Book 3: Chapter 306: Demon King

The central plaza was paved inch by inch with gray-white granite. Around the altar, cone-shaped black pines pointed toward the night sky like blades, casting the whole place in a solemn, murderous atmosphere.

Standing in the crater strewn with rubble, Yvette met the black-robed girl’s gaze for several seconds. Then, slowly, she planted her tentacles against the ground, raised herself up, and made a move that caught everyone off guard.

She turned around and left without looking back, scuttling away from the plaza like a gigantic spider.

Of course, it was not because she had chickened out. There were too many bystanders here. Once the fight broke out, far too many innocents would be caught in it.

But she had no intention of leaving the city entirely either. Compared with the mist sea, where one could only fall endlessly downward, this place was packed with buildings and crisscrossed with alleys. A complex environment like this was much better suited for countering the black-robed girl’s teleportation ability.

That was, provided the surrounding crowd was not too dense.

Very soon, a shrill alarm blared from loudspeakers all across the area. It was the air-raid siren of the Anbis city-state. To prepare for possible city-state wars, the locals had gone through plenty of evacuation drills. So although most of them had no idea what was happening, they still headed at once for the nearest shelters, and did so in fairly good order.

That made things much easier for Yvette. After the crowd had mostly cleared out, she finally stopped in a dimly lit old district.

At the moment, she had landed on a black flat-roofed attic building and briefly surveyed her surroundings.

By the yellow glow of the streetlamps, she made out the district’s urban landscape. Concrete buildings were everywhere, monotonous, rough, and somewhat filthy. On their sides and rooftops were makeshift sheet-metal shacks that looked almost illegally added on, barely held up by steel plates, strips of cloth, and wooden stakes. In the alleyways, pipes and cables crisscrossed through the grimy darkness like capillaries. Many buildings had shattered windowpanes sealed over with planks or scraps of cloth, like patch after patch.

Yvette recalled that when she had first seen the city from above, she had already noticed that it sat atop a gigantic metal chassis, with copper walls encircling it, colossal metal beams, and astonishingly huge wheel-like structures beneath the city base. How to put it? Rather than a city, it looked more like an enormous mobile fortress.

Such a staggering structure had to represent a level of supertechnology beyond even the reach of the Origin Civilization. Yet its interior style was so post-apocalyptic, even somewhat dilapidated?

But this was not the time to dwell on that. Turning her head, Yvette saw that the black-robed girl had already appeared atop the spire of a clock tower not far away.

She wore a smile, seemingly full of anticipation for Yvette’s next move.

Yvette immediately withdrew her gaze and leaped into the narrow gap between the streets and alleys. The alleys here were extremely dark. Standing in one, she was all but invisible to the naked eye. On top of that, during the process, she covered herself with tentacles, making it impossible for the black-robed girl to track her with detection magic.

That did waste a fair amount of the girl’s time. But after several fruitless searches, the black-robed girl let out a cold laugh and came up with a simpler solution: bombardment.

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Dense rings of runes lit up one after another, covering a radius of more than ten kilometers, like a gorgeous evening glow spread across the sky.

The roofs of old buildings were torn away. Sheet-metal shacks twisted and melted. Concrete walls cracked and collapsed. In just a few dozen seconds, the vast district had turned into a charred wasteland of ruins, with thin streams of scorched smoke rising among the broken walls.

In truth, this posed only limited danger to Yvette. It was more a part of a war of attrition. At this stage, both sides had realized that taking the other down quickly was going to be difficult. Only by wearing each other down could a victor be decided.

But for the locals, it was nothing short of total catastrophe. In the underground monitoring room of the city-state, the priests of the Rebirth Order watched all of it with numb expressions, unable to say a word.

It was not that they did not want to say or do something. The problem was simply that the level of this battle was far too high. The aftershocks alone had already damaged relics of the old civilization, including the Titan, so the heavily armed combat forces sent toward that district had died before even arriving. How could they possibly intervene?

Earlier, they had thought a divine emissary had descended, and their excitement had reached its peak. But reality had poured a bucket of cold water over them. Rather than the descent of a divine emissary, this looked more like two godlike beings fighting each other. All of Anbis seemed to have been dragged into a struggle between gods.

…

“What, not playing cat and mouse anymore?” Standing atop the wreckage of a ruined building amid the city district’s rubble, the black-robed girl mocked her from several hundred meters away.

