Chapter 1094: 1093: Battle Against Ilvara
The darkness beneath Ilvara’s feet rippled.
Then the first hand reached out of it.
It was black and blurred at the edges, like ink that hadn’t finished drying. It gripped the surface of the shadow as though it were climbing out of a pit.
A second hand followed.
Then a head.
Then hundreds.
They rose out of the spreading darkness one after another, pulling themselves free and standing upright on the surface of the sea. Beasts with too many legs. Demons with horns and tails. Daemons whose shapes Simon could barely make out. And among them were figures that made his eyes narrow.
Humans.
They were all made of shadow. Their faces were blurred and featureless, as though someone had smeared them with a thumb. But their outlines remained, and where their eyes should have been, faint pale lights glowed in the dark.
Hundreds became thousands.
The shadow spread for kilometers across the sea, and still they kept rising. The rain fell through them without touching anything.
Simon’s expression became solemn.
He could feel it. None of them were as strong as they must have been in life. Death and shadow had taken something from each of them.
But they were still powerful.
Most were at the level of Archfiends and Greater Demons. Many were Demon Lords.
And a few stood apart from the rest.
A colossal beast rose from the center of the army, a six-legged behemoth with a spined back and a jaw like a broken cliff. Its aura pressed against Simon’s skin.
It was comparable to a Prime Catastrophe Beast.
Beside it stood a horned demon in shadow armor, holding a greatsword nearly as tall as Torvek. It too carried the weight of a Demon King.
’A Prime Demon King also.’
Then Simon’s eyes moved to the last one.
His breath stopped for a moment.
It was a human.
The figure stood tall and straight, holding a long spear at its side. Shadow armor covered its body, and the long hair was black like everything else.
But beneath the shadow, Simon could feel the faintest trace of something he had not felt since Earth.
Divinity.
It was weak and nearly smothered, but it was there.
’A Demi-God.’
Simon couldn’t recognize its face. After becoming a shadow, its features had been reduced to a smooth, dark blur.
At first, he thought that this was a Demi-God of Earth, but then he recalled that there were other Demi-Gods besides that of Earth.
And Ilvara had most likely killed one of them.
’She might have killed a Demi-God of one of the pantheons.’
Simon’s grip on the Chaos Blade tightened.
Ilvara lowered her hand.
The army charged.
They came across the sea like a black flood. The shadow wolves and lesser demons reached him first.
Simon met them head on.
SHHK!
The Chaos Blade cut through a shadow demon’s neck. He spun and drove his claws through the chest of another. His horns flashed, and three needles of crimson tribulation lightning punched through the heads of the beasts behind them.
They kept coming.
Simon’s third eye flared, and the silver cross within it brightened. He searched for the knots holding them together.
He found them.
But these weren’t like the beasts Ilvara had formed before. The lines holding these shadows together were thick, like ropes and cables, wound tightly around their cores. When he fired a needle into one of them, it only frayed.
’Too strong.’
He would need far more power to sever these.
For the weaker ones, though, it still worked. A shadow demon lunged at him, and Simon’s horns found the thin knot behind its neck. It burst apart before it could swing.
But for every one he destroyed, ten more replaced it.
Simon gritted his teeth.
Six seams opened along his back.
His wings unfolded.
They spread wide behind him, ivory spars and black membranes with silver undersides, and the slits along their surfaces opened all at once.
WHOOOOSH!
The vents fired. Simon shot into the sky above the army, rain spraying away from him in a wide ring.
The lowest pair of wings turned downward.
Their vents screamed.
Six narrow jets of compressed wind tore down into the army, slicing through dozens of shadows at once and carving long white lines across the sea.
Simon guided Ice into the edges of his middle pair. Curved blades of frost formed along them. He dove, cutting through a cluster of shadow birds and climbing again before they could swarm him.
A stone spear shot up from the sea toward his back.
Simon twisted and raised his forearm.
Black scales surged across his skin beneath the Chaos Wraps.
CLANG!
The spear shattered against them.
Below, the ram-horned Daemon glared up at him, already raising another spear from the seabed.
Simon clicked his tongue.
"Tch."
The behemoth roared.
It leapt from the sea, all six legs kicking, its broken-cliff jaw opening wide enough to swallow him whole.
Simon raised his right arm.
Black light gathered around it, and a giant arm formed beyond his own. It was broad and translucent, glowing faintly at its edges.
Black Sky Incarnation.
The giant fist met the behemoth’s jaw.
BOOOOOM!
The behemoth’s head snapped back, and it crashed down into the sea, sending a wave rolling outward through its own army.
Simon dismissed the arm immediately.
His reserves had dropped. Not as much as summoning the full form would have cost, but enough for him to notice.
