Deus Necros

Chapter 830: A Hero For The People

The battle did not slow after that last clash. If anything, it became purer.

Ludwig came in again with Nightbreaker raised, and the Demon King answered him with nothing but claw, horn, shoulder, and raw physical force. Neither of them cast a spell. Neither of them tried to layer the battlefield with traps or ranged arts or some grand display of sorcery. The fight had stripped itself down to something almost primitive, two beings meeting in open ground and trying to break the other through impact, timing, and the simple certainty that if one’s body gave out before the other’s, then that was all there was to it.

The frozen field around them suffered for it.

Each collision sent booming force through the ice and stone below, breaking apart the hardened earth in jagged lines that spread outward for dozens of meters. Nightbreaker’s swings churned the air with enough violence to shear frost off distant rocks, while the Demon King’s claws tore through space in arcs that left the ice behind Ludwig bursting apart a heartbeat later. There was no rhythm that a normal warrior could read. Their movements were too fast, too abrupt, too full of power to seem human. Ludwig would bring the mace down in a brutal descending sweep, only for the Demon King to duck under it, step inside the range of the weapon, and drive a knee toward Ludwig’s ribs hard enough to dent Noctivex and launch him across the field. Before Ludwig’s boots had fully carved him to a stop, he would already be moving back in, Durandal flashing once to catch an incoming claw and deflect it just enough for Nightbreaker to hammer into the Demon King’s shoulder.

The Demon King laughed through it all.

Not because he was winning. Not even because he thought he would. His laughter came from somewhere else entirely, from that deep and ugly delight of finally finding resistance worth acknowledging. His temporary body leaked mana more heavily with every exchange. The longer he remained manifested, the more unstable he became, but that only seemed to irritate him, not frighten him. He fought like a starving beast given real meat for the first time in years, and Ludwig, much to his own annoyance, understood the feeling better than he should have.

At one point, after Ludwig caught a claw on Durandal and twisted hard enough to force the Demon King’s arm aside, the Demon King sprang back several paces and studied him with narrowed crimson eyes.

"You have a great deal of mana," he said, his breath coming out as a dark steaming haze in the frozen air. "Why have you not used magic yet? You even used it to stop that... vermin."

Ludwig rolled one shoulder, Nightbreaker hanging loosely in his grip while Noctivex tightened over the place where an earlier strike had landed. "Says the guy who’s literally made out of mana," he replied. "But that’s not fair. If you use it, you’ll leak even faster."

The Demon King’s smile deepened, and there was genuine amusement in it. "You do not have to be too accommodating."

Then he pointed a finger forward.

The moment he did, Ludwig felt the shift.

The mana gathering at the fingertip was so dense and sudden that it made the air around it deform. It was not a spell formation in the conventional sense. There were no sigils, no circles, no spoken words. It was just power being pulled into a single point with such obscene efficiency that Ludwig’s instincts screamed at him before his mind had even fully processed what he was seeing. He did not bother trying to block. He did not even bother trying to dodge conventionally.

A black panel as thin as paper opened beside him.

Dark Mirror.

Ludwig stepped into it just as the Demon King fired.

The beam that erupted forth was monstrous. A surcharge of compressed mana blasted through the field in a straight line, crossed the frozen distance beyond them, and struck the mountain face behind Ludwig’s last position with enough force to punch through half the peak. Rock, snow, and ancient ice simply ceased to be where it touched. For a moment, there was only a burning line of absence through the mountain, and then the whole summit began to groan.

Ludwig stepped out of the second mirror several paces to the side and turned in time to see the far peak split and begin shedding whole sections of itself. Snow collapsed in blinding waves, ice sheets cracked free, and an avalanche roared down the mountainside with enough mass to swallow a fortress.

"Damn," Ludwig muttered, glancing from the ruined peak back toward the Demon King. "No wonder you’re pissed you can’t use your full power."

The Demon King lowered his hand.

Or rather, what remained of it.

His arm had begun to dissipate from the elbow downward, not in blood or torn flesh, but in streams of leaking mana that peeled away from him like smoke from a wound in reality. He looked at it with the kind of displeasure one might direct at a servant who had failed a very basic task.

"Tsk," he said. "I suppose my time is up."

"You’ll come back, I assume," Ludwig replied.

"Eventually," the Demon King said. "Always."

