Chapter 243: Truces With Demons Are Always Cowardly [Bonus - ]
Chapter 243: Truces With Demons Are Always Cowardly [Bonus Chapter]
The moment they arrived, Thor raised her warhammer and exclaimed, "Lightning Storm Singularity!"
The heavens immediately tore open. Dozens of blinding blue lightning bolts rained down from the sky, instantly converging at the very tip of Thor’s hammer.
Then, they blasted outward in a singular mighty bolt of lightning, directly into the center of the miasma-ravaged gates.
KRAAAABOOOMMMM!!!!
A shockwave of white light erupted outward, blinding everyone else as the force erupted straight through the blockade, broad enough to swallow the entire entrance in a storm of heat, sparks, and blinding radiance.
The barricade’s timbers burst apart first. Then the iron braces buckled inward. Then the reinforced stone behind them cracked, split, and went flying in shattered pieces as the lightning column tore a clean opening through the center of the defense line.
When the light finally thinned, the gate was gone.
What remained was a ragged opening in a blackened wall of ruin, the air still hissing with leftover static.
Thor lowered her hammer and gave the smoking wreckage a flat look, as if it had been mildly disappointing rather than spectacularly destroyed.
"There," she said. "Open."
Lancet stared at the opening, then let out a breath. "You could have just said you wanted to make an entrance."
Thor gave him one of those looks that suggested she had, in fact, considered this and found it unnecessary to discuss.
Then they walked through.
Deathrock waited beyond the ruins, a dying town frozen in a state of half-death.
From the outside, the first thing Lancet saw was the stonework. The mountain stones had been shaped by necessity into streets, terraces, steps, walls, and homes that clung to the terrain like stubborn weeds.
Deathrock had been built into the rock rather than on top of it.
Stairs ran up steep cliff faces in crooked switchbacks. Bridges spanned gaps between jutting platforms. Miners’ cranes stood abandoned over collapsed quarry mouths. Narrow alleys wound between buildings that had been cut into the mountain itself, with windows opening straight into the slope and roofs layered one above another like stacked armor plates.
It would have been a truly brilliant town if not for the rot that had now invaded it.
Red-black Gloom clung to the walls in thick, oily streaks. Purple sludge pooled in the dips between roads and seeped down the stone steps like infected rain.
The miasma drifted through the streets in low, suffocating layers, not rising so much as breathing against every surface it touched. It coated chimneys. It furred over railings. It sat in the corners of market stalls and old watch posts and half-collapsed civic halls like a living stain that refused to leave.
And yet the most unsettling thing was the silence.
Unlike Hebthej, there were no Demons rushing at them even after they had blasted through the gate.
No screams echoed from the streets. No claws scraped the stone.
Deathrock was quiet in the way a grave was quiet. Lancet stood just inside the gate and took it all in.
The red-black haze blurred the outlines of the upper buildings, making the whole town look bruised and half-forgotten. Farther up the slope, the old citadel ruins loomed on a ridge of black stone, their tower shapes broken and crowned with rot.
Below, the lower terraces were nearly drowned in miasma. Even the roads looked sick. He could see where the town had once been alive: little public squares carved into flat platforms, hanging lantern posts now rusted over, old mine carts sitting crooked on rails, and stone homes with archways and balcony ledges cut directly into the cliff face.
Lancet’s jaw tightened.
"Yeah," he murmured. "The Second World definitely did a work in this place."
Thor scowled with great anger and disgust. "Such a vile world. To do this to a landmark, to tarnish such an honorable place with their loathsome, disgusting aura. The day I set my foot on Hel, Demon Lords will surely be buried."
Lancet gave her a look. ’Even though she’s not powerful enough, I don’t doubt that it would happen.’
Kestrel stood beside him with her Dragonswords still sheathed behind her back, green eyes moving over the streets with a swordsman’s precision. "The cowardly truce makes sense now."
Thor grunted. "Truces with Demons are always cowardly."
Spectra floated ahead a little on her crimson cloud, her expression unreadable as she looked over the miasma and the stone. For a moment Lancet thought she might actually be enjoying the atmosphere. Naturally, the villainess enjoyed everything else that smelled faintly of Gloom.
But then she rolled her eyes and made a face.
"Ugh," she said. "This is filthy."
Lancet glanced at her. "You literally lived in a mountain filled with Gloom."
"Yes," Spectra said, offended by the comparison. "And I maintained standards."
Espel stepped forward more quietly than the rest, her gaze already fixed on the rot coating the lower streets.
There was no disgust on her face, only concentration and something more subtle: the caution of a healer looking at a wound that had been left untreated for too long. "How did the kingdom council ever agree to a truce?" she asked. "Gehenna has all the advantage. Gloom is strong in this place, and it has already settled into the stone."
Lancet looked at her with a thoughtful expression. "Can you clear it?"
Espel’s answer was simple. "I will."
She lifted her hands and called her Grace.
The air around her shifted first, becoming soft and strange, as if the ruined town had suddenly drifted into the edge of a dream. Pale moths emerged from the Grace around her, dozens of them, then hundreds, their wings thin and luminous and almost ghostly in the red-black light.
They swarmed low across the streets and walls in a silent cloud, touching the miasma with delicate wings that looked too gentle to do anything at all.
Then the corruption began to fall apart.
Espel’s Gravewings started to do their jobs. It didn’t matter whether something was created and empowered with Gloom or Grace, they could reduce it into nothing.
Whereever the moths perched, the Gloom thinned and frayed, breaking into dull wisps that dissolved into unseeable atoms.
The black-red rot that had clung to walls like tar began to peel away in strips. Purple sludge in the street shriveled and vanished. The infected air slowly lost its grip, and rather than that disgusting scent of demonic aura, the smell of damp stone and old ash infiltrated everyone’s noses.
Lancet and the heroines watched quietly as the moths worked across the nearest building facades, stripping away the blight inch by inch.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The moths were covered in sparkling golden lights, then vanished. A second later, butterflies took their place.
The Bloomwings flapped their bright wings and softly landed on stones which although had been freed from the miasma rot, were scarred and ruined after the lasting effects.
Suddenly, the scars and the marks of the stones began to fill up with gravel and rock. Thin vines pushed through cracks in the masonry. Small patches of green rose from the seams in the road. Moss began to creep over dead edges of wall and stair. Tiny plants unfurled in the places where the rot had been stripped away.
Around them, that fragment of Deathrock became whole again, like it was a brand new town.