Author's Note:
Hello everyone!
I want to sincerely apologize for the irregularity in the updates lately. I know that sometimes I upload several chapters at once, sometimes just one, and other days I don't upload anything. I've been quite busy and I also took a necessary physical and mental break.
As I have mentioned several times, I was rewriting all the chapters I had already done. During that process, I took the opportunity to add a ton of new things that didn't even exist before: many unreleased chapters and much more detailed combats. I used to skip fights as if they were a quick flash, but I wanted to change that.
In fact, this chapter wasn't even in the original draft. It was going to be a quick fight where reinforcements arrived almost immediately and the next combat began. However, I decided to expand it much more because I felt it lacked emotion; the story needed real action and not something fleeting. And here you have it!
Tomorrow I will upload new chapters as always, continuing this intense battle against the Demon King. I hope you are truly enjoying it. Please leave a comment; they always help me a lot to improve, to notice what I missed, or to know what you would like to see in the future. I accept all your ideas!
Without further ado, I leave you with the chapter.
Your beloved author, Void_Scribe
Chapter 180: The Awakening of the Crown and the Gate to Hell (Part 2)
The air in the immense bone corridor ceased to be a breathable gas to become a dense soup of pure killing intent. The five dragons of the Morningstar Clan, bathed in the overwhelming green and golden light of vitality that their siblings sent them through the Soul Nexus, shot out like vengeful meteors against the dead god.
The speed of the joint assault broke the sound barrier in five simultaneous booms. But for Violeta, the Frigid Executioner, the concept of distance was a mere suggestion.
As she ran, the space around her began to curve. Her Neon Violet Eye, glowing with an electric and incandescent light that cast no human shadow, dissected the battlefield. In her vision, the air in front of the Demon King was filled with silver threads and seams that vibrated with the tension of reality. Her pupil, stretched into a sharp vertical dragon slit, located the exact point where the three-dimensional fabric was so incredibly thin that her will could tear it with a graze.
She activated the [Bridge Between Worlds].
Her physical body didn't gradually fade into a cloud of smoke; it compressed inward unnaturally, as if the entire universe were being sucked into a tiny black hole hidden in her own chest. The space around her folded in concentric circles, generating a sharp optical lens effect right before completely disappearing into the void. For an absolute millisecond, a dark violet trail, like an open wound in the glass of reality, connected her starting point to the right flank of the Grand Saint.
Violeta "burst" back into material existence directly in the Demon King's blind spot. Upon reappearing, a frigid shockwave kicked up the calcium dust, halting the toxic breeze around her. With her left eye weeping thick drops of golden blood from the massive effort, she executed the annihilation technique designed to massacre deities.
[Absolute Zero Lotus: Singularity Petal Execution]
Violeta didn't launch a simple physical thrust. Leveraging the Passage of Ethereal Blood, her attack fragmented dimensionally. The Demon King didn't see a steel blade coming; he saw with genuine surprise how the very fabric of space cracked around him. Out of absolute nowhere, twelve gigantic spikes of primordial black ice emerged simultaneously, converging toward him in the perfect, deadly shape of a geometric lotus.
Each blade aimed at a different vital pressure point, ready to inject the Absolute Zero Vibration. If just one of those spikes touched his flesh, his atoms would stop dead and his circulatory system would turn into a solid crystal tree that would implode inward from the pressure of the singularity.
The Demon King nodded slowly, a twisted smile drawing on his withered face. It was an overwhelming attack, exquisitely lethal for a simple girl of the Saint Realm.
With millennia of war experience forged in oceans of blood, the monster made a split-second tactical decision: he deactivated his immense [Domain of the Blood Purgatory]. Keeping it active consumed a colossal amount of Qi, and he needed that energy concentrated in a single point to survive the dimensional singularity.
By withdrawing the domain, the sea of blood on the ceiling evaporated, and the Demon King counterattacked.
[Primordial Extinction Claw]
The right arm of Li's corpse swelled grotesquely, the dead flesh tearing as it transmuted into a horrifying five-meter-long demonic claw of solid miasma. It wasn't a simple appendage; each finger possessed the gravitational mass of a mountain falling from orbit.
