Lagun's fists crashed down again, a four-pronged impact that detonated the ground around Asmodeus. Ice ruptured. Stone split in burning lines.
A frozen ridge collapsed onto itself.
But the smoke didn't part with Lagun's next blow.
It cleared on its own.
Evaporated.
Driven backwards by sothing deeper.
A pressure built beneath the battlefield—not magic, not fury—but sothing older than either.
The pulse of sovereignty.
The Earth felt it first.
Then the wind.
Then Lagun.
He froze mid-step.
His chest rose once.
Then stopped.
Asmodeus walked out from the ruins of the last blow.
Straight-backed.
Unbothered.
His cloak had burned away.
The sigil over his chest had vanished, replaced by black, jagged lines curling outward across his ribs, pulsing with coal-red heat.
His black eyes with small blue pupils now burned with a slit-pupil gleam, glowing faintly from beneath his brow like lanterns buried in ash.
And behind him, twin black horns curled backwards along his skull, seared with glowing runes.
There was no scream. No explosion. Just a voice.
Low.
Clear.
Final.
"Enough."
The word hit like a spell.
Lagun took a half-step back before he realised it.
"You…" Lagun growled, his fists flexing. "That's… magic. It's... impossible."
Asmodeus tilted his head slightly.
Not like a predator, but like a ruler that grew tired of waiting.
"If you were worthy of her gaze," he said softly, "you would've known this power when you saw it."
With a single breath, he vanished.
No warning.
One mont, he was standing.
The next mont, Lagun's head snapped to the side as a hand gripped his face, and then a crack echoed across the valley.
Asmodeus gripped his face — his arm still extended, posture perfect. Lagun flew backwards, slamming into the cliff face hard enough to crater the wall inwards. And before the dust even settled—
Asmodeus was there again.
His foot slamd into Lagun's gut, caving the crater in further, the mountain itself groaning in protest.
Boom!
Lagun coughed blood — real blood this ti. The blue fluid splattered against his chest.
"You call them whores," Asmodeus said quietly, grabbing Lagun by the throat with one hand. "Because nobody has ever loved you."
He slamd Lagun down into the earth once—twice. A third ti. Each blow created a deeper crater until the demon's body was half-subrged in the stone.
Lagun struggled—arms twitching, but the fear had reached his eyes now.
And Asmodeus saw it.
"You served her like a dog."
"But, I was chosen."
He dropped Lagun's head back into the earth like a discarded weight.
"That's the difference."
The ground trembled as Asmodeus stepped back.
Lagun pulled himself from the crater with a roar—blood streaming from his nose, his jaw cracked, his left lower arm hanging loose.
But he wasn't dead.
Not yet.
He rose, trembling, fury radiating off him in waves.
And that's when a new pressure hit the battlefield.
Colder.
Heavier.
It rolled in like frost at dusk.
The won felt it first.
Asmodeus turned his head slightly, eyes narrowing.
In the distance, a figure stepped forward through the mist. Her halberd scraped behind her, dragging a line across the ice. Her hair floated upward in the windless cold. And her skin shimred with pale ice blue.
The Demon Empress had entered the field.
Her footsteps echoed without sound.
The snow didn't crunch beneath her bare feet — it simply evaporated.
Each stride left behind a trail of frost-flowers.
They blood for a heartbeat.
Then shattered.
Riel approached the battlefield like a moon descending toward the earth —graceful, slow, and utterly unstoppable.
She didn't speak.
She didn't scream.
Her lips moved, whispering sothing only she could hear.
Asmodeus turned to face her, still half-shadowed by the fractured mountain, his body wreathed in residual heat and flickering embers.
His eyes locked with hers.
What he saw wasn't the woman he'd rembered.
Not Sariel.Not the one who offered power in seductive riddles and double-edged smiles.
No.
This was sothing else.
A fusion of obsession and sovereignty, desire twisted into vengeance, Love reshaped into ruin.
"Riel—"
She lunged.
The transformation didn't explode.
It unravelled.
Like silk slipping from a blade.
Her skin was like fresh snow, with pale blue veins of glimring frost.
Shards of ice spread from her shoulders, like armour, pulsating with the rhythm of her heartbeat.
Her halberd flicked into the air, no longer dragged in the snow — it sang, sharp and tallic, spinning once in her hand like a strear turned executioner's axe.
Her pupils vanished.
Her eyes beca mirrors of the blizzard itself — white, infinite, empty.
The title she had never spoken aloud now etched itself into the air she created, the aura that flowed around her.
