Episode-1037
Chapter : 2073
Lucifer’s body became a blur of white and blood. He flew backward, crossing the entire length of the courtyard in a fraction of a second.
He hit the first defensive wall of the estate—a thick barrier of stone and reinforced steel.
CRASH.
He went through it. He didn't leave a hole; he took the entire section of the wall with him. Stone bricks exploded outward, turning into dust.
He kept going.
He hit the second wall, the older fortification from the original castle.
SMASH.
It crumbled. He punched through it as if it were made of wet cardboard.
He hit the third wall, the outer perimeter wall that marked the edge of the Ferrum lands.
BOOM.
This wall was twenty feet thick. It was meant to stop armies. Lucifer’s body slammed into it with such force that the entire wall shook. A massive cloud of dust erupted.
Finally, the momentum ran out.
Lucifer tumbled out the other side of the third wall. He rolled across the grass of the outer fields, bouncing and skidding for another hundred yards before finally coming to a stop in a muddy ditch.
Back in the courtyard, Lloyd stood frozen in his follow-through pose, his fist still extended.
Steam was pouring off his body. The blue cracks on his skin were glowing so brightly they were hard to look at. His arm was shaking violently. The recoil of the punch had shattered the bones in his own hand and forearm, but the Void energy was holding the pieces together, knitting them back into place with agonizing speed.
The silence returned to the estate.
The gravity field was gone. The singularity above the house fizzled out and vanished, leaving only a clear blue sky.
Rosa slowly stood up. Her ice armor was cracked, and she was breathing hard. She looked at the hole in the walls—a perfect tunnel of destruction that stretched for a quarter of a mile. She looked at Lloyd.
"Lloyd?" she whispered.
Lloyd didn't answer immediately. He slowly lowered his arm. He turned his head. The white light in his eyes faded, returning to their normal color. The pitch-black skin began to lighten, the blue cracks sealing up and vanishing as he manually closed the Seventh Gate.
He gasped, a wet, ragged sound. He fell to his knees.
The pain hit him all at once. It felt like every muscle in his body had been torn apart. His nerves were on fire. The "biological collapse" the System had warned him about was starting. He coughed, spitting up black blood onto the marble.
"System," Lloyd croaked. "Status."
[Gate Seven: Closed.]
[Body Integrity: 15%.]
[Mana Reserves: Empty.]
[Target Status: Critical.]
Lloyd nodded weakly. He was broken, but he was alive.
Far away, in the muddy ditch outside the walls, there was movement.
Lucifer tried to stand up.
The Devil King was a ruin. His white armor was gone, leaving only his pale, bruised skin exposed. His chest was a crater. The black cables that had been under his skin were ripped and sparking, leaking purple fluid into the mud. His wings were broken, dragging behind him like dead weights.
He coughed, wheezing for air. One of his lungs had collapsed. His jaw was broken.
He looked up at the sky. He looked at the Fire Fly dropships hovering there. He expected them to fire. He expected them to help him.
But the ships were turning around. They were engines roaring as they began to ascend, retreating back into the clouds. They had seen the data. They had seen a human punch a god through three walls. They were cutting their losses.
"Wait..." Lucifer rasped, reaching a hand toward the sky. "Do not... leave me..."
The ships didn't stop. They vanished into the atmosphere, abandoning their asset.
Lucifer slumped back into the mud. The arrogance was gone. The pride was gone. All that was left was a broken creature who realized, for the first time in his eternal life, that he was not the strongest thing in the universe.
He tried to summon his magic, but the Reality Anchor was destroyed. The world of Riverio was rejecting him. Without the anchor, his power was draining away, leaking into the earth.
He was just a guest in a hostile land now, and his visa had expired.
Back in the courtyard, Ken Park and the Titan Squad were rushing toward Lloyd. Rosa got there first. She knelt beside him, her hands glowing with cold, soothing magic to lower his body temperature.
"You idiot," Rosa said, her voice thick with emotion. "You absolute, reckless idiot."
Lloyd looked up at her. He managed a weak, painful smile.
"Did I get him?" Lloyd asked.
"You threw him into next week," Rosa said, tears running down her face. "You broke the walls. You broke everything."
