Chapter 62: The Price of a Plan
Leornars stood motionless, the emerald glow of the healing spell fading from his fingertips. His eyes, fixed on the spot where Vice-Captain Shirlene's body lay—a crushed, discarded shell—were flat and cold, devoid of any visible emotion. The silence was heavier than the darkness, broken only by the sickening, wet sound of the Devil consuming the ripped-out heart. Leornars walked up to vice captain Shirlene's body and took the embedded Vurnam crest from her armour and stashed it in his pocket.
" I'll take this to your fellow knights and inform them of your demise. Let's hope I am not too late to get there after I bash this...filth!" Leornars said in fury.
A low, resonant hum began to rise around Leornars. This was something deeper than mere power—a pure, terrifying emission of his raw self. The air grew thick, the stone floor beneath his feet began to faintly crackle, and every shadow in the cavern seemed to stretch, contort, and point only at him.
The Devil, its power surging from the grotesque feast, lifted its armored head. Its crimson eyes, bright with renewed strength, met Leornars's gaze.
"A simple demi human," the Devil's voice echoed, a harsh, grating sound of grinding iron. "You interrupted my retrieval, you healed the offering, and now... you stand in the way. Foolish."
Leornars took a single, slow step toward the Fiend. The noise was gone. The aura had vanished. In its place, an absolute void of presence settled around him.
His lips barely moved. His voice was no longer that of a man, but the whispered final draft of an impossible decree.
"You. Took. My. Piece."
A shimmering, invisible field of kinetic force slammed into the Devil. It was not a physical punch; it was a sudden, violent correction of its coordinates in space. The colossal Fiend was launched backward, sliding across the dungeon floor and leaving two deep trenches in the stone before it crashed into the far wall.
"What...?" the Devil growled, scrambling back to its feet.
Leornars closed the distance with a speed that defied physics, appearing directly in front of the Devil as if the intervening space had ceased to exist. He simply reached out and placed a single, open palm on the Devil's massive, horned helmet.
A new, overwhelming Authority activated.
Skill Activation: Auditor erase.
A silent, black light burst from the point of contact, enveloping the Devil entirely. The air shrieked in protest. The Devil let out a soundless, utterly primal roar of agony as the fundamental laws governing its existence were violently rewritten.
"You... who are you!?" the Devil hissed, its voice fracturing, its form flickering at the edges.
Leornars's eyes, now glowing a cold, silver-white, bore into the Devil's.
"I am the one who calculates the cost of your defiance
With a final, terrifying surge of will, Leornars clenched his fingers. The silent, suffocating black light intensified, and the Devil—a creature of pure demonic power—didn't explode or burn.
It simply vanished.
The instant the Devil vanished under the terrifying weight of the Auditor - erase, the stone cavern filled with an ear-splitting, thunderous crack. A colossal, jagged obsidian sword, wreathed in dark violet lightning, slashed down from where the Fiend had stood. Leornars reacted on pure, instinctual data, twisting his body to evade the strike that would have cleaved him in half.
The Devil was back. But this was a different, more primal return. The disappearance wasn't annihilation—it was a forced teleportation back to a designated waypoint, triggered by the Fiend's own hidden magic. And the Fiend was now furious.
"The audacity of a mortal! You dare to erase me!?" the Devil roared, its armor pulsating with black fire. "I am the herald of the Durmount King's doom! I am the one who cleared these floors for the invasion! My kind by now has already arrived in Vurnam city, you stuck your nose in our business!!"
Leornars's eyes narrowed, a realization clicking into place. "You're the source of the stampede," he stated, his voice a low growl of deadly calculation. "You emptied the dungeon for your masters. You are an Invasion Point."
The Devil laughed—a dry, horrible sound. "Too late to know! Taste defeat from a high rank devil as myself!!"
The Fiend lunged, its speed instantly breaking the sound barrier, then the next. The world around them blurred into gray streaks as the Devil, moving at an impossible Mach 2000, slammed its obsidian blade toward Leornars. Leornars threw up a hastily constructed barrier, but the force was too great. The barrier shattered like glass, and the impact sent him skidding violently across the floor.
