Chapter 87: The King of Demons—Crowned by Mankind's Endless Torment
Speculation ran rampant.
When someone attempted to calculate the scale of those colossal tendrils rising from the earth—each seemingly woven from countless human bodies—the numbers were harrowing.
The math suggested one horrifying answer: the entirety of humanity. Their corpses. Their spirits. Their history.
Not figuratively. Literally.
And beyond the tentacle columns, the scenery was utterly alien. It was not any known divine realm, nor the mortal plane. A fractured wasteland, torn from reality, drifted in what looked like the abyss of deep space.
This was not the arena they knew.
Faced with such a vision, people could no longer dismiss the worst possibility—that the real human world had been destroyed, reduced to sacrificial matter in the creation of this horror.
Even the gods, though some had once advocated humanity's extinction, had never imagined something so grotesquely unthinkable.
What kind of monster would commit this?
One name reverberated in every trembling mind.
Solomon.
He, whose gentle face masked his nature. He, who had performed a ritual of cruelty unparalleled even by the vilest demons.
Now, none feared Satan most. That distinction now belonged to Solomon, the man who had crowned himself Demon God King through unimaginable sacrifice.
Tears brimmed in Grey's eyes. Her voice trembled, full of fear.
"Brunhilde gave everything, risked death to propose Ragnarok—not to destroy us, but to give humanity a future!"
But this scene was a betrayal. A wound to her sister's soul.
No… Solomon was no longer human.
His mind fractured. In the pursuit of victory—not for pity nor survival, but for supremacy—he had cast humanity aside. He hadn't waited for the mercy of gods every thousand years. He had claimed a power beyond gods.
He had sacrificed all of humankind to reshape the battlefield.
Ragnarok, now truly deserving its name, had come to mean annihilation.
"No," Brunhilde protested. "There's no way everything was destroyed so suddenly. There were no signs!"
Yet where had the multitude of human souls come from?
They couldn't have materialized from nothing.
Brunhilde retrieved her device—a sub-terminal of the Akasha system, far more powerful than any mortal tool. She pointed its scanner toward the towering tendrils of flesh.
Nothing happened.
A glitch? No signal?
Then, in a blink, the screen erupted in an avalanche of pop-up windows—each a profile, each tied to a soul.
The flood wasn't dozens. Nor hundreds. It surged in millions. Hundreds of millions. Perhaps billions.
So overwhelming was the data that the device combusted.
Brunhilde's complexion paled as she stared at the charred remains in her hand.
The reaction had confirmed the worst.
They were all real.
Then the tendrils moved.
Their countless eyes pulsed red, blasting beams of light toward the plague-borne insects—those carriers of Taboo No. 13.
In seconds, the beams vaporized the swarm. Only scattered remnants buzzed through the air, fragmented and dying.
It was as though someone had fired a cannon at a cloud of mosquitoes.
"Stop! Stop now!" Brunhilde screamed, her voice raw.
She had realized the truth.
Those beams were powered by the humans themselves. These billions had become batteries—feeding death with their lingering despair.
And the monster she had summoned… was obeying.
It ceased fire.
But the horror wasn't over.
A deafening crash echoed from the spectators' seats. Screams followed.
Feathers filled the air.
Angels lay broken on the ground.
One of the massive tentacles had burst forth from beneath the heavenly council, its tip impaling an archangel.
A closer look revealed something grotesque—a black mass embedded in the angel's chest. No, not a mere wound. It looked disturbingly like Satan's heart.
But when had it entered him? How had it taken root?
Then, a voice echoed across the ruined arena.
"This is the despair of billions. May you savor it well."
All eyes turned skyward.
Solomon had reappeared—seated on a floating throne above the arena, atop a strange temple suspended in space.
He was no longer the Demon God King.
He had reverted to his human form.
And yet… something was wrong.
His body was eroding—patches of black rot spread across his limbs, like corrosion from within. Cracks—jagged, glowing—snaked across his skin like cursed veins, slowly fracturing him.
