Episode-1021
Chapter : 2041
He looked at the towering Aegis suit. Beelzebub had just ripped the chest plate off. The demon looked inside, expecting to find a juicy human.
When he saw the empty seat, Beelzebub froze. He blinked his large, yellow eyes. He looked confused. He sniffed the empty cockpit.
"Empty?" Beelzebub whined. "Where is the filling?"
"Right here," Lloyd said.
Beelzebub spun around. He saw the small, human figure standing in the mud twenty feet away.
The Prince laughed. It was a dry, rattling sound. "You came out? You took off your shell? Are you offering yourself to me?"
"No," Lloyd said. He stood up straight. He didn't raise a weapon. He didn't summon a spirit. He just stood there, his hands loose at his sides. "I'm putting you on a diet."
Beelzebub’s eyes narrowed. "Arrogance. It tastes bitter. I prefer fear."
He waved a hand. "Glutton, eat him."
The amorphous shadow-blob, the Glutton of Hell, shrieked. It abandoned the half-eaten robot and surged toward Lloyd. It moved like a tidal wave of tar, opening its massive maw to swallow him whole.
Lloyd didn't move. He watched the shadow come. He waited.
In the Aegis, he had relied on armor and guns. He had relied on mass. But Beelzebub’s power was "Matter Deletion." The more matter you threw at him, the more fuel he had.
So Lloyd needed to use something that wasn't matter.
He closed his eyes for a split second. He reached into his bloodline. He bypassed the [Steel Blood]. Steel was matter. Steel could be eaten.
He went deeper. He went to the Austin bloodline. The power of the Black Ring Eyes. The power of Concepts.
Concepts have no weight. They have no calories. You can't eat an idea.
Lloyd’s eyes snapped open. The whites of his eyes turned pitch black. His irises glowed with a brilliant, spinning blue ring.
The shadow was five feet away. The smell of rot was overwhelming.
"Void Step," Lloyd whispered.
He didn't run. He folded space.
The shadow lunged, its mouth closing around where Lloyd had been. But its jaws snapped shut on empty air.
Lloyd appeared ten feet to the left, standing on a rotting log. There was no sound of movement, just a faint distortion in the air, like a glitch in a video video.
The Glutton roared in frustration. It turned and lunged again.
Lloyd stepped again. Blink. He was behind it.
Blink. He was on the other side of the swamp.
He was moving through the gaps in reality. He was faster than the eye could track because he wasn't crossing the distance; he was deleting it.
Beelzebub watched this dance with growing irritation. "Stop moving!" he screeched. "Stop hopping around like a flea! It makes the meat tough!"
The Prince extended both hands. The air around him shimmered. He wasn't just inhaling now; he was creating a gravity well. A "Vacuum Domain."
The swamp water began to rise, pulled toward Beelzebub. The trees bent inward. The air rushed past Lloyd’s ears, dragging him toward the center.
"You can't outrun hunger!" Beelzebub yelled. "Everything comes to the mouth eventually!"
Lloyd dug his boots into the log. He felt the pull. It was strong. It was like fighting a hurricane. If he slipped, he would be dragged into the Prince’s aura and dissolved.
But Lloyd wasn't trying to run away anymore.
"I'm not running," Lloyd said through gritted teeth. "I'm positioning."
He let the vacuum pull him. He let himself slide forward, riding the current of air.
Beelzebub grinned. "Yes! Come to me!"
Lloyd accelerated. He used the enemy’s own pull to gain speed. He was flying toward the Prince now, skimming over the yellow water.
Thirty feet. Twenty feet.
Beelzebub opened his mouth wide, ready to consume.
Ten feet.
Lloyd didn't attack with a sword. He didn't shoot a fireball.
He attacked with a definition.
He focused all of his mental energy into his right eye. The blue ring spun so fast it looked like a solid disk of light.
[Concept Magic: Seal of Inertia.]
He didn't target Beelzebub’s body. He targeted the space around him. He targeted the suction itself.
In physics, inertia is the resistance of an object to any change in its velocity. Lloyd took that concept and weaponized it. He imposed a rule on the air in front of him: Stop.
