POV: Dimora
I had everything. I am fine… and yet there is something missing, says my deeper self.
Something important, like the last piece of a puzzle that refuses to reveal its shape.
I search for it, yet I cannot find it. Strange, isn't it?
To stand in rooms filled with abundance, to hold comfort in both hands, to know that every door opens when I approach and still feel the quiet echo of absence.
I was never denied. The world bent gently around my wishes. Gold, laughter, music, admiration, all of it arrived before I even learned to ask.
People would say I am fortunate. They see a life without hunger, a path without thorns. And perhaps they are right.
But somewhere beneath the silk and certainty, there is a whisper I cannot silence.
It speaks in moments between breaths, in the stillness after applause fades, in the strange emptiness that lingers, even after joy has visited.
It asks me a question no one else seems to hear: Is this all?
I wander through my days like a traveler, who has reached every destination only to realize the map was incomplete. What am I missing?
A purpose? A struggle? A love that does not arrive easily?
Or perhaps it is something more fragile…something that cannot be gifted, purchased, or inherited.
Fulfillment.
Yes… that word circles me like a distant star. Close enough to see, too far to touch. I search for it in beauty, in knowledge, in the eyes of others; hoping one of them will reflect the answer back to me.
But the mirror remains silent.
And so I continue searching, because I possess everything except the one thing that would make it enough.
…
Dimora smiled as she rose to meet him.
The battlefield fell away beneath them. Tens of thousands of soldiers looked like black scales spread across the cracked plain. Standards snapped in the hot wind. The dead already stained the earth in long dark smears. Above it all, the sky of the Underworld churned in bands of red and violet, streaked with distant lightning that never touched the ground.
Meruem stopped across from her in open air, wings spread wide, black and proud, his hair dark as midnight stirred around a face far too young to understand who he's rebelling against. He was merely a boy of Seventeen. He still had the smooth arrogance of youth in his features. Still had that irritating ease in his grin. He looked like a prince from a painting - one who foolishly believed the world functioned like a fairy tail.
He would learn the hard way.
Dimora had lived more than eight centuries. Young men always believed themselves invincible, they did not have the wisdom of old age. She had buried prodigies before he was born. She had seen heirs rise bright and die young because genius made them reckless. The House of Beleth had always raised princes of pride, and this boy was the sharpest of them. Even so, a sharp blade still snapped if pressed hard enough.
"Hello." Meruem met her eyes with an arrogant smirk. "My name is Meruem Beleth. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
"You should have knelt when you had the chance," she said.
Meruem tilted his head. "That line sounds better when the speaker can back it up."
She did not laugh. "You have no idea what you're up against, Boy. Surrender and you shall have my mercy."
"You wish to surrender to me?" Meruem asked lightly. "I'm afraid I'm all out of mercy. You destroyed any I might have had when you killed my father."
"It seems you of house Beleth are all the same." Dimora sighed. "Generation after generation proving that pride is all you possess. Pride without wisdom or restraint. You will soon learn what every fool eventually learns…Pride is the blade that turns in the hand of the one who wields it."
His smile remained. His eyes changed.
The King's Eye awakened. His pupils sharpened, and color moved through the air around him. Dimora could not see what he saw, yet she felt the gaze pass over her demonic power, over the currents in her wings, over the weight of destruction coiled in her body. It felt invasive and chilling.
"You admit it then," he said quietly. "You killed my father."
"I admit nothing," she replied, unimpressed. "Your father was a fool who couldn't even see his own father-in-law sharpening the knife behind his back. I had hoped you would prove a touch wiser." Her gaze swept over him dismissively. "Evidently, I was mistaken."
His face was light. His aura was not.
The pressure around him deepened. Flames spilled into existence at his shoulders in curling arcs of gold and crimson. They circled him like obedient beasts, then drew into a spiral, finally forming three huge layers of circles behind him, each circle bigger than the last. Demonic energy flooded his body and reinforced every part of him. The air around him began to bend from the heat.
Art of destruction: web of the end.
Dimora raised one hand and released a thread of destruction. It left her fingertip as a pale violet line, thin as silk, silent as thought. The air in its path vanished. Heat and dust along with everything in its narrow path vanished.
Meruem's head tilted.
The line passed beside his cheek and kept going into the far horizon where a mountain hanging over the underworld plain lost its peak in a clean, soundless cut. A second later the upper half collapsed. Fire erupted from the wound in the rock. The shockwave rolled back over the battlefield and flattened banners, trenches, and ranks of soldiers on both sides.
He glanced at the falling mountain, then back at her. "That was my favorite mountain."
"You had a favorite mountain?"
"I did now."
Then he moved.
He shot forward hard enough to break the cloud layer above them. The shockwave rolled out behind him in a white ring. Dimora's wings snapped once and took her higher. Fire tore past her face, close enough to singe a strand of her hair. He had aimed for where she would dodge, not where she was.
Clever.
She turned and sent three black spheres after him. Meruem twisted through the first, slapped the second aside with Sovereign Pressure, and burned the third out of the sky with a concentrated lance of flame. The impact shook the air and birthed a brief hollow in the cloud bank behind him where even vapor had been devoured.
He was on her a heartbeat later.
Their fists met in midair with a crack that thundered over the battlefield.
Dimora's eyes widened.
She had expected him to be fast and skillful. She had, however, not expected a raw force at this level from a boy barely out of his diapers. Yet his punch drove straight through her guard and jolted her arm to the shoulder. The physical reinforcement from his demonic energy was perfect, layered with exact control and no waste. Every muscle in his body worked like a weapon forged by a god of war.