In just a few short minutes, she had turned the surrounding area into a sea of fire and buried countless innocent lives. Yet when faced with this hellish scene, she seemed to regard it as no more than a boring game. As for the dead, she could not even be bothered to spare them a glance.

Could it be that this world was not real, and that was why she could kill so wantonly… And if she really had traveled through time back into the past, then how was the connection between herself and her original body still stable…

Thinking that, Yvette gave a soft hum, a perfunctory response.

Then, before the other girl could speak again, Yvette remained standing where she was, but the aura around her suddenly changed.

More and more dense black tentacles burst wildly from beneath her skirt, from her cuffs, collar, and hair, swallowing her whole. All that remained was an evil black hole, endlessly releasing tentacles outward as it expanded in place. In only a few seconds, it became the most outrageous giant object in this ruined district, already more than a hundred meters across. Even the clouds overhead began to rotate into a vortex.

“This is a new game. Watch carefully.” Yvette’s cool voice still drifted over from afar. By now, her figure was completely gone. Only the shifting winds and clouds above remained, echoing the continuously rising pressure she was giving off.

The smile on the black-robed girl’s face faded somewhat. Narrowing her eyes, she watched the ever-growing tentacle black hole, and her expression gradually turned ugly. She did not know what the other side was doing, but at this moment, she had to admit that the writhing tentacle black hole gave her a powerful sense of mortal danger.

If it caught her… if it dragged her in… she would definitely die.

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But she quickly let out another cold laugh and said, “Really? Then let me see just what use this final trump card of yours can possibly have against me.”

She did not say how she would deal with it, because there was no need to. She could come and go freely within the abyss. If she ran into something she could not handle, she could leave whenever she wanted. And her reactions were fast, while her close-combat ability was also extremely strong. If only a small number of Shadowtouch tentacles coiled toward her, then as long as she did not want to stay and get entangled on the spot, she could directly knock them back or tear them apart. That much had already been confirmed in their earlier exchanges.

At the same time, if the other side wanted to use divine arts of the soul domain to affect her mentally, then by all means, she was welcome to try. The black-robed girl even had a little surprise prepared for her.

“Really?” Yvette’s voice sounded by her ear once again.

“As long as you can even lay a finger on me…” The black-robed girl was just about to continue mocking her when her expression abruptly froze. She sensed that something was off.

Unlike before, this reply was too clear and too close. It was as if someone had leaned right up beside her ear, so close she could almost imagine warm breath brushing the back of it.

Like a bolt of lightning flashing through her mind, she immediately tried to teleport away and open the distance, but it was already too late. At some unknown moment, Yvette had already appeared at the black-robed girl’s side. Countless shadow-like tentacles, like black snakes, coiled upward from her legs. There were simply too many of them. In her brief struggle, she failed to shake all of them off. Instead, the more she resisted, the deeper she sank into them, until escape became impossible.

She had been caught.

“How could you…” For the first time, the black-robed girl’s expression changed visibly. Her teleportation relied on spatial rifts, but while she was entangled by the tentacles, even if she entered a spatial rift, the rift itself would be unable to close.

She looked at Yvette’s beautiful yet icy crimson eyes, so close before her, then glanced at the still twisting, swelling tentacle black hole in the distance, and remained stunned.

She could not have been mistaken. That tentacle black hole was the Silver Witch. It had never moved from its spot. But then what was the one beside her? Why did the two feel completely identical?

And how had Yvette appeared at her side?

That was the real reason Yvette had chosen this district for their game of hide-and-seek. She had always been able to capture the black-robed girl by teleporting through her markers, but she would only get one chance. If she missed it and the information gap disappeared, it would be hard to succeed again afterward.

So, because the mist sea had been too open and offered too little room to operate, she had kept enduring and waiting. Only just now had the right opportunity finally appeared. She had planted a large number of markers throughout the district’s ruins, then pretended to unleash a nonexistent “ultimate attack” to draw the black-robed girl’s attention. At the final moment, when the timing was ripe, she switched places with a marker and finally took the black-robed girl down.

…

After that, there was not much conversation. Yvette seized the black-robed girl by the throat. Tentacles surged ceaselessly from within her like a pitch-black tide, wrapping themselves around the body beneath the girl’s robes, searching for every scrap of flesh they could rend and drain.