His time had come.
Chapter 88: A Vengeance Carved by Millennia
Solomon had prepared for this.
To assume the power of Goetia, he had aligned himself completely with the roots of the cosmos. The gateway between his soul and the world source now spanned his entire body.
He had become the human-shaped hole through which magic flowed.
But he was not the Goetia of myth. Not truly.
Unlike the depiction from the Type-Moon legends, his incarnation was imperfect. His output of mana was vast, yes, but not infinite. His physical vessel—the human form—had limits. It could not withstand eternity.
To truly become Goetia, one would have to endure the transformation of all recorded history—every human event from 1000 BCE to 2016 CE—into pure magical essence.
Solomon had not gone that far.
What he achieved was a temporary state—a brilliance born from unbearable cost.
His soul had reached its final limit. It was collapsing.
And he allowed it.
He had calculated this moment.
If his current body died while still in the stream of history, he could pass into another form—another actor on the stage. A rebirth that would circumvent the consequences.
Had he already fulfilled his full cosmic role, this gamble would have been suicidal.
But he hadn't.
So he chose a grand exit.
A final act worthy of a myth.
He knew there were entities hiding still, afraid to emerge until his influence ended.
Now, they would see he was truly dust.
White Moon alone knew the true identity of Satan, and those who had responded to Solomon's summoning—the Pillars of the Demon God—had come not out of loyalty, but revenge.
Whether Satan was linked to the hidden forces was unclear. But the possibility was real.
What was human despair, truly?
Perhaps gods could taste fragments of it. Perhaps they could bear suffering multiplied a thousandfold.
But could they withstand millions? Billions? Tens of billions?
The answer was no.
Because one god, now, was drowning in it.
And it was not random.
These souls had known trial. Known judgment.
Ever since ancient times, gods had tested humanity—through floods, flames, wars, and divine punishments. Not all survived. Those who perished had long vanished from memory.
Now, they were back.
This despair belonged to them—the rejected, the sacrificed, the forgotten.
And the god who had presided over the most tests was now connected to their vengeance.
Billions of threads of anguish now wove into his soul.
Each soul told him:
Feel what we felt.
Die as we died.
The god panicked, his consciousness fracturing.
He tried to flee—tried to eject his spirit.
But a veil descended.
His soul split apart.
Signal cut. Pathways broken.
There was no escape.
"Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh—!"
The scream that followed was inhuman. Wretched. Pure suffering.
Gods and mortals alike recoiled.
They questioned everything.
Which of these beings was the true harbinger of darkness?
Perhaps it was both.
But Solomon's curse was clear. The torment was psychological. A collapse from within.
His words echoed once again:
"This is the despair of billions."
"He's reached his limit." Zeus muttered, narrowing his gaze.
Solomon's body, subjected to cosmic erosion, now buckled. His collapse was irreversible.
Zeus exhaled slowly.
Power had its price. And Solomon had paid the ultimate.
Yet, regret lingered in Zeus' eyes. He had wanted a duel—a true clash with the Demon God King.
Crackling noises rippled through the sky.
The space around them fractured. Through the rupture came a familiar breeze—the breath of Heaven.
The stars above shattered. A window to reality opened.
Light poured in.
"Looks like we were dragged into a false world," Zeus declared.
The illusion—crafted by Solomon—was collapsing with its creator.
The seventy-two tendrils began to dissolve. Black glows faded. In their place rose golden light—gentle, warm, almost sacred.
It was the aura of release.
Each soul bowed with solemn grace, then vanished.
Their mission was complete.
They returned to the stream of history, to their final rest.
Each had been a soul drawn from humanity's ancient record—from millions of years of death and trial.
This truth was confirmed by Heimdall, who had reconnected with the Akasha system. The database affirmed their origin: the dead of every era.
To catalog them all would be impossible. Their numbers defied comprehension. Their identities, lost in the depths of time