The clash of steel echoed across the ruined expanse of the Demon Continent—a land once alive with families, mothers, fathers, elders, and children.
A land of people.
Despite the vicious lies the human nations and elves spread to justify their crusades.
Dante's cracked blade met the divine sword Aesha once more. Somehow, the fractured metal held up for yet another violent collision. The impact sent a massive shockwave tearing across the battlefield, shattering the stone beneath them.
"This is the Hero.." Dante thought in slight awe, clicking his tongue as he threw himself backward into a defensive retreat.
As he drifted through the air, several crimson sigils materialized before his palm.
"[Shallal Alnaar!]"
Black and crimson fire erupted from the arrays. The torrent swallowed everything in its path, reducing stone and steel alike to ash. The ground instantly melted into bubbling magma as the spell surged directly toward Wolfsheim.
But before the flames could hit the Hero dead on, the stream abruptly split apart, diverting and exploding harmlessly in the distance. A shimmering, golden barrier pulsed in front of the Hero.
Dante's eyes narrowed. This wasnt Wolfsheim's doing.
"Thank you, Lady Gabrielle." the Hero murmured, lowering his sword slightly.
Standing just behind him, the Saintess folded her hands in a serene prayer.
Dante cursed internally. The Hero alone was already a living nightmare to deal with. Adding Gabrielle to the active battlefield made things infinitely worse.
Suddenly, the ground beneath Dante's feet lit up with a blinding radiance. His instincts screamed.
"[Fold]!"
Space folded around him. In a flash, Dante vanished, reappearing fifty meters in the air just as a pillar of holy light engulfed the area he had just occupied. The residual pressure still clipped his flank, scorching through his coat.
He didn't give them a moment to breathe. Flashing a sequence of rapid mental commands, he activated his twin enhancements.
"[Red Shift!][Blue Shift!]"
A crimson aura cloaked his limbs while a deep blue light pulsed through his circulatory system. His perception slowed. The battlefield became a stagnant canvas.
Dante dropped his left hand toward the ground, tearing a massive rift in the air.
"[Malebolge!]"
Violent spatial fissures tore open directly beneath Wolfsheim and Gabrielle, seeking to swallow them into the void. At the same instant, Dante raised his right hand to the sky.
「Donderstorm」
A violent violet storm system manifested instantly, hammering the fissures with continuous, heavy lightning strikes to seal off their escape.
Inside the chaos, a flash of gold erupted. Wolfsheim burst through the spatial distortion, Aesha glowing with blinding fervor as he cut right through the vacuum of the fissure. The Hero launched himself skyward, closing the distance in a fraction of a second.
Dante threw up his hand."「Mur de Flammes!」"
A colossal wall of demonic fire erupted between them. Wolfsheim didn't slow down; he clove the sea of flames in two with a single vertical strike. Anticipating the breakthrough, Dante was already gone, utilizing [Spatial Shift] to reappear directly behind the Hero.
He thrust his hand forward, condensing raw electricity into a blinding, solid point.
"「Lightning Lance!」"
The concentrated bolt shot forward like a railgun, aimed directly at the Hero's spine. Yet, as if possessing eyes in the back of his head, Wolfsheim spun, parrying the hyper-dense bolt with the flat of his blade. The deflected energy exploded outward, shattering the clouds above for miles.
Before Dante could fall back, Gabrielle's voice echoed from below, chanting a verse of binding. Holy chains manifested from the light, wrapping tightly around Dante's left leg and pinning him in mid-air, the bindings cutting into his leg.
Wolfsheim capitalized instantly, dropping from above with a heavy, downward cleave.
Trapped, Dante channeled his demonic power, forcing the atmospheric pressure around them to invert completely.
"「Event Horizon!!」"
An ultra-dense gravitational singularity formed right between him and Wolfsheim. The immense pulling force dragged Aesha's downward trajectory violently off course, pulling the Hero's blade toward the center of the void.
Taking advantage of the sudden disruption, Dante snapped the holy chains on his leg, ignited his wings with explosive force—"「Phoenix Dive」!"—and propelled himself away, leaving a trail of sonic booms behind him.
He skidded across the sky, his hands weaving an immense geometric array that covered the entire horizon. "Your army has already been defeated, So why continue to fight?" Gabrielle's voice drifted upward, carrying across the wastes through the power of her grace.
"The kingdoms have fallen. Ninety percent of your race is dead. So...why fight?"
Dante opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Because he didn't know.
Revenge? Hatred? Duty? He wasn't sure anymore. It was unlikely he could survive even if he managed to kill the hero.
So instead of answering, he attacked.
Hundreds of magic circles blanketed the darkened sky. Black spears descended like a cataclysmic rain, each carrying enough concentrated power to level a mountain.
Golden barriers intercepted many of them. Others were cleanly cut apart by blazing arcs of light released from Aesha. Yet, several managed to breach through, and massive explosions erupted across the horizon.
Dante didn't stop. More sigils flared to life around him.
"「Azrael's Grasp」"
The earth split apart. Massive black chains erupted from the deep fissures, surging toward Wolfsheim and Gabrielle from every conceivable direction.
The Hero simply stepped forward. A single, fluid swing of Aesha reduced the nearest chains to fragments. A second backhand swing erased the rest from existence.