He was stronger than he should have been. Far stronger than he had any right to be.
His bones should have shattered the moment she touched him. Anyone beneath an ultimate-class being could not exchange blows with her. That left only one possible conclusion.
Ultimate-class.
Meruem of House Beleth, a mere seventeen-year-old boy, had reached the pinnacle.
No.
That was impossible.
The thought itself felt ridiculous, insulting even, because power of that magnitude was not something one stumbled into by accident, nor something talent alone could bridge, and certainly not something a child could possess, no matter how prodigious the stories surrounding him might be.
Not even those two monsters had achieved such a feat.
Sirzechs Lucifer and Ajuka Beelzebub had reached ultimate-class only in their late twenties, and even that had shaken the foundations of the Underworld when it happened, because beings like them were an aberrations of existence itself. Freaks of nature whose very birth had tilted the balance of power in Hell and forced the old nobility to reconsider the future of their world.
And you mean to tell me that this boy… this seventeen-year-old child… belongs in the same category as them?
Impossible.
Utterly impossible.
The more she entertained the notion, the more her mind rebelled against it, rejecting the idea as a nun might refuse the advances of a priest. Devils did not simply ascend to ultimate-class through talent alone. It was the very pinnacle of what a devil could hope to achieve after centuries of relentless training, countless battles, and a lifetime spent sharpening one's power against equally monstrous opponents.
There was, of course, a realm above it - the domain of Satan-class beings - but that level of power existed so far beyond the reach of ordinary devils that it might as well have belonged to another species entirely, a realm reserved for those rare individuals whom the heavens themselves seemed to favor.
For the vast majority of devilkind, ultimate-class was the summit.
The peak.
The absolute limit of what even the most gifted devils could hope to attain.
And even then it required centuries. Centuries. Not decades. Not years.
It was decidedly not something one reached in their teenage years, no matter how extraordinary their talent might be.
Even Dimora herself, recognized since childhood as a once-in-a-generation prodigy among the house of Bael, had not achieved ultimate-class through her own power alone, having required the enhancement of a King's Piece to cross that final threshold after decades of growth and refinement.
And even that accomplishment had been considered remarkable.
Forget reaching ultimate-class in one's teens. Across the entire recorded history of devilkind there had been only four devils who had achieved that level of power before their hundredth birthday.
Four!
The number was so small it was practically legendary. Which made the conclusion her mind was slowly, inexorably forming all the more absurd.
Dimora Bael's mind circled that fact again and again, like a predator refusing to approach something it could not understand.
Seventeen.
Her thoughts stalled there, refusing to move forward.
No. That can't be right. It must be wrong.
Her brain simply refused to accept what the logical part of her mind was suggesting. The conclusion was too ridiculous. Too grotesque.
It had to be something else.
I must have subconsciously held back. she thought, clinging to the explanation desperately as she replayed the brief exchange in her mind. It isn't my intention to kill him, after all.
Yes. That had to be it.
And besides, his King's Eye allowed him to perceive and predict movements to a certain extent, an ability that could easily explain how he had evaded her initial strike and endured one of her blows without collapsing outright.
That was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
And yet…Dimora felt uneasy.
She had come here expecting a simple confrontation, a brief and perhaps mildly entertaining clash against a talented but ultimately inexperienced child, because that was how her ancestor had described him. A prodigy, certainly, but still merely a boy when viewed from the perspective of beings who had lived for centuries.
So why…Why was every instinct she possessed screaming at her to run?
Am I… sweating?
The thought came with quiet disbelief as she glanced down at her hands, noticing the faint sheen of moisture along her palm as though her body had already reached a conclusion her mind refused to acknowledge.
Ridiculous. She forced out a quiet breath.
I must have lost my edge, she thought, tightening her fingers into a fist. That's all this is. Imagining power where there is none.
Yes. That had to be the explanation.
In truth, had she not expected this much? Meruem was, after all, widely considered a prodigy. It was only natural that he would show something impressive.
But still…Her gaze drifted back to the boy standing across from her. The unease in her chest refused to fade.
Meruem saw the surprise in her face and laughed. "Why my demonesse of Ruin," he said. "You look like you just saw a ghost."
Dimora answered with a knee toward his ribs. He caught it on his forearm. She pivoted and drove her elbow toward his temple. He dipped under it and slammed a palm into her sternum. Sovereign Pressure detonated on contact.
Invisible force burst through her body and hurled her downward.
The sky screamed around her as she dropped. She opened her wings, stopped herself less than a hundred feet above the armies below, and felt thousands of terrified eyes lift toward her. Meruem descended after her in a streak of fire.
He was trying to drag the battle lower.
Dimora understood at once. He wanted her aware of the soldiers beneath them. He wanted her constrained and to think about collateral damage every second.
He's annoying, she thought. The uneasiness grew in her heart.
She lifted two fingers.
Art of destruction: Third from.
The space beneath Meruem twisted. Air itself lost coherence. Gas vanished in a widening cone, and the pressure balance broke apart. The sky collapsed into a violent implosion. Meruem's charge faltered for a fraction of a second as the air around him ceased to behave like air.
That fraction was enough.
Dimora appeared above him and drove both heels into his back.
He plummeted.
He struck the battlefield with the force of a meteor dropped from the heavens. Stone, iron, bodies, and earth burst upward in a massive ring. Soldiers from both sides were thrown from their feet. A crater ripped open beneath him and spread with branching fractures across the plain.
The armies recoiled. The amount of damage from one clean hit would have flattened a fortress district.
Dimora hovered above the crater, one hand lifted, prepared to erase the molten earth around him and trap him in a falling grave.
