The palace interior cleared itself in sections as we moved through it.
The demon units that felt us coming and made accurate assessments stepped out of the path. Not in submission. In the specific practicality of something that understood the difference between loyalty and survival and had made a choice. They pressed against the walls and the doorways and watched us pass with the stillness of things that had decided watching was the better option.
The ones that didn't step aside were the ones that couldn't.
Not incapable. Unwilling. The units that had been bound to the demon lord with the particular devotion that went past calculation into something else, the ones for whom stepping aside wasn't a choice that existed.
They came at us in the corridors and the antechambers and the long gallery that ran along the palace's eastern wing.
I let the mana sword do something other than warn.
The first one in the gallery came fast, committed, the full force of a demon unit that had decided to see this through. I caught its strike with the mana blade and held contact.
Contact with the mana blade was not the same as contact with a physical weapon.
A physical weapon struck and separated, the damage done in the moment of impact, the wound existing afterward as a consequence. The mana blade disrupted on contact and kept disrupting for as long as contact was maintained, the pathways it found in the target's mana structure sending the disruption inward, deepening, compounding.
I held contact.
The demon unit made the sound the greater demon had made in the garden. That frequency. I pushed more mana into the blade while holding contact and the frequency changed, higher, the compounding disruption reaching something deeper in the unit's structure than the surface pathways.
I released contact.
The unit was on the ground. Not dead. Present. Fully conscious. Experiencing something that physical damage didn't produce.
"Move." I said to it on the ground. "Or I come back."
It didn't move. It couldn't. But it heard me.
The next one came before the first had finished registering what had happened to it. This one tried a different approach, the mana-based attack that higher units could produce, a compression of demonic energy pushed outward rather than a physical strike.
I walked through it.
The aura I was running absorbed the compression and added it to what was already radiating off me, the demonic energy becoming part of my own output the way a fire absorbed fuel.
I put the mana blade into its side and held it there and watched the unit's face while it understood what was happening to it.
Then I removed the blade and kept walking.
The captain moved at my shoulder through all of it. He was not fighting the way I was fighting. He was fighting the way the sword I had given him was designed to be used, clean and efficient, the units that came at his angle receiving the straightforward version of what I was doing to the ones on mine.
He was good. He had always been good. The best I had faced for the first three years of training before I had surpassed him.
He was also watching what I was doing to the ones that came at me.
He said nothing about it.
"Leigh." He said at the entrance to the throne room corridor. His voice was even but there was something in it that had not been there in the gallery. "They'll feel this. The ones we're leaving behind us."
"Yes." I said.
"Is that the point." He said.
"The demon lord is watching through his units." I said. "Every one that's still alive when we reach the throne room is a report of what I did to it." I looked down the corridor. "I want a detailed report."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You want him afraid." He said.
"I want him to understand." I said. "There's a difference."
We walked into the corridor.
The throne room doors were open.
Emperor Karvian was inside.
He was standing to the left of the throne in the position he had occupied since the demon lord had taken the seat, the position slightly behind and below, the posture of someone who had been performing relevance for so long they had forgotten what actual relevance felt like.
He saw me.
The color left his face in a way that was visible even from the doorway.
The demon lord was on the throne.
He was in the posture he occupied when he was managing something he found tedious. One leg over the armrest, his head resting on one hand, the affect of someone watching a play they had already seen and were waiting for the interesting part.
He looked at me with the eyes of something that had been awake for a thousand years and had decided in the past thirty seconds that it was now awake for the right reason.
Karvian found his voice.
"Kill him." He said. To the demon lord. "You swore to protect this throne. Kill Crescentine Fleur."
The demon lord didn't move.
"Kill him." Karvian said again. Louder. The volume of someone whose instructions were not being followed and was trying to address this through repetition.
The demon lord looked at the emperor with the expression he used when he was deciding whether to acknowledge that someone was speaking.
"Our contract." Karvian said. His voice had found a different register. Lower. The register of someone invoking something they believe gives them standing. "You swore under blood contract to act on my command against threats to this throne. He is a threat. I command you to act."