Chapter 321: Something Else Descended

Yuuta’s bleeding crimson eyes remained fixed on him.

Zeri could no longer control the trembling running through his body. He had fallen backward onto the ruined street, and now he was using both hands and feet simply to drag himself away from Yuuta. His claws scraped against the broken pavement as he retreated, his golden eyes refusing to leave the figure slowly approaching him.

The aura surrounding Yuuta had become suffocating.

It wasn’t merely dense anymore. The darkness covering his broken body moved restlessly, constantly twisting and folding into itself as though it couldn’t maintain a stable shape. There was no trace of the dark-green aura Yuuta had used before, nor did this resemble the mysterious power that had briefly appeared during his previous attack.

This was something else.

Something unknown.

Just standing near it made Zeri feel as though death itself had noticed him.

For perhaps the first time in his entire existence, Zeri couldn’t even find the words to make another joke. His lips parted, but nothing came out. He had never properly understood fear before. Even when Raven’s black aura had shaken him, he had been confused more than anything. Even when Yuuta nearly cut his head off with that mysterious power, the terror had been mixed with disbelief and excitement.

This was different.

His body understood before his mind did.

Get away.

Zeri dragged himself backward.

Get away from him.

He no longer resembled a High Demon who had spent the entire battle treating everyone around him as prey. His movements were instinctive and desperate, like a rabbit that had suddenly realized a wolf was standing directly in front of it.

But Yuuta wasn’t looking at him anymore.

His crimson eyes slowly shifted toward Elena.

For several seconds, Yuuta simply stared.

His daughter wasn’t moving.

Her small body had been thrown into the ruined remains beside the crater, partially buried beneath broken stone and shattered concrete. She looked almost like a tiny statue among the wreckage, completely still despite everything happening around her.

"Elena..."

Yuuta’s voice barely escaped his throat.

His legs trembled beneath him. His body was still broken, and even standing seemed impossible, yet somehow he remained upright beneath that enormous black aura.

He waited.

Perhaps she would move her hand.

Perhaps her little head would rise.

Perhaps he would hear that familiar voice call him Papa again.

Nothing happened.

Yuuta’s lips trembled.

More tears gathered in his crimson eyes, except they were no longer clear. Blood mixed with them before rolling slowly down his cheeks. One crimson tear reached his chin and fell onto the road beneath him.

Then another followed.

Yuuta lowered his head for a moment.

When he raised it again, he looked at Zeri.

The High Demon stopped moving.

Something about Yuuta’s face was horrifying.

There was no wild screaming anymore. No desperate rage like before. The hatred remained, but beneath it was something far worse grief so deep that it seemed to have hollowed Yuuta out from the inside.

Zeri suddenly wished Yuuta would scream again.

Instead, Yuuta spoke quietly.

"Why...?"

His voice trembled from pain.

Zeri stared at him.

"Why do you love tormenting me?"

The question was so quiet that it almost disappeared beneath the distant destruction of the city.

Yuuta took another unstable step forward. His knee nearly buckled, but the darkness surrounding him seemed to hold his broken figure upright.

"Have I ever hurt you?"

Zeri said nothing.

"Have I?"

Yuuta’s voice cracked.

His eyes briefly returned to Elena before finding Zeri again.

"Then why...?"

Another bloody tear fell.

"Why do you keep taking my happiness away from me?"

The black aura moved.

Zeri’s golden eyes widened.

"Why do you keep hurting the people around me?" Yuuta asked, his voice becoming increasingly broken. "Why do you keep taking everything from me... again and again?"

The darkness around Yuuta suddenly surged upward.

"Why?!"

A wave of black aura exploded from his body.

Zeri threw an arm over his face instinctively, but there was no ordinary shockwave. No violent wind struck him. No explosion tore apart the street.

Something far stranger happened.

The surroundings began to die.

Zeri slowly lowered his arm.

The faint lights still flickering inside nearby buildings dimmed before going out completely. Small weeds growing between cracks in the pavement shriveled within seconds. The air itself became suffocating, carrying something so unnatural that every breath made Zeri’s body recoil.

Then Zeri looked at his hand.

His expression changed.

"What...?"

The outer layer of his blue skin had begun deteriorating.

Tiny fragments peeled away from his fingers like dead tissue. His regeneration immediately attempted to repair the damage, yet the newly restored skin began deteriorating again merely from remaining close to Yuuta.

Zeri’s breathing stopped.

He looked around.

The farther Yuuta’s darkness spread, the more lifeless everything seemed to become. It wasn’t destruction in the ordinary sense. Yuuta wasn’t smashing buildings or cracking the road with raw force.

