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{Chapter: 253: The Wrath of a Demon King}
'Because he can't do that,' Dex realized. 'He's bluffing. Brilliantly, but still bluffing.'
The temporal cage had limits.
It couldn't lock blood.
It couldn't reverse resurrection.
It couldn't stop my thoughts.
And it sure as hell couldn't contain a monster like me forever.
And in that realization…
Dex grinned wider than ever.
"Time… is on my side."
Through the glowing lattice of deep-space runes drifting around him like fractured constellations, Dex slowly began to piece together the nature of the spell that had entrapped him. The more he studied the ethereal symbols, the more obvious it became—it was a ritual-based spell formation, one that had to be painstakingly prepared ahead of time, inscribed into space itself, and was likely stationary by necessity.
Unlike Larte, whose mastery over this spell demanded constant magical output to sustain its effects, Dex stood in stark contrast.
He didn't need to maintain anything.
Dex's innate ability, [Evil Undying Body], was a passive skill — eternal, consumption-free, and always active. There was no ritual circle to draw, no incantation to chant. As long as he simply existed, the cursed life-force of the world would surge toward him like a black tide.
Wherever he stood, so too did the echoes of malice.
The passive skill [Immortal Body of Evil and Resentment] thrived on sin — hatred, jealousy, despair, lust, greed, and rage — the twisted breath of civilization itself. Every scream, every sob, every curse hurled into the abyss empowered him. Whether it came from innocent victims crushed beneath falling rubble or from the frenzied minds of mortals desperate to live — he absorbed it all.
And Augustus, now a city under siege by demons, had become a fountain of negative emotions.
To Dex, the battlefield was no different from an immortal hot spring, overflowing with despair — and he was bathing in it like a king.
Even if he did absolutely nothing, the amount of evil energy being passively drawn into his soul was enough to grant him ten full instant regenerations.
But this fight had already exceeded that number.
He'd been obliterated more than twenty times — torn to pieces, dissolved by anti-demon magic, shredded by temporal rifts — and every single time, his body returned whole.
Unblemished. Untouched. Unholy.
To him, death was just another flavor of rebirth.
It was becoming clearer now: Larte's spell was powerful, no doubt. But its power had a limit, and more importantly—it consumed something with every use.
Dex, however, had a bottomless tank and infinite fuel. As long as hatred existed, as long as Augustus continued to scream and bleed, he could never truly die.
In a fair fight, this alone wouldn't matter. But this wasn't fair. Larte hadn't yet realized the battlefield was stacked against him.
The archmage's power, while incredible, was burning out like a torch held upside down. Meanwhile, Dex's demonic core only pulsed brighter.
Unless Ralt had access to a higher-tier plane-altering godlike spell or true divine smiting force, he simply couldn't erase Dex from the material layer.
And Dex knew it.
The only real option would be to completely banish him — trap him in a sealed, isolated pocket dimension with no intelligent life, no negative emotions, and no way out.
There, without his fuel source, Dex would eventually run dry.
But Ralt hadn't even considered it. Because to him, negative emotions were like dust in the air—ever-present and therefore invisible.
He hadn't seen the truth.
Dex wasn't just absorbing negative emotion. He was negative emotion.
He fed on the agony of others. He thrived on fear, despair, lust, fury, guilt. It was his essence — not an attribute, not a spell — but his nature.
One man was drawing power from a finite well.
The other was a walking black hole.
Despite all this, Larte remained composed — stoic and focused — but not blind. He wasn't arrogant. He knew that time was running out. Not just because Dex was seemingly unkillable, but because there were other demons. Dozens, maybe hundreds.
And if they were here, in Augustus, that meant one thing: a plan.
This wasn't a random invasion. It was a coordinated effort, and if Ralt and Larte wasted too much time trying to kill an immortal that refused to stay dead, the rest of the city's defenses would fall.
He couldn't let that happen.
He would have to finish this, even if that meant abandoning the idea of killing Dex and going for the next best thing — containment.
If banishment spells were ineffective because of the outerworld barrier's interference, then perhaps…
Sealing magic.
As time slowed around him — his chronomantic aura extending again like a glacier across reality — Larte moved faster than any mortal could think. Hundreds of sigils burst into existence in the blink of a moment, spiraling around Dex's form like a cascading waterfall of ancient glyphs.
