A huge sound resounded, shaking the earth itself as the shockwaves were strong enough to crush any kept emerging.
In the center of it, two pairs of golden eyes and silver eyes gleamed, one with white flowing hairs and the other with inky black ones.
The two exchanged blows one after another, causing huge craters to form, the corpses that once lay on the ground flew around or were simply turned into nothing.
"Damn it! Why the hell am I able to only keep up with you when you are restricting yourself to SS+ rank? This doesn't make sense! And why you are suddenly angry? You are a demon, Noah's a human! You ain't coupling anyway! And my question still stands, is he hot?" The inky black-haired lady questioned trying to defend herself from the demon lord's ferocious attacks
"Didn't I tell you? You may be an SSS- ranker but you don't know how to best utilize your strength in your attacks. And I am not angry. What Noah does is anyone's business, I just don't understand how you know about him. Are you a prior acquaintances? If not then did you have spies in my castle? And why are you interested in him?" Demon lord asked, fusing her sword with dark flames and bringing down the sword towards her opponent.
Fusing one's weapon with the magic wasn't a simple thing, it showed the delicate mastery with which the demon lord could control her demonic energy and mana.
"If we were acquaintances then I wouldn't have asked you how hot he is, would I? He is apparently the one who planned all this. Scary, isn't he? But if he is hot then it's all cool. As for the spy part? Sure, we had one. All thanks to your lousy ass sitting in the room all day like a hikikomori, it wasn't that hard. I am kind of interested in him, I mean, I want a hot guy to take care of me, have a family with him, once all this shit is done." The inky black hair said as an onyx-black liquid emerged to form a solid shield in front of her, clashing with the dark-flamed sword.
"He is ugly" The demon lord replied a bit disgruntled, as she questioned to herself 'Planned this all? What's that supposed to mean?'
"Oh? By your standards, even I would be considered ugly, wouldn't I? Tell me, real shit, how hot do you think he will be when he grows up"
"...Maybe, as much as I am but you won't be there to see him"
And that was the last talk that ever happened between the two strongest people in the world, afterward, it was simple chaos, the ground was shattered, and the sky was cut apart. They went from one continent to another, leaving utter destruction in their wake.
The sky tore, the beasts cried out, and anyone near their vicinity felt the clash between huge mana making it harder for them to breathe, dying in the process, friends and foe all alike.
Someone somewhere a lady saw the sky crackling as if it was going to break apart with a crystal ruby eyes girl in her arms.
Someone somewhere felt the strong winds hitting them, despite being thousands and thousands of miles away from the source of it.
Some prayed for their God to win.
Some prayed for their hero to slay the God.
The oceans cried out, the volcanoes erupted, tornadoes raged, and the earth cracked.
Everyone felt it in their bones, it was as if the world was coming to an end.
And the battle continued for 3 whole days, and so did the disasters.
"I wasted a lot of my time..." huffing, she wiped the blood off her mouth using her right arm and threw an .. chewed-out arm by her left, engrossed in the battle for 3 days straight, after coming out of a slumber where she hadn't eaten that much, she needed to consume the food or else it wouldn't end well for her.
Wasting no time, she drank an Elixir, her shattered and broken bones, the scratches and deep cuts that ran all over her body, dripping crimson blood, started to heal itself.
She looked around herself, thick black smoke surrounded her, and the earth cracked and ripped so that even the fire that resides deep inside the land was visible.
The land around her looked as if it belonged to the purgatory.
She made sure to engrave the destruction in her eyes, this was all caused because she had been stubborn about not using her strength at full.
This was on her.
She must not forget that.
Everyone has some principles, she does too, and no matter the cost of it, she would never break this principle of hers.
But more than that, she remembered the countless people she saw who died, their despair-induced faces, demons, humans, elves, dwarves, vampires.
Countless people have died.
I didn't want that.
All she had ever wanted was ...to just live peacefully, to never worry about anything.
But now she was reminded.
Something that she had never bothered to think about.
She was their king, their lord, their king. Her words held far more weight than she had thought.
This war made it clear to her.
It was her fault things escalated to this degree. That people suffered unnecessarily. Even if her kind needed the flesh of others, they had crossed lines that shouldn't have been crossed and it was because of what she had 'Do whatever you want'. The words she had once said leisurely, without care had resulted in this.
She is by no means, a king material.
She tried to forget all she saw, and in trying to do so she focused on worrying about Noah.
She needed to know what the dead corpse meant when it said that Noah had planned the current scenario.
She looked at the person lying in front of her once more "You ...were good."
And the moment she said that a white crystal embedded into her sword broke apart.
She had used the 'Spirit Stone' that Noah had brought her allowing her to use light and dark affinity.
Using, two affinities of the opposite of characteristics is destructive. For those who have fire and water affinity, using both would need them to have great control over them and a high proficiency, if they don't they might end up harming themselves and could kill oneself.
The light and dark affinity, which are opposite of each other are even more life-threatening to control.
Well, to be fair, no one has both the affinity's, but currently the demon lord was able to use the light affinity with the help of the spirit stone and the dark affinity that she naturally had. The amount of strength her attacks gained thanks to that, she was able to match the difference between SS+ rank and SSS- rank, in the end, it all came down to skills and she far surpassed anyone in them.
