The Damned Demon - Chapter 922: To Achieve Eternal Peace

Chapter 922: To Achieve Eternal Peace

Ash drifted down like dead snow.

Rowena, Isola, Rebecca, Grace, Yui, Naida, Layla—the whole line of them stood amid cracked ground and hanging mist, weapons up, breaths tight. The dead doppelgangers they’d been hacking apart a moment earlier—those uncanny copies with their ominous eyes and borrowed habits—stiffened all at once as if the same string had been yanked inside each of them. Then the copies shattered into gray ash and fell apart in soft, collapsing heaps.

Rebecca exhaled hard and dragged the back of her hand across her brow, smudging soot. “Please tell me those creepy versions of ourselves aren’t coming back…”

“I think they are really gone…” Isola mumbled, a relieved look spreading over her face as she lowered her staff. Her shoulders dropped, the tension unwinding from her spine like a pulled blade finally put away.

Rowena’s own breath left in a slow, measured hiss. She didn’t say much, but the way her grip eased on her whip said enough. Even her eyes, sharp and cold as a rule, warmed by a small degree.

“They did it…” Naida murmured, voice wobbling between a laugh and a sob. She glanced at Layla, who met her gaze with the same shaken relief.

Grace frowned, still scanning the ruin in case the ash decided to grow hands. “What do you mean they did it? You mean Asher and…”

Naida nodded. “Aira. The Prime one. The version of her who’s been guiding us all along to save him.” She lifted her chin, as if the name itself needed some kind of protective wall. “This was her plan. To take down the Time Wraith with Asher’s help. So it must be finally over. His fate is safe now… so is all of ours.”

Rowena stepped forward, eyes pinning the distant sky like a target. “Let’s go then. We can finally be with him without having to worry about tomorrow.”

They barely had time to move.

A ripple passed across the clouds; several of the women looked up, hands going to hilts or staffs out of habit. Two figures cut down through the air at speed—one a beautiful woman who looked to be in her thirties, silky blue hair streaming; the other a young man in gleaming gold armor with a white cape snapping behind him. He descended faster, urgency pinned to his posture.

Rowena’s brows rose, not from worry but calculation. She clearly recognized the woman as Cecilia Sterling, the wife of the evil human who tried to destroy all of them.

And then there was him. The young man’s aura caught her attention—a shape and pressure that in some stubborn way felt like Asher’s, the way certain storms smell like rain before they break. She could now see how he belonged to his father’s blood and soul.

Isola’s mouth softened into a warm smile as the pair landed hard enough to send dust rolling. She knew the boy; the recognition brightened her features. “Arthur,” she said under her breath, and the word carried more than a name—it carried relief, affection, and the quiet thought that Asher would want to see this.

“You’re that eager to see your father, huh? You goody little brat,” Rebecca said, hands on her hips, tone light but eyes tracking his face for the crack in it.

Arthur didn’t bristle. He was too anxious to notice the tease. He took in the semicircle of powerful demons—-strangers. No, not-strangers—his father’s people—eyes tightening a fraction as their attention swept him, weighing him, comparing the familiar lines of his jaw to a man they loved. He nodded once—polite, quick—then faced them.

“I apologize for being rude,” he said, voice steady but too fast. “I’ll introduce myself properly later. Right now I need to find my father—and my mother. Do you know where they are? I can’t sense his aura for some reason. Maybe because he’s… an immortal now.”

“Child…” Naida stepped forward. Hope lit Arthur’s eyes and then faltered as he registered the look on hers—sorrow drawn clean across the face. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. But your mother… she… she made the ultimate sacrifice to save us all.”

The words hit him like a thrown wall. “W-What? Sacrifice? No… no… That cannot be. She promised…” The color left his face; his knees wavered as if the ground had tilted.

Grace and Isola moved in together on instinct, hands bracing his arms. He didn’t shove them off. He stared at Naida as if repeating the sentence would change it.

Rowena’s eyes flickered. She didn’t speak into his grief; she held it with the respect she reserved for hard truths.

But in her chest a dull ache took root—the understanding that the woman who had once been Asher’s first love had purchased this hour for all of them and paid in full. Rowena swallowed once. In her mind she saw Asher witnessing it—saw the way he would nod, jaw set, and never forgive himself even when everyone else did.