A pillar of fire erupted from below and blasted toward her.
She veered aside as the blaze speared into the cloud ceiling, tore through it, and painted the dark sky gold. The heat washed over the battlefield in a brutal wave. Stone near the crater ran like wax.
Meruem rose from the center of the ruin on a column of flame, brushing dust from his shoulder. "Not bad," he said. "You should try putting more force into it next time."
Dimora's smile thinned. "Y-you can still stand."
The sound snapped something inside Dimora's mind.
For a moment she simply stared at him without speaking, her thoughts scattered in a haze of disbelief so deep that she could not form a coherent reply. The idea itself was so absurd that her mind tried to reject it outright, yet the evidence stood directly in front of her and refused to disappear no matter how strongly she wished it would.
She was utterly stunned.
Shock gripped her so completely that she could neither respond nor even decide what she wanted to say. Her thoughts kept circling the same impossible conclusion again and again, each repetition only making it feel more ridiculous than the last.
It made no sense.
There were devils who had lived for thousands of years who had never come close to reaching ultimate class. Many of the most powerful nobles in the underworld spent centuries training, gathering knowledge, refining their bloodlines, and mastering ancient techniques, and even then most of them never crossed that final threshold.
And yet here stood a child, an infant by the standards of her people, declaring that he had already reached the pinnacle of power most could only dream about.
If anyone had told her this story a few hours ago she would have laughed in their face. She would have assumed it was some elaborate insult or mockery meant to undermine her authority, and the fool who dared to suggest such nonsense would likely have been executed before sunset for wasting her time.
Yet the boy in front of her was not lying.
She knew that with absolute certainty.
She had felt it already.
She felt it the moment she descended onto the battlefield earlier and released her pressure across the army below. Thousands of soldiers had collapsed instantly beneath the weight of her aura, devils from noble houses and veteran warriors alike dropping to their knees as the presence of an ultimate-class being crushed the air itself.
That reaction had been expected because it was the natural response of weaker beings when confronted with someone who stood so far above them in strength.
Everyone had fallen. Except him.
Meruem had simply laughed.
She had seen it again when she struck him for the first time. Her punch had landed cleanly with the full weight of her physical strength behind it, the kind of blow that would have shattered the body of any high class devil instantly and scattered their remains across the sky. That was the natural difference between those levels of power. A high class devil could not withstand the full physical force of an ultimate class strike.
Instead the boy had absorbed the strike without his body collapsing into ruin, and the calm expression on his face had not even faltered as he met her attack with strength equal to her own.
She had seen it again in the way he moved across the battlefield with a speed her eyes struggled to follow despite centuries of training.
The evidence had been there from the beginning. She simply had not allowed herself to accept what it meant.
The conclusion had become unavoidable.
What was meant to be a simple conquest of a declining household had transformed into something far more dangerous. A campaign that should have been routine now carried the potential for complete disaster.
Meruem Beleth was ultimate-class, and that single fact changed everything.
They had made a grave mistake.
Even so, retreat was impossible. She had already committed her forces and revealed her intentions, and the boy himself had made his stance perfectly clear. He had stated openly that he would not negotiate and that he had no interest in compromise. Only now did she fully understand the source of that certainty.
Until this moment she had dismissed his attitude as the arrogance of youth, the reckless confidence of a child who had not yet learned the limits of his own power. She believed that once confronted with the reality of a true power he could be forced into submission and gradually molded into something manageable.
She had been wrong.
The child of flames could never be tamed.
Art of destruction: First from.
The earth beneath him blackened in a circle a mile wide. Solid matter vanished in expanding layers. Rock, metal, bone, and fortified soil disappeared into smooth nothing. The plain folded inward as support vanished. Soldiers screamed and fled from the edge as a vast basin opened below the prince.
Meruem clapped once.
Flames spread out from him in a ring and pushed back the tide of erasure through pure demonic force and heat shaped into dense pressure. He was reading its spread with the King's Eye and severing its path by moving matter faster than she could erase it. He thrust his hand downward and Sovereign Pressure ripped a slab of earth free from outside the basin, flipping it up beneath his feet like a thrown shield. Then he launched from it straight at her.
Again he chose the attack with reckless abandon.
Dimora felt her first true irritation.
Art of destruction: Orbs of entropy.
She filled the space between them with black orbs, dozens this time, each one a seed of deletion. Meruem's eyes flashed with unnatural focus and the world seemed to slow around him. He moved through their pattern with impossible precision, slipping by margins so thin they made her skin crawl.
One sphere shaved the edge of his wing and the membrane vanished in a narrow strip. He did not even glance at the damage. Fire sealed the wound, reshaped the wing, and kept him in motion.
He came through her barrage and seized her wrist.
It burned.
His hand burned like living metal, the pyrokinesis packed inward so tightly it did not spill outward as mere flame. He had turned heat into a grip.
Sovereign Pressure crushed down her arm.
Dimora snarled and let destruction flow through her own flesh, across the skin of her captured hand. Her powers did not harm her, she had too much control for that. She erased the heat clinging to him, the gathered energy in his grip, the force traveling through the contact point. His hold broke for a split second.
She used it without hesitation, snapping her head forward and slamming her forehead straight into his face with brutal force, the impact of the headbutt cracking loudly as her skull smashed into the bridge of his nose.
Cartilage crunched under the blow, and a burst of blood sprayed through the air as Meruem recoiled instinctively, his body drifting backward on reflex from the sudden violence of the strike.
Dimora did not give him even a moment to recover; the instant he staggered, she stepped forward and drove her hand forward in a spear-like thrust, her fingers swift as the strike aimed itself into his chest before she unleashed a tightly focused line of destructive power directly into him.
