บท 29: Death and Ruin
Lokus' eyes widened in awe as the true might of Monarchs was put on full display.
Crackling bolts of electricity arced through the air, illuminating the dark cavern in gorgeous reds, whites, yellows, blues, and purples. Some were as thin as a hair, while others were as thick around as his wrist, and all of them rained down on the King demon like the wrath of the heavens themselves.
Spikes and orbs of ice flew out to join these bolts of lightning, puncturing fat and shattering against the demon's flesh. Jets of water flew out from the fingertips of some of the soldiers, splashing into the demon's singular eye and causing it to roar out in fury.
Spurred on by this new assault, the demon picked up its pace, its six arms effortlessly lifting its fatty torso off of the ground before it launched itself forward like a cannonball made of fat.
The earth shuddered as it landed in the humans' midst in an instant, over ten soldiers having the life crushed out of them before they could even scream out in pain.
Its arms spread out to its sides, two under, two over, and two in the middle, as if the demon sought to mimic the wings of a dragon or the battle stance of a furious god, and with a deafening roar that made the listeners' eardrums bleed, it slammed down.
Lokus and several of the others were thrown back, and he skipped against the ground once, twice before coming to a stop, just barely managing to place his shield between him and the ground each time and thus avoiding any major injuries.
He pushed himself up with a serious expression, his eyes locked on that glowing monstrosity that was currently swiping at the pitiful humans that hadn't been launched far enough to escape its wrath.
Those that had been sent further back swiftly got to their feet and resumed peppering the demon with lightning and ice, but it hardly seemed to care as it brought death and ruin to those that had angered it.
But anyone with a keen eye would notice that unlike before, it was going to great lengths to protect its lone eye, making sure to keep a hand or two close to its face to block oncoming ice attacks.
Lokus' eyes darted to the mask that had fallen out of his grasp. It sat only a couple of meters away from the demon, more than close enough to be within range of its six hands.
Without it, Ibmund would be unable to shift and would be stuck as an intangible entity. Giving the house-sized demon a brief glance, Lokus quickly made a decision and dashed forward.
"Stay back!" commanded the mustachioed man, who was the only one not to be thrown off his feet by the demon's landing. Even now, his sword was a blur, fending off the demon's strikes as he struggled to protect the men who had been knocked off their feet. "This is no battlefield for a Prince!"
Lokus paid no mind to the man, ducking underneath a swing of the demon's meaty paw and snatching his mask off the ground. He put in on just in time to jump out of the way of a hammering fist from above, his Domain acutely aware of the small crater the attack had left in the ground as he picked himself up.
'Ibmund,' Lokus thought, speaking to the demon through their bond. 'Anything you can do against this thing?'
A growl of denial, hardly audible over the din of the battlefield, was his answer.
'Then go get the other groups. There should be nine of them. Make them chase you if you have to, just bring them here.'
He didn't once consider that the other groups were dead. The horde before was incomparably weak, to the point Majesty wasn't even necessary to deal with them. If the other groups had been exterminated by such a pitiful force, then they had no place being soldiers in the first place.
As for what Lokus would be doing while Ibmund was doing that… An idea came to mind.
It wasn't a good one by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than standing there waiting to be squashed by the demon.
Ibmund slithered off into the distance to fulfill its master's orders, leaving Lokus behind to enact said plan.
Lokus dodged another giant hand by the skin of his teeth, skirting around it and running to the demon's back. Tossing aside his shield and his axe, he took two fistfuls of fat and began to climb.
Now that he was so close to the demon, he could hear the anguished wails of the souls trapped within it. They echoed around him, filling his surroundings and silencing everything else like the cruel lullaby of the grave.
The demon's roars, the humans' shouts, the pounding of fists on stone, even his own heartbeat were washed away, those pained cries seeming to demand he join in on their suffering.
They saw someone unfettered by the torture they experienced, and for this crime, they hated him more than even their abominable jailer.
But Lokus' plans didn't involve joining them.
He climbed up the demon's back in relative silence, unnoticed by his impromptu ladder. He likely registered as a mere fly to the monster, or its fat was so thick that it couldn't even feel him crawling up.
His climb was still rough, however, as every attack the demon levied sent shuddering waves through its back fat. He nearly lost his grip several times, but after many close calls, he hauled himself onto the top of the demon's head.
The demon finally noticed him at that point. As Lokus inched his way along the demon's head, flat on his stomach and holding onto its skin for dear life, it made a move to crush this nuisance.
Almost absentmindedly, as if swatting at an annoying fly, one of its giant hands came soaring toward Lokus, leaving him with no room to dodge.
'Shit.'
Lokus had nowhere to run.
With the silence created by the wailing souls around him, the descending hand was painted in sharp relief by his Domain, as if nothing else in the entire world deserved his attention more.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl, thoughts and half-formed ideas flashed and dissipated in his mind as he struggled to find a way out of this situation, but no matter how hard he tried, the only certainty was that looming hand above him.
A tug pulled at his Sovereign Gateway, signaling to Lokus that Ibmund had found one of the other groups, but it was too little, too late.
Lokus' idea of blinding the demon felt foolhardy to him now, an idiotic thought conjured by someone far out of his element. What hubris had given him the confidence to attack a demon that even those years his senior on the battlefield died to a mere swipe of?
Right now, Lokus' death felt to him like an inevitable result, a tower built up from mistake after mistake, its construction's completion missing the final piece of the hand before him now.
Would he never see the sun again? Would he never pay his apathetic banisher back for what he had thrust upon Lokus? Would his entire life up until this point truly culminate in such a lackluster end?
SHING! BOOOOM!
The demon roared, shaking the cavern as it gripped the bloody stump of its wrist with another hand.
A man appeared near Lokus on the demon's head, peering down at Lokus from the bottom corner of his eyes as his face faced straight forward.
A sword molded from a single piece of bone rested in his right hand, its dancing edge dripping with blood as a flickering cloud-like substance wafted off of it, much like the wailing souls of the demon.
It was the commander of the soldiers below, and he looked severely unhappy.
"I told you to stay back," he said accusingly. "Now are you just going to lay there like a dead fish, or are you going to stand and fight?"
"If you could do that, then why didn't use it on the demon's head?" Lokus couldn't help but ask as he jumped to his feet. "It's a prime target, considering where we're standing."
"All I did was redirect the attack's force back to the source. My Edict cannot do anything more. And don't expect another one of those; because of you, I'm almost out of Majest – pwah!"
Suddenly, the man spit up a mouthful of blood. He wiped it off on his sleeve with a grimace, his arms and legs visibly shaking.
"Are you all right?" Lokus asked him.
"To redirect the demon's punch, I had to channel a fraction of its kinetic energy through myself. To think such a small amount is enough to do so much…" He shook his head. "Come. Now that you've involved yourself, there's no point in keeping you on the sidelines."
The man jumped off of the demon's head shortly after saying that, spinning around in the air and throwing his sword straight into the beast's open eye before deftly landing on his feet on the ground below.
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