Worse, the Fiend's attack had been laced with an ancient, dark curse. A searing, blinding pain erupted in Leornars's chest.
"An anti-magic field!" the Devil gloated. "You are cut off from your core! No mana for the complex spells, mortal!"
Leornars staggered, the world wobbling. He could feel his immense internal mana pool—a cosmic sea of energy—locked behind an unbreakable, agonizing seal. He couldn't cast, not the grand revision spells, not the complex elemental strikes.
No magic? Fine.
His eyes bled crimson for a split second from the physical strain. Roaring in frustration, Leornars abandoned all subtlety. He rushed the Devil, using pure, brute physical force honed by years of knowledge acquisition. He dodged the next blade swing by a hair's breadth and plunged his shoulder into the Devil's armored gut, tackling it with the force of a runaway siege engine. The two figures became a chaotic blur, slamming into the cavern floor, the impact shattering the stone into dust and sending shockwaves rippling through the rock.
Leornars, his fists now his only weapon, bashed the Devil's helmet repeatedly against the dungeon floor. The Devil fought back with savage, monstrous strength, tearing at Leornars's defenses, its claws ripping through his reinforced attire.
Tension soared. Leornars was bleeding from a dozen cuts, his breath ragged, his strength rapidly failing against a foe that could shrug off the force of a tectonic plate. The Devil, already regenerating, grabbed Leornars's throat and lifted him clear off the ground, a triumphant snarl shaking its armored form.
"This is the end, white plague! You are a mortal! You lose!"
In the crushing grip, a horrifying, almost demonic smile stretched across Leornars's bloody face—a grim, feral twist of the lips that chilled the Devil to its core.
The pressure on his mana core had reached its zenith, and now, it snapped.
Skill Activation: Hellish Critical Output
A blinding, raw red energy exploded outward from Leornars's body, vaporizing the Devil's grip and scorching the surrounding stone. This was not calculated energy; it was pure, unbridled, panicked cosmic power forcing itself through the dam.
In the next moment, Leornars was gone.
The Devil's top speed was Mach 2000. Leornars, fueled by Critical Output, surpassed it instantly. He moved at an incomprehensible Mach 4000. The air screamed, igniting into plasma as he slammed his fist into the Devil's chestplate. The impact sounded like a million thunderclaps occurring simultaneously.
The Devil was hurled into the air, its armor finally beginning to buckle and crack. Leornars appeared above it, channeling immense, violent Elemental Spells—a torrent of superheated void flames and brilliant-white lightning—that enveloped the Fiend, turning it into a screaming beacon of pain. The Devil hit the ground, a smoking, shattered wreck.
But the dark magic was tenacious. The black fire on its armor flared, and the broken pieces of the Fiend stitched themselves back together at high speed.
Leornars saw it. Regeneration again. He couldn't afford to let it keep fighting.
He landed, channeling a specialized dark power into his palm.
Skill Activation: Touch of Decay}
He drove his fist into the Devil's heart, not for force, but to deliver the devastating payload. The Touch of Decay was the negation of life itself. The Devil's cells began to die, its internal structure dissolving at a molecular level, destroying the very essence of its healing factor. The Fiend shrieked, its regeneration instantly failing.
Leornars became a whirlwind of brutal, calculated violence. He slammed, punched, and kicked the now-mortal Devil, ignoring his own mounting injuries. He grabbed the Devil's armored arms, and with a sickening crunch and tearing of metal and sinew, ripped both of them off.
The raw exertion, the backlash from the mana seal break, and the sheer power of Hellish Critical Output finally took its toll. Both of Leornars's eyes burst, spilling trails of crimson blood down his cheeks, momentarily blinding him.
In that blinding moment, the armless, desperate Devil coiled its legs and launched itself with a final, massive leap toward Leornars's exposed head.
