once again a pillar of unyielding, articulated steel. They stood shoulder to shoulder, a unified front of cold, hard, and deeply personal intent.
“Leaving so soon, Uncle?” Lloyd asked, his voice a low, casual thing that was utterly devoid of the respect the title implied. It was a drawl laced with a cold, almost cheerful amusement. “The party’s just getting started. It would be rude to leave before the final act.”
Rubel’s demonic eyes, which had been darting around for an escape route, now narrowed into slits of pure, concentrated hatred. “You,” he spat, the word a curse. “The whelp and the cripple’s whelp. You think you can stand in my way? I am a king! I am a god!”
“You’re a middle-manager with a fancy new uniform,” Lloyd countered, his smile not reaching his eyes. “And your performance review is long overdue.”
Ben said nothing. He simply stepped forward, his one good eye, a blazing point of blue-white fire, fixed on Rubel. The very air around him began to warp, to grow heavy and thick with a contained, terrifying power. "You will answer for my father," he stated, the words not a threat, but a simple, brutal statement of fact. His mastery over his Steel Blood, a power he had kept leashed and controlled, now began to unfurl in its full, terrible glory. It was a presence that surpassed even Lloyd’s own B-Rank, a chillingly precise art form that felt less like magic and more like a fundamental law of physics being rewritten.
Rubel laughed, a high, unhinged sound. "You think your pathetic mastery of metal can challenge me? I wield the very fires of the Abyss!"