A sickening crack echoed as the neck twisted far beyond what should be humanly possible, the head completing an unnatural turn with a wet pop. The smile never left Robert’s face. No, not Robert anymore. Sothing else was wearing his skin like a trophy. The hollow eyes shimred with flickers of ice-blue fla, and the air around Damon dropped several degrees.
"You..." the demon rasped, voice like glacier shards scraping against bone. "Such a familiar scent... Blood. So much blood. And such potent blood, too." Its eyes, still glowing embers of abyssal fire, seed to pierce through Damon, analyzing, consuming. "You, little mortal, reek of sothing... interesting."
The ground around Robert began to crack, black ice spiderwebbing out from beneath his contorted feet. The swirling snow, which had been dancing around him, now began to turn an ominous black as it coalesced into jagged shards that floated nacingly in the air.
The next instant, the demon unexpectedly ran towards Damon with an unnatural speed, using Robert’s legs that looked more like claws now. "You must be the reason why the thread of fate was leading to this shit hole of a world. What are you? Your blood is making desire all sorts of things." The demon screeched, sending a chill down Damon’s spine.
Damon did not waste any ti as he instantly conjured a blood lance in his hand, the strongest attack he could muster. The lance had fire, shadow, and even hints of lightning swirling around it. It howled with unstable power, a chaotic convergence of elents.
Damon did not even waste a single mont, throwing the lance before the freakish thing could reach him. The lance tore through the storm like a missile, warping the air in its path, leaving behind a trail of crimson fire. The demon shrieked in delight rather than fear, throwing its body forward to et the attack head-on. The mont of impact was apocalyptic.
A blinding flash consud the field as the lance collided with the demon’s chest. Fire erupted outward, snow and ice vaporized in a shockwave, and the earth beneath cracked open like brittle glass. Black shards of corrupted frost rained down across the battlefield, each one humming with residual demonic energy.
When the smoke cleared, the demon stood hunched, its chest smoldering, a crater where its heart should have been. But it was laughing.
A low, guttural sound that grew louder, fuller, until it shook the bones in Damon’s spine. The wound was sealing, no, freezing over from the inside, as tendrils of black ice snaked outward to rebuild what had been destroyed.
"Oh, that was beautiful," the demon hissed, eyes wild. "I haven’t felt sothing like that in eons. Do it again. Hurt more, little vampire."
Damon’s eyes narrowed. He was not this demon’s match. It was simply toying with him despite him going all out. That attack had been everything, and yet it had only made the damn thing smile. Worse, the cost of the attack was significant. He had used 5% of his blood archives. He couldn’t simply keep throwing lances like that infinitely.
The demon’s body cracked again as it straightened, bones clicking into place like loose marionette strings snapping taut. The hole in its chest sealed with one last hiss of frozen vapor, and its expression twisted into sothing euphoric.
"You taste like the old world," it whispered, licking at the air with a frostbitten tongue. "I can’t wait to eat you alive." The demon cackled loudly and once again started running towards the demon in a weird, contorted way.
Damon’s mind spun. What could he do now? How could he face sothing like this? An avatar of a demon god? He was about to conjure another lance again, a more powerful one this ti, when suddenly Artimius flew in front of him.
"Your opponent is !"
Damon’s eyes widened in shock as he watched the old man move like he had never done before. His skills and his movents were at an epito as an unbelievable aura flared up around him. Pure soul energy poured out of him like an unstoppable force. It was silent, disciplined, and unyielding like the will of a man who refused to fade.
The demon actually halted mid-step, its grin faltering for the first ti. "You..." it rasped, "Aren’t you the seedling who refused my blessing?" Its head cocked to the side with a sickening crunch. "I can sll my curse on you." Its grin widened. "And you dared to co before ? You didn’t know, did you? Oh, pitiful little ant, you are nothing but a soul battery to now."
"I’m well aware," Artimius said quietly. "But if one man must burn to buy so ti... then so be it." He unleashed another swing of the sword as a powerful attack blasted forth.