A wall of absolute stillness slammed into the vacuum.
Chapter : 2042
It was like a car hitting a concrete wall at a hundred miles an hour. The rushing air stopped instantly. The water that was being pulled toward Beelzebub crashed into an invisible barrier and exploded outward in a massive spray.
The backlash hit Beelzebub. The Prince wasn't expecting his own gravity to bounce. He was thrown backward, tumbling through the air. The "Vacuum Domain" shattered.
Lloyd landed on a patch of solid ground, sliding to a halt. He was breathing hard. Using Conceptual Magic without the suit’s stabilizers was exhausting. It felt like running a marathon in seconds.
But it worked. Beelzebub was on the ground. He looked confused. He looked angry.
The Prince scrambled up, his skeletal frame shaking with rage. Mud dripped from his pale skin.
"You..." Beelzebub hissed. "You refuse to be eaten? You rude little morsel. You think a little trick will save you? I am a King! I am an eternal hunger!"
He began to glow.
Lloyd Ferrum didn't move. He stood in the middle of the yellow, stinking mud, watching the steam rise from the spot where his Aegis Mark III suit was slowly being digested. To anyone else, the situation looked like a total disaster. His best piece of technology was half-melted, his expensive weapons had been literally eaten, and he was standing face-to-face with a Prince of Hell while wearing nothing but a reinforced cloth bodysuit.
But Lloyd wasn't "anyone else." Inside his head, the eighty-year-old Major General was already filing the previous minute under 'Data Collected.'
Beelzebub stood a few yards away. The thin, skeletal demon looked at Lloyd with those big, jittery yellow eyes. He looked pathetic, like a man who hadn't eaten in a month, but Lloyd knew better than to trust appearances. Beelzebub was licked his lips, his needle-teeth clicking together in a fast, nervous rhythm.
"You're a very strange little snack," Beelzebub said. His voice was a dry rattle, like dead leaves blowing across a sidewalk. "Most things run. Most things scream. You just stand there and think. I can practically taste your brain working. It tastes like... bitter copper. Very nutritious."
Lloyd adjusted his stance, his feet sinking slightly into the muck. "You talk too much for a guy who's supposed to be hungry," Lloyd said. His voice was flat, bored, and totally unimpressed. "If you're going to eat me, get on with it. I have other appointments today."
Beelzebub stopped twitching. For a second, the mask of the starving animal slipped, and Lloyd saw the real monster underneath. It was a flash of pure, cold intelligence. This wasn't just a hungry beast; this was a manipulator who had spent centuries tricking entire kingdoms into starving themselves to death just so he could watch.
"You think I'm a fool," Beelzebub said, his voice suddenly becoming deep and smooth. "You think Gluttony is just about filling a stomach. You think it's a lack of control. But you're wrong, Lloyd Ferrum. True gluttony is absolute control. It is the ability to decide that everything in the world belongs inside of you."
The Prince of Gluttony spread his long, bony arms. The air around him didn't just get heavy; it started to feel empty. It was like the oxygen was being sucked out of the room, but it wasn't a physical wind yet. It was a spiritual drain.
"I've watched you," Beelzebub continued, his yellow eyes glowing with a sharp, mean light. "I watched how you handled Bael. You used physics. You used gravity and mass. You think the world follows a set of math problems that you've already solved. It’s very arrogant of you."
Lloyd narrowed his eyes. He didn't like being called predictable. "Math doesn't have an ego, Beelzebub. It just works."
"In your world, maybe," the Prince sneered. "But here? I am the one who decides what equals zero. And right now? I've decided your life is a remainder that needs to be cleared."
Beelzebub didn't shout. He didn't growl. He just took a deep, slow breath.
The transformation hit like a physical wall.
The color didn't just leave Beelzebub’s body; it felt like the color was being erased from the entire area. The sickly gray of his skin turned into a blinding, perfect bone-white. It was the color of a clean plate. The rags he was wearing didn't fall off; they simply vanished, leaving him in a form that looked like a marble statue carved by a master artist.