He caught it with both hands.
For one incredible second the air between them held a black beam of erasure, her will trying to tear through him, his power and pressure containing it inch by inch. His arms shook. The skin on his palms blistered, burned, then split. Flames wrapped his forearms in spirals. His eyes stayed on hers the entire time.
Then he smiled through the blood running from his nose. "There you are," he said. "I was worried you'd chicken out once seeing my power."
He twisted.
The beam bent.
Dimora's eyes widened as Meruem redirected her own attack off to the side. It crossed half the battlefield in an instant and erased a mountain wall at the horizon. The entire cliff face vanished. A heartbeat later the upper half of the range slid into the absence with a roar like the end of a world.
Silence followed the clash, spreading across the battlefield like a suffocating blanket.
Even the armies fighting far below stood rooted to their place, their movements slowing as countless eyes turned upward to the aftermath of that single exchange.
The deflected strike alone had carved away an enormous mass of stone, enough that the falling debris could have buried entire cities beneath it.
Meruem allowed the remaining force he had been holding back to disperse into the air before abruptly lunging forward, closing the distance in an instant and slamming his head straight into Dimora's.
The impact was violent enough to rattle her skull, and pain exploded through her vision in a blinding flash of white.
Before she recovered he was inside her guard, fists and elbows and knees coming in brutal sequence. No wasted movement. No time to take a breath. A prince raised for war. He struck like he had already watched this exchange happen in his mind and chosen the version where she failed. One hit to the liver. One to the floating ribs. One to the throat. She blocked two, ate three, parried one, and still he kept rhythm. Flames burst from his shoulders and curved around her flanks like hunting hounds.
He's predicting all of my attacks, she cursed that accursed eye of house Beleth.
Dimora dropped away and spun.
Art of destruction: destruction blade.
Black crescents erupted from her fingertips, thin blades of destruction that curved through the air like fragments of moonlight.
Meruem reacted instantly, crossing his arms in front of his body as Sovereign Pressure burst outward from him and condensed into a tightly compressed dome that surrounded him like an invisible fortress.
The crescents slammed into the barrier one after another, their edges biting into the unseen wall as they began to eat through the layered force protecting him.
For a moment the pressure held.
Then one slipped through.
The blade grazed across his side as it passed, carving a clean line through him where flesh simply ceased to exist before blood followed in its wake.
He hissed and glanced down. "For someone who plans to make me her husband, you sure aren't holding back."
"You speak too much."
"And you think too slowly."
His answer came with the sky itself.
Meruem raised one hand, fingers closing like a king taking hold of a servant's throat. At once, invisible pressure surged outward from him and crashed into the sky above, seizing the air itself and dragging a vast portion of the cloud cover downward into a violently spinning vortex.
Flames rushed into the spiraling mass as the pressure compressed everything within it, feeding the storm until the rotation intensified and the temperature climbed higher and higher.
Within seconds he had shaped it into a towering burning cyclone that stretched from the upper sky toward the battlefield below.
The heavens themselves seemed to twist into a massive pillar of rotating fire and crushing wind, a colossal inferno spiraling downward with terrifying force.
Then, with a simple motion of his arm, he hurled it at her.
Dimora shot to the side at once, moving with explosive speed, yet the sheer scale of the attack forced her to veer far wider than she intended.
The cyclone roared past her position and continued across the battlefield before slamming into the distant edge of the plain with catastrophic force.
Hundreds of tons of rock were torn from the ground and hurled into the air, twisting violently within the inferno as fortifications shattered like brittle glass beneath the impact.
An entire ridge stretching several miles along the horizon split apart under the assault, the stone cracking open before the exposed rock began to glow and melt under the overwhelming heat.
Even from that distance, the waves of scorching air rolled across the battlefield with enough force to knock soldiers off their feet, sending men and devils alike tumbling as the shock of the attack rippled through the war-torn plain.
Ultimate class.
That was what the armies below were witnessing now - natural disasters in humanoid form.
Art of destruction: fourth form.
Dimora thrust both hands forward at once, her fingers cutting through the air as waves of destructive power surged outward and began tearing the incoming cyclone apart piece by piece.
Sections of the inferno simply ceased to exist as her power erased them in sequence; flames vanished as though snuffed from reality, the roaring winds collapsed into nothingness, and the searing plasma at the cyclone's core imploded under the force of her attack.
The massive spinning tower disintegrated in fragments until the structure holding it together failed completely, and the sky around the collapsing storm thundered loudly as the pressure violently equalized.
By the time the last remnants of the cyclone had been erased, Meruem was already behind her.
He had used the attack as nothing more than a distraction.
His fist slammed forward without warning and drove straight between her shoulder blades, the force of the blow detonating through her back and launching her violently upward into the air.
Dimora's body flipped through the sky before she managed to catch herself and stabilize, twisting midair just in time to see Meruem already ascending after her.
As he closed the distance, a trace of mocking sympathy colored his voice. "You're geriartic," he called. "Should I slow down?"
Dimora felt anger sharpen into focus.
Enough.
She stopped climbing. She let him come.
When he entered range she opened both palms and invoked a deeper layer of her art.
Art of destruction: Seventh Form.
The phenomenon around them began to die.
The change came gradually at first, subtle enough that it might have gone unnoticed by anyone less attuned to the fabric of the battlefield.
Gravity loosened its grip.
Sound began to distort and blur as though the air itself had forgotten how to carry it properly.
High above them, the electric charge building within the storm clouds faltered and collapsed before it could fully form, leaving bolts of lightning to die before they were ever born.
