He tried the direct attack again. Full output, physical and mana simultaneously, the combination that had produced the hit against the wall in the throne room.
I stepped inside it.
The physical component went past me. I cancelled the mana component in his hand before it released. I put the mana sword into his guard and held the contact and pushed the disruption through the pathways I had already mapped from the previous contacts, the damage compounding on what was already there.
He made a sound.
I released contact and hit him again from a different angle before he had processed the release.
He went to one knee.
The absorbed life force that had changed his mana density in the throne room was still there. I could feel it sitting in him, the borrowed power from the palace's population. It had not been enough to match my reserves in the throne room and it was not enough now, the gap between what he had taken in and what I was operating with not something life force could close.
He looked up at me from one knee.
The pleasant expression was entirely gone.
What was in its place was not fear exactly. The demon lord had been alive for long enough that fear as a simple response had been replaced by something more complex, the compound awareness of something intelligent encountering a situation it cannot resolve and understanding exactly why it cannot.
"What are you." He said.
I looked at him.
At the demon lord who had broken the seal my predecessor had placed. Who had coordinated the fall of kingdoms and opened two portals and used children as shields in a throne room fight and had killed the population of the Medalline palace with a snap of his fingers.
Who had taken Torra from a merchant's cart on the northeastern road.
I hit him with the mana sword again.
He went down fully.
I stood over him and hit him again.
And again.
Not killing. The mana sword's disruption didn't kill cleanly. It accumulated. It found every mana pathway in the target and pressed against them and the accumulation of contact after contact had reached the point where the demon lord's ability to build workings had been compromised, the pathways that fed the construction disrupted enough that the mana couldn't flow through them correctly.
He was trying to build.
I could feel him trying.
The dark mana gathering, the familiar pattern of one of his constructions starting to form, and then the disruption in the pathways interrupting the flow before it reached peak, the construction falling apart before it completed.
Again.
Falling apart.
Again.
"Stop." He said. Not a demand. The flat statement of something that had arrived at the limit of what it could manage and was saying so.
I stopped.
I looked at him on the ground of the lower palace.
At the ruins around us. At the afternoon sky visible above the absence of the palace that had stood here for three generations of Karvian's bloodline.
I tracked the five necklaces.
Five signals, moving steadily northeast, well outside Medalline's capital, the captain carrying them toward the border at a pace that said he understood the urgency and was meeting it.
They were going to make it.
I looked back at the demon lord.
He looked up at me with the compound awareness of something intelligent that had run every available option and found none of them workable.
"Close the portal." I said.
He looked at me.
"The south portal." I said. "Medalline. Close it."
He was quiet for a moment.
The calculation running.
"And if I do." He said.
"Then this ends here." I said. "You go back through it before it closes and you don't come back."
He looked at the sky above the ruined palace.
At the space where the demon lord of a thousand years had been sitting on a stolen throne and running a war against the human realm and had found something in the northwest mountains that had followed him home.
"You'll let me leave." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"Why." He said. "You could end this now."
I looked at him.
"Because ending this now means I'm the hero again." I said. "And I'm not the hero. I'm the farmer who came to get his children back."
He held my gaze for a long moment.
Then he closed his eyes.
The south portal's signature in the mana field shifted. I felt it happening in the ambient mana around us, the portal that had been running at sustained output since the demon lord had opened it beginning the process of closure, the mana structure that held it open withdrawing, the opening compressing.
It closed.
The mana field across Philantria shifted the way it had shifted when the Winterly portal had closed, the wrong quality in the air beginning to resolve, the contamination losing the source that had been feeding it.
The demon lord opened his eyes.
He looked at me.
Then he looked at where the south portal had been, the empty air of Medalline's ruined palace, the space it had occupied now just space.
"The demon realm has other generals." He said. "Others who will look at what's here."
"Tell them." I said. "Tell them what's in the northwest."
He looked at me.
"A farmer." He said.
"Yes." I said.
He was quiet.
Then he produced the portal himself. Not the sustained construction of a fully powered portal. A door. Small, sufficient, the working of something that had enough left to open a passage and not much more.
He went through it.
It closed behind him.
The ruins of Medalline's imperial palace were quiet.
The emperor was somewhere in the rubble. Alive. The blood contract had ensured that much. What remained of Karvian Von Medalline was going to have to manage what came after on his own.
I looked at the five necklace signals on the tracking function.
Northeast of the capital now. Moving steadily. The captain's pace not breaking.
I teleported.
••••••••
I arrived on the northeastern road twenty meters ahead of them.
The captain saw me first. He stopped and the children around him stopped with him and there was a half second of stillness on the road before Torra covered the distance between us.
He hit me at full speed and I caught him.
He didn't say anything. His arms went around my neck and he held on and I held him back and neither of us said anything for a moment.
Then Maya hit me from the other side and Jenna from behind and Nico from whatever angle was left and Sia last, quiet and deliberate, her arms going around whatever part of me wasn't already occupied.
The captain stood on the road and looked at the pile of children attached to me and said nothing.
I looked at him over the top of Torra's head.
He looked back.
"Leigh." He said. The name sitting differently in his mouth than it had in the throne room. More settled.
"Come." I said.
I teleported all of us home.