Leornars didn't see it. He felt it. His mouth opened in a silent scream of pure red energy, a spell of ultimate destruction he hadn't used in centuries.
He shouted the name of the spell, the sound ripping through the cavern like a sonic boom:
"HELVECKLEV!!!!!!"
A bolt of concentrated, searing red plasma energy, thick as a tree trunk, erupted from his palm and slammed into the airborne Devil. The Fiend was vaporized in a sickening explosion of black smoke and shredded armor fragments, its demonic form ripped apart at the atomic level.
The Fiend's remaining consciousness instinctively rushed toward the largest surviving piece of its body, realizing with horror that the Touch of Decay meant the ruin was permanent. No healing. No regeneration.
The Devil looked up, through the smoke. Leornars stood swaying, his face covered in blood, his eyes now totally void black—the color of pure, unlit mana. He raised one shaking hand for the final blow, leaning entirely on the last dregs of his strength. The exhaustion was absolute; his knees buckled.
Almost... collapse...
The world faded, then instantly snapped back into terrifying, sharp focus.
{Skill Activation (Automatic): Gatekeeper}
The concept of the Devil's magic, its demonic presence, and its very connection to the Abyss was instantly killed. The Devil's senses its ability to hear, smell, and taste vanished, leaving it kneeling in a suffocating void.
With its last vestige of sight, the Devil looked up, not at Leornars, but behind him. There, hovering over the dungeon in a moment of utter finality, was the manifestation of the skill: a 400-foot-tall, monolithic statue of a Lady, her face carved in sublime sorrow, with thick, crimson tears of blood flowing endlessly from her eyes. The Gatekeeper—the final seal on all that defies eternal law.
Leornars, his expression perfectly cold, fired the last of his energy
Final Spell: Dark Aria
A stream of pure void energy flame erupted, striking the kneeling Devil. The Gatekeeper descended, engulfing the burning Fiend. The two forces—the nihilistic flames of Dark Aria and the absolute judgment of the Gatekeeper—merged, burning the very concept of the Devil's soul. There would be no resurrection, no rebirth. Only absolute, eternal silence.
Leornars stood for a moment longer, breathing heavily, the black of his eyes slowly receding. He looked down at the lifeless body of Vice-Captain Shirlene. The moment of raw, overwhelming fury had passed, replaced by the grim acknowledgment of a failed calculation.
He turned to Shirlene's body and walked to it and raised his hand over it.
"Vice captain Shirlene of the Vurnam city royal guards ,you've served your nation well, protected your comrades from the lower level monsters and even fought a high rank devil . Your actions are not seen as futile but as a key for the growth of The imperium of Avangard, I Leornars Servs Avrem,Ruler of Avangard need your valiant strength and resolve in the kingdom's growth. Since your actions showed me what needed to be done for the benefit of my nation,serve me as we create a new world free from pain and injustice. AWAKEN!" Leornars said as his voice echoed in the dungeon floor as his aura burst covering the vice captain's body as she instantly rose, her hair turned into a pitch black and her eyes turned to a deep crimson. She knelt on one knee.
"Lord, grant me a name " she said
"I grant thee the name.... AVRYL VORS AVREM, you are now a knight of Avangard, You will serve only I " Leornars adds as she drew a dagger from her hilt and raised it over her head. Leornars took it and cut his thumb as a drop of blood dropped down to her armour and his crest glowed on her back in a deep crimson colour.
He instantly summoned one of his other undeads which couldn't talk yet
" Avryl, this matter has now reached to where even I can't do it alone. I need you to follow this knight to Avangard,get Stacian and the others and tell them to hurry up or Vurnam will fall tonight" Leornars said as Avryl and the knight vanished instantly. He sighed.
He turned and, using the last of his speed, launched himself skyward, rushing out of the cavern and into the sky, flying toward the capital city of Vurnam.
"My plan can't be ruined,I've spent an entire month planning this, Rachael Suvallina don't die on me, I need you alive , I can't afford wasted time and effort like this!!!" He said