The monster launched a brutal swipe that physically tore space. The twelve spikes of the black ice lotus and the indestructible claws of toxic miasma collided.
There was no sound of metal against metal. It was the roar of two conceptual laws attempting to erase each other. Sparks of pure entropy erupted in all directions, simultaneously rotting and freezing the air. The clash of forces generated a massive crater beneath their feet.
"Hahahahaha!" The Demon King's laughter echoed like infernal thunder over the detonation. "That's how I like it, child! After millennia locked away and rotting in the dark, feeling this warrior passion and bloodlust again is a delicacy! Hahahaha, come on! Give me more!"
Violeta narrowed her heterochromic eyes, withstanding the shockwave without stepping back, injecting more Qi into her Absolute Zero Needle to maintain the clash. But she was only the anvil; the hammer was already on its way.
Taking advantage of the demon's claw being occupied containing the ice, Ciro arrived at the exposed flank like a supersonic flash.
With his Wind Marrow Bones nullifying all his weight, Ciro wasn't running; he was gliding in pure zero inertia. His Cloud Walker Boots had eliminated one hundred percent of environmental friction. In his hands, the Twin Swords of the Silent Gloom were drawn, but they emitted no sound whatsoever.
He executed his forbidden art: [Zero Wind Thrust: The Whisper of the Apex].
The Zephyr Dragon assassin collapsed the air in front of him, creating a tunnel of absolute vacuum. With no aerodynamic drag, he surpassed the speed of light in his own perception. To normal eyes, Ciro didn't move; he simply "appeared" mere centimeters from the Demon King's jugular, with the two vacuum steel blades already grazing the old man's dry skin. It was an attack where death arrived long before the sound of the breeze.
But a Saint King does not possess normal eyes.
Sensing the anomaly in the wind behind his back, the Demon King didn't panic. While his colossal right claw continued to clash against Violeta's ice lotus, the monster used his left leg. With an impossibly fast movement, he connected a lateral kick directly against Violeta's stomach.
The Frigid Executioner managed to cross her arms and the shaft of her rapier to block, but the overwhelming physical power of Stage 5 sent her flying through the air like a projectile. Violeta shot backward, her arms completely numb and trembling from the impact, losing control of the Absolute Zero Lotus.
Free from the icy attack, the demon spun on his own axis in a blur of miasma and raised his claw to intercept Ciro.
The enormous miasma hooves clashed against the twin swords. Ciro felt his arms breaking under the immovable force of the deity. Seeing that his ambush had failed and that he was going to be crushed by the weight of the claw, Ciro used the recoil of the clash to quickly gain distance. In mid-air, he activated his second skill: [Phantasmagoric Displacement].
Ciro delayed his own physical image a fraction of a second using the laws of the wind. He landed softly five meters from the monster, sheathing his swords and adopting a static guard stance, frozen like a statue.
The Demon King turned toward him. His yellow demonic eyes evaluated Ciro's stance. As he prepared to take a step to massacre the young assassin, the entity's instinct warned him of danger. He felt a sharp buzz and a cold ghostly itch right on the nape of his neck.
The Grand Saint tilted his neck to the side in a reflex act. A millisecond later, a gigantic bone rib located ten meters behind him was cleanly split in two by an invisible, transverse slash.
The Demon King was genuinely impressed. He looked at the "Ciro" still standing motionless in front of him, understanding the illusion. The real attack had already been executed and was traveling hidden in the wind, while the body he saw was just a luminous echo.
"Good, boy..." the entity purred, his cracked lips curving into a macabre smile. "You have a wonderfully deceptive sword technique. But let's see if your fragile glass body can withstand this."
Sensing the wind currents announcing Ciro's true attack approaching from his blind spot, the Demon King didn't move. He let himself be hit. Or so the squad thought.
The instant Ciro's real swords pierced the old man's back, the Grand Saint's body dissolved into a thick dark puddle. He had activated his movement and deception technique: [Coagulated Blood Mirage].
