First, Take the Hit (2)
Mana Stacking
Magic Amplification
Physical Enhancement
I reinforced my body to the absolute limit.
Elemental magic that needed time to cast wouldn’t cut it against that bitch. The only option was to beat that face of hers into pulp.
She’d come alone, most likely. Her legion wouldn’t be here.
And then the crazy bitch finally crossed over.
A black rift in dimensions tore open. By way of a long-overdue greeting, I knocked William out cold right on cue and threw a fist-first welcome toward the dimensional crack writhing with demonic energy.
BAAANG!
The impact was pure satisfaction.
She stepped through and immediately took my fist straight to the face, slamming into the wall.
I was catching Clanis, so Grandma would definitely overlook this one. I believed that firmly.
Something felt off, though. This lunatic. Even if she’d charged in without thinking, she wasn’t the kind of idiot to eat my fist head-on like that.
Or what? Had she gone soft?
“But damn, that impact is killer. This is how it should feel.”
“Khhh… The Demon King would never attack me. What the hell. Who are you?”
Clanis forced her head up and spoke.
Ahh. Now I get it. So this moron thought I was the Demon King.
Jerato, you absolute bastard. Thanks a ton. That slippery eel of a woman finally opened a proper gap for me because of you.
No—more accurately, it was Clanis’s own suicide. She was the one who handed over the Demon King’s fragment.
If she was asking who I was, the decent thing was to answer.
“Me? I’m Noah, and I’m also the Demon King you created.”
“What? What the hell does that—”
“That Demon King’s fragment you gave Jerato. I absorbed it.”
I eased the force in my right hand just enough.
The impact felt great, and watching Clanis take the hit felt even better. Yeah. A Four Heavenly King ought to get beaten by me. Right?
“Why would you be the princess of Ashtar?”
Maybe because I was the Demon King, the bitch managed to interrogate me with some cold composure. No—if anything, her murderous intent was thicker than before.
“I killed the Demon King you adored, then possessed the dead Olivia who’d become the Demon King’s vessel. On top of that, that bastard Jerato randomly jammed a demon fragment into me—the Saint—to corrupt me. So right now, I’m basically the Demon King, aren’t I?”
Even as I said it, it sounded a little weird. No wonder Clanis was wearing a blank, stupid expression. That vicious, crafty bitch making a face like that.
“That’s impossible! How could you be the Demon King!”
“Looking at how much of a moron you’re being, I’m already the Demon King, aren’t I?”
“Die!”
Slow. She was slow. It wasn’t that I was strong—this bitch had gotten weak. Truly astonishing. This idiot’s skill was pathetic.
“There’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while.”
“When did you—”
“That’s my afterimage, you fucking bitch!”
BAAAK!
I drove my fist into her face with everything I had again.
Yeah. This was the taste. This was why you beat a Four Heavenly King.
Just because I resembled the Demon King, she changed like this. Seriously, Clanis. I was speechless.
All because I looked a little like the Demon King, she acted like she’d been hit with a curse.
“Gyaaaah!”
“Ah. Finally get to thrash this slippery eel of a bitch.”
This was the first real benefit I’d felt since absorbing the Demon King’s fragment.
It felt amazing. I was riding a genuine high of pure exhilaration.
“You dog bastard! You kill the Demon King, crawl into that Ashtar slut’s body, and cling to life like a cockroach! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! Killing the Demon King alone is already a death sentence, but you dare crawl into an Ashtar body?! Today I will definitely kill you!”
One of her authorities was Deviant Magic.
Unlike me, she was a bitch specialized solely in the deviant path.
That power inverted a person’s body. It inflicted internal damage from the inside out and shattered them down to the cellular level. A freak of a woman.
The reason it never worked on me was that my body was in a state of mana fusion.
Of course, if she went all out she could split even mana, but there was no way I’d just sit there and take it.
And this time the conditions were even better.
“Think you can kill me?”
“Ugh.”
The moment I closed in on the bitch about to swing her magic, she flinched.
Yeah. This was the taste. In the end, this stupid woman only amounted to this much.
So this fight was absolutely stacked in my favor.
“That’s just how you are, isn’t it? Blind, one-sided obsession. Loyalty. Love for the Demon King. A bitch like that is going to kill me, who carries the Demon King’s aura? Impossible.”
Absolutely impossible. Idiots. Did obsession, loyalty, or love ever save their own lives? They were just morons.
I smiled wickedly. More villainous than anyone. Wicked enough to stand comparison with the Demon King they loved so much.
“Ah… aah…”
“Try killing me. Go on. Kill me. Just try.”
At the end I smiled like a fox and stepped closer to her.
Berna hadn’t been able to move either.
That Seto bastard might be different, but at least the women couldn’t handle me. Women who’d devoted everything to the Demon King, trying to take down someone with the Demon King’s aura?
Baak.
I drove my fist into her gut with full force.
“Kehek?”
“You lot really are soft.”
In short, it was my violence time. Stupid bastards. Could they still call themselves Four Heavenly Kings like this? Didn’t I look like the villain here?
Whatever. At least I got to thrash someone after so long. Violence with a satisfying hand-feel. This body itself was weaker at punching than Noah’s original one, but absorbing the Demon King’s fragment had strengthened me, and beating this bitch wasn’t hard.