Things were simply losing their vitality around him.

And Yuuta himself stood at the center of it.

His broken body was almost completely concealed beneath the dense black aura now. Only those crimson eyes remained clearly visible, glowing through the darkness while trails of blood continued running beneath them.

Zeri’s instincts screamed.

Run.

His body moved before he consciously made the decision.

He stumbled backward, turned, and prepared to flee.

There was no pride left to protect.

There was no curiosity left.

He didn’t care about the Demon King’s orders. He didn’t care about understanding Yuuta’s strange powers anymore. He didn’t even care how humiliating it would be for a High Demon to run from a broken human who could barely walk.

Every instinct inside him demanded the same thing.

Run away.

Not merely from the street.

Not merely from Yuno City.

Some irrational part of Zeri wanted to run until he reached the furthest corner of the world, then continue farther still. If there were somewhere deep enough in the universe that Yuuta could never find him, Zeri wanted to hide there.

He took his first step.

Yuuta’s bleeding eyes moved.

"Where do you think you’re going?"

Zeri froze.

His entire body locked in place.

Slowly, painfully, he turned his head.

Yuuta was still standing behind him.

His legs were shaking. His shoulders were barely holding themselves upright. Physically, he looked like a man who should have collapsed several minutes ago.

Yet the darkness surrounding him continued to rise.

Yuuta took another trembling step toward Zeri, his blood-filled crimson eyes never leaving the High Demon.

"Didn’t I tell you?"

Zeri’s lips trembled.

Yuuta’s expression didn’t change.

"I’ll rip your face from your soul."

Zeri felt it the moment Yuuta finished speaking. Every instinct inside the High Demon screamed at him to run, and for once there was no pride, amusement, or curiosity strong enough to make him ignore that warning. He twisted around and pushed strength into his legs, intending to escape as far from Yuuta as possible.

Before he could take even a single step, Yuuta disappeared.

"What...."

Darkness covered Zeri’s vision before the word could leave his mouth. He hadn’t seen Yuuta move. He hadn’t sensed his approach or even felt the air shift between them.

One moment Yuuta had been standing several meters away with a body so broken that he could barely walk, and the next Zeri’s feet were hanging above the road.

For a confused instant, he couldn’t understand what had happened. Then his golden eyes shifted downward, and his entire body went cold.

Yuuta stood directly beneath him with one hand wrapped across his face, lifting the High Demon entirely by his skull. Dense black aura rolled around Yuuta’s body in violent, unstable waves, hiding almost everything except those bleeding crimson eyes.

"U-Uncle...?"

There was no answer.

Panic immediately overwhelmed Zeri.

Every tentacle on his back shot forward at once, striking Yuuta from multiple directions with enough force to send violent shockwaves through the ruined street.

The pavement cracked beneath Yuuta’s feet, loose pieces of concrete flew through the air, and the remains of nearby windows shattered from the pressure.

Yet Yuuta didn’t move.

Zeri’s eyes widened as another tentacle slammed directly into Yuuta’s side. Instead of Yuuta’s body bending from the impact, the tentacle itself bent around him as though it had struck something completely unbreakable. Another smashed against his shoulder hard enough to pulverize concrete, but Yuuta didn’t dodge, block, or even react.

"What the hell...?"

Zeri attacked again and again. The shockwaves became stronger, tearing apart what remained of the street around them, yet Yuuta continued standing in exactly the same place. It didn’t feel as though Zeri was hitting flesh anymore. Whatever was beneath that darkness felt impossibly solid.

"Stop..." Zeri whispered, his voice becoming smaller as his tentacles continued striking uselessly. "Uncle, wait. Just....."

Yuuta suddenly moved his arm.

He smashed Zeri headfirst into the road.

The impact shattered the pavement beneath them. A massive web of cracks spread across the street as dust and broken concrete erupted into the air, and Zeri’s head was crushed beneath Yuuta’s hand until there was almost nothing recognizable left.

Yuuta remained crouched over him for several seconds. When he finally raised his hand, blood and pieces of flesh covered his fingers.

He stared at them silently.

This should have satisfied him. This was the demon who had slaughtered Raven and her soldiers, tortured people simply because he found their suffering entertaining, and hurt Elena while Yuuta had been forced to watch.

But nothing changed.

His grief remained.

"Elena..."

Yuuta’s trembling fingers slowly curled into a fist.

Something moved beneath him.

Zeri’s body twitched as the destroyed flesh around his neck began reconstructing itself. Bone regenerated, followed by muscle and skin, rebuilding the head Yuuta had just crushed. But unlike every previous time Zeri had regenerated, the process wasn’t instantaneous.