What Ciro had stabbed with all his might wasn't the Demon King, but a hollow shell of super-dense dead blood. The physical impact detonated the trap. The clone violently exploded, releasing a suffocating cloud of boiling toxic acid directly into Ciro's face.
While the assassin was blinded and coughing amidst the mist, the true figure of the Demon King silently emerged from the ground right behind him, raising an open hand.
Ciro's reaction, empowered by his infernal training, was outstanding, but tragically slow compared to the reflexes of a superior entity. His Solid Wind Scale Dermis vibrated, attempting to optically phase his body so the enemy's hand would pass through mere air. At the same time, his Intangible Breeze Body activated, trying to dissolve his vital organs into kinetic smoke to avoid the fatal damage.
He barely managed to withstand the first impact.
[Blood Collapse Palm]
The Demon King struck his palm against Ciro's back. The attack injected a pure pulse of the Blood Law. It wasn't blunt force; it was a divine command to the boy's own fluids. Ciro's blood went crazy, trying to boil and "flee" his own body, pushing the veins and arteries to the limit of bursting.
Thanks to his phased scales and partial intangibility, Ciro managed to purge part of the attack, preventing his heart from exploding instantly.
"HAHAHAHA!" the Demon King bellowed, feeling the youth's conceptual evasion. "Well, you have a slippery rat hiding in your veins! I couldn't burst your blood on the first try... but let's see if you can withstand the weight of death."
Before Ciro could even groan from the pain of his boiling blood, the Demon King unleashed a brutal flurry. He launched three successive palms with the speed of cursed lightning.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Each blow was an earthquake upon the assassin's flesh. The overwhelming physical and conceptual pressure shattered Ciro's entire defense to pieces. The solid wind scales burst into a thousand invisible fragments. His intangible breeze state collapsed, forcing his body back into the solidity of mortal flesh.
The sound of Ciro's hollow bones giving way was nauseating. The second impact cleanly dislocated his left shoulder, tearing the arm from its socket with a wet snap. The third impact almost completely caved in his ribcage, shattering six ribs in the process and sending Ciro flying like a blood comet.
The assassin sailed through the air spitting a crimson trail until crashing with thunderous violence against the massive wall of the bone corridor. BOOOOM!
"CIRO!" Lirael and Voltar screamed, their voices breaking with desperation.
Ciro's limp, smoking body fell at the foot of the wall, inert in a puddle of his own blood, barely breathing.
The Demon King turned slowly, the old man's robes swaying with the dark miasma. He looked at the faces of the remaining dragons and saw the homicidal rage burning in their eyes. There was no fear, only a promise of absolute vengeance.
The deity let out a maniacal laugh, a wet sound that vibrated the fossilized ribs. "Hehehehehe! Come! I want much more! Entertain me, little lumps of meat!"
He didn't wait for them to reorganize. Instead of receiving the attack, the Demon King took the initiative. He took a single leap, ignoring the laws of inertia, and instantly appeared in front of Lirael, Jareth, and Voltar.
Voltar, The Walking Storm, was already in a state of limit overload. With his bloodline and his Tribulation Intent active, his nervous perception was moving much faster than normal sight. He saw the Demon King moving in slow motion, read his trajectory, and in an act of pure suicidal heroism, stepped in as a wall of flesh between the deity and his more fragile comrades.
Voltar's Crystal Storm Pupils burned an incandescent violet, scanning the putrefying body's immense electromagnetic potential. His eyes read the iron signature in the King's corrupted blood, calculating the exact point of maximum conductivity. At the same time, the deep Lichtenberg Marks along his torso and arms sucked the electricity from the cavern's air, turning his arms into biological capacitors of extreme mass.
His Ionized Plasma Blood cauterized his own muscle micro-tears before they could form, giving him the strength of a ballistic missile.
He only had time to launch his most destructive attack before the miasma devoured him.
[Tribulation Intent: The Hammer of Heaven] combined with [Collapse Fist: Indra's Hammer].