“Let’s go to him,” Rowena said, cutting through the quiet with a steady voice. “He’s going to need us. The least we can do is be there.”

Everyone nodded. Grace’s palm settled firm between Arthur’s shoulder blades. “I know this hurts,” she said. “Come with us and be with your father. He’s hurting like you are. You need each other right now.”

Arthur’s mouth trembled; tears rolled and fell, fast and clean. He nodded, a small, choked sound escaping him as he let them guide his first steps.

—

Meanwhile, not too long ago—

Asher stood facing a patch of empty air that felt heavier than the rest of the world.

One moment there had been light—Aira’s light—undoing itself into clean, final particles. The Chronophage still remained there, like a reminder of the execution it had just carried out. Silence collected in the shape of her absence.

He didn’t move. He let the quiet bite. Then, somewhere behind him, a sound—tiny, wet, unwilling—broke the air. The kind of sound a person makes when they’re trying not to make any sound at all.

He turned.

The Time Wraith knelt where the ground was less ground and more scraped memory. Half her body was still in the world; the other half was a slow storm of radiant white particles peeling off and drifting away. The wildness she wore like armor before—the sharp smiles, the cold eyes, the rage that moved like fire—had fallen off her. What was left looked fragile and human in a way that hurt to look at.

He knew what he was seeing. He had always known it, under the madness, the fight and the words. This was the true Aira—worn to the bone by time, cracked by a million failures, stubborn past the point of mercy.

The Aira who had kept walking when a sane person would have lied down. The Aira who had put herself on the altar again and again and called it a plan.

His heart didn’t break; it pulled apart slow and even, the way old cloth gives up. He blurred—green flame twitching—and the next heartbeat he was beside her, dropping to one knee slowly so he didn’t jolt what still held her together. He lowered his head until he was level with her gaze.

“Aira,” he said. The word came out rough, quieter than he meant. “I know no amount of words can absolve me for how much I’ve wronged you. But I am sorry… for not being there for you.”

He reached for her hand. She tried to steady it to meet him, but as her fingers lifted she gasped—the lower half of her legs broke apart into dust with that motion, the edges of her dissolving even faster for the effort. Her balance gave; she started to fall.

“Asher,” she breathed, a reflex more than a plea.

He caught her gently, one arm behind her back, the other under her knees that were no longer there, careful as if she were made of glass instead of light. He guided her until her head found his shoulder and her torso settled against his chest. His flames calmed down and pooled close, warm but not burning. He bent his head to hear her breath.

She looked up into his face and managed a crooked, pained smile that still found a way to be beautiful. “I… I forgot how good it feels to be in your embrace,” she whispered. “She was right… I ruined it all…”

He shook his head, the motion small so he didn’t jar her. His hand slid up and smoothed a lock of hair back from her brow the way he had done in countless lives he did not remember, and a few he did. “No,” he said. “I’m the one to blame. I ruined your life and soul, and I can never forgive myself for it.” He swallowed, heat that wasn’t flame burning the backs of his eyes. “Tell me if there is still a way to save you. I will do anything—even if it means I have to get damned again. I just want you to live on… happily…”

Her eyes shimmered. The light in them had always been fierce, but now it was soft in a way that hurt worse. “Your eyes,” she murmured, a small laugh breaking on the edges, “they always looked at me with so much warmth no matter which timeline, no matter what atrocities I did. I hurt you so much in so many lifetimes… and yet you always wanted to save me.”

He didn’t look away. He let her see everything—his shame, his anger at himself, the stupid, stubborn hope that kept breathing even when told to stop. “Why,” he asked, voice breaking, “why did you go so far? Why didn’t you ask me for help in any of those lifetimes? I might have been weaker, but I wouldn’t have stopped—for both our sakes. Even if we die together, we would at least be doing it together.”

Aira’s breath hitched, but a weak, broken chuckle escaped her lips as her trembling fingers reached up to caress Asher’s face. Her touch was faint, almost transparent, yet it carried the weight of eons.

“The way you lie hasn’t changed as well,” she whispered, her voice shaky but laced with tender familiarity. “Whenever you help me and we end up facing death… you break your promise and die first, while I’m left behind. I got angry and hated you for it. I cursed you for abandoning me…”

Her voice cracked, tears slipping down her cheeks. But then she forced the faintest smile, eyes shimmering with a bittersweet glow.

