The Leroy Advent Cour 5: The finale Silhouette
The setting sun painted the sky in streaks of bruised violet and blood orange, casting long, fractured shadows across the ruined cobblestones of the Vurnam City outskirts. The stench of sulfur and burnt earth hung heavy in the air, a familiar perfume of battle.
Leornars turned, his silhouette stark against the fading light. His eyes—a startling, crystalline void blue—gleamed with an icy, predatory focus as they settled on the small cohort of devils they had cornered. These were not the common, mindless fiends, but low-ranking tactical officers of the infernal legions, their skin like obsidian and their eyes like embers.
Leornars drew his custom dagger, its black, non-reflective surface absorbing the light. The faint sound of steel sliding from leather was swallowed by the omnipresent roar of distant fighting in the city. His voice, when it came, was a low, chilling rasp that promised absolute finality.
"Zaryter, Zhyelena, Zhyier, Bellian, and Avryl," he ordered, his gaze never leaving the enemy. "I need you to deal with these devils. Kill team. No mercy."
The five subordinates vanished in a coordinated blur of motion, their movements so fast they were less seen and more felt—a violent shift in the air pressure. This was not a negotiation; it was an execution.
The air around the devils suddenly spiked in temperature, the scent of brimstone overcome by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and superheated iron.
Zaryter, clad in deep crimson armor, moved with a brutal, single-minded ferocity. His specialty was control and incineration, and his target was a bulky, horned devil attempting to rally its kin. With a whip-like crack, flaming chains erupted from Zaryter's palms, a torrent of infernal metal moving too fast for the eye to track.
Sla-thwack!
One chain wrapped instantly around the devil's thick neck, the other coiled around its ankles. The metal wasn't just hot; it was alive with a hungry, pale-blue flame. Before the devil could even register the pain, Zaryter yanked his arms back with inhuman strength, dragging the massive creature down into the dirt. A guttural, screeching roar of pain was instantly muffled by the earth.
The remaining devils lunged, but they were already too late. Zaryter didn't spare them a glance. He stood over his pinned adversary, his shadow long and menacing. The devil thrashed wildly, its claws tearing up chunks of the earth, its attempts to break free futile against the divine-grade mana woven into the chains.
"You smell of our Lord's enemies," Zaryter said, his voice quiet, almost mournful, a disturbing contrast to the blazing shackles. He knelt, his eyes—hidden behind the visor of his helm—boring into the devil's panicked, glowing orbs. "A stench I cannot tolerate. Tell me, fiend. Did you enjoy polluting the ground you walked on?"
The devil could only emit a strangled croak as the flames intensified, the skin under the chains blistering and smoking. It was being purified, molecule by molecule, a process so agonizing that its fear-fueled screams were mute and internal.
"A pity. It was too short a life for a crime so vast," Zaryter mused, a phantom sigh escaping his lips. He tightened his grip, the chains hissing like a thousand angry vipers. He maintained the pressure until the devil's struggles faded into a series of pitiful spasms. The life was crushed out of it long before the fire did its final work.
Zaryter stood, watching the chains—now glowing white-hot—continue their work. The devil's body was rapidly collapsing into a pile of smoking, blackened ash. In less than a minute, there was nothing left but dust. Zaryter snapped his chains back, the fiery metal vanishing back into his gauntlets. He then kicked the pile of ash, scattering it on the wind.
His voice, low and imbued with lethal satisfaction, carried on the cooling breeze. "I did say I'd kill you for touching the Lord."
Across the devastated square, a different kind of slaughter was underway.
Zhyelena—lithe and terrifying in her obsidian leather and woven steel—was engaged with a taller, more agile devil, one that wielded a jagged, two-handed scythe. The devil was fast, relying on pure demonic speed and strength, but Zhyelena was speed incarnate, a blur of impossible motion.
Fzzzt!
She vanished, leaving only a shimmering heat-haze. The devil spun, its scythe whistling through the air, carving a trench in the stone where she had been a microsecond before.
"Where are you, vermin!" the devil snarled, its voice a grinding sound like stones crushing bone. It swung the scythe again, tracking her residual mana trail. "Stand still and fight!"
Zhyelena appeared an inch behind its left shoulder, her custom-made rapier, Whisperwind, flashing out. The blade was moving at a staggering Mach 2000. The air around the tip was super-compressed, creating miniature shockwaves.
Shing!
A sliver of the devil's armored pauldron, along with a chunk of the muscle underneath, was instantly cleaved off. The speed of the attack made the pain arrive late. The devil roared, not in pain, but in sheer frustration and shock that a mere human could bypass its defenses.