It was struggling.

Zeri noticed it the moment his consciousness returned.

Why is it so slow?

His regeneration had always made death meaningless. Losing a limb meant nothing. Even decapitation had only been an inconvenience. Yet now his body seemed to be fighting against something that remained inside the wounds, slowing the regeneration far more than Zeri had ever experienced before.

His golden eyes finally formed and opened.

Yuuta was already staring down at him.

"No..."

Yuuta’s hand closed around his throat before Zeri could move. He lifted him effortlessly, but this time the ground beneath them began to disappear as well.

Zeri’s eyes widened.

They were rising into the air.

Yuuta had no wings and wasn’t standing on anything. His broken legs hung beneath him while the dense black aura twisted around his body, somehow carrying him higher without any visible effort. Even Yuuta himself didn’t seem aware that he was doing it.

"Uncle... listen to me."

Yuuta’s bleeding eyes remained empty.

"This isn’t what they told me." Zeri grabbed Yuuta’s wrist with both hands, his voice becoming increasingly desperate. "They didn’t tell me about this. They didn’t tell me you could do any of this!"

Yuuta’s grip tightened slightly.

"Leave me alone, Uncle. I’ll go. I swear I’ll leave." Zeri spoke faster when Yuuta gave no response. "I won’t touch your daughter again. I won’t come after you. You won’t ever see me again, so just let me..."

Yuuta opened his mouth.

Zeri immediately stopped speaking.

Something moved inside.

At first, Zeri thought black smoke was leaking from Yuuta’s mouth, but the darkness didn’t disperse into the air. It stretched outward instead, thickening and twisting until shapes slowly began forming inside it.

Fingers.

Hands.

Zeri’s golden eyes widened as a long, distorted black hand emerged from Yuuta’s mouth. Another followed it, then another, their fingers twisting over one another as they reached toward him. There was no possible way those things could have physically existed inside Yuuta’s body. It looked more like his mouth had become an opening into something impossibly deep and dark.

"What... the fuck...?"

The first hand touched Zeri’s face.

His body immediately convulsed.

"No!"

Several more hands wrapped around his head, fingers spreading across his cheeks, forehead and jaw. Zeri’s claws dug desperately into Yuuta’s wrist as he felt the shadowy hands beginning to pull him toward the darkness inside Yuuta.

"NO! GET THEM OFF!"

For the first time, Zeri understood that they weren’t merely trying to destroy his body. He had experienced that before. His skull had been crushed, his head had been severed, and every time his regeneration had simply restored him.

This felt completely different.

The hands felt as though they weren’t trying to take his flesh.

They were trying to take him.

Zeri’s entire body began trembling so violently that he could barely breathe. His tentacles thrashed through the air without purpose as his mind collapsed into pure panic.

"UNCLE! STOP!"

More hands crawled from Yuuta’s open mouth.

"PLEASE! I’LL LEAVE! I’LL DO ANYTHING!"

The High Demon who had laughed while people screamed was now desperately clawing at Yuuta’s arm, trying to escape. The shadowy fingers tightened around his face, pulling harder, and Zeri felt something inside himself being dragged toward them.

"I DON’T WANT TO DIE! STOP! PLEASE...!"

Then everything vanished.

The black aura disappeared so suddenly that the entire street seemed to change in an instant. The hands were gone, the impossible darkness inside Yuuta’s mouth vanished, and the crimson glow in his eyes weakened.

Yuuta’s grip around Zeri’s throat loosened.

For a fraction of a second, both of them remained suspended in the air as if the world itself had forgotten they were supposed to fall. Then whatever force had been holding them there disappeared as well.

Zeri hit the ground first.

"AH...!"

His body crashed violently into the ruined road, bounced once, and rolled through shattered concrete before finally stopping several meters away. His regeneration immediately went to work, repairing the damage caused by the fall, but for several seconds Zeri remained where he was, staring blankly at the sky as his mind struggled to understand what had just happened.

Then the memories came rushing back.

Those hands.

Zeri suddenly grabbed his own face.

His fingers trembled uncontrollably as he touched his cheeks, forehead, jaw and mouth, almost as if he needed to make sure everything was still there. His breathing became erratic, and tears began gathering in his golden eyes before he could stop them.

"No..."

He had seen them.

He was certain of it.

Several black hands had crawled directly out of Yuuta’s mouth. They had grabbed his face and begun pulling him toward that impossible darkness, and even now Zeri could still remember the sensation. It hadn’t felt as though those things wanted to tear apart his flesh. It had felt as though they wanted to drag away something much deeper than his body.