The hot updrafts feeding the raging fires across the battlefield suddenly fractured and dispersed, their rising currents breaking apart as if the atmosphere had lost the rules that governed its flow.
Even within Meruem's own body the change became apparent, as the invisible forces his muscles relied upon shifted unnaturally while the surrounding field lost its natural coherence.
The seventh form of the power of destruction was the ability to destroy Natural phenomena.
Dimora was selectively erasing the laws that governed the world. Within a carefully controlled sphere surrounding them, reality itself had begun to malfunction.
For the first time since the battle had begun, Meruem's eyes widened.
His body suddenly dropped several feet through the air as the delicate balance required for controlled flight collapsed beneath him, the familiar dynamics of lift and resistance failing all at once.
He caught himself before he could fall further, forcing his body to stabilize through raw strength and the crushing pressure of his power. His wings continued to beat against the air, though the currents no longer supported them correctly, forcing him to rely more on brute force than natural aerodynamics.
Even his fire reacted strangely.
The flames that had once roared fiercely around him now sputtered and stretched thin, their structure weakening as the patterns of heat transfer that sustained them began to break apart.
The fire was still his.
But the world no longer knew how it was supposed to behave.
Watching the disruption spread through his powers, Dimora allowed a slow, satisfied smile to form."There," she said. "Now we fight on my terms."
She lunged.
Without stable gravity or normal airflow, movement became treacherous for anyone less skilled. Dimora had mastered this kind of battlefield long ago. She glided through dead zones of physics and met him with a black-edged kick to the jaw. His head snapped sideways. She drove a palm at his heart. He turned enough to spare the centerline. Her hand grazed his shoulder and half his armor vanished. Another strike carved away a portion of his left wing.
Meruem retreated instinctively, recalibrating his movements in response to the assault. Good, Dimora thought. Let him fear facing me. Let him feel the pressure mounting.
Art of destruction: Destruction sphere.
Dimora pressed harder. Destructive spheres bloomed around her like a dark halo. She fired them in intersecting patterns while disabling pockets of gravity and pressure around his path. Meruem started to evade, found the routes changed, and took two direct glancing hits. One erased flesh from his thigh. Another sheared away his sleeve and a strip of skin beneath it.
Blood scattered into the air, breaking into small red beads that drifted for a heartbeat before falling. He grunted.
She appeared before him and drove her fist into his stomach hard enough to fold him around it. Then she seized his throat and hurled him downward.
He struck an invisible patch of altered gravity and bounced sideways through the air, disoriented for the first time in the battle. Dimora spread her arms and the clouds above them began to vanish in smooth expanding rings. She began to destroy the gas in the atmosphere. Every layer she erased made the sky collapse inward. The battlefield below dimmed beneath a growing void dome where the atmosphere itself had been removed.
Panic erupted through the armies like wildfire. Officers screamed orders, their voices sharp and urgent, but the soldiers could not contain their fear; they scattered in all directions, desperate to flee from the projected collapse of the zone around them. Dimora observed their terror with a cold, calculating gaze and chose to exploit it.
She let the image of the heavens being peeled away above their heads wash over the battlefield, magnifying the spectacle of her dominance. A ruler needed power and theater both.
She looked down at Meruem, who had righted himself below her, breathing hard, body marked now by blood and missing pieces.
"You see?" she called. "This is power. This is what your father only glimpsed, understood only half-heartedly…could never fully understand. His precious pride means nothing in the presence of true strength."
The words were chosen carefully to provoke him.
She watched his face as for the first time, the grin left him.
The air changed.
Meruem lifted his head slowly. Blood ran from his split lip and broken nose. One eye was half-shadowed by scorched hair. Yet the thing that met her gaze was not the hot rage she expected or even the cold rage of a prince. She saw only indifference in his eyes.
"And why is that?" he asked calmly.
Dimora answered with a shrug. "Because he was too weak. You are strong, so you should know. The lesser devils could never understand us."
He vanished.
Dimora's instincts screamed. She threw destruction in every direction around herself. Black arcs ate through the air, through cloud, through the edges of her own dead zone.
Meruem came straight through a gap that should not have existed.
The King's Eye, she realized in annoyance.
He had read the structure in her technique and found the slightest seam in her storm of annihilation, a microscopic weakness, and seized it with flawless timing.
Before she could react, his hand closed over her face, an iron grip in the heart of the maelstrom she had created.
Then flame erupted, a violent, searing explosion that tore through the battlefield, scattering fragments of destruction and sending a shockwave that rattled even her bones.
It was no ordinary blaze now. It burned with such concentrated violence that even Dimora felt her own destruction strain to keep up with the assault. He slammed her downward through the air, through the failing zone of altered laws, through the thinning atmosphere she had erased, and back toward the battlefield at terrifying speed.
The ground rushed up.
At the last moment Meruem twisted and flung her across the plain.
Dimora tore through three ridges, shattered a watchtower ruin, and carved a trench miles long before she stopped. Mountains of dirt and broken stone rose behind her. Fires spread where her body had passed. Soldiers fled in waves from the shockfront.
Pain throbbed through her skull and spine.
She stood up slowly.
Meruem descended through the smoke and landed on a floating slab of rock above the trench she had made. He looked down at her with open contempt.
"You are right. My father was weak." he said calmly. "But he had one thing you lack."
"Oh? And what would that be?"
"Pride."
Dimora laughed, a deep musical laughter full of mirth and irony. "Pride you say? What use is pride if it brought him to his own death? Did his pride make his death in any way more dignified than those that don't have? No! He died like any other dog."