Fzzzt! Fzzzt!
Zhyelena teleported again, appearing on its right, then its left, then spinning over its head. Each flash of motion was accompanied by a surgical strike. The devil was being systematically disassembled while it was still standing. Its armor was stripped to bare flesh, its ligaments were severed, and small, deep wounds bled ichor onto the ground.
"You boast of being a warrior, yet you can't even perceive your death?" Zhyelena's voice was a soft, mocking chime, her breath barely disturbed by the effort. Her speed began to increase even further, fueled by an adrenaline-laced mana spike. She moved from Mach 2000 to the edge of the speed of light—a realm of impossible physics.
The devil, driven to desperation, swung its massive scythe in a wild, arc-spanning attack, an area-of-effect panic move.
It was a fatal mistake.
Fzzzt! Zhyelena appeared a foot in front of its face, her rapier held point-down.
"A simple brute. You rely on muscle when you should rely on the mind," she spat, a cold disgust hardening her tone.
Before the devil could even initiate its next action, a single word of power was spoken. "Paralysis."
A bright, emerald-green light erupted from Zhyelena's palm, washing over the devil. Its massive body instantly locked up, its muscles seizing, its scythe clattering to the ground. Only its eyes could move, wide with dawning horror.
Zhyelena's rapier flashed twice, too fast to be seen.
Thk-Thk!
The devil's glowing, ember-like eyes were cleanly sliced from their sockets and tumbled onto the blood-soaked stone. The creature finally found its voice—a deafening, ear-splitting shriek that tore at the very air, a sound of absolute, blinding agony.
Zhyelena stepped back, giving it a moment to appreciate its suffering. She then raised her rapier high above its head.
"This world doesn't need creatures that torture the innocent." She brought the blade down with a single, brutal slash, an act of sheer finality.
Slish!
The devil's head separated cleanly from its neck, its scream cut short mid-wail. The body collapsed, its nerve endings still firing in useless spasms. Zhyelena wiped her rapier clean on the devil's own torn armor, her expression cold and devoid of remorse.
"Die!" she hissed, kicking the detached head away. The silence that followed was absolute.
The final two devils were caught in a trap of perfect, coordinated destruction—a maneuver born from countless hours of training.
Bellian, the armored giant of the team, raised his colossal, two-handed greatsword, its edge shimmering with a contained, hungry energy. Zhyier, the lithe, mage-oriented killer, sprinted up the broad, flat surface of the blade, using it as a ramp.
"Now!" Bellian roared, a guttural command.
He launched Zhyier into the air with a perfectly timed upwards swing, flinging the mage-assassin high above the charging devils. As Zhyier reached the apex of his arc, he initiated his signature move.
"Barrier Weave: Twin Edge!"
A tight, compressed mana barrier instantly enveloped Zhyier, protecting him from air resistance and potential counter-attacks. Then, a second, larger barrier—razor-thin and crackling with kinetic energy—manifested twenty feet in front of him, aimed at the ground.
He focused his mana, channeling the kinetic energy of his launch and his speed into the construct. With a silent mental command, he fired the forward barrier.
Vwoom!
The construct became a single, invisible wave of compressed force, slamming into the first devil. The sheer, focused power of the kinetic impact was equivalent to a massive guillotine blade dropping from a hundred stories up. The devil was instantly sliced in two—a perfectly bisected ruin of flesh, armor, and bone—before its momentum could even stop.
As the remains hit the ground, Bellian's voice echoed in a deep, booming challenge. The final devil, startled by the sudden death of its comrade, veered toward the massive knight.
Bellian didn't move. He stood, his greatsword planted point-down, and performed a terrifying, almost ritualistic action. He inhaled deeply, a breath so profound that it seemed to draw the very air from the surrounding area. His plated, heavy armor began to crack and shift, the joints and plates splitting open. A rush of raw, uncontained energy pulsed from his body.
The devil, sensing a massive mana spike, flew at him, claws extended in a final, desperate charge.
Bellian raised his head, his face contorted in a mask of pure, exhilarating power. The breaking of his armor was the breaking of his limits. He didn't move his legs. He simply shouted, the sound an explosive, world-shaking release of force.
"GREAT... DIVIDE!"
His sword, still planted, wasn't what did the damage. The sheer concussive force of the focused mana he exhaled—his "Great Divide" technique—hit the charging devil like an invisible, mile-long blade. The devil was caught mid-air, and the force was so immense, so precisely aimed, that it sliced the devil into two pieces as cleanly as Zhyier's barrier had done its work. The remains tumbled lifelessly onto the cobblestones.
