Chapter 828: Change of Scenery
Chapter 828: Change of Scenery
"This summoning..." the Demon King said, his crimson eyes moving from Ludwig to the broken sphere and then to the exposed lines of blood and holy power shattered across the chamber. His voice carried no panic, no confusion, only disappointment deep enough that it almost sounded bored.
"This is unfortunate. I will only be here for a short while." his expression was borderline displeased, disapointed and quite angered all at once.
"I guessed as much," Kaiser replied, his gaze narrowing as he studied the Demon King’s body and the faint streams of energy leaking from it like vapor through cracks in a vessel. "You are already leaking mana. Something is wrong with the ritual."
"Not many lives have been sacrificed," the Demon King said.
The statement silenced more of the room than the pressure of his arrival had. Several priests stared at him in horror, not because they did not understand, but because they understood far too well. A summoning that should have been fed by slaughter had been starved. The ritual had reached across worlds, pulled something vast toward them, and dragged it into existence with barely enough sacrifice to keep the form stable. Clementine had tried to cheat the cost, using faith, trapped souls, and holy authority to replace the blood price, but a thing like the Demon King knew the difference between a proper offering and a counterfeit feast.
"Get the fuck out of my way!" Hiro shouted as he forced himself out of the pile of priests and paladins he had crashed into. He stood with his holy sword clenched in both hands, face red with humiliation he seemed too stupid to recognize as humiliation. "This is my fight!"
The paladins around him did not move with the same confidence. They could feel the Demon King now. Not merely see him, not merely understand from doctrine that he was dangerous, but feel the weight of him pressing into their bones. Some had already taken a step back. Some held their weapons but did not raise them. The priests behind them whispered prayers in shaking voices, and those prayers sounded very small inside a room where the summoned creature had just admitted that an incomplete ritual was the only reason they were still alive.
Hiro, unfortunately, had never been cursed with enough awareness to measure danger properly.
The Demon King looked toward him with mild curiosity. "Who is this creature?"
"They call him the Hero," Ludwig replied.
The Demon King’s expression shifted only slightly, but the change carried more insult than laughter would have. Hiro took it as mockery, because for once he had understood something correctly, and jumped forward with his sword blazing in holy light. The blade came down in a clean arc, the kind of strike meant to be painted on temple walls after the fact, but the Demon King raised one hand and caught the sword between two fingertips.
The holy light sputtered.
Hiro froze.
The Demon King plucked the sword from his grip as if taking a twig from a child, then flicked his other hand without looking particularly invested in the result. A blast of condensed energy struck Hiro in the chest and launched him across the chamber. It was not a wild attack. It did not fan outward, did not scatter into the priests, did not catch paladins in the shockwave. The Demon King was precise enough that the beam carried Hiro alone, punching him through the far wall and several more beyond it, leaving a smoking tunnel through stone, plaster, and holy ornamentation.
A long silence followed.
"Gnats nowadays get to be called heroes," the Demon King said, letting the stolen holy sword fall point-first into the floor. "What a shame."
No one argued.
Even the priests who had been ready to condemn Ludwig moments earlier now looked as though the floor had become the only reliable thing left in the world. The Church’s chosen sword, the public answer to fear and prophecy, had just been disarmed with two fingers and removed from the room like an unpleasant draft. The paladins could not pretend they had missed it. The clergy could not pray loudly enough to erase it. The lie of easy salvation had been struck through several walls in front of them.
"What a shame," the Demon King repeated, his eyes roaming over the chamber, the cracked sphere, the paladins, the priests, Mot, Redd, Kaiser, and Ludwig. "What a great, great shame."
His gaze settled on Mot.
"You there. You are also very strong."
Mot shrugged lightly, the purple ward still holding around Ludwig, Redd, and Kaiser while divine power continued eating away at the ritual’s exposed filth. "I’ve been told. But I’m just a tool."
The Demon King looked down, and his eyes narrowed as if he could see through the floors beneath the Sacrosanctum. "There is also a strong being imprisoned here."
Titania, Ludwig thought.
The Demon King then looked upward, past the cracked ceiling, past the building, perhaps past the city itself. His disappointment sharpened into something closer to anger, not at those present, but at the insult of his arrival. "And there are many, many strong people coming here fast..." His voice deepened, and the pressure around him rose until the air shook. "Why? Why have I been summoned this weakly when there are so many strong people?"
The aura that burst from him drove almost everyone to their knees.
Priests collapsed first, hands slamming against the floor as their prayers broke into choked gasps. Paladins followed, armor creaking as they resisted for half a second longer before the weight bent them. Redd snarled and dug his claws into the stone, refusing to kneel but forced low regardless. Mot’s staff tapped once, and purple light spread through the doorway and across the nearest clergy, preventing the Demon King’s frustration from crushing them outright. Kaiser remained standing inside Mot’s protection, but even his disguised face tightened from the pressure.
Ludwig only rolled one shoulder.
The Demon King noticed.
Ludwig looked at him for a moment, then at the shattered route Hiro had been blasted through. The Demon King was unstable, leaking mana, and dissatisfied with the poor summoning. He wanted battle, not worship. He wanted to test himself against something worthy before the weak ritual lost hold of him. That was dangerous, but it was also a lever, and Ludwig had survived long enough by pulling the levers everyone else was too busy panicking to see.
"I can feel your dissatisfaction," Ludwig said after a short pause. "How about this? I’ll guarantee you a proper fight."