“…But then I realized… that’s the kind of man I fell in love with. That’s why I only knew one way for us to be together.”

Asher’s lips parted. His throat tightened until words felt like shards. “…Aira…” His voice was weak, strained, as his chest ached with a pain deeper than any blade could carve.

But then Aira’s smile faltered. Her eyes filled with unease as her hand slid down to clutch his arm, her nails pressing faintly into his skin as if desperate to keep him anchored.

Her tone grew urgent, almost frightened. “But it’s not over… Other than what awaits you beyond our realm, you… and your loved ones… they are in danger right now. I messed up… If only I could turn back time one more time…”

Asher’s brow furrowed. Confusion flickered in his eyes as he gripped her fading hand tighter. “What are you talking about? Who or what can put us in danger now?”

Her lips trembled. She met his gaze, sorrow and guilt drowning her expression. “…Me…”

Her voice cracked on the single word. And then, before he could even grasp it, her figure blurred and began to disintegrate—her body unraveling into a cascade of radiant white particles.

“Aira!” Asher’s heart plummeted. He caught at the air desperately, his voice shattering in anguish as her presence slipped away from his arms, gone like dust in a cold wind. His teeth clenched, flames roaring from his body as he screamed her name into the silence—

And then the silence changed.

The air shifted—chilling, heavy, suffocating. His breath misted. The battlefield grew darker as an unnatural cold crawled across it.

A voice broke the air, sharp and mocking, dripping like venom from a wound.

“Ugh… that pathetic echo of us… telling on us…”

Asher’s head snapped up, his eyes widening.

Another voice followed, eerily similar yet distinct, laced with cruel amusement. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks to us, including her, we can finally finish what we started. It’s a good thing we planned for a scenario like this.”

His chest tightened as he slowly looked around, the dark green flames around him blazing higher in alarm.

One by one, figures emerged from the gloom. Women—multiple women—each identical in face, each wearing the white hair, the spines, the eyes of radiant hate.

The Time Wraith. Not one. Not two. But many. Their bodies shimmered with unnatural radiance, their lips curled into malevolent smiles as they circled him like predators that had been waiting forever for this moment.

“How…” Asher whispered, his voice hollow, disbelief shaking through him. His body tensed, every muscle wound tight, his instincts screaming.

Dealing with one was already a nightmare. But this many…

One of the Time Wraiths stepped forward with a scoff, her gaze dripping with mockery. “Come on, Asher. Do you really think someone who lived as long as we did wouldn’t have at least a few backup plans? So all we had to do… was find each other. Echoes of us from different timelines.”

Another Wraith chuckled bitterly, her voice grating against the air. “Of course, we broke some so-called divine laws by doing this. But who cares? Nobody seemed to stop us, did they? And now… we are going to finish what we started.”

Asher’s jaw clenched, his hand tightening around the Void Reaver until the blade hummed. His flames writhed like a storm, but his heart quivered with something colder than rage.

Then another of the Wraiths stepped closer, her hands dripping—not with light, but with fresh, red blood. She smiled with twisted satisfaction, her radiant eyes gleaming.

“Yes… we already took care of your little loved ones. Now only you are left and soon we can all join them…”

Asher froze. His mind went blank for a moment before the meaning of the words struck him like a blade through his chest. His flames exploded outward, searing the ground beneath his feet as his body shook in anguish. His voice tore free in a roar that carried both fury and grief.

“NO!! What have you done?!” Just when he thought it was all over, his world came crashing down again. But what hurt him more was that it was caused by someone he loved more than himself.

“There, there,” another Wraith cooed mockingly, her steps slow and deliberate as she moved toward the frozen Chronophage. “Don’t feel sad or angry. You don’t have to. We’ll take all that pain away from you.”

She extended her pale hand toward the divine artifact, her lips twisting into a smile that was equal parts cruel and serene.

“Together…” she said, her voice echoing in layers, overlapping with the others. “…we will achieve eternal peace.” Saying so, she activated the Chronophage, the hands of the artifact about to slip towards midnight once more.

Oh damn…is this it? The end?

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