But she also faced a lot of internal injuries by using both light and dark affinity, enough for her to be able to feel that she could have died if things went even a little in the now-corpse, favor.
One can restrict their rank but not their mana or demonic or aura proficiency for that matter.
In other words, even her SSS+ ranked proficiency couldn't help her keep herself safe from the damaging aspects of contrasting light and dark affinity's use at once.
Once she left, the presence that she had ignored came out of the hiding, his aqua-colored eyes looking at the corpse that lay in front of him and then he looked all around him, breaking into a hysterical laughter.
He laughed and laughed, at the futility of it all.
He failed to kill his god.
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It's time for a story.
A story of a boy who hated his god, was sick of his god.
Everywhere he went he only listened to how marvelous their god is and he didn't like it.
To him, this god was useless. She sat in her palace room, all day, every day, never addressing the problems of her kind. She sometimes came out of her room and then fought some battles but that was all.
He hated her, he hated her way of ruling, he hated the savage ways of his own kind.
And so, he wanted to kill her.
But he was weak, far too weak. Forget about killing her, he wouldn't even be able to kill the people in the palace.
For his kind, he was weakest, his potential was S- ranker.
So, he sharpened his brain like a knife, if he can't kill her in front-on battle, he will kill her in some other way.
He wanted to change the world.
He wanted to change the way it worked and her god needed to die for it.
So, he will.
He tried to find some way, any way, and he found one. He chose a slave, she was a human child. Humans don't have any potential limits. The moment he saw her, he knew she would be one he would groom, the girl's black hair and silver eyes were in complete contrast to his god, and that made him crazy about her. For him, she was his hope.
From then on, he made her kill, and kill and kill, a child, a pregnant woman, a starving man, an elder on the edge of his death, he made her kill.
She killed far far stronger people than her, to a demon like him, it was easy to procure high-level individuals, so he did and made her kill them.
Thus, she became stronger, far stronger than anyone could have imagined, but she couldn't become stronger than that, her growth stunted, and she was still far behind the god he wanted her to kill.
So, he needed a different plan.
And he decided to use his god's arrogance.
Apparently, his god restricts herself to a lower level than her opponents.
If she has restricted her strength and then suddenly gets attacked by an overwhelming power, what would happen?
He worked towards creating this exact scenario, but that wasn't the end of the things he wanted.
Who would become their next god? What will happen if that person turns out to be even worse?
So, he needed their next god to be nothing more than a puppet.
Everything was going according to his plan but then, someone appeared.
He never even met this someone, yet, that someone completely turned the game into his.
Making everyone but a mere puppet, including him, in this dog-shit world.
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As the laughter subsided, the man with long blue hair tied in a ponytail sat down, beside the corpse of a black-haired lady, her silver eyes that once shone now left with a blank look.
He slowly opened his mouth.
"Seems, like we failed to kill her. Even after all we did..." he self-derisively whispered then clapping himself on his cheeks, he spoke in a cheerful tone "But that doesn't matter, what matters is that we achieved our objectives."
He continued to speak, to the corpse.
"See? Look around you? This looks like hell, who knows how much time it would take to recover from this level of destruction? Certainly, not in my lifetime. She seems to be on her way to Noah but he won't be caught, not at least for coming next few days, that much I can assure you. No way, I read the situation wrong." He said the latter part of his voice has a desperation as if he was to be right in his prediction.
"Her going missing would definitely send unrest to her kind. That should be enough. Common masses are but ignorant and stupid. They wouldn't know how things truly were, all they will know is the destruction that now lay before them and... a battle that occupied even the demon lord, their god for 3 days." His latter words were as if he was proud.
"Laura has completely made Elizabeth fall for her. So, we have someone who would want the chance to co-exist with other species, someone whose voice would not go unheard" He said remembering the time when he convinced Laura to work for him. That was a pretty hard thing to do, but he managed to do it and gladly long before Noah had even arrived in this world.
"All that's left is for Elina to do her bit..." He said so with a hopeful voice, continuing "We have done our part. Our jobs are done. You are free, resigned, well, you really resigned for good though" He chuckled at his own joke, a bad one.
And then he went silent.
For quite a while, he didn't speak a word.
"Sorry," He spoke, in a shaky voice. "I couldn't give you a peaceful life or a normal family to spend your time with, I failed to do so... Sorry" Tears streamed down his face as the once-white sclera started to turn black.
"Sorry." He uttered those words, unable to speak anything else despite knowing nothing would ever change.
But he uttered "Sorry" over and over.
With his life whittling away.
His life and her's were tied, for that was the pact they made.
Life intertwined with one another's.
If one wouldn't live to see the world that they worked hard to see then the other wouldn't either.
At least that's what he told her, but it was something that only applied to him, if he had died she would have still lived.
In the end, it no longer mattered.
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A black-haired boy with black blank eyes was looting a treasury all the while saying "That was some anime-level shit happening out there."
"Are you sure we should be going around doing it? And you haven't taken so much good stuff from here, what's wrong with you?" his vampire companion asked to which he simply replied
"If not now, when? Also, there's limited space, there's only so much I can ste-take. Shut up and follow me, vampy." as the boy looked into the space, as if looking at something and muttered "It's going to end soon"