So he opened himself.
Devour stirred, and his Seed of Gluttony answered it. Together, they reached into the storm and began pulling in the demonic energy hanging in the air. It flowed into him in thin red strands, drawn from the rain, the clouds, and the remnants of every shadow he destroyed.
The Miser’s Ring halved everything he spent. His control kept his wastage of energy close to nothing.
It wasn’t infinite.
But it was enough to keep fighting.
The demon general came next.
It flew straight at him, its greatsword raised. Simon met it with the Chaos Blade.
CLANG!
The impact drove him down toward the sea. The general swung again and again, each strike heavier than the last, and Simon blocked, deflected, and gave ground.
Then a gust of wind slammed into his back.
The ram-horned Daemon had attacked him.
Simon staggered, and the general’s greatsword cut across his shoulder.
Blood sprayed.
Simon twisted away, scales flashing across his arm to catch the follow-up strike.
BANG!
Unholy Regeneration began closing the wound, but the shadow army was already closing in around him from every side.
He needed to thin them out as quickly as possible.
Simon raised the Chaos Blade high above his head.
Demonic energy poured out of his heart, through the cube, and into the blade.
Around the Chaos Blade, nine colossal swords of black energy appeared, each one longer than a warship, their edges glowing a faint crimson.
Then they fused.
All nine collapsed into the Chaos Blade, and a single colossal sword formed above Simon, so large that its shadow fell across a portion of the army below.
’Sword Daemon’s Sword Art…’
The behemoth lifted its head out of the sea.
’…Nine Hells Descend.’
Simon swung.
The colossal sword fell.
BOOOOOOOM!
It struck the behemoth’s back with enough force to split the sea open beneath it.
But before the first impact had even faded, a second strike landed on the exact same spot.
BOOOOM!
Then a third.
BOOOOM!
A fourth. A fifth. A sixth.
They came so fast that they looked like afterimages of the first swing, each one carrying the same overwhelming power, each one striking the same place.
The seventh.
The eighth.
The ninth.
When the last strike faded, the behemoth was gone. Where it had been, the sea had been carved into a deep crater, and the water was slowly rushing back in to fill it.
Simon breathed out slowly.
When he was still a demon, a technique like that would have torn his body apart. Now his body could handle it.
But it had cost a lot of demonic energy.
He didn’t stop.
The army was still surrounding him. Hundreds of shadows were rushing toward him from every direction.
Simon lowered the Chaos Blade to his side and turned his body.
Then he swung horizontally.
’Sword Daemon’s Sword Art… Horizon of Severance.’
A thin line of black and crimson light spread out from the Chaos Blade.
It didn’t stop.
It kept spreading outward in a perfect circle, wider and wider, racing across the sea at the height of his blade.
Every shadow it passed through was severed.
Hundreds of them fell apart at once. Wolves, demons, beasts. Their upper halves slid away from their lower halves and dissolved into black mist before they hit the water.
The stronger shadows survived. The demon general caught the line on its greatsword and was thrown backward. The Demi-God shadow simply raised its spear and let the line break around it.
But the army had been cut down by nearly a third.
Simon’s arms trembled slightly.
His reserves were running low.
Devour and Gluttony pulled harder at the air around him.
Then he saw the Demi-God move.
It drew back its spear and hurled it.
The spear flew toward Simon, trailing black mist, and Simon could feel the faint divinity inside it. It was weak, but against a demon, divinity was like poison.
He couldn’t afford to take that hit.
At the same moment, the ram-horned Daemon appeared at his flank, raising a massive stone pillar from the seabed, ready to crush him while he dealt with the spear.
Simon didn’t dodge.
He didn’t block.
Instead, he raised his free hand toward the spear.
The space in front of him folded.
The Demi-God’s spear entered the fold.
And came out of the space directly beside the ram-horned Daemon.
The Daemon’s eyes widened.
He had no time to turn.
PUCHI!
The spear punched through his chest.
For a moment, the ram-horned Daemon simply hung there in the rain, staring down at the black spear sticking out of his body. The faint divinity inside it spread through his wound and was eating at his flesh like acid.
"What…?"
His voice was barely a whisper.
He looked up at Simon.
Then at the Demi-God shadow that had thrown the spear.
Then at Ilvara.
Ilvara didn’t react. Her expression didn’t change at all as she looked at him for a few seconds before shifting her attention back to Blackmoon.
The ram-horned Daemon’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Black veins spread outward from the wound, crawling up his neck and across his face.
The stone pillar he had raised crumbled back into the sea.
Then the light left his eyes.
His body tipped backward and fell into the storm-tossed waves.
And the ram-horned Daemon was dead.