All the explosive, unstable, and expansive energy of a heavenly tribulation that would normally have leveled the cavern was tyrannically forced to confine itself to the exact volume of his Zenith Knuckles. The electricity ceased to be a volatile gas and acquired the properties of solid matter. Around the heavy Celestial Gold coils of his gauntlets, a natural armor of black and purple plasma of zero reflectivity formed.
The space itself mere millimeters from his fists visibly curved, creating a gravitational lens effect. The atomic weight of the lightning gave his arms the density of a white dwarf's core.
When the Demon King entered his lethal range, Voltar launched a straight punch to the corpse's sternum.
The Demon King, with his yellow eyes shining with excitement, smiled upon seeing the overwhelming density of the approaching attack. "Good... so you managed to react. But let's see if your body can withstand this."
Instead of retreating, the monster simultaneously launched four [Blood Collapse Palms], seeking to intercept and pulverize Voltar's plasma fist in a head-on clash.
The four palms loaded with the Law of Rot collided against Indra's Hammer.
The impact did not produce an explosion of fire or wind; it generated an immense vacuum dome of negative pressure. The noise of the battle was suppressed. All the physical and magical damage of the collision didn't expand, but injected vertically inward into both combatants. A dull, dry, extremely low-frequency thunder was heard that vibrated the marrow in the bones of everyone present. BOOOOM!
The residual shockwave was so violent that Lirael and Jareth, even prepared, were sent flying through the air, dragging backward several meters as a thick cloud of calcium dust and plasma smoke blocked their vision.
As the black and purple smoke dissipated, the scene chilled the warriors' blood.
Voltar was standing, but his right arm had been twisted and wrenched backward at a horrendous and disgusting angle, the white bones protruding through the metal of his Zenith Knuckles. The internal pressure had been so massive that the plasma couldn't cauterize everything. Thick clots of charred black blood dripped profusely from the warrior's open mouth and, most terrifyingly, gushed from his eyes, whose electric pupils flickered weakly.
But in front of him, the Demon King had not emerged completely unscathed.
The monster looked at his own hand. On his withered fingers, Voltar's electrical density had managed to bypass the miasma's defense and bent three of old man Li's fingers into unnatural positions, causing a small fissure in the dry skin.
Without wiping his smile, the Demon King raised his injured hand and, with a simple, violent dry slap, broke his own fingers, snapping them back into their original position with a horrifying crunch. The tiny fissure in the skin closed instantly beneath the dense healing miasma.
That had been barely the second real wound he had received since the start of the battle, and the first was courtesy of the ice brat.
"This human body is damn fragile garbage," the Demon King thought with mathematical coldness. "A simple overload attack from a Saint brat has managed to splinter the bones. I need to end this fast. I sense more bursts of Qi hitting the obsidian wall from the outside; the mass won't hold forever. If that whole legion of flies joins in, it will be boring and exhausting to fight so many insects at the same time and keep this vessel intact."
The monster ran his cracked tongue over his putrid lips. "But... if I could devour them all... Forty-five souls with pure dragon bloodline affinity. What a majestic feast that would be. I would reclaim my throne and advance by leaps and bounds. The only problem would be dealing with the beasts of their clan seeking revenge, but it would be worth it. Besides... outside remain those two little women with delicious auras. It would be very pleasant to spend a night shattering their sanity, hehehe."
While the monster's mind savored fantasies of torture and power, not even a second passed in the physical world. And in that microsecond, Jareth and Lirael, having recovered from the expansive shockwave, were already in lethal motion.
With Voltar immobilized by the pain and paralysis of his broken arm, the king prepared his other hand to rip out his heart.
But Jareth appeared like a cursed shadow. Activating the [Wasp Shadow Stride], he used rapid pulses of vibratory Qi on the soles of his feet. His movement was so erratic and fast that his figure dissolved into a repulsive cloud of black, illusory flies. He appeared in a blink, grabbed Voltar by his healthy shoulder, and threw him forcefully backward, taking him out of the Demon King's deadly range.