"Good," Lloyd whispered. "I hated those walls anyway. Bad feng shui."
He closed his eyes. He didn't pass out, but he let himself drift. The immediate threat was gone. The singularity was stopped.
But he knew it wasn't over. Lucifer was broken, but he wasn't dead. Devils were hard to kill.
"Ken," Lloyd mumbled.
"I'm here, Sir," Ken’s voice said, close by.
"Go find him," Lloyd ordered, his voice fading. "Go find the trash I threw out. And put him in a box. A really... strong... box."
"Yes, Sir," Ken said. "The Wraiths are already moving."
Chapter : 2074
The world was quiet, but it was a heavy, painful kind of silence.
Lucifer lay on his back in a muddy ditch, about three hundred yards away from the shattered walls of the Ferrum Estate. The sky above him was a pale, uncaring blue, beginning to brighten with the true light of morning. But Lucifer couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun. He couldn’t feel much of anything except a dull, throbbing ache that seemed to live inside his very bones.
He tried to take a breath, but his chest didn't want to move. It felt like a pile of rocks was sitting on his ribcage. When he finally managed to suck in a ragged gasp of air, it tasted like dirt and old blood. He coughed, a wet, hacking sound that racked his entire body with spasms of agony. Black fluid—his own divine ichor—spilled from his lips and ran down his chin, staining the ruined white armor that clung to his chest.
He was a mess. The pristine, god-like being who had descended from the sky just hours ago was gone. In his place was a broken thing, lying in the trash like a discarded doll. His white armor, which had been a marvel of both magic and technology, was shattered. Pieces of it were missing entirely, revealing pale, bruised skin underneath. The cybernetic cables that used to pulse with purple light under his skin were ripped and hanging loose, sparking weakly against the wet mud.
Lucifer stared up at the sky, his vision blurry. He was trying to understand what had just happened.
He hit me, Lucifer thought. The thought was slow and sluggish, like trying to think through a fog. A human hit me. And I broke.
It didn’t make sense. It violated every law of the universe that Lucifer knew. He was a King. He was a Prince of the Seventh Circle. He was a being of gravity and void, a creature that had lived for thousands of years. Lloyd Ferrum was... meat. He was a blink in the timeline of history. And yet, that meat had just punched Lucifer through three layers of fortified stone walls.
A surge of anger tried to rise in Lucifer’s chest, but it fizzled out quickly. He didn't have the energy for rage. His Reality Anchor—the device the Fire Fly Corporation had given him to exist in this dimension—was destroyed. Without it, he was bleeding power. The atmosphere of Riverio was toxic to him now. Every second he stayed here, his soul was evaporating, leaking out into the dirt.
He needed to leave. He needed to get back to the Abyss, or at least to a containment chamber where he could stabilize.
"Move," he whispered to his own legs.
They didn't listen. His spinal cord felt like it had been fused together. He couldn't feel his toes.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to prick at the back of his mind. For the first time in eons, Lucifer felt truly helpless. He was alone in enemy territory, broken and bleeding, with no magic left to call upon. If the humans came to find him now—if that monster Lloyd Ferrum walked over the hill—Lucifer knew he would die. He would be executed right here in the mud.
He couldn't let that happen. He was too important. He was too valuable.
His hand trembled as he lifted it. It took every ounce of willpower he had left just to raise his arm a few inches off the ground. His fingers brushed against a small, metallic node embedded in his collarbone. It was the emergency comms-link, a direct line to his partners.
His partners. The Fire Fly Corporation.
Lucifer let out a weak, rattling laugh. It hurt his throat. He remembered how he had looked down on them, thinking of them as useful tools. He had used their technology to boost his power, thinking he was the one holding the leash. Now, he was the one begging for a ride.
He pressed the node. A faint, static hiss echoed in his ear.
"Marcus," Lucifer croaked. His voice was barely a whisper. "Marcus... do you copy?"
Static.
"This is... King Lucifer," he tried again, forcing a shred of authority into his voice. "I require extraction. Immediate extraction. The mission... the mission has encountered a variable."
He didn't want to say he lost. He couldn't admit that. Kings didn't lose; they just encountered variables.