NOVPUBBloodedge's army could have been much more useful back in the city, defending the shrine cannons. But they could not be trusted — this direct savagery was the best they could get out of them. The order was given, so Damian pushed Bloodedge back into the waygate, connecting it to a solid runic steel cage he had built — it was placed in the basement of the royal castle.
With nothing to occupy his time and focus, Damian was free to use the massive wave of liquid mana that his three sacrium mana cubes had made. Leaving the few hundred meters of the ice wall where Shadecaster's and Bloodedge's armies were fighting against each other — the bigger army overwhelming the smaller one little by little, not without heavy casualties, though. Corpses were piling up in the hundreds of thousands on the battlefield — the savage black pigmen using them without a thought as stepping stones to reach the top of the wall.
But… Damian was here. He activated over five enormous wormholes right in the middle of the battlefield, behind the one-sided fight between the two armies. Each wormhole was over 3 kilometers in radius. The endpoint was not far — Damian just kept it to the side, high up at 700 meters, keeping the mana cost low.
Hundreds of thousands of densely packed black pigmen fell aimlessly into the dark abyss and landed right on top of their own soldiers behind them — causing double casualties. The battlefield was now truly painted black. The black blood, smelling guts, and raw flesh made the whole battlefield smell worse than a privy.
Damian did not stop there and just kept opening more wormholes amongst the dense animalistic charge of the black army — flying around along the whole ice wall stretching for kilometers among the snow-covered mountain range. The giant wave of golden liquid mana circling around him had been reduced to barely a few liters.
Damian returned to the center of the valley — using his spear clad in aura to shoot down flying monsters, along with chains of occasional lightning spells — while he waited for the sacrium mana cubes to generate more liquid mana. Supporting the "Mana Disperse System" for the whole ice wall with only his mana was very taxing for his three cubes, all the while supporting his own spells.
Millions had already died. And still, the black army was the same as before — the difference wasn't even enough to see clearly. It felt pointless, but they could not stop. Even after Sam, Lucian, and all the hand-cannon-wielding pigmen did their best to stop the flying hordes of monsters — more and more had reached the wall and beyond. In many places on the wall, the monsters had even landed, and the pigmen warriors were fighting with their lives to protect the ones shooting the laser cannons.
"We can't stop them…" said Lucian from behind Damian.
She was constantly using a wormhole to get around and kill the flying ones. Damian was standing still in the middle of the air, just throwing his spear at groups of monsters while releasing occasional lightning and exploding light constructs.
"Killing them all was never the goal," Damian replied.
"Why would he come himself when he can kill us all with his minions?" Lucian asked, releasing icicle lances one after another to injure the wings of nearby monsters.
Indeed. Why would the Demon Lord care so much for him?
"Because I am his only hope to get off this planet…"
For a second, Lucian froze. But Damian covered for her with his dark flaming spear, so it wasn't an issue. Then she handled the nearby monsters quickly and turned back to look at his face.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Bloodedge."
That's all Damian said, but Lucian understood what it meant. Damian had let Bloodedge assume that he had a way to get back to their world. He had not said it directly but let it slip when he first talked with the guy — like a young boy acting like he was in control. The Demon Lord should have heard it through him, otherwise this ability of his was not of much use. The thousand-year-old demon wouldn't be foolish enough to believe his words, but there would be a doubt — that maybe, just maybe, there was something to it.
Damian had already shown his waygate spell to the Demon Lord when he ran for his life after saving Alex and Maelor. Even Shadecaster knew how it worked.
"Why did you—" Lucian started to say something, but before she could finish, a strange chill spread into the atmosphere all around the massive battlefield.
It became… eerily silent.
All millions of monsters, fighting like savage beasts a second ago, froze at once. Their outstretched hands and fighting postures returned to just standing still with their hands down. All their eyes had a lifeless look in them, replacing the murderous rage from before.
Then Damian felt it. The familiar, overwhelming, disgustingly dark and terrifying presence. He felt it before an enormous figure rose out of the giant black pigmen army.
It was like the darkness of half the black army was sucked into a giant sphere of floating abyssal black hole, and then a gargantuan leg was materialized using that dark energy. A leg, then half a waist, then another leg, a muscular bulging stomach, then powerful massive hands — at last, the abyssal black hole stuck at the face of the gargantuan pitch-black figure — two terrifying smoky red slit-like eyes coming out of nowhere.
The Demon Lord.
At his full power, after taking millions of lives and using their life energy to raise his own esper power to the peak. A fourth-ranker — with more terrifying presence than anything Damian had ever faced before; Not that annoying dragon, not even the giant pigmen Sun God he had met in the dungeon.
A being probably almost close in power to a real fifth-ranker God-level being.
The powers of espers were always disgusting like this. Damian's eyes had to look up, even after being hundreds of meters above land, to see the full figure of the dark lord. There was no time for being shocked, though. The palm of the gargantuan dark-armored creature turned into a fist right before everyone, and in the next second, it was already meters away from the ice wall.