Immediately, the Toxicologist switched from rescue to assault. Seeing that the Demon King was still smiling, Jareth channeled his darkest Law: the [Miasma Intent: Conceptual Rot]. His purple cloud ceased to be a simple biological acid; it became pure entropy, capable of aging and decomposing divine energy into dust.
He launched his melee assassination technique: [Inner Void Stinger].
The purple tips of Jareth's fingers hardened until they were sharp as obsidian blades. He injected a super-concentrated drop of entropic poison and attacked directly at an exposed pressure point on the corpse's chest, seeking to insert the chemical "key" that would open and empty the deity's meridians.
And while Jareth forced the frontal attack, Lirael attacked existence itself from the flank.
The mirror master didn't stand paralyzed watching her team get massacred. At the exact instant Jareth stabbed, Lirael executed her conceptual offensive with the [Fragmented Mirror Execution: A Thousand Cuts of Dusk], combined with the [Immaterial Slash].
She invoked the darkness of her [Veil of the Eternal Night], turning the space around the beast into a photonic trap. She swung her Moon Fang, the scimitar becoming invisible in the gloom. As she did, she released thousands of microscopic particles of her Lunar Mercury Blood, which floated in the air like a lethal diamond dust.
Each speck of mercury acted as a micro-mirror capturing the immense reflection of the Demon King. Lirael didn't cut her opponent's physical body; she slashed the air in front of her just once with pure homicidal intent. That intent multiplied and reflected in billions of particles.
In the darkness of the hallway, thousands of silver flashes blinked like stars falling from the sky. Without a single physical sword in sight, thousands of lines of lethal white light appeared out of nowhere, converging simultaneously on the Demon King's armor, soul, and presence, attempting to extinguish the link between the ancient soul and the flesh of the Grand Saint.
The Demon King, feeling Jareth's piercing necrosis touching his chest and the terrifying weight of thousands of blades aiming directly at his immaterial soul, understood the magnitude of the simultaneous ambush. The danger was absolute.
With a rabid growl, he interrupted his attempt to kill Voltar and activated his most formidable defense: the [Black Blood Lotus].
He violently slapped both palms together. From the previous wounds and the miasma of his body, blood was squeezed out to construct in milliseconds a gigantic lotus flower forged of scarlet and black crystal around his body. The lotus functioned as a Grade 4 absolute defense, designed to absorb any attack, regardless of whether it was physical or spiritual, and return it to the environment in the form of pure shock destruction.
However, due to Ciro's immense speed, Voltar's sacrifice, the swiftness of Jareth's toxin, and the atomic deflection of Lirael's mirror, the Demon King didn't have the physical time or the mental concentration necessary to fully form the lotus.
When Jareth's Stinger and Lirael's Thousand Cuts impacted the fragile, half-built scarlet barrier, the structure collapsed.
A massive explosion of corrupt energy and moonlight burst through the bone corridor. The unstable detonation shattered the lotus into pieces, turning it into a shrapnel hurricane of boiling blood. Jareth and Lirael, caught in the epicenter of their own attacks' dimensional rupture, were sent flying like rag dolls for the second time, their clothes scorched and their skin suffering severe cuts from the crimson shrapnel.
Even the Demon King himself fell victim to his hasty defense. The monster was lifted up and sent rolling through the air in a chaos of uncontrolled miasma.
As he spun in the dark air of the cavern, stabilizing his dead body with his mastery of gravity, the god's patience evaporated. He became infuriated beyond any limit. He was bleeding, using his divine power, and still couldn't manage to massacre a few mere teenagers.
With a gaze injected with pure yellow fury, the Demon King decided to end this with a single definitive blow. His target was not the injured Voltar, nor the fallen Ciro. It was the root of the problem, the squad's center of gravity, the ice girl who had just recovered from the numbness of his first kick.
Violeta.
Violeta had remained motionless, her arms slowly regaining feeling as she observed with calculating coldness the enormous sacrifice of blood, bones, and pride of her siblings. She was waiting for the exact moment. A millimeter-perfect window of opportunity that only appeared when a god made the mistake of being distracted by fury.
The moment arrived.
