Free Web NovelChapter 671: The Destroyer
The vast telecast chamber, with its dull gray ceiling and its floor of absolute matte black, was drowning in sound.
Roars and cries poured from the 4D projection surrounding them, explosions registering not just as noise but as pressure, and sounds so alien that most people hearing them for the first time would have struggled to identify their source.
The air in the chamber carried the particular quality of a space built to contain spectacle, now being tested by something that exceeded its expectations.
Grace stood at the center of it alongside eight of the most powerful players currently active in the Ancient World, guild masters and their most trusted seconds, individuals who had participated in battles that others could only read about and study from a distance.
Each of them had seen extraordinary things. Each of them had stood in the middle of moments that would have broken anyone less prepared for the scale of what the Ancient World was capable of producing.
Yet, all of them were drowning in stunned silence.
They watched without speaking as five cities, each one taken and held by demons and cultists for months, were systematically and completely cleansed.
The feeds showed it without softening. Blood filled the streets. Screams replaced the ambient sounds of occupation. Nothing was spared, not the demons, not the cultists, not even the players who had been present in those cities under the pretense of content creation, recording footage, and narrating discoveries for their audiences.
Grace watched it with the same stunned stillness as everyone else in the chamber, her usual instincts for commentary and framing completely submerged beