The demon opened its eyes.
Not Hwi-seong's eyes. Not Blake Dunzel's eyes. Something else entirely—something that had waited dormant in the depths of their merged consciousness, patient as stone, hungry as the void between stars.
The eyes that opened were black. Completely black, like staring into wells that descended forever. And across each iris, a horizontal slit of crimson—not a pupil, but a wound in reality itself, glowing with malevolent intelligence.
Blake Dunzel's body rose from its kneeling position.
The movement was wrong. Too smooth. Too controlled. Like a corpse being lifted by invisible strings, joints bending at angles that suggested the thing inside no longer cared about human limitations.
It stood.
The whole aura around Blake Dunzel changed in that instant—shifted from broken boy to apex predator. Authority radiated from the possessed form like heat from a furnace, the kind of presence that made prey animals freeze and predators reconsider their dominance. This was something that stood above the food chain entirely, looking down at everything with the casual assessment of a butcher surveying cattle.
The demon's black eyes swept across the battlefield.
Three warriors standing—elite killers in corrupted armor, weapons ready. One man on his knees, dying, leaking light and blood in equal measure. Around a dozen other figures scattered across the killing ground, moving between corpses, searching for survivors to finish. And everywhere—everywhere—blood. Bodies. The beautiful carnage of slaughter painted across earth and stone.
The demon's lips—Blake's lips, but moved by something else—curved into a smile.
"Hehehe..."
The sound that emerged was Blake's voice run through something broken and bass-deep. It resonated in the chest, in the bones, in the teeth. The air itself vibrated with each syllable.
"A meal just after waking up. This seems to be a really abundant place."
Its gaze tracked across the warriors, lingering on each one with the focused attention of a gourmand examining a menu. The three elite fighters. The dying chief inquisitor still clinging to consciousness through sheer spite. Each one assessed, categorized, their spiritual energy evaluated like cuts of meat.
"Very much nutritious, this is going to be."
The demon's vision perceived more than human eyes could—saw the life force blazing within each warrior like candle flames of varying brightness. The stronger the fighter, the brighter the flame. The three elites burned steady and strong. Aldric's flame guttered and faded, but carried a quality the others lacked—a divine seasoning, holy power that would make his soul especially... interesting.
Appetizers, the demon thought with alien amusement. Good appetizers, but still just the opening course.
Then its eyes fell on the robed figure standing forty feet back, clutching something in his hands.
The box. The crystal container.
And inside—the demon heart.
The demon's smile widened. Impossibly wide. Far wider than human musculature should permit, stretching Blake's face into something horrible.
That. That was the delicacy. That pulsing black organ radiating corruption and concentrated demonic essence called to it like a siren song. Compared to that concentrated morsel of power, everything else on this battlefield was mere filler.
The demon spoke again, voice dropping even lower. The words came out as physical force—bass vibrations that moved through the air like shockwaves, rattling armor, making blood ripple in its pools, shaking leaves from nearby trees.
"Delicious."
The warrior with the hammer—Threat Gamma, the system had labeled him, though the system was screaming warnings into a void now—shifted his stance. His voice carried through his helmet with professional assessment. "This is going to be a troublesome opponent."
The demon moved.
One instant it stood twenty paces from the robed mage. The next—
The world blurred.
Speed beyond human capability, beyond even enhanced cultivation at Blake's level. This was the demon fragment accessing power it had hoarded, burning through constraints that limited mortal flesh.
The elite warriors' eyes could track the movement—barely. Could see the streak of motion cutting through space. Could watch Blake Dunzel's possessed form cross forty feet in less than a heartbeat.
But tracking didn't mean intercepting.
By the time their muscles began responding, by the time synapses fired commands to move and block and counter—
The demon already stood before the robed mage, one hand extended.
The mage's eyes went wide behind his hood. His mouth opened to scream, to cast, to do something—
The demon's right hand closed around his skull.
And squeezed.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and final. Bone didn't just break—it pulverized. The mage's head collapsed inward like an eggshell, skull fragments driving into brain matter, eyes bursting from sudden pressure. Blood and cerebral fluid exploded between the demon's fingers.
The headless body stood for one absurd moment, arms still holding the crystal box, before toppling sideways.
The demon caught the box with its left hand before the corpse hit the ground.
"Ah," it said pleasantly, examining the container. "There we are."
Inside, the demon heart continued its unnatural pulse, unaware its protective barrier had just been eliminated.
The demon opened the box with the casual ease of someone unwrapping a gift. The heart sat there, black and glistening, veins of sickly green running through corrupted tissue. It beat once. Twice. Three times.
The demon's free hand reached in, fingers closing around the organ. When it pulled the heart free, the organ writhed—alive, aware, trying desperately to escape.
The demon lifted it high, tilting Blake's head back, mouth opening impossibly wide.
Then it squeezed.