"Good. We’ll finish it properly afterward." Ludwig tilted his head, then raised one hand and pointed a finger back at him. "Also, that skill you just used..."

The Demon King’s gaze sharpened.

"Was it like this?" Ludwig asked.

He had seen enough.

Ludwig gathered power not through a polished spell structure, nor through the neat discipline of a proper mage, but through the far uglier methods that had become natural to him. Mana moved first. Then Dark Flame bled into it. And then, instead of stopping there, he fed the forming attack with the Aura of Wrath. As much as his Heart of Wrath could pump without immediately forcing a full transformation, he dragged it in, layer after violent layer, until crimson heat and blackened fire twisted around the forming point at his fingertip.

His body reacted.

The skin around his knuckles ruptured first, not with blood, but with jagged crystalline protrusions forcing their way out as if the gathered force needed more room than his hand naturally provided. The shape around his fingers became harsher, more monstrous, and for a second the beginnings of wrathful horns tried to emerge around his forehead before collapsing away again. Ludwig kept smiling through it, the expression sharp and unpleasant in a way that fit the power collecting before him.

The Demon King watched closely and then smiled back, as though someone had just handed him a final pleasant surprise before the end.

"That is close enough," he said. "But does it have the power?"

He spread both arms wide.

He was not defending.

He was inviting it.

The challenge in the gesture was too clear to mistake. The Demon King knew he could not win in this form. He knew he was already unraveling. But if he was about to be banished back to wherever this broken ritual had dragged him from, then he would at least see the answer to his own question.

"Show me how powerful you are then!"

Ludwig did.

The attack left his hand like a verdict.

It shot forward in the same brutal fashion as the Demon King’s earlier discharge, but this one was wrapped in black flames and stained red by Wrath. The beam did not merely burn through the space between them. It mauled it, a column of dark fire and violent force that swallowed the Demon King whole and kept going, crossing beyond him to strike the base of a far distant mountain. The impact detonated through rock and snow alike, punching a vast molten tunnel into the mountain’s lower body before erupting out the opposite side. The whole range shuddered. Ice cliffs burst apart. Snowfields collapsed in rippling avalanches. The sound rolled across the frozen lands like the aftershock of some angry god slamming his fist into the world.

For a moment, the Demon King vanished inside the blast.

Then the attack ended.

What remained of him was already breaking apart, his body unraveling in violent streams of leaking mana. Yet Ludwig immediately understood what the people of Solania would not.

The Demon King had not been slain.

He had been repelled.

Driven back, broken apart by instability and overwhelming force, yes, but not destroyed in the absolute sense. He was a being half-formed, half-summoned, already coming apart. The blast had accelerated the process and hurled him from the battlefield like a star torn out of orbit, but Ludwig could still feel that strange, ugly certainty that clung to him. A promise of return.

The people watching from Solania saw something else entirely.

From the walls, rooftops, gates, and frozen streets, they had witnessed the battle in fragments, enough to understand only the broad strokes. A demon king had descended. The Hero had arrived late, filthy, furious, and utterly useless. He had even tried to charge the man fighting the demon instead of aiding him. Then Ludwig, the stranger, the lone warrior under the eyes of the Tower Masters, had battled the creature in open ground and finally driven it away with an attack so overwhelming that a mountain had nearly split apart from the aftermath.

The first cheers came hesitantly.

Then more followed.

Then the whole wall erupted.

Soldiers who had moments ago been on the edge of panic now shouted themselves hoarse. Citizens cried with relief. Priests who understood nothing and paladins who understood too much both found themselves trapped under the same conclusion: whatever that man was, whatever his place in this catastrophe might turn out to be, he had stood against the Demon King when no one else had. And the city had seen it.

More importantly, the city had seen everything else too.

They had seen Hiro come late.

They had seen him fail.

They had seen him try to strike the very man who was holding the line against the summoned horror. Under the eyes of the Tower Masters, no less. There would be no burying that truth now, no polished retelling that could easily smooth over what had happened in plain sight.

High above, the Tower Masters continued to watch in silence.

Down below, Hiro was still buried in the ice with only his face exposed, his fury no less pathetic for how loudly he expressed it.

And Ludwig, standing alone on the ruined field with the fading afterglow of Wrath and Dark Flame still crackling around his hand, simply let out a slow breath as the last traces of the Demon King’s temporary form vanished into the freezing air.

The battle, at least for now, was over.

But the consequences of it were only beginning.