All I had to do was exploit the fact that I was being treated like the Demon King.
Bak!
Fists weren’t just for decoration.
A long time ago, when endless training had pissed me off so much that I clenched my fist, my Master had said those words. So to prove that fists weren’t decoration, I’d planted one straight into her cheek.
Maybe that was the first time I felt it.
Punching was truly fun.
“Pector, honestly, I have to fight him seriously with magic just to barely catch him or match him. But you? You’re weak enough that I can just beat you with my fists like this. And on top of that, you’re looking at me as the Demon King, so it’s even worse, right?”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
“Oh? You’re starting to fight back?”
Oh? This time she grabbed my hand? So she could still tell that much apart.
Fine. Should I rate her a bit higher than Berna? No—Berna had at least seen Eldacrad in me, so maybe not.
“You’re not the Demon King! A bitch like you!”
Yeah, yeah. Realizing that was good and all, but wasn’t it a little late? You got yourself beaten and injured this badly and still wanted to fight me?
It wasn’t even funny.
“Sorry, but what can you do? You’re a little too thoroughly beaten to start counterattacking this late, don’t you think?”
Beoeok!
I buried my fist into her stomach with everything I had.
“You’re just William Season Two.”
“Gyaaaaaaaaaah!”
She’d probably have a hard time holding on. Even a Four Heavenly King—in the end, this Clanis bitch was inevitably weak in close combat.
Berna had at least fought me with magic, but Clanis had a glaring weakness: elemental magic that flared up the second you poked her even a little.
“Besides, the parts of me that had gotten a bit physically weaker—I covered all of that by absorbing the Demon King’s fragment.”
Truly grateful, and truly stupid.
“Uuugh.”
“Thanks? Thanks to you I got my hands on this much power.”
Because of her I could finally exert force on Noah’s level. In a way, this bitch could even be called a benefactor to me.
“This dogshit…”
“Blame your own greed, you stupid bitch. You never imagined the things you did to make that precious Demon King’s vessel would come back to you like this, did you?”
Kwajik!
This time I outright shattered her shin.
If I finished her in one go she’d try to run, so I had to beat her just enough that her strength gave out and she collapsed unconscious.
“Ah… aah… khhh…”
“That’s just how the world works. You reap what you sow. You’re nothing more and nothing less than the bitch who loses to me.”
“Kehek. Cough.”
I couldn’t just beat her until she ran. Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to settle everything with this bitch right here.
No matter how far she’d lost her mind, once she’d come all the way to the Holy Kingdom she would’ve prepared contingencies. The best I could do right now was piss her off as much as possible and drain her strength.
Should I provoke her a little more?
Then maybe I could finish this.
“Honestly, if you or Seto swore loyalty, I could play Demon King for you. Why? Because I prefer keeping people in the palm of my hand and rolling them around more than killing them. Like a cat batting a mouse with its paws.”
“What kind of Demon King do you think you are?”
Yeah, yeah. I had no intention of being any Demon King either. How could some hollow puppet king of Seto’s that didn’t even realistically exist be called the Demon King?
Bak!
This time I drove my fist hard into her solar plexus.
“No. Not ‘the likes of you.’ Whether the Demon King even actually exists in this world has become unclear now. So why can’t I be the Demon King? Kneel, I said. Who knows? Maybe I’ll embrace you with love?”
If she really crawled like a dog, I would embrace her with love. The love of fists. The love of magic. The love of boots. I’d teach her with a wide variety of violence.
“Die! You damn bitch!”
Clanis’s hand turned black and she lunged at me.
Yeah. She’d finally reached the point of attacking. She’d done at least that much right. Honestly, that attack was a burden even for me.
She meant to go beyond twisting organs and flesh and deliberately detonate my mana. And that only made me happier.
It was proof that the fight no longer had any room left for her.
Besides, against me—who had even absorbed the Demon King’s fragment—that attack didn’t even feel like an authority.
Kwaaak!
An ordinary person would have their flesh torn the instant they blocked, bones and meat inverted, and eventually even their mana circuits explode under Clanis’s toy. But I was different.
Even before, I’d dodged or barely blocked attacks of this level.
Likewise, Clanis couldn’t fire that attack every time either.
“Hey. That one actually hurt a bit.”
“Wh-what. How did you—”
“I told you, thanks to your fragment.”
What had this girl even been listening to this whole time?
“Impossible. Even if you absorbed the fragment, you only absorbed the power, right? How are you controlling it however you want?”
Ah. So that was it. Yeah. This was the difference in power.
I hadn’t simply absorbed the fragment as raw strength—I was suppressing it inside myself and using it. Of course it would shock her.
“Isn’t it obvious? The fragment is weaker than me. I can wring it dry however I want. In other words, I’ve jammed the fragment into the demonic energy circuits inside me and I’m only pulling out power when I feel like it.”
Honestly, even I never imagined it would be this stable.
The reason it was this stable was probably that scroll Lily’s mother had jammed into me. This bitch clearly never expected an item I’d coincidentally gotten from a black mage to be this useful.
“So that’s how it is. Looking at it that way, the Olivia who was newly born after Noah died is basically a being you created.”
Thinking about it, this bitch had essentially made me.
I could have a lot of fun with that.