As for the other Great Demons trapped within the barrier? They had no time to mourn their King, nor could they come to his rescue. They were far too busy fighting for their own lives.
From the golden portals that had opened beside each of them, a figure stepped out.
Clones. Dozens of them.
Every single demon found themselves facing their own personal executioner. Stell had calculated the exact number of hostiles and deployed an equal number of units to match. It was a perfectly balanced, utterly ruthless one-on-one extermination.
The Demon King, bound by chains of light and stripped of his mana, could only watch.
He watched as his strongest generals, the pride of the demon race, were slaughtered. Some managed to exchange a few desperate blows with their assigned clones before being cut down. Others, relying on tricky or slow-casting magic, were decapitated the moment the clones stepped out of the gates.
In exactly sixty seconds, the chaotic sounds of battle died away. The ruined courtyard returned to a chilling, absolute silence.
Stell said nothing. There was no need for grand speeches or villainous monologues. Against a defeated enemy, words were just a waste of time.
She turned her attention back to the Demon King. To extract the maximum amount of data from his centuries of life, she needed physical contact with his neural pathways. She reached out.
However, there was a slight logistical issue.
Even forced onto his knees, the Demon King was a massive creature. Stell, with her petite frame, couldn't quite reach the top of his head.
Without a change in expression, her internal gravity manipulators hummed. She simply floated a few feet into the air until she was level with him, floating gently before his face.
Seeing that small, pale hand reaching for him, the Demon King finally closed his eyes.
He had wanted to resist. He had wanted to secure a future for his people. But the gap in power was a bottomless canyon. He hadn't even lasted a single exchange.
The screams of his dying kin still echoed in his mind. They were the last sounds of a fading era.
Stell's cold, metallic fingers rested against his forehead.
Initiating Mind Hack.
As the torrent of data began to transfer, the Demon King's consciousness slipped quietly into the dark.
…
"Hold on," Takson said, his brow furrowing.
He and Flamme had left their waiting spot, jogging toward the site of the massive explosion. They didn't doubt Stell's strength for a second.
They knew she could handle whatever was over there. But the sheer scale of the blast had ignited their curiosity.
Surely, taking a quick peek from a safe distance wouldn't hurt?
But something was wrong.
"Flamme, stop for a second."
Flamme halted, her boots sliding in the dirt. "What is it?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she stared intently at the landscape ahead. She reached her hand out into the empty air, her fingers splayed as if she were feeling the surface of an invisible window.
"Did you notice it too?" Takson asked, a sour look crossing his face.
They had been walking toward the ruins of the Demon King's Castle for quite some time. The jagged, smoking silhouette of the fortress was clearly visible on the horizon.
Yet, no matter how fast or how long they walked, the castle never got any larger. The distance between them and their destination hadn't closed by a single inch.
"It's a barrier," Flamme said softly, her eyes narrowing as she analyzed the mana flow. "A spatial loop. We're just walking in place."
"Tch. Magic." Takson clicked his tongue.
This was the one thing he hated. Against a physical threat, he could swing his axe. But against an invisible maze that warped space itself? All his physical strength was useless. He had to rely on his junior apprentice.
"Can you break it?"
"I can try," Flamme muttered, her brow sweating. "But this is strange. The spell structure... it has elements I've never seen before. The caster's strength is completely off the charts."
She began to weave a counter-spell, her hands glowing with pale light. But before she could even finish the first incantation...
CRACK.
The empty air in front of them fractured. Jagged lines spiderwebbed across the sky.
With a sound like a falling chandelier, the spatial barrier shattered into a million glittering pieces of glass that dissolved before they hit the ground.
The illusion fell away, revealing the true, horrific devastation of the battlefield just a few miles ahead.
"Eh? Ah?" Flamme blinked, her hands still raised awkwardly in mid-cast.
She lowered her arms and looked forward.
Standing right in front of them, looking as calm and immaculate as if she had just returned from a light stroll, was a familiar figure with violet-blue hair.
…
The Future:
"Ugh... wh-what...?"
Aura's vision snapped back into focus.
A fraction of a second ago, she had been smiling triumphantly, throwing herself backward off a thousand-meter cliff to escape.
But now? The rushing wind was gone. The sickening drop was gone.
She was lying flat on her stomach in the dirt, right back where she had started. And a heavy, chilling weight was pressing down on the top of her head.
Her brain couldn't process the sudden shift in reality. But her survival instincts didn't need logic to understand that she had lost. Complete, overwhelming panic seized her heart.
"Don't kill me!" she shrieked, her voice a shrill, ragged pitch. "Please! I'll do anything!"
Feeling that small, cold hand resting on her skull, Aura's desire to live eclipsed every ounce of her demonic pride.
"You want my magic, right?! You want Auserlese, the Scales of Obedience! I'll give it to you! I'll teach you everything! Every spell I know, just please... if I do it, you'll let me go, right?!"
She babbled uncontrollably, her words tripping over themselves.
By human standards, Aura was a beautiful creature. Demons evolved to look pleasing, using their aesthetics to lower the guard of humans before eating them. But right now, there was no deceptive charm left in her.
Her pretty face was a twisted, ugly mess of snot and tears. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot, fixed in a stare of absolute terror.
In this future era, humanity barely believed demons still existed.
The Great Purge orchestrated by Stell a thousand years ago had reduced them to little more than campfire myths.
Aura was one of the rare few who had survived in the shadows, clawing her way to power. She refused to die now, extinguished by a ghost from the past.
The clone of Stell looked down at the sobbing, pathetic creature.
….
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