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But the process was more difficult than ever before. The black-robed girl’s physical strength and toughness were beyond imagination. In terms of pure close-combat ability alone, she was enough to beat every divine-realm powerhouse, Tertia included. Breaking through her defenses would still take quite some time. And throughout that process, the black-robed girl kept struggling without stop. Yvette had to devote her full concentration to it.

Then she would grind her down slowly.

From the outside monitoring perspective, however, the priests of the Rebirth Order saw that the two girls had vanished from among the ruins. In their place was a black sphere about twice a person’s height.

The black sphere trembled continuously in place, as if something inside it were struggling. In the end, it disappeared in a flicker, leaving only devastation everywhere, proving that everything which had happened before had not been an illusion.

…

If the boundless darkness, the gray sea of mist, and the Ultra-ancient Civilization were taken as the upper, middle, and lower layers of the abyss, then during the final struggle that followed, Yvette kept changing positions through all three regions.

Of course, that was not something she accomplished with her markers. Rather, the black-robed girl was continuously using spatial rifts, dragging her along as they flashed around the vast abyss. Every second, Yvette saw the scenery around her changing frantically. That also proved from another angle that the black-robed girl had indeed mastered certain rules of this space, which was why she could use them so freely and without restriction.

Amid this insane sequence of teleportations, Yvette gradually devoured a small portion of the other girl’s spirit body and obtained the corresponding fragments of memory.

And after reading through those memories, Yvette was shocked to discover that the black-robed girl was not merely the ruler of the Abyssal Court, nor just the mastermind who had sent Surian to cause trouble for her. She was also the very Demon Angel Yvette had been thinking about all this time.

But why? Why was she not staying put in the Demon King’s Castle? Why had she personally stepped in, trying to become… the Demon King?

Was this her own decision, or the instruction of a Demon God?

Then, before Yvette could think through the reason behind it, another scene came into view along with the Demon Angel’s memories.

It was a top-down perspective, inside a dim gigantic structure whose decor looked less like a palace and more like a temple.

In the memory, the Demon Angel had her head lowered. What she saw was a middle-aged man in a magnificent mantle and a black crown, standing at the entrance to the hall.

Time had left its marks on his face. The spirit of youth was gone, replaced by steadiness and weariness. Yet Yvette still recognized the identity of the richly dressed man in an instant.

Lant… Yvette stared blankly.

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Even after more than three hundred years, her impression of Lant was still that of the simple, earnest boy who had set out alone on a journey of training one autumn day. She had never imagined that he would now have become an old big shot who had spent years in power.

But judging from his clothes and the black crown on his head, could it be…

“Lant Quinn, do not forget who made you the Demon King!” In the memory scene, the Demon Angel’s furious voice rang out, though it seemed to have been deliberately altered, coming out somewhat muffled.

So he really was the Demon King. But which one… Wait. Which one else could he be?

A sudden thought struck Yvette. A hundred years ago, Moga the Wandering Wind Ranger had assassinated the Bloodmoon Demon King, ending the war between humans and demons. Since then, only one Demon King had ascended the throne.

That meant Lant was the Night Demon King, and could only be the Night Demon King.

Because if one traced matters back further, to the era of the third-generation Arcane Demon King, Lant had already been the famed First Demon General. And if it were the fourth-generation Bloodmoon Demon King, Moga would never have assassinated her senior brother in the first place. On the contrary, the death of the Bloodmoon Demon King should have been the very thing that let Lant help his junior sister.

Now Lant had been stripped of his position as Demon King and gone missing, while Moga had suddenly vanished and gone to the Western Continent. The timeline matched perfectly.

“I have always held deep gratitude for the Demon God’s grace,” Lant said steadily in the scene, his tone earnest. “But the matter of the expedition is no trivial affair. Without a necessary reason, even if it is your will, this lowly one must still beg forgiveness for being unable to obey.”

The fragmented memory ended there.

While she was pleased by Lant’s accomplishments, Yvette also immediately caught the odd detail within it.

This was clearly the Demon Angel’s memory. So why did it contain a scene from the Demon God’s point of view?

Was that truly the Demon Angel’s own memory?

If so, was she the real Demon God, or merely pretending to be one?

And if not, then where had the real Demon God gone?