Dante then threw up his hand, releasing another surge of demonic power.
"「Gravity Crush」!"
The sky dimmed as the ambient gravity inverted. The remains of a distant mountain shuddered violently before tearing free from the earth. Then another. And another. Several mountain-sized landmasses rose into the air before violently compressing together under overwhelming gravitational force.
The resulting, ultra-dense sphere hurtled downward like a falling moon, catching fire with the velocity.
In the blink of an eye, Wolfsheim vanished from the ground.
The giant mass above split perfectly in half, and a moment later, it exploded into a cloud of dust and debris.
Dante barely raised his blade in time. Aesha collided with his guard with the force of a falling star.
The sheer force sent him hurtling backward. The clouds above shattered from the pressure, and the ocean below churned violently. Dante's feet dug deep trenches through the air itself before he finally managed to stabilize his position. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, though thankfully they hadn't been destroyed.
Wolfsheim wasn't shaking. Not even slightly.
The Hero raised his sword, his voice entirely even. "Are you finished?"
Dante laughed a little hysterically, a little desperately too. "No!"
Wolfsheim's face remained as impassive as ever. Returning immediately to the offensive, a silver aura coated his form as he appeared directly in front of Dante, his blade coming down like lightning.
"「Distortion Field!」「Voile du Néant!」"
Dante warped the space in front of him, trying to force the attack to veer off course. But the holy light cut through the spatial distortions like dry parchment. It tore through his barriers, his reinforcement, and his armor.
Blinding pain exploded across his torso. A clean, searing line appeared from his right shoulder down to his left waist. Blood sprayed into the air as his wings burned, black feathers scattering across the ruined battlefield.
The sheer force of the impact launched him across the continent. He crashed into the earth hard enough to create a crater several kilometers wide.
For a few moments, he couldn't move. Not because of his physical injuries, but because Aesha had erased at least a quarter of his spiritual body—his very soul.
'Is this how it ends… after all this?!' Dante cursed the heavens. Forcing his body to move, he puppeted his broken limbs with raw demonic power, knowing full well the strain would likely kill him afterward.
His remaining wing extended outward, the feathers turning a bright, volatile violet as purple and black lightning arced violently across them.
One of his ultimate spells, one in which destruction was its main priority. Be it friend or foe. "Luckily" he was most likely the last demon fighting.
"「ASTRAPHAE ULTIMA!」"
The sky completely disappeared beneath a catastrophic storm. Master-tier black-violet lightning descended in thousands of relentless streams. Entire sections of the battlefield vanished into nothingness. Mountains collapsed into dust, and abandoned cities in the far distance disappeared beneath the apocalyptic bombardment. The entire storm converged upon the Hero and the Saintess, who had just caught up.
For the first time in their fight, Wolfsheim's eyes actually widened. Grabbing Aesha with a white-knuckle grip, he frantically erected a barrier around himself and the Saintess just before an explosion of blinding thunder covered them from sight.
"Take that… you fucking bastard…" Dante wheezed, electrified blood spilling from his mouth.
Heavy footsteps approached the crater's edge. Wolfsheim stood there, looking over the rim. For the first time, the Hero actually looked tired. His pristine armor was gone, several bleeding wounds covered his body, and blood ran from a deep cut near his temple. Even so, he remained standing.
"So that's what you were hiding," Wolfsheim said, his expression entirely unreadable. "I expected more."
Even as he spoke, his body had already started to recover, his complexion noticeably improving with each passing second. The words stung far worse than the physical wounds.
The rest of the subjugation army soon arrived at the lip of the crater, and deafening cheers erupted across the wastes.
"Wolfsheim defeated the demons!" "Wolfsheim defeated the Demon King!"
Elves, humans, Murim warriors, various kingdom representatives, and races from all over the world—they all celebrated together in a chaotic frenzy. Some carried the severed heads of fallen demons like gruesome trophies.
Dante stared up at them silently. The war was all but over. And they were celebrating atop the corpses of everyone he had failed to protect.
Beatrice, the Witch of the End and archmage of Wolfsheim's party, appeared beside the Hero. Her ornate robes remained perfectly clean despite the heavy ash hanging in the air. She glanced down into the dirt, tapping her staff against the stone.
"Oh," her lips curved into a slight, mocking smile, surveying the damage he dealt to the hero.
"So that's the great Ort Demon King. I guess even the weakest demon king is still a demon king~" She sighed dramatically, waving a hand as if bored by the sight. "All that grandstanding, and you couldn't even leave a permanent scar on our dear hero~ How disappointing."
Dante's fingers twitched in the dirt. The mocking condescension in her voice was the final straw.
Memories flooded his mind in a chaotic rush. His mother. Valentine. His comrades. The burning cities. The countless, nameless dead. The demons had done nothing to deserve this. Yet, the world had unilaterally decided they deserved extinction.
'I won't let them have a happy ending.'
Deep cracks began to spread across Dante's skin, a volatile, blinding light leaking from beneath his flesh. The demonic power inside his core churned, reversing its flow into a catastrophic chain reaction.
Gabrielle's expression changed instantly.
"Wolfsheim—"
A massive holy barrier formed around the Hero's immediate party.
"Everyone get back!"
The world disappeared into a blinding, white light.