When the Demon King stabilized in the air, preparing a lethal shot of miasma directly toward her, Violeta stepped forward. She didn't flee; she used her entire Qi reserve to launch the fastest and most aggressive spatial technique in her repertoire to close the distance until she was face to face with death.
[Dimensional Frost Step]
Violeta didn't disappear into a simple vacuum. Her entire body abruptly fragmented into thousands of tiny black crystals that were sucked into a microscopic wormhole. The air where she stood turned completely white from the sudden condensation of her cold absence.
The Demon King barely had time to register her disappearance when Violeta emerged from a deafening burst of fractal snow less than two meters from him, suspended in the air. Between the starting point and the Demon King, only an ominous and deadly line of silver frost suspended in the void remained.
The King tried to punch the air to crush her, but Violeta, taking advantage of the anti-ambush Exit Nova, released an expansive wave of absolute zero directly into the old man's legs and arms. The cryogenic pressure froze the ambient moisture into bluish ice shackles on the Demon King's body, halting his physical attack and giving the Executioner total and absolute initiative in the final second of combat.
Because the girl's displacement was quantum and overwhelming, the divine entity didn't have time to execute a dimensional escape before Violeta sank her intent into the bone floor beneath her flying feet.
[Astral Frost Prison]
Violeta pointed her stoic finger at the Demon King and invoked the inescapable cage. A massive net of frost erupted from the focal point and rose to form a gigantic dome that completely enveloped the deity.
From the outside, the dome looked like a beautiful, peaceful crystal sphere filled with twinkling constellations. But inside, it was a thermodynamic and existential nightmare. The thick walls of the dome were not made of simple elemental ice; they were formed by unbreakable "walls of solid space".
The laws of physics collapsed within the sphere. The Demon King, suspended in the center, felt his limbs weigh tons while his head floated erratically. Every micro-movement became agonizingly slow because the fabric of space had been thickened to feel like lead syrup. The absolute cold not only attacked the putrefying skin of Li's corpse but penetrated deeply to "freeze" his Grand Saint meridians, halting the furious flow of his lethal demonic Qi.
Unable to move a single muscle, trapped in a still frame of time, the Demon King saw through the walls of the starry dome Violeta in front of him, holding her translucent galaxy rapier, preparing to execute again the cursed skill that had wounded him before.
Violeta drew the Absolute Zero Needle and initiated the final execution of her Codex: the [Song of the Void Winter Sword].
For Violeta, this wasn't a fight of fury; it was a strictly mathematical execution where entropy had to stop.
The [Cold Horizon Collapse] activated. All spatial coordinates around the trapped Demon King permanently froze and began to contract toward a single, absolute dead point. The world around her was dyed in pure black and white. The distant noise of Lirael and Voltar panting disappeared, replaced by a sharp crystal cry, a pure lament that came from all directions of the cavern. It was the "Song of Winter."
Violeta didn't thrust her blade, but the ultimate move—the [Crystal Coffin: Absolute Zero]—activated.
There was no visual trajectory. Suddenly, deep, thick cracks of bluish ice appeared directly over the body and soul of the Demon King. From the stasis wounds, blood didn't spout; instead, resplendent crystals of light glowed with the painful intensity of a frozen supernova. The attack would erase the monster's cellular memory; he would be locked in a translucent black diamond monolith, preserved in his final grimace as an inert relic for the eternity of the void.
Violeta watched the black ice closing over the deity's face, waiting for the end.
But then, something unnatural and profane happened.
The Demon King, whose body was completely immobilized by spatial compression and absolute zero frost, showed no terror in his yellow eyes. He wore a faint, almost imperceptible, hair-raising smile.
It was a brief image, but Violeta, with her Spatial Eye, managed to see the massive distortion forming. Above the head of the rotting old man, an immaterial crown forged of black light and condensed blood materialized. It was the supreme symbol, the irrefutable proof that this being possessed an Inner World.
The Demon King murmured only three cursed words that shook the very foundation of reality.
He activated his royal power: the [Crown of the Abyss: The Sovereign Decree].
—"Cease to exist."
