Harem System In A fantasy World

An excruciating amount of pain caught up to him.

“Fuuuuuck!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as his knees slammed into the ground. His whole body convulsed violently, his remaining hand dropped Kurogoroshi onto the floor, instantly flying to the stump, gripping above the ruined flesh as blood burst between his fingers in a hot, horrifying flood.

The pain was so sharp it didn’t even feel real for the first second, then it became all too real, a savage white-hot agony that shot through his shoulder, chest, and spine, making his vision blur and his stomach lurch.

“Elion!” Zenith rushed toward him so fast she nearly slipped, stopping right in front of him with wide, horrified eyes. “What happened!?”

Of course, she could see what had happened. His damned arm was lying on the floor a few feet away, but she clearly hadn’t seen how it happened, and that was what terrified her most, the fact that she had not been able to perceive that attack.

Elion grit his teeth so hard his jaw shook, sweat bursting across his brow as his body trembled uncontrollably from the pain.

Suddenly, a single footstep echoed, and they both raised their heads to see this new entrant. Elion was still gritting his teeth against the brutal pain burning through what remained of his arm.

Zenith, however, went frighteningly still. Her blue skin paled deeply, and her expression turned grim.

“No…” she whispered. “It can’t be.”

Another step echoed, then another.

“Why are you here? You are supposed to be fighting the coalition Saints!”

Elion forced his gaze upward as the figure stepped into the golden light of the chamber. He could see that this person’s body was humanoid in shape, but unmistakably something far beyond human.

His skin was a deep, cold blue, like Zenith, smooth and almost flawless beneath the blood and dust that covered him.

His face was terrifyingly handsome, so much so that for the first time in his life, Elion was looking at someone and thinking, with some distant irritation buried beneath the pain, that this bastard might actually be better looking than him.

Unfortunately, he did not have the capacity to care about such things right now. The demon had seven horns on his head.

Two large ones curved from either side of his skull like a crown of black bone. Four smaller horns sat beneath them, two on each side, sharp and elegant, while a single horn rose from the centre of his forehead and curled upward slightly.

His body was battered and bruised. His robe was torn, his armour cracked, and dark blood stained several parts of him, and he had no weapon in his hands, yet none of that made him seem weak.

If anything, the injuries only made him look more terrifying, because the blank expression on his face told Elion everything he needed to know.

This demon was not bothered by his wounds, not in the slightest, despite the fact that he had a gaping hole in the right side of his thoracic cavity.

In fact, these grave wounds seemed to be healing in real time. The torn flesh looked like it was still in the process of knitting itself back together.

The cracks in his skin closed slowly beneath the golden light of the chamber, and each breath he took seemed to pull more power from the air itself.

He looked at least twice Elion’s age, maybe more, but with demons, who knew what age even meant? And from what Elion had heard, this demon’s identity could only be one.

The Demon King, Asmodeus.

“I am disappointed, Zenith,” he said simply, in an effortlessly thundering voice. However, his tone did not sound disappointed as he had said. He sounded bored at most, completely unbothered.

It dawned on Elion that the unseen attack that had severed his hand to prevent him from grabbing the stone had come from this fabled character.

Zenith clenched her fists.

Asmodeus’ gaze shifted to him, and Elion suddenly felt like an invisible mountain was pressing down on him; however, it wasn’t so bad. Clearly, Asmodeus wasn’t even trying; it was just a passive effect his gaze had on people.

In fact, he didn’t seem to be interested in Elion himself; he only looked at his face for nothing more than a second before his gaze narrowed, dropping to the weapon lying on the floor beside Elion.

“A Mythical weapon?” he said. “Is that how you were able to undo some of my failsafes? How troublesome.”

Zenith took a step forward, “Father, listen to me.”

Asmodeus did not look at her.

“I have listened to you enough times.” Zenith froze in her tracks.

Elion’s eyes narrowed.

’Enough times?’

“You believe yourself clever,” he said. “Hiding memories across repetitions. Slipping between the cracks of a broken trial. Whispering to enemies and feeding information to cattle who would kill you the moment they learned what you were.”

Zenith’s face went completely still. So he knew. Asmodeus knew about the loops, or at least enough of them.

Elion’s brow furrowed even further. He wanted to fall into another trance, forming some sort of conspiracy theory, and try to piece things together from what he had just heard, but in the end, he shook his head.

Let alone the pain clouding his mind, he might end up being very wrong anyway.

Zenith’s voice lowered. “How long?”

Asmodeus tilted his head slightly.

“How long have I known?” he asked, as if the question amused him. “Long enough.”

“You thought you were the only one who remembered fragments?” Asmodeus continued. “That you were special? How arrogant. You forget, you inherited all that talent and power from me.”

Zenith’s mind raced. This was bad. Worse than bad.

She had made a lot of assumptions about why she was the only one living through these loops. In the end, she had been off the mark, and now, she was paying for it.

If Asmodeus remembered even part of the loops, then her advantage was far smaller than she believed. Maybe every plan she had made, every move she had tried to hide, every failure she had been trying to correct, had never been as secret as she thought.

She wanted to hope that his mentioning fragments meant he didn’t remember everything, unlike her, but she didn’t want to make any more uninformed assumptions.

Maybe he was just so powerful that the loop could not entirely block out his awareness of it. That gave her a thought, were the coalition saints also aware? Just a thought that she quickly put to the back of her mind.

Asmodeus walked forward slowly.

“Did you think I would not notice my own daughter becoming stronger between impossible days? Did you think I would not notice your eyes changing each time the world reset? Did you think I would not notice the movements you thought you hid so well? And this human hero, the first time you brought him here, I was fully aware of it. If I wanted to, he would have died during that time you left him in that hidden cell.”

Elion’s lips twitched despite the pain. He let the confusing parts fly over his head, deciding that Zenith would explain it to him and clear things up, if they somehow made it out of this alive.

“Human hero,” he muttered. “I really need to start charging people every time they call me that.”

Zenith shot him a horrified look. Asmodeus stopped speaking, his lips curved faintly, “You still have the courage to speak.”

Elion breathed through the agony in his arm. He released his bleeding stump and picked up Kurogoroshi, “Well, I recently discovered that I talk a lot when I’m nervous.”

“Are you nervous?”

Elion looked him dead in the eye.

Asmodeus had the same enigmatic black-red eyes as Zenith, which, combined with his impossibly handsome features, truly made him look like an older, male version of this new wife of his, “My arm is on the floor, so yes, a little.”

The faint curve on Asmodeus’ lips remained for a moment longer before fading.

Zenith slowly moved closer to Elion, not close enough to stand directly beside him, but close enough that her voice could reach him in a whisper.

“You cannot fight him.”

Elion did not look away from Asmodeus, “I figured, and you are just stating the obvious, my dear.”

“I mean it,” she whispered sharply.

“And I said I figured.”

Asmodeus’ gaze moved between them.

“Touching,” he said. “The traitorous daughter and the troublesome hero. How many times has this scene played out, I wonder?”