"He met his death bravely of that I'm sure. Whatever can be said of my father, he was no coward." Meruem looked at her with disgust. "And he would certainly never boast of borrowed power."
Her heart stilled at that accusation. Does he know?
"Did you think I wouldn't know that power of yours was not earned?" Merume mocked.
He extended one hand. Every flame on the battlefield answered his summons.
Burning siege towers cracked and splintered, ignited standards flared like beacons, and pools of spilled oil erupted in sudden, furious tongues of fire. Sparks danced across broken armor, and even the great river of molten stone along the far ridge writhed and surged, drawn into the growing inferno.
Fire from miles around converged in impossible streams, each line spiraling upward to meet behind him, forming a vast, burning mantle that draped the battlefield like a cloak of living flame. The light was so brilliant it turned the entire plain into the glow of a second dawn, and the soldiers below shrank to mere insects beneath this terrible, incandescent sun.
Dimora felt the scale and understood at once that he had been holding back.
He had spent most of the battle studying her.
Now he was done learning.
The sea of flame compressed, layer after layer, until it became twelve enormous lances floating behind him in a circle, each one radiating a blinding white core while plasma bled violently along their edges. The heat warped the very air around them, twisting distance and perspective until the battlefield seemed unreal, twisted.
He's finally getting serious, she thought, a shiver of despair crawling up her spine.
"So now it begins," Dimora said, forcing calm into her voice.
Meruem smiled again, though there was no warmth in it. "No, now it ends."
The first lance fired.
Dimora erased the beam before it hit. The second came from a different angle. She destroyed half of it and dodged the rest. It struck the horizon and vaporized a fortress ruin, leaving behind a glassy crater hundreds of feet deep.
The third and fourth came together. She broke one, took the edge of the other across her hip, and felt agony as flesh vanished. She retaliated with a flood of destructive spheres meant to swallow him whole.
Meruem's Sovereign Pressure swept outward in layered pulses. The first wave shoved the spheres off line. The second crushed the ground beneath Dimora's feet into a basin. The third came from above and hammered her into the earth.
Art of destruction: Fifth form.
She roared and shattered the pressure with a burst of destruction aimed at his demonic energy itself. At last, the effect hit.
The invisible force around her ruptured. Meruem actually staggered as a portion of his active power field was erased on contact. Dimora surged from the crater, one wing half-ruined, dress torn, hair wild around her face, and launched herself at him with both hands coated in black radiance.
Their next clash tore the battlefield apart.
His fire met her destruction.
His pressure met her erasure of force, heat, and momentum.
They crossed the sky in flashes so fast the armies below saw only bursts of light and black gaps opening in the air. Every collision birthed storms. One exchange erased a lake in the distance when a missed crescent clipped its shore and devoured the water in a widening swath.
Another sent a wave of pressure rolling across the plain that flattened entire regiments where they stood and opened trenches beneath their feet.
A third clash ignited the cloud cover over half the battlefield and turned it into a burning red ceiling.
Dimora fought with everything she had.
Meruem fought with joy. He laughed as one fay as he parried her attacks.
She hated it. The laughter and mockery in his gaze.
He enjoyed this.
Even bloodied and wounded, even against a power that could erase the world piece by piece, he treated the battle like a game he had already solved. He baited reactions. He stepped into danger to gather information. He let her think she had broken his rhythm, then punished the assumption a second later.
Every time she tried to widen the field and overwhelm him with scale, he narrowed it to a contest of precision where his instincts and speed ruled. Every time she tried to force a close exchange, he used pressure and flame to shape the terrain around their bodies and turn it into another trap.
He learned too quickly.
No. He had always known this was how it would go.
The realization chilled her.
He had been toying with her.
Dimora shot past him and spun, trying to take his head with a whip of destruction stretched along her leg. Meruem ducked under it, caught her ankle, and looked up at her upside down.
"You're improving," he said. "I'm proud of you."
She screamed and exploded a sphere of erased gravity between them. The effect ripped her free and threw them apart.
Meruem laughed.
Dimora landed hard on a high spire of broken rock at the far end of the battlefield. She was breathing harder now. Her body had begun to feel the damage. Destruction could remove many things. Fatigue was stubborn. Pain was worse when pride forced one to ignore it.
Meruem settled in the air across from her. "You killed him," he said.
It was no longer a question.
Dimora stared at him, then decided the truth would wound more than denial.
"Yes."
The battlefield seemed to hold its breath.
Meruem was silent. Then he nodded once. "All right."
That was all.
He disappeared again.
This time she could not track him even with eight centuries of experience guiding her instincts. He moved with the King's Eye feeding him perfect paths, with fire accelerating his body, with pressure clearing resistance, with a mind that had finally stopped testing and started killing.
The first hit shattered her right arm.
Sovereign Pressure crushed the bones before his fist even landed.
The second tore through her side in a blast of flame that cauterized and burned at once.
The third came from below and launched her into the sky so high the battlefield shrank into a dark coin.
Dimora fought to regain control. Her wings fluttered desperately.
Meruem met her there.
He seized her head, drove his knee into her face, and hurled her downward. She spun helplessly. He chased. Twelve flame lances reformed behind him like a crown.
One by one they struck.
The first pinned her path.
The second burned away her left wing.
The third detonated under her and broke her descent into a stagger she could not correct.
By the sixth she was falling through a corridor of fire and pressure, battered wherever she turned.
By the ninth she understood that he had arranged every angle in advance.
By the twelfth she hit the center of the battlefield in an explosion that made the world jump.
A crater many miles wide bloomed from the impact. Walls of earth rose and folded outward. Fire ran through the fractures. Whole sections of the plain collapsed inward. The armies broke and scattered from the expanding devastation, unable to tell ally from enemy anymore.