Bellian closed the splits in his armor with a groan of protesting steel, a faint smile on his lips. The entire engagement was over. Total time: four minutes.
As the dust settled on the periphery of the battle, Leornars stood perfectly still, his eyes scanning the chaos. He didn't need to look at his subordinates; he knew the job was done.
Flicker!
A shimmering distortion of space announced the arrival of Rachael Sullivana. She materialized next to Leornars, her long, silver-chain-woven coat swirling as she completed the teleportation. She was the team's anchor, the tactician, and the master of Chain Breaker: Limitless World, a spatial manipulation art.
She took one look at the carnage and then turned to Leornars, her brow furrowed in confusion. "Lord, why the ambush? These were just low-rank fiends. The main force is still in the North District. Our priority—"
She was cut short by the appearance of a third figure.
Captain Luke. The Knight Captain of Vurnam City's Royal Guard. He stumbled into the scene, covered in ash and soot, favoring his left leg. He looked like a man who had narrowly escaped a collapsing building, his normally spotless uniform ripped and scorched.
He looked up, meeting Leornars's piercing gaze. He offered a strained, almost gentle smile—a look of exhausted relief. "Leornars. Thank the Goddess. I managed to escape the explosion. It's a disaster, the whole city is falling, we need to coordinate the retreat—"
Captain Luke's words died in his throat as Leornars moved.
It was not a dash. It was not a charge. It was a single, terrifying lunge, driven by the powerful muscles of his legs, his body moving in a line of perfect, predatory momentum.
His black dagger was a blur of motion.
Shlk!
It buried itself instantly, cleanly, and deeply into Captain Luke's throat.
Rachael Sullivana gasped, recoiling a full step, her eyes wide with unadulterated shock. Her composure, always iron-clad, shattered instantly.
"L-Lord Leornars! What are you doing?! He's Captain Luke, the Knight Captain! Our ally! " she cried, her voice rising to a pitch of confusion and alarm.
Captain Luke staggered back, the dagger protruding from his neck, black ichor—not blood—leaking onto his armor. His eyes, however, were not the eyes of a dying man. The shock lasted only a second, replaced by a slow, knowing amusement. The dagger was still in his throat, but the wound was already beginning to close, the flesh knitting itself back together at an impossible rate.
He raised a hand, touching the hilt. A sound escaped his lips—a slow, bubbling, almost fond laugh.
"A-ha-ha. So that's how it is," Captain Luke said, the words slightly gurgled but perfectly clear as his vocal chords repaired themselves. He pulled the dagger out and tossed it carelessly onto the ground. The wound vanished without a trace, leaving only clean, unmarred skin. He was healing far too fast for a human, even a magically-enhanced one.
He smiled, a wide, predatory grin that revealed unnaturally sharp canines.
"So, Leornars. What gave me away?"
Leornars calmly retrieved his dagger, wiping the ichor on the captain's ruined coat. His void-blue eyes were colder than ever, holding a chilling, absolute certainty.
"It was a combination of things. You, as a captain, should have been defending the inner wards, yet you appeared on the outskirts, playing the part of the exhausted hero who made a dramatic escape," Leornars began, his voice flat and informational, as if explaining a simple math problem. "But the true clue was far earlier. I killed a high-ranking devil in the southern dungeon an hour ago. Before it died, it shrieked that its kin were attacking all six—its kin, meaning other devils of its rank. The reports confirmed five other major attacks across the land. But it said six."
Leornars paused, his gaze burning into the Captain's smiling face.
"The witch classification in the archives doesn't match this high-rank enemy. That meant one of the six was not a devil. It had to be a human collaborator of a high rank, a person who had gained immense power through demonic pacts or, more likely, had been one of them all along."
He let that sink in, watching the smile on the captain's face falter slightly.
"I wasn't sure then. But it led me to an old, shelved case. The Pollium drug. It's a refined demon-sourced narcotic. The Lord of the Land being addicted was a smokescreen. The supply chain was too clean, too protected for a civilian operation. The supply had to be secured by someone with absolute impunity and access to all military and trade chokepoints. Someone who was already close to the Lord to monitor his addiction."
He concluded, his eyes narrowing to slits of ice. "The only one who fits that description, Captain Luke, is the Knight Captain of Vurnam City, who controls the security, logistics, and intelligence of the entire domain. You were the sixth assault. You opened the gates and secured the supply of the drug from your masters."
Captain Luke threw his head back and roared with laughter, a booming, malicious sound that echoed off the nearby cliffs.