The heart ruptured. Green ichor—blood that wasn't blood, essence that wasn't essence—poured out in thick streams. It fell into the demon's open mouth like poisonous honey, each drop sizzling where it touched tongue and throat.
The three elite warriors snapped into full combat readiness, weapons rising, bodies coiled to strike.
Aldric, vision fading, consciousness slipping away by degrees, watched through dying eyes.
The words came back to him—Ferolina's warning, her analysis of Redfront's ritual site. A greater demon, perhaps even a demon king's soul fragment. If it slipped through the world's laws...
And there it stood. Wearing the boy like a stolen coat. Moving with the casual cruelty of something so far above humanity that mortal concerns meant nothing.
I'm sorry, Aldric thought as his holy spell guttered out completely, as the last of his divine power faded. Sorry for failing. Sorry for bringing this thing to the capital. Sorry for—
His body fell forward, face-first into blood-soaked earth.
Dead.
The demon swallowed the last of the heart's essence, lips smacking with satisfaction. "Eww. What was this guy eating?" It examined the deflated organ with mild disgust before stuffing the remaining husk into its mouth like finishing an unpleasant vegetable.
Chewed. Swallowed.
"Well, it's manageable. Not that bad, actually."
The moment the demon heart's essence entered Blake's possessed body, everything changed.
Black smoke began rising from the blood pools scattered across the battlefield. Not normal smoke—this was thick, oily, moving with purpose. It poured upward from every puddle, every splash, every corpse's leaked vitality, gathering and spreading like sentient fog.
Within seconds, the entire killing ground was filling with darkness that had nothing to do with night.
The smoke moved. Flowed. Spread outward in tendrils that sought living warmth.
The scattered warriors—cultists and assassins who'd been searching through corpses, finishing wounded knights—looked up too late.
"What the—"
Smoke wrapped around the first one. He screamed. The sound cut off mid-breath as the darkness covered his mouth, his nose, poured into his lungs. His body thrashed, then... dissolved. Not into gore, but into nothing. Consumed. Erased. The smoke moved on, slightly thicker, slightly darker.
"HELP! SOMEONE—"
Another warrior. Same result. The smoke found him, embraced him, and he simply ceased to exist. Not even bones remained.
"DON'T KILL ME! PLEASE! I'LL—"
Gone.
Thirteen warriors scattered across the battlefield. All veterans. All dangerous in their own right. Each one vanished within seconds, their screams creating a symphony of terror that echoed and died and left only silence.
The two elite fighters and a warrior stood in a rough triangle, weapons ready. The black smoke pressed against them, testing, probing—but couldn't penetrate. Their corrupted armor glowed faintly, repelling the darkness. Artifacts, enchantments, protections purchased at great cost.
But the warrior with the shoulder wound—the one Aldric had cut —was weaker. His protective aura flickered.
The demon moved through the smoke like a shark through dark water.
No footsteps. No warning. Just sudden presence.
A hand emerged from the darkness behind the wounded warrior, fingers extended like spears—
They punched through his back, erupting from his chest in a spray of shattered armor and pulped organs.
The warrior looked down at the hand protruding from his sternum. "How—?"
The demon yanked its hand back. The warrior's body collapsed, twitching.
The smoke covered him. He vanished screaming.
"STAY VIGILANT!" the blade-wielder—the one who'd dual-wielded those curved swords before Aldric destroyed them—shouted to his remaining companion. He'd drawn backup weapons, shorter but no less deadly. "IT'S ONLY TARGETING THE LIVING! NOT THE CORPSES!"
True enough. The demon paid no attention to the scattered bodies of knights and horses. Only the living interested it. Only warm flesh and beating hearts.
"BACK TO BACK!" the hammer-wielder commanded.
The two survivors pressed together, weapons facing outward in opposite directions. The smoke surrounded them completely now, a wall of living darkness that pressed close but couldn't quite touch.
Somewhere in that smoke, the demon laughed.
The sound came from everywhere and nowhere. Front and back, left and right, above and below.
"Running would be smarter," it said conversationally. Blake's voice, but layered with harmonics that hurt to hear. "Not that it would help."
A shape moved in the smoke to the left. The blade-wielder struck—his sword cut through nothing but darkness.
Another movement, right side. The hammer-wielder swung. His weapon passed through empty air.
"This isn't fighting," the demon continued, circling them like a shark, always just beyond vision. "This is dining. And you're trying very hard to make my meal difficult."
A hand shot from the smoke—clawed, wrong, fingers too long—and raked across the blade-wielder's armor. Sparks flew. The protective enchantment held, but barely.
"Troublesome artifacts," the demon mused. "I'll have to be creative."
The smoke pressed closer. Tighter. The two warriors stood back-to-back in an ever-shrinking circle of visibility, breathing hard, weapons ready.
Waiting.
Fighting for their lives against something that viewed them as nothing more than food that inconveniently fought back.
And in the darkness, the demon smiled with Blake Dunzel's stolen face.
Patient.
Hungry.
Inevitable.