Dimora lay at the bottom.
Her body twitched. One arm useless. One wing gone. The other mangled. Blood pooled beneath her and vanished into hot stone.
Meruem descended slowly through the smoke and landed a short distance away. He looked young again from a distance. Too young for all this death.
Dimora tried to rise, but a powerful pressure slammed her back down.
He walked toward her, flames drifting around him in quiet loops.
He placed two fingers beneath her chin and made her look at the armies around the crater, at the shattered plain, at the distant mountains broken by their clash, at the burning sky and the lakes of molten stone and the empty scars where destruction had eaten chunks from the world.
"You wanted them to watch," he said. "So let them."
Dimora gathered the last of her power. One final sphere of destruction formed near her palm, small and hidden by the angle of her body. Enough for a killing stroke if he leaned closer. Enough to erase his heart.
The King's Eye flicked once to her hand.
Of course.
Meruem smiled. "Is that all you've got?" he mocked. "You who claimed my throne and sought to make me her boytoy. Look at you now, weak and defeated."
Sovereign Pressure crushed her wrist flat. The sphere winked out.
Dimora screamed.
He stood and raised his hand. Illusory pink colored fire gathered above his palm. The color was strange and unnatural, a pale rose hue that seemed almost gentle at first glance, yet the energy contained within it hummed with terrifying density.
The fire began to stretch.
It lengthened and sharpened until it formed the shape of a narrow spear hovering above his hand, its surface burning white at the core while faint ripples of pressure spread outward from it into the surrounding air.
Dimora's breath caught.
Something about that flame felt wrong.
Not dangerous in the usual way. She had faced countless destructive attacks in her life and she could sense physical power instinctively, yet this did not feel like ordinary fire. Strangely enough, she had the feeling that the flames were for something worse than burning.
A cold fear crawled up her spine.
"What… is that?" she asked hoarsely. "W-what…are you doing?"
Meruem glanced at the spear as though examining it for the first time.
"I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's work." His tone was casual.
Dimora's instincts screamed.
Then he drove the spear down.
The moment the spear touched her chest the world seemed to pause for a fraction of a second, and then the pink flame plunged through her body and into the heart of the crater beneath them.
There was no explosion.
No roar of flame.
Then Dimora screamed.
The sound that tore from her throat did not resemble a human voice. It was a raw, ragged shriek filled with agony so deep that every devil within hearing distance felt their blood run cold.
It was the scream of a wounded animal. A rat set a blaze.
Soldiers around the crater clutched their ears as the sound echoed across the battlefield. Some stumbled backward in horror. Others simply stared in frozen disbelief as the proud sister of lord Bael convulsed on the ground while that strange pink fire burned inside her.
Dimora thrashed against the stone.
Her body arched violently as the flames tore through her soul. The spear itself had already vanished after striking the ground, yet the flames remained within her like a parasite that had burrowed into something far deeper than flesh.
It was burning her soul.
Dimora felt it clearly now.
The fire had passed through her body without leaving a mark on her skin or bones, yet something far deeper inside her was being torn apart. It felt as if invisible claws had reached into the core of her being and were ripping something away piece by piece. Every fragment of her being felt as though it were being dragged through a furnace.
Her scream rose higher.
It became a shrill screech that made even hardened warriors flinch.
Meruem stood above her calmly while the spear of soul fire remained embedded through her body and deep into the earth below. The pink flames flickered softly, almost peacefully, while the invisible pressure around them continued to hum with contained force.
Seconds passed.
Then the fire began to fade.
The spear dissolved into drifting embers that vanished into the air, leaving Dimora collapsed on the ground with her chest heaving violently as she gasped for breath.
The battlefield fell silent again.
Dimora's eyes were wide with terror.
Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself onto one elbow and stared at Meruem as realization settled over her like ice.
Her mind raced through the sensations she had felt during the attack while dread crawled through her chest.
He took it.
The King's Piece that had elevated her to ultimate class power had been embedded within the depths of her soul for centuries, fused with her existence in a way that should have made it impossible to remove without destroying her completely.
Yet now that presence had vanished.
He took out my king piece.
The thought formed slowly as disbelief twisted inside her chest.
He had stolen it.
He had reached into the very depths of her soul and ripped the piece out as though it were nothing more than a loose thread.
Dimora's hands trembled against the ground.
He had stolen it from the depths of her soul.
Meruem had not revealed the piece. He had not held it up or shown it to the armies surrounding them. His hand remained empty, which meant he was deliberately hiding the fact that he now possessed it.
He wanted it to remain a secret.
But Dimora knew.
She could feel the absence where the piece had once existed.
The hollow space inside her soul made her entire body feel weak and unstable in a way she had never experienced before, as if part of her very foundation had been violently removed.
Fear crept into her mind.
Fear of what he had just done.
He touched my soul. If he can touch my soul as it is then nothing stops him from doing it as he wishes once he kills me.
That realization terrified her more than anything else.
Soul magic was an elusive and nearly impossible art. Even among devils who had lived for thousands of years it was almost unheard of because the soul was the deepest core of a being's existence, protected by layers of natural defense that even powerful magic could rarely bypass.
It was a domain usually reserved solely for the gods themselves. Even then only a select few.
Yet Meruem Beleth had reached into her soul as casually as someone reaching into their pocket.
Dimora stared at him with growing horror.
For the first time since the battle began she truly understood that the boy floating calmly above her might be far more dangerous than anything she had prepared for.
Dimora Bael understood something in that moment that no warrior ever wished to realize while lying defeated before an enemy.