"Magnificent! I should have known! You are a brilliant little analyst, Leornars! Yes, I'm the sixth! I'm the one who opened the gates for my 'kin'!" He spread his arms wide, his body visibly bulking up, his human façade melting away to reveal a towering, demonic form—skin of deep amethyst, a pair of serrated horns curling back from his temples, and eyes that blazed with hellfire. "No more games! I am Lord-Regent Kaelus!"
Leornars didn't flinch. He slipped into a low, combat stance, his dagger held expertly.
" Lord Kaelus?! The demon lord of the south!!!??" Rachael Suvallina said in fear in her tone in the understanding of the threat that was Infront.
Luke lunged first, a blur of purple and black, his demonic strength overwhelming. He swung a clawed fist, aiming to liquefy Leornars's head.
BAM!
The ground beneath Leornars's feet cratered as he side-stepped the attack, the wind shear alone tearing his coat. Leornars countered with a lightning-fast flurry of stabs, aiming for the newly-revealed demonic joints.
Luke simply roared and swatted him aside. Leornars met the blow with a tightly woven mana shield, but the force was monumental. He was sent smashing into a massive granite outcropping, the rock fracturing and screaming as he hit it.
"Pathetic!" Luke sneered. "You think a few paltry magic tricks can stop the power of the Abyss? I am reborn!"
Leornars slid off the shattered rock, his expression completely unchanged. He didn't seem hurt, merely annoyed. He raised his hand, and a hail of compressed mana shards—"Void Shrapnel"—shot toward the demon's eyes. Luke shielded himself with a flash of dark magic, but the force of the magical assault sent him staggering back.
Leornars didn't give him a moment to recover. He closed the distance with a speed that defied belief, weaving magic and hand-to-hand combat into a single, terrifying art form. He sidestepped a second, heavier blow and jammed his dagger into a gap in the demon's armor. Luke roared in pain, the ichor spraying forth.
"You waste your Adaptive Energy!" Luke yelled, spitting ichor. "Every spell, every move! You are depleting your store faster than you can fight me!"
Leornars felt the familiar, uncomfortable drain—the magical exhaustion that came with channeling too much power too quickly. He briefly closed his eyes, then opened them, a grim, defiant set to his jaw.
"Don't worry," Leornars stated, his voice a low promise of pain. "I don't need mana."
He discarded the dagger, letting it fall, and instead slammed his fist—sheathed in an invisible aura of pure kinetic force—into Lord Kaelus's solar plexus.
K-CHUNK!
It was a devastating, crippling blow. The demon-lord doubled over, vomiting a torrent of caustic liquid onto the cobblestones. Leornars followed up with a brutal, high-speed kick to the side of the demon's face, snapping its head violently back.
The fight instantly escalated from a two-sided duel to a brutal, one-sided beatdown. Leornars was a force of nature, using his perfect understanding of physics and anatomy to inflict maximum damage with minimal effort. He slammed the demon into the earth, twisted a limb until the bone groaned, and delivered a barrage of bone-shattering, non-magical strikes.
Finally, Leornars kicked the massive creature over, placing a boot on its chest, forcing it to look up at the crimson sunset. Lord Kaelus, in the form of Captain Luke, was defeated. He was bleeding black ichor from a dozen places, his demonic form already starting to recede as his power was spent.
But even defeated, the smile returned, tinged with madness and fanaticism.
"Kill me then, you little half breed!" Kaelus wheezed, his laughter strained. "You still don't understand the glory of this! What did you want me to do? Live with demi-humans? Never! They are filthy, weak, and frail! They should be happy I'm separating them from their families and selling them off instead of just killing them!"
His voice rose to a hysterical, evangelistic shout. "I'm doing the gods' work! Humans are superior to demi-humans! I am cleaning up the world! The children... the demi-human brats... I was going to dissect them, turn them into chimeras! Monsters for our armies! It's a glorious, necessary evil! I was in the right! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
The Captain/Demon Lord dissolved into a fit of insane laughter, convinced of his own monstrous superiority and righteousness.
Leornars stood there, listening to the confession of pure, unadulterated evil—the attempted use of children as monstrous chimera experiments, the casual dismissal of an entire race's right to exist. The coldness in Leornars's eyes finally broke, replaced by a terrifying, all-consuming heat.
His void-blue eyes glowed crimson, a flash of terrifying, suppressed power.
