The world lit up like it was a festival.
Ludwig moved through the void of reality, mind stretched to the edge, taking account of every spell being used by his comrades.
Twisters of heat and carnage brought the air to boiling point, storms of ice adding its flavour to the fight, and the steam created through the combination… It should be devastating for anyone with human skin.
But for the amalgamation of so many different demonkin they were currently fighting, it was as harmless as a flowing water.
The reason it cast a shielding spell around itself was the other spells flying at it. Arrows of life energy, slash of debuff, mace with power of mountain behind it, and a warhammer attack with power to level a city.
Through it all, gold waves, sacred and warm cut through. It pierced through the cacophony of world-ending spells.
When it crashed into the Purplish layer that had been covering the Demon King from the assault of thousands of spells earlier, it finally left a crack.
The sound echoed through the devastated field before the shield fragmented and fell one by one like leaves in a storm.
But Ludwig just kept moving. It was not his time to attack. If he missed the window, only the gods knew when the next time they would be able to get the same chance. Their win and their death was hanging on his next attack.
At that moment, the Hero's greatsword shone. Smaller in scale compared to the attack he just unleashed but as bright if not brighter. At the same time, his spatial sense felt a fluctuation in the shadow.
It was shifting, slithering. Obeying the thought of the controller of the shadow.
This is it. Ludwig spoke to himself.
Satoshi dashed towards the towering Demon King, at almost the same time, one of his comrades was brought into the Demon King's back by the shadow.
Varcus stepped out of the Demon King's spine like it was a curtain he'd grown bored of hiding behind. One moment only shadow clung there; the next, a pale hand and a length of impossibly thin steel were already in motion.
The Demon King twisted, instinct flaring. Horns scraped the air as its head snapped toward the Hero, too many eyes narrowing, too many mouths opening in a roar.
Behind it, Varcus cut.
He didn't aim for the core. Not yet. His blade traced a shallow line along the base of one vast, fused wing, then another, each stroke too slight to matter to anything that big.
Until they did.
The Demon King lunged to swat Satoshi aside and found its balance gone. The mass of its wings tore wrong against the air, tendons parting where Varcus had kissed them a heartbeat before. Its body tilted, weight dragging sideways.
The opening was there.
Not For Ludwig. Not yet.
For Satoshi.
The Hero's greatsword crashed into the Demon King's chest, right where the golden wave had cracked the shield. Light bit deeper this time, the blade howling as it carved into a hide that had resisted the city‑killing spells like rain. The impact jarred Satoshi's arms to the shoulder, shock rippling out in concentric rings of force.
Cracks spiderwebbed from the point of contact.
Not enough.
The Demon King's roar tore the air apart. Its hand, big enough to crush a house, came sweeping down in a backhand meant to turn Satoshi into paste.
Shadow surged again.
Varcus was suddenly no longer behind the Demon King. He was under that descending arm, one foot braced lightly on empty air, cloak fanned like broken wings. His sword flicked once.
The wrist parted.
No resistance. No spray. The limb simply ceased to be attached where the blade passed, momentum carrying the severed weight past Satoshi's head to crash into the ruins.
The Demon King staggered, It tried to pull away from Satoshi's blade, to twist its chest out of reach, to crush the Hero between knee and jagged ground instead.
Finally, Ludwig moved.
He stepped out of the void above shattered stone, boots slamming into real ground for the first time since the assault began. The shock of contact ran up his legs, welcome and solid. In his hand, the White Blade was already drawn, white handle warm against his fingers.
He didn't shout a spell name. He didn't have a breath to waste.
Space gathered around the sword like water around a drain.
It wasn't mana in the way fire or ice were; it was the thin, sharp pressure that existed between things. The air around the blade bent, lines warping, the world's outline smearing as if afraid to be too close.
Ludwig raised the sword. At the same time, Satoshi pulled his sword away.
Double time.
To everyone else, it looked like a single step and a single cut.
To Ludwig, the world shrank to the line his sword would carve.
The White Blade fell.
The first impact hit like a verdict. Space‑coated Voidite and Chronosteel met demonic flesh already cracked by Satoshi's strike, and for a heartbeat the world refused to accept it. The Demon King's hide held, strained, then lost the argument. The edge didn't so much slice as erase: a white line driven straight down through purplish plates and the dense, blackened muscle beneath.
The sound was wrong. Less a boom, more a muffled, grinding tear as reality itself complained.
The Demon King lurched, roar breaking into a ragged bellow.
The second strike landed in the same breath.
The same arc, the same force, the same murderous intent—laid perfectly over the first. No pause, no recovery. Two blows occupying one moment, hammering the same fault line before the titan's body could remember how to be solid.
The wound split.
Bone and fused chitin screamed apart. The crack Satoshi had carved deepened, then blew wide, a jagged canyon opening in the Demon King's chest. Black ichor and sickly light geysered out, splattering the shattered ground in chunks that hissed and dissolved.
Behind it all, something pulsed.
Ludwig's boots skidded on broken stone as the backlash hit him. His shoulders felt like they'd been torn out of their sockets, fingers numb around the hilt, vision spiderwebbed with white. The White Blade hummed in his grip, space mana burning along its length in sharp, stinging threads.