If she died here, if her life ended beneath his hand while that strange authority still held her soul within its reach, then her fate would not be a simple death.
Her soul would belong to him. And if he already had the power to burn a soul like that while she still lived…
Her stomach twisted in cold dread.
Devils knew what could be done with souls in the hands of someone capable enough to manipulate them. Even the most skilled magicians treated that domain with fear and caution, because once a soul fell under another's control there were very few limits to the torment that could be inflicted upon it.
And Meruem had already shown that he could reach into the deepest part of her existence and alter it.
That meant if she died here her soul would not pass on.
It would fall into his hands.
The realization ignited a flicker of madness in her thoughts.
Dimora gathered every fragment of demonic energy she still possessed, dragging it together with the last of her strength while ignoring the pain tearing through her body. Her control over the Power of Destruction was absolute even in this weakened state, and there was still one thing she could do before he decided to finish her.
If she erased her own soul there would be nothing left for him to claim.
The thought came with a strange calm acceptance. Better oblivion than whatever awaited her otherwise.
Her demonic energy surged violently as she directed it inward, forcing the destructive nature toward the core of her own existence with the clear intention of erasing herself completely.
The Power of Destruction stirred inside her again like a dying star gathering its last heat and condensed around the center of her being.
She pushed the command through her mind with everything she had left.
Art of destruction: eleventh form.
Destroy.
Nothing happened.
Dimora blinked. For a moment she thought her senses were failing from exhaustion.
She pushed again.
Her demonic energy stirred faintly within her body yet it did not obey the command she gave it. The destructive power that had answered her will for centuries now remained strangely still, as though it had suddenly become something foreign inside her.
A faint tremor passed through her fingers.
No.
She forced the command again, pouring urgency and desperation into the attempt.
Erase the soul. Now.
The energy inside her refused.
It simply lingered there, unmoving, unresponsive, like a locked door that would not open no matter how hard she pushed against it.
Dimora's breathing quickened. A cold wave of panic crawled through her chest.
Why is it not working?
She tried once more with greater force, gathering the energy violently and attempting to detonate it within her own soul.
Again nothing happened.
Her power ignored her. The realization hit her slowly and then all at once, her demonic energy was no longer answering her commands.
Dimora's head lifted slowly from the shattered ground as dread crept across her face.
Her eyes met Meruem's.
The boy stood a few steps away watching her with that same relaxed posture, and the faint smile on his face had deepened into something far more unsettling, morphing into a hideous smile that looked strange in a face so beautiful. She understood at once what was happening.
He stopped me, the thought echoed in her mind with growing horror.
I don't know how but my demonic energy is not obeying me.
Her heart began to pound violently.
She tried again to gather the Power of Destruction within herself.
Nothing.
She tried to summon even the smallest spark of destructive energy toward her core.
Nothing.
Her breathing grew ragged as the truth settled in.
Her hands trembled.
No-
No. Please no.
No no no.
Her mind began racing as panic spread through every thought.
I cannot even die. The simple fact shattered the last piece of composure she had left.
Her chest tightened as fear surged upward like a rising flood. If she could not destroy her own soul then the only path left was the one she had tried to avoid.
Her soul would remain intact. And if Meruem chose to take it fully this time there would be nothing she could do to stop him.
Dimora's eyes widened with raw terror.
The underworld had many stories about what could be done to a captured soul. Devils did not speak of such things openly, yet every noble family knew the rumors. Souls could be broken. Souls could be reshaped. Souls could be forced to endure suffering that lasted far longer than physical life ever could.
And now she had just witnessed a seventeen year old boy reach into her own soul and remove the King's Piece that had fused with her existence for centuries.
Dimora's breathing became frantic.
This cannot be happening.
Her thoughts began to spiral.
He touched my soul. That flame burned my soul.
Something changed.
The terrible truth rose slowly through the chaos in her mind. He had done something to her.
Somewhere during that moment when the spear of soul fire had pierced her, Meruem had altered the connection between her will and her power. The demonic energy inside her no longer belonged entirely to her.m
Her control meant nothing.
Her power meant nothing.
Her experience meant nothing.
She was completely at his mercy.
A cold sweat formed along her skin as her breathing became shallow and uneven.
There will be neither salvation nor escape for her. Not even the mercy of death.
Dimora stared up at him with wide eyes as the full weight of that realization crushed down on her.
Meruem slowly crouched beside her. His expression remained gentle, almost polite, yet the calmness in his eyes made the fear inside her grow even stronger.
She could feel it now. That quiet pressure surrounding her soul.
He was still holding it.
Still touching it.
"You tried to erase yourself," Meruem said softly.
It was not a question.
Dimora's lips trembled.
"You… w-what the hell are you…monster"
Meruem tilted his head slightly as though considering the accusation. "That seems harsh."
Her voice rose with desperate panic. "Let me die."
Meruem's smile widened just a little. "No."
Dimora's heart slammed against her ribs. Her mind scrambled wildly for any remaining option yet every path led to the same conclusion.
She was trapped. Her soul belonged to him now whether he claimed it openly or not.
Meruem slowly stood again while looking down at her trembling form. "Your suffering is not over, my lady. This, I command."
AN: And we have our first real fight, I hope you enjoy it. I recently watched The Princess Bride, and it was an amazing film, so naturally there are some references to it in this chapter.
So the consensus I got about using different POVs is that, while it isn't bad, it should be used in moderation since readers mainly want to follow Meruem's story. I'll keep that in mind for future chapters.
Advanced chapters are available on my Patreon, so if you want to read ahead or support me so I can focus more on writing, check out my Patreon: patreon.com/abeltargaryen?