The demon lord was in the ruins of the lower palace.
He had opened the portal again. Not fully. The damage from the first closure and from what I had done to his mana pathways in the fight had made a full opening expensive, the construction less stable than it had been, the portal flickering at the edges in a way that said it was being held open through effort rather than running at its natural output.
Demons were coming through it in a trickle. Not the flow of a fully functional portal. The trickle of something that was working with compromised infrastructure.
He saw me arrive.
He looked at Flame beside me.
"You brought the dragon." He said.
"He wanted to come." I said.
The demon lord looked at the portal behind him. At the demons emerging from it. At the capital around us, quiet now, the units that had been spread through it gone.
"You cleared Medalline." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"At once." He said. Confirming.
"Yes." I said.
He looked at me.
"I gave you a chance." I said. "You opened the portal again."
"Yes." He said.
"Then we're done negotiating." I said.
I reached into the mana field around the portal.
Not into the portal itself. Into the demon lord. Into the mana pathways I had mapped in the fight, the ones the mana sword's contacts had disrupted and charted simultaneously, the full network of how he moved mana through himself and into his workings.
I reached in and pulled.
Not gently.
The demon lord's mana came out of his pathways the way water came out of a wrung cloth, the extraction running through every pathway simultaneously, the full reserve of what he had taken in from the palace's population and what he had built over however many centuries he had been operating in the demon realm coming out of him in a sustained pull that he had no defense for because his defenses were built from the mana I was pulling.
He went to his knees.
I took what I pulled from him and fed it directly into the portal.
The portal's intake reversed.
Instead of generating the stable mana field that kept the opening functional, it was receiving a sustained input of the demon lord's own mana at a rate that the portal's structure wasn't designed to process. The edges of it, already flickering from the damaged construction, started shaking.
The frequency of the instability increased as the input increased, the portal's structure working against itself, the mana it was receiving pushing at the seams in its construction from the inside.
The demon lord looked at the portal behind him.
At what it was becoming.
"That's." He stopped. "That's going to—"
"Yes." I said.
He looked at me.
I put a field around Flame. The same field I had put around the captain in the throne room, dense enough to hold against what was coming.
Then I lifted the demon lord.
He didn't have the mana to resist the lift. I had taken it. He rose from the ground in the field I was running around him, the particular weightlessness of something that has been separated from its own resources and is operating on what the situation allows.
He looked at me from the air.
"A chance." He said.
"I gave you one." I said.
I threw him into the portal.
The moment the demon lord's body made contact with the portal's mana field at the level of instability it had reached, the structure found the trigger it had been building toward.
The explosion was not sound first. It was pressure. The mana that had been fed into the portal releasing simultaneously in every direction, the portal's structure coming apart at all its seams at once rather than sequentially, the contained energy of a demon lord's full mana reserve and the portal's own construction finding the open air of Medalline's ruins in a single instant.
The shockwave moved outward.
I took it.
All of it. The full mana release of the explosion, redirected the moment it left the portal's perimeter, absorbed into the field I was running and dispersed upward into the upper atmosphere rather than outward into the territory below.
The tremor was still significant. It moved through the ground across Philantria the way the first portal's opening had moved through the mana field, the continent registering something significant had ended rather than something significant had begun.
Windows shook in every capital. The surface of Eryndor's lake rippled. The purifying stones in the beastfolk territory registered the mana shift and adjusted their output.
But the buildings stood.
The farms stood.
The people in the streets of Amlada and Branklore and Winterly felt the ground move and looked up and found the sky unchanged, the air cleaner than it had been since the portal opened, the contamination that had been spreading across Philantria for over a year beginning to disperse into something the natural mana field could process and eventually absorb.
The portal was gone.
The demon lord was gone.
The ruins of Medalline's imperial palace were quiet around us.
Flame lowered the field I had put around him and looked at where the portal had been.
At the empty air.
Then at me.
The communication stone activated.
Frostina's signal. One tap, then two, then one, which was her code for finished and unhurt and coming home.
I pressed it.
"Come back." I said.
"Already on my way." She said. "Singrael is clear. Every single one." A pause. "How's Medalline."
I looked at the empty air where the portal had been.
"Clear." I said.
A longer pause.
"And the demon lord." She said.
"Gone." I said.
The stone was quiet for a moment.
"Leigh." She said.
"Yes." I said.
"Come home." She said.
I looked at Flame beside me.
He was already looking back toward the north. Toward Eryndor's direction. The young dragon with Torra's fireworks toy in his pocket and a patrol route that had been his for two years and a settlement that called him by a name I had given him in a forest when he was small enough to fit in my arms.
"Yes." I said.
We went home.