Each one carved from pure essence, each reinforced with layers of containment laws.
Like glowing shackles made from compressed space-time, the seals wrapped around Dex's torso, his limbs, his throat, and even around his shadow.
It was a masterwork of arcane precision.
But there was a problem.
Larte's sealing magic, while passable among demigods, was not his specialty. Compared to his mastery of time manipulation, this field was mediocre at best. He simply didn't have the foundational theory or control necessary to lock away a being like Dex for long.
And Dex? Dex was a prodigy among demons, a former archmage in his own right, one who understood the structure of these spells the moment he felt them latch on.
Even as time resumed, the shackles snapped tight, and reality surged back into motion, Dex was already unraveling the inner equations.
One hand burned with cursed fire, the other traced symbols in the air that corroded space itself.
Larte held out his hands, reinforcing the seal with all the magical might he could spare. The chamber began to quake, runes etched into the floor began to bleed white light, and the windows of space-time began to fracture.
A battle of endurance.
One side building.
The other side destroying.
Power surged. Dust fell. The library began to shudder like a creature caught in a thunderstorm. Even the protective enchantments on the structure began to crack, groaning under the pressure of so many conflicting forces.
And so it began again: the endless loop.
Dex, the unkillable beast, breaking every chain thrown around him.
Larte, the master of time, reinforcing every seal, knowing each one would only last seconds.
It wasn't about winning anymore.
It was about who would break first.
---
After an exhausting while, the same sequence repeated.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Dozens of times.
Every time Dex broke, Ralt threw his highest-level sealing incantations back at him in a desperate effort to contain the unstoppable.
But now Dex was growing visibly bored.
He looked as casual as a man stuck in traffic.
"Can you at least try different spells?" Dex muttered, brushing bits of charred flesh off his shoulder like lint. "Maybe make it more entertaining?"
That small comment—spoken casually—landed like a thunderclap on Ralt's pride.
The archmage's mouth twitched. He didn't respond, but the insult festered. It was true—he had no better sealing spells than these. What he used were already his most advanced, most refined, most desperate incantations.
So, in silent frustration, he merely switched the casting sequence and threw the seals again.
"Pathetic," Dex growled, his tone now laced with disgust. "You loser."
The moment those chains of light reappeared and began snaking around him again, Dex's fury ignited.
He had played long enough. The farce was over.
The hatred that had been smoldering inside him like magma finally broke free.
BOOOOOOOOOM!
With a deafening roar, the energy stored within his body erupted outward as he triggered the most forbidden, destructive technique of his bloodline—the infamous spell known among demons as: [Burning Body Explosion]
A living death-surge.
A suicide spell tied to pure elemental rage.
The essence of a Fire Demon's Balor soul combusting in full fury. But this wasn't just one explosion. Dex had died dozens of times, and with each death, a charge had built up. And now—
He unleashed all of them at once.
A maelstrom of blood-red flame and infernal pressure tore through the world.
A blinding dome of annihilation burst forth from Dex's body, not as a fireball, but as a sun, collapsing and expanding simultaneously—flames hot enough to melt diamond vaporized the floors beneath him, vaporized everything, even space itself.
The walls of the legendary Kafira Library—built from enchanted alloy mined from stars—disintegrated without resistance.
Reality folded and cried out.
Even the air screamed as every molecule between Dex and the outside world was turned into plasma, a blazing sea of red lightning and atomic fury. It ripped the atmosphere from the building, dragged it upward like a cosmic vacuum.
Larte had seconds to act.
He tried to invoke [Time Stop], to freeze this overwhelming death tide—
Crack!
—but it shattered like glass under the pressure.
As if a mortal had tried to hold back a tsunami with a single hand.
Everything collapsed.
The small timeliness Larte had maintained imploded under the entropy, shattered by a force that had transcended structure, law, and logic.
All of it—runes, energy grids, spacetime tethers—melted, like wax before the apocalypse.
The archmage, despite his immense strength, was instantly incinerated.
His body turned to ash in a heartbeat. His defensive layers, his divine-tier equipment, his temporal shields—obliterated. Not even his soul escaped.