But the gap was there.
The Demon King's core burned in the hollow of its chest—an ugly, throbbing knot of condensed malice and stolen divinity, beating out of sync with everything else on the field. It dragged at the eye, wrong and heavy, surrounded by splintered plates too slow to close.
The Demon King tried anyway.
Its remaining arm clawed toward the wound, fingers like towers scraping over its own sundered ribs. Muscles bunched, legs braced, what was left of its wings flared, trying to haul its massive torso back from the line of fire.
The world around it refused to help.
Wind slammed sideways, shoving at that reaching hand. The ground shifted half a pace, stealing leverage from under its heel. Fire that had licked lovingly along its skin moments before flickered and turned away.
Imelda.
She hovered above the battlefield like a second sun dragged too close. Fire coiled around her in a blazing ring, water hung in rivers that ignored gravity, jagged hunks of stone spun lazy orbits around her, and threads of lightning stitched the air into a trembling cage. Her hair whipped in the storm she'd chained. Her eyes were locked on the exposed core.
"Hold him." She whispered, more to the elements than to anyone else.
They listened.
The Demon King's arm slowed, muscles straining against air that had turned to iron. The ground beneath its feet buckled just enough to sink its weight, like the world itself had decided it was tired of bearing him.
Ludwig staggered one step back, barely keeping his feet. His lungs burned. His arms shook. But he didn't need to swing again.
His part was done.
Imelda raised her hand.
Five motes of light flared into being around the Demon King's broken chest, each one a different color, each one seething with a different elemental fury—scarlet, deep blue, verdant green, blinding white, electric violet.
They were small at first. Seeds.
With a thought, she made them grow.
They expanded in a breath, twisting into rings of force and sigils, crowns of pure elemental law that circled the core without touching it. Each traced patterns that no human tongue could have pronounced, symbols that meant obey in every language that mattered.
"Fire." Imelda said, voice ringing clear and sharp. "You are mine."
The red crown flared.
"Water. Mine."
Blue blazed.
"Earth. Wind. Lightning."
Green, white, violet—each in turn, each answering the same claim.
The Demon King's core thrashed, ugly light pounding against the five rings. It reached for the elements the way it always had, grabbing for flame to harden into armor, for stone to lock into new ribs, for air to drag itself backward, for stray mana to knit wounds.
Nothing answered.
The crowns tightened.
"By my dominion." Imelda said, every word a hammerblow, "You will not burn, you will not mend, you will not stand."
She closed her fist.
The five crowns snapped inward like a trap.
They clamped down on the core, biting not into flesh but into the concept of what sustained it. Fire curled away instead of fusing, water surged past instead of soothing, earth crumbled under instead of supporting, wind sheared across instead of lifting, lightning bled off into the sky instead of filling.
For one breath, the Demon King hung there—huge, wounded, suddenly alone.
Then the core cracked.
A thin, hairline fracture appeared across its surface.
The light inside forced its way out.
It wasn't a blast in the way soldiers understood explosions. It was implosion—five colors of raw, howling power sucking inward, devouring the heart that had stolen them. The crowns crushed tighter, grinding the core down until the crack spread, multiplied, webbed the entire surface.
The Demon King screamed.
The sound went on long after its mouth had stopped moving.
Fissures tore through its body, radiating out from the ruined chest. Every stitch that had held a hundred demonkin together unraveled at once. Plates of armor slid, shattered, and sublimated into drifting black dust. The remaining arm disintegrated at the elbow. Wings dissolved into flakes that never reached the ground.
The core shattered.
Light flared one last time—
—and went out.
The giant frame collapsed in on itself. A hot wind rolled out over the battlefield as the mass that had dominated finally died.
Silence followed.
Not the silence of peace. The thin, stunned quiet that came when the loudest thing in the world had been cut off mid‑roar and nothing had figured out how to replace it yet.
Ludwig stayed where he was, one knee half‑bent, White Blade buried tip‑first in the torn earth, his weight leaning into it more than he'd admit. The space‑warping shimmer around the steel faded by degrees, the air's lines drawing themselves straight again.
He sucked in a breath that tasted like ash, lightning, and the faintest, impossible hint of rain.
Above, Imelda sagged, the five crowns gone, her elemental storm shrinking. Flames dimmed, stone fell away in harmless chunks, water spilled into steam, the lightning that had danced so eagerly around her flickering out in tired threads. She didn't fall. Yet. She just hovered there, shoulders bowed, eyes still fixed on the empty air where a god of ruin had been.
On the ground, Satoshi dragged in a breath and let his sword's tip drop until it rested on the stone. His shoulders shook with exhausted laughter that didn't quite make it to his face. Varcus had already vanished, the shadows where he'd stood thinner than they should have been, like they'd been wrung dry.
The Demon King did not move.
Could not.
Ludwig let his eyes close for a heartbeat, the echo of his double strike still ringing in his bones.
"We did it." Satoshi said hoarsely somewhere to his left, as if speaking it aloud might make it real.
Ludwig opened his eyes again, gaze on the empty wound in the world where his blade and Imelda's Crown had bitten deepest.
"For now." He answered, voice rough. "It's dead."
That was enough.
For this breath, on this broken field, it was enough.