For the first time in his life, Zeri felt genuinely traumatized by something he couldn’t understand.

His body had survived. His regeneration was working again. Even the strange deterioration caused by Yuuta’s aura was disappearing now that the darkness was gone, yet none of that comforted him.

Zeri slowly turned his head.

Yuuta lay unconscious several meters away.

There was no black aura around him anymore. No bleeding crimson eyes watching Zeri. No impossible pressure suffocating the street. He was simply lying there, completely motionless after crashing onto the road.

Zeri stared at him.

Fear crawled through his body again.

"No..."

He couldn’t leave Yuuta alive.

That thought overwhelmed everything else. Zeri didn’t care about his orders anymore, nor did he care why Yuuta had been wanted in the first place. He didn’t want to capture him. He didn’t want to understand his power. He didn’t even want revenge for the humiliation.

He simply wanted Yuuta gone.

"I’ll kill you."

Zeri forced himself onto his feet.

His hands were still trembling.

"I’ll kill you right now."

All four tentacles rose behind him as demonic power rushed through his body. Zeri bent forward, digging his feet into the shattered road, while his golden eyes locked onto Yuuta’s unconscious figure.

"If you’re dead... you can’t do that to me again."

Zeri launched himself forward with everything he had.

The road exploded beneath his feet.

His body became a blur as he rushed toward Yuuta, mouth opening unnaturally wide until rows of shark-like teeth were exposed. Four tentacles spread around him, each prepared to tear Yuuta apart the instant he reached him.

There would be no playing this time.

No talking.

No torture.

Zeri intended to destroy Yuuta so completely that there would be nothing left to awaken again.

Yuuta remained motionless.

Zeri reached him.

His tentacles descended.

And Yuuta disappeared.

BOOM!

All four tentacles slammed into the empty road.

The impact shattered the pavement, creating another massive spiderweb of cracks beneath Zeri. Dust and chunks of concrete erupted around him as he stared at the empty space where Yuuta had been lying only an instant earlier.

Zeri froze.

"Huh?"

He looked left.

Nothing.

His head snapped toward the opposite side.

Yuuta was gone.

"What...?"

Zeri’s eyes widened.

He hadn’t seen anyone approach.

He hadn’t sensed any aura.

He hadn’t even seen Yuuta move.

One moment the unconscious human had been lying directly in front of him, and the next he had simply ceased to be there.

"What the hell just...."

A presence appeared behind him.

Zeri stopped breathing.

There was no explosion of power announcing its arrival. No enormous aura descended upon the city, nor did some violent pressure force Zeri onto his knees.

It was simply there.

Yet that somehow made it worse.

Every muscle in Zeri’s body became rigid. Even his tentacles stopped moving as a sensation unlike anything he had experienced before slowly crawled across his skin.

Someone was standing behind him.

And for some reason, Zeri’s instincts warned him not to turn around.

Don’t move.

Don’t speak.

Don’t even breathe too loudly.

It felt as though death itself were standing behind him, calmly deciding whether the sound of his breathing was irritating enough to justify killing him.

Then a voice broke the silence.

"Fascinating."

Zeri’s pupils contracted.

The voice wasn’t loud. There was no anger within it, no excitement and certainly no effort to intimidate him. It sounded almost thoughtful, as though whoever stood behind him had merely encountered something mildly interesting.

Zeri slowly tried to turn his head.

His body refused.

"It’s been so long..."

The presence behind him moved.

A shadowy figure stood only a short distance away, its form difficult to understand even when Zeri tried to focus on it. Darkness concealed its features so completely that there seemed to be nothing for his eyes to recognize.

The figure looked around at the ruined city.

"It has been so long since I descended into the mortal realm."

Zeri’s lips trembled.

Descended?

Something about that word disturbed him even more.

The shadow figure’s attention slowly returned to him.

"I never thought anyone would actually be capable of drawing me into this cursed world."

Its voice remained perfectly calm.

Zeri finally managed to move one foot backward, but the instant his shoe scraped against the pavement, his entire body froze again. The figure hadn’t threatened him. It hadn’t attacked him or even raised its voice.

Yet Zeri suddenly felt that taking another step would be the last mistake he ever made.

Then he noticed something else.

The city had gone silent.

Completely silent.

The distant explosions were gone. The screams and gunfire that had echoed throughout Yuno City could no longer be heard. Even the wind seemed to have vanished.

Nothing moved.

Nothing made a sound.

Zeri stood in the middle of that impossible silence, too terrified to turn around completely, while the shadow figure quietly watched him from behind.