"Against you?" the Demon King asked. His eyes studied Ludwig with real interest now, weighing what stood beneath the mortal shape and the weapon at his side. "You are powerful, but I can already feel too many stronger beings focusing their eyes on me. They will not allow a fair battle. Not that I care about fairness."
"They will," Ludwig said. "Put your guard up."
The Demon King tilted his head. "Hmm?"
Nightbreaker answered the call.
The mace appeared in Ludwig’s hand with the kind of weight that made the chamber seem suddenly smaller. It was not merely a weapon. It carried the history of slaughter and monstrous intent in its form, a thing built to crush what should not easily be crushed. Several paladins flinched when it manifested. Gallows, still recovering from where Ludwig had thrown her, stopped smiling for the first time since the Demon King emerged.
Ludwig swung.
The Demon King sensed the nature of the blow before it landed. Nightbreaker was monstrous, yes. The weapon was made to kill, to break, to slaughter. But there was no killing intent behind the swing, not truly. The power was real, the force absurd, but it was not aimed at ambush or execution. It was an answer to Ludwig’s own promise, a way of moving the battle out of the city before every holy fool in the room decided to help by making everything worse.
The Demon King raised both arms.
Nightbreaker smashed into him.
The impact folded sound for a heartbeat, then released it all at once. The Demon King shot backward like a meteor, tearing diagonally through the chamber wall, through the reinforced structure beyond it, and out of the Sacrosanctum entirely. Stone, wards, stained glass, and sacred masonry exploded outward in his wake. The hole left behind cut through the building at an angle wide enough for daylight and dust to pour into the chamber, exposing the sky beyond and the distant fields outside Solania.
The room stared.
Ludwig rested Nightbreaker against his shoulder as if he had merely opened a door.
"Mot," he said, looking toward the young Saint, "care to slow them down for me? I have to satisfy a demon of battle."
Mot did not answer with words, but the purple light around his staff deepened, spreading toward the doorway and the priests clustered there. It felt enough like an agreement for Ludwig.
Another rumble echoed from beneath the Sacrosanctum. Not the Demon King’s descent this time. Something else shifting below, something reacting to the breaking of the ritual lines and the divine power finally able to seep through the places Clementine had hidden. Titania would not be sitting quietly much longer.
A notification appeared.
[You have failed in preventing the premature summoning of the Demon King.]
’That took a while,’ Ludwig thought. "Unfortunate for the half liter of Nephilium, I guess."
The next notification appeared almost immediately after.
[The God of Prosperity has requested you to banish the Demon King.]
[Reward: 1 Liter of Pure Nephilium.]
Ludwig blinked once, then smiled.
"Oh," he said. "The reward got bigger. I guess watching their Hero get handled like a ragdoll clarified the budget."
Kaiser pulled his burned hands back inside his sleeves, the flesh already damaged enough that even the disguise could not make the pain look elegant. "You are enjoying this far too much."
"I am coping."
"Poorly."
"Effectively," Ludwig said. He turned toward the priests and paladins still recovering near the entrance, then pointed toward Redd without softening his tone. "Heal him."
Several priests stared at him as if the command had come from an enemy, which, technically, it had. Ludwig did not care.
"He is injured because that bitch in priest robes helped call the Demon King under your holy house," Ludwig said, his gaze cutting toward Gallows. "He is also a member of the Imperial Knights. So, unless you want to explain to the Emperor why one of his men died on the floor of the Sacrosanctum while your Pope was busy selling salvation, he had better not die."
Redd looked as if he wanted to object, mostly because his eyes were still fixed on Gallows and the chance to continue tearing into her had been stolen by larger problems. Ludwig met his gaze for a moment. The meaning was simple enough. Live first. Revenge later. Redd’s claws flexed, but he did not argue.
Gallows laughed weakly from the floor. "Running already, little Apostle?"
Ludwig glanced at her. "You’re not important enough to run from. Get that neck of yours cleaned up, I have some hope to collect once I’m back."
Her expression twisted.
He looked toward Kaiser. "Follow me."
Kaiser’s brows rose. "Into open battle with a Demon King?"
"You’re the one who knows why not to hit him at the wrong time. I assume that means you may know something useful about hitting him at the right time."
"A flattering assumption."
"Don’t get used to it."
Kaiser sighed and followed as Ludwig walked toward the massive hole carved through the Sacrosanctum wall. Wind rushed in from outside, carrying dust, screams from the upper halls, bells ringing out of rhythm, and the distant impact of something enormous landing beyond the city. Ludwig stepped onto the broken edge and looked out.
Far past the shattered outer walls of the Sacrosanctum, beyond the city limits of Solania, the Demon King stood in the open fields. Smoke rose from the trench his landing had carved across the earth. He did not look injured. If anything, he looked pleased. His arms lowered slowly from the guard he had used to take Nightbreaker’s blow, and the crimson smile on his face was visible even from that distance.
Good, Ludwig thought.
Better there than here.
Behind him, Mot’s purple power thickened, slowing the priests and paladins, holding the room together long enough for truth to keep spreading. Beneath them, the Sacrosanctum groaned again as the broken lines gave way. Somewhere below, Titania’s chains were about to learn what three months of patience had done to her mood.
Ludwig jumped.
He fell through the broken wall and hit the side of the Sacrosanctum once, using the impact to launch himself farther outward. Stone cracked beneath his foot as he pushed off again, crossing the city’s edge in a long arc toward the open fields where the Demon King waited. Kaiser followed behind by magic rather than brute force, his movement far less theatrical and far more irritatingly composed.
The Demon King watched them approach.
Ludwig tightened his grip around Nightbreaker.
The city remained behind him.
The fight moved forward.