It wasn't a simple shout loaded with Qi. It was a Spoken Law. A Saint King does not need to move his muscles to fight; a Saint King verbally imposes his mandate upon the fabric of reality, and the physical universe simply complies with the command.
The instant that Law left the monster's lips, the fragile human vessel paid the toll. The neck and vocal cords of Grand Saint Li's corpse began to tear disgustingly, the dead skin bursting under the stress of emitting a King's will, splattering black blood inside the dome.
But the effect was absolute, devastating, and instantaneous.
Under the command of "Cease to exist," the unbreakable Astral Frost Prison, the dimensional cracks, the Singularity Lotus, and the sentence of the Crystal Coffin enveloping the god... were simply erased. Violeta's entire ultimate technique, the majesty of her codex, and the lethal cold of the primordial ice disappeared from existence, turning into harmless smoke without leaving a trace or sound.
Violeta widened her dual eyes in overwhelming stupefaction. The shock was so great that her Frigid Executioner face, normally unperturbable and stripped of human emotion by the Crystal Heart, showed genuine and profound surprise. Her entire immense ocean of spent Qi had been nullified by a verbal whim.
The Demon King, freed from his frost chains with his neck bleeding profusely from the cost of the Law, did not waste the genius's confusion.
He extended his putrid hand and, before Violeta could phase out or use the Bridge of Worlds to escape, brutally grabbed her by her pale neck. He lifted her off the ground with crushing force, his fingers injecting miasma directly into her veins to neutralize her frigid Qi and strangle her breathing.
At the same time, with the ice girl immobilized, the entity turned his sadistic attention to the rest of the squad.
The Demon King activated the [Threads of the Dead Puppeteer].
He shot extremely fine, imperceptible threads of coagulated blood from the fingertips of his other free hand. These threads crossed the cavern at the speed of light and attacked the injured Ciro, Voltar, Jareth, and Lirael. But they didn't bind them from the outside like a common net; the threads were cruel. They violently infiltrated inside the deep, open wounds from the previous combat: they coiled around Ciro's splintered ribs, tangled in the exposed bones of Voltar's twisted arm, and penetrated Jareth's dissolved skin and Lirael's pierced abdomen.
The threads anchored directly into their nervous systems. If any of them tried to even move a finger or channel an ounce of Qi to save Violeta, the threads would pull their broken bones and torn organs taut, causing paralyzing and agonizing torment.
With his pesky enemies bleeding and silenced like broken marionettes on the floor, the Demon King raised a choking Violeta toward his withered face. The demon's black nails began to open small wounds on the girl's throat, preparing for the feast.
"What a disappointment, little Executioner..." the Demon King whispered, licking Violeta's golden blood dripping from his mouth. "In the end, ice melts, and geniuses die. It is time to..."
But then.
Right behind the back of the deity claiming his victory, the immense, suffocating wall of black obsidian of infinite mass separating them from the rest of the labyrinth—the wall the Demon King believed absolutely impenetrable and eternal—began to emit a deep, seismic, discordant hum.
The bone floor began to vibrate with terrifying intensity. Calcium particles bounced.
From behind the insurmountable barrier, the voice of the Commander of the Morningstar Clan vibrated. It wasn't a mental communication through the Nexus; the shout resonated physically, straight through the heavy fabric of space. It was so densely loaded with a pure, colossal, apocalyptic killing intent that it made the Demon's own suffocating miasma shudder, staying his hand.
"Break the world!" roared Kael Morningstar.
A violent burst of ultrasound swept the cavern, microscopically fracturing the dense molecules of the obsidian wall in the first millisecond.
A second later, the true catastrophe arrived. A massive, perfect transverse slash of magmatic fire, intertwined with white lightning and pure black Ruin, impacted directly into the blind center of the infinite wall. It shone blindingly with the incomprehensible existential weight of three million dead souls.
With a deafening crash that would have brought death itself to its knees and that shook the foundations of the labyrinth to dust, the unbreakable barrier was cleanly split into two pieces.
The door to true hell swung wide open, revealing the figures waiting right behind the back of the astonished Demon King.