The blade sang with sorrow and wrath, its arc trailing glimring soulfla, azure light burning so brightly it turned the shadows to ash. The snow hissed as it vanished beneath the heat of that swing, and the black ice around the demon cracked and flared.
The demon scread. "Soul Cleave..." it hissed, reeling back as the edge of the attack tore through its shoulder and severed the outermost ring of corrupted runes circling its body. "How did you manage to master such an attack in this backwater world? I have truly underestimated you-"
The demon did not have the ti to talk as it was cut short by the seven consecutive blood lances that ca flying towards it one after another.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Attacks rained down on the demon continuously from all fronts. A thunderous barrage of crimson fire and elental chaos crashed into the demon’s twisted form.
Each lance slamd into it like a divine hamr, shaking the heavens and tearing through the icy gloom. The ground split into jagged ravines, swallowing frozen corpses and dismbered limbs as the power of Damon’s assault shook the entire area.
The demon howled, not in amusent this ti, but in pain. Real pain.
Its form flickered, the black frost shielding its body fracturing with every impact. The corrupted runes that had coiled protectively around it were cracking like brittle glass, losing their glow. One of its arms was torn clean off by the fourth lance.
The fifth shattered part of its spine, forcing it to the ground with a sickening crunch. The sixth burned away the last of its makeshift armor, exposing a rotting, pulsating core of demonic energy within its chest.
And the seventh, Damon’s final, most desperate lance, pierced straight through that core.
The demon shrieked, the sound so high and sharp it split the air like a bell made of agony. Shadows poured out of its mouth like smoke, and the twisted snowflakes around it lted into oily black tears.
But even as its body writhed and convulsed, it wasn’t dead.
Sothing darker began to bleed out from the center of its being, a second form, taller, colder, more real. The true fragnt of Skal’Zarith’s will started breaking through, the very space tearing apart the avatar. The world simply did not have enough strength to handle such a developnt.
Damon’s eyes went wide as spatial rifts started occurring everywhere, the entire area becoming extrely unstable and pretty much a death trap in a fraction of second. But the demon did not seem to care about any of it. Its eyes greedily locked onto Damon as more and more of it started erging.
This was not its true form and this was still only a fraction of its manifestation and yet the power was enough to make the entire world tremble.
Earth quakes started appearing in random places on earth. Oceans began churning violently. Even the sky itself reacted, turning from blue to gray to pitch black, the sun blotting out like a candle behind ash.
Cracks ford in the firmant above, not just in clouds but in reality itself, like a mirror fracturing beneath an unseen force. Lightning that carried no light arced between the rifts, striking mountains far in the distance, splitting them like twigs.
Damon froze. He did not know what to do anymore. How could he possibly stop sothing like this from happening? This was true power. This was the might of a God! He was rely an ant in front of a colossal being like this. His blood boiled and his heart hamred inside his chest as he witnessed firsthand power that couldn’t be restrained.
Was the world going to end today? Were they all going to be consud by this demonic creature from hell? How did everything co to this? How could such a being enter their world? Then what was the point of all this preparation and entire fucking ga?!
Even as his mind shook with this possibility, his heart couldn’t help but stare in awe at the display of such a terrifying power.
And as that shadow rose like a colossal giant, looming behind the broken shell of Robert’s flesh, suddenly sothing else snapped. A thunderous boom rang loudly sowhere high up in the sky, and the next second, more earth-shattering, heaven-breaking explosions followed.
Streaks of lightning could be seen everywhere in the sky, almost as if the heavens themselves were breaking apart.
Then, light. Not lightning, not fire, not even soulfla. Sothing older. Sothing truer. A blazing, golden-white radiance broke through the cracks in the sky like a flood behind a shattered dam.
The heavens didn’t just crack, they were pierced. And from that wound in reality, a will surged forth. A will a lot more profound than the demon god’s ever was.
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