Riel was a Demon Empress.
She struck.
The halberd's arc was faster than thought.
Asmodeus raised his arm to intercept — his skin cracked under the force, black energy flashing up his bones.
The blow launched him back through stone, through ice, through mory.
He crashed down against the edge of the cliff — one boot skidding, claws digging into frozen rock to halt his montum.
Blood ran down his wrist.
Real blood.
Not the monsters or a small amount, it was a deep wound in his black exoskeletal armour.
Riel stood where she had struck, one hand extended behind her, the halberd humming with hunger.
Steam hissed off her skin, from his instant counter, flas sizzling around her in the snow.
She smiled.
Not cruelly.
Not even proudly.
Lovingly.
"You made feel things I hate," she breathed. "And now you'll feel them too."
Asmodeus stared at the line of crimson sliding off his elbow.
The cold bit into his bones for the first ti.
He clenched his fist.
Then slowly raised his head.
The Demon King smiled.
"Fine," he muttered. "You want to see what true power really looks like?"
His aura trembled.
The fire within him ignited.
The ground around his feet cracked, boiling from the inside.
The transformation to co… was not one of vengeance.
But of a sovereign's will.
The sky no longer moved.
Not even the blizzard stirred.
Every flake hovered midair, frozen in ti by the aura radiating from the two figures now standing at the heart of the battlefield — one barely upright, the other newly born.
Lagun gasped, steam curling from his lips with each staggered breath.
His chest caved inward at odd angles. Cracks ran down all four of his arms. One hand no longer responded. The glowing lines of his Fracture flickered and pulsed in uneven patterns — the light of a candle burning its last inch.
And still, he stood.
Teeth bared.
Knees bent.
Four fists clenched, even if only two could still strike.
He was a monster, yes — a warrior. A shield. A tool. A believer.
But most of all…
He was a servant.
A servant to the dream she gave him.
To the cold world, she promised to build.
To the Queen.
To Riel.
Across the clearing, Asmodeus took a single step forward.
The sound echoed — not like a boot on stone, but like a bell tolling in a ruined temple.
The air trembled around him.
His transformation had finished in silence.
Now he burned like a dying star.
Black flas crawled down his arms, crawling toward his fingertips like veins of liquefied night. His horns had sharpened, curving upward like a crown, glowing softly with an infernal script that no living creature could read, but all could feel.
His wings were not wings—not truly. They were shapes of power, like the ghostly silhouettes of a creature that had once devoured heaven and was exiled to earth.
Two shadows stretched behind him.
Slow.
Wide.
Royal.
The Demon Emperor ignored the insignificant ants' struggle.
Lagun forced himself to raise his guard.
"She made you strong," he said, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. "But foolish."
His voice cracked mid-word.It was a broken sound — not fear, not begging.
Pride trying to remain after its legs had been cut
"She made you… defiant. Corrupt. You infected her."
Asmodeus said nothing; no reason to correct him or argue.
There was no sermon.No rebuke.
Only judgnt as he moved.
One step.
A blur.
Lagun's eyes barely tracked it.
By the ti his arms rose, Asmodeus had already buried his fist in his chest.
No roar.No explosion.Just a sound like glass fracturing.
A quiet, sudden shatter.
Lagun's arms dropped.
He looked down —and saw Asmodeus's fist sinking into his sternum, fingers curling through the flickering blue core hidden deep within his body.
His breath caught in his throat.
The Fracture runes flashed once, twice — Then extinguished.
Asmodeus spoke, voice barely louder than a whisper.
"It wasn't her who made ."
"I was always this."
He twisted his wrist —
and shattered Lagun's core.
The entire battlefield darkened for a mont.
The snowflakes finally fell.
Lagun didn't scream.
He exhaled once, almost like a sigh of understanding.
His knees buckled.He dropped to them, still upright.Still staring forward.
He t Asmodeus's gaze one last ti.
And smiled.
"So… that's what she saw…"
"A real king…"
Then he crumbled.
The First Fang collapsed into steaming ash.His last breath whispered across the battlefield like a secret carried away by the winter wind.
Asmodeus didn't watch him fall.
He turned toward the woman who now ruled the sky.
The Demon Empress.
Her eyes widened as the black fla rose around her King's body.
"Lagun?"
"Gorrhan?"
"Yuzuha.... where did they all go?"
A wave of power pulsated from her body, as her wings fluttered, a strange feeling... though she didn't feel attached to the ice demons and couldn't stop her trembling body.
"Where did you go?"
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