"You believe you have power?, Power is a mere illusion to make us believe that we are in control of our destiny and mortality, yet the strings are still in the palm of the puppeteer, we are in a grand game of chess in which we are mere pawns as the gods hold top rank spots. But I remind you kindness to a murderer is not kindness it's pure stupidity unless you control your own strings, otherwise how is a puppet ever going to fight his puppeteer? Luck and logic don't apply when we are seconds away from our demise, our own lives feel etched on a collapsing brick wall, the only way to help ourselves is sheer confidence and power, but what power do we have over our puppeteer? Live to entertain,learn our mistakes and profit from our mistakes. It's life and it's... truly unfashionable "
He spat, the gesture one of absolute, lethal disgust.
"You have done wrong to the world. You are not fit to exist in the new world I intend to build," Leornars's voice was now a low, resonant rumble, no longer human. "I don't see your existence needed. So, die."
"I give you my judgement... accept it as you no longer are of value of existence,Perish into the neverending sea of despair "He said coldly
Leornars lifted his hand to the darkening sky, ignoring the wounded, blasphemous creature beneath his boot. He didn't use a spell or a war cry. He simply issued a silent, absolute command to the very fabric of reality.
"Gatekeeper. Descend."
The ground began to rock violently. The gushing wind turned into a deafening gale, pulling the rubble and debris into a chaotic vortex. A tear appeared in the fabric of the sky—a perfectly circular, black hole that seemed to absorb all light and sound.
Then, from the abyss, it descended.
It was a four-hundred-foot monolith, a towering, terrifying silhouette against the crimson sunset. It took the form of a woman, perpetually weeping, her face a study of infinite, silent sorrow. Two massive, segmented black wings were folded against its back, scraping the cliffs as it materialized. In its hands, it held a vast, obsidian tablet.
The tablet was inscribed with words in ancient, burning Latin: AETAS NOVA. The New Age.
Its descent was truly horrific. The very air pressure warped. Echoes—the sound of ten thousand souls wailing in perpetual, inconsolable grief—reverberated from the Gatekeeper's form, assaulting the senses.
Lord Kaelus, terrified out of his fanaticism, instantly found the energy to move. He scrambled to his feet, driven by pure instinct.
"No! NO! I won't be erased!" he screamed, trying to flee. He attempted to use a demonic speed boost, pouring the last of his ichor-mana into his legs.
He was too slow. The Gatekeeper had already taken action.
The massive entity didn't move a muscle. It simply focused its immense power on the kneeling Kaelus, and with a silent, conceptual command, it killed the concept of speed for the demon-lord.
Kaelus was suddenly moving in slow motion, trapped in a bubble of non-velocity, his terrified rush slowed to a pitiful crawl. His mind, still operating at normal speed, watched his own slow-motion escape fail. Then, the Gatekeeper struck another concept. Kaelus's vision died, leaving him in absolute, blinding darkness.
Leornars walked toward the helpless, flailing demon-lord, his boots crunching on the cobblestones. He retrieved his dagger, now moving at normal speed in the slow-motion field.
He stepped directly in front of the paralyzed, sightless, agonizingly slow Kaelus.
"Your power is a lie," Leornars stated coldly.
He plunged the dagger into Kaelus's neck again, and at the same time, infused his body with the full, catastrophic force of Touch of Decay—a power that instantly kills all forms of regeneration, both mundane and magical.
Lord Kaelus, the self-proclaimed Lord-Regent, was now a mere, fragile man. His demonic life force was exposed and dying.
The Gatekeeper finished the job. Massive spiked chains, made of the same sorrow-laced obsidian, shot out from the monolith. They wrapped around Kaelus's chest and neck, and the Gatekeeper pulled.
RRRIIIPPPP!
The demon-lord's soul was ripped from his body, a screaming, dark-purple effigy of agony. The Gatekeeper didn't absorb it; it simply crushed it. With a sound like breaking glass, the soul was utterly, permanently, and conceptually erased from all existence—past, present, and future.
The massive monolith remained for a moment longer, its silent sorrow washing over the battlefield, before it silently ascended back into the rift, which sealed shut as if it had never been there. The gushing wind immediately calmed, the rocking earth ceased. The air was still, heavy with the absence of a high-ranking demon.
Leornars retrieved his dagger, wiping it clean on the dust that was once a megalomaniacal tyrant. The victory was complete.
Miles away, at the edge of the sprawling, burning town, Rachael Sullivana appeared with a flicker of spatial distortion. She didn't spare a moment to register the chaos. Her face was pale, her usual calm demeanor replaced by an edge of panic.
She took a deep breath, cupped her hands around her mouth, and projected her voice with a sonic-amplifying spell—a raw, desperate sound that cut through the noise of battle and the terror of the town.
"MARRIELLE!!!" she cried out, the single name echoing in the smoke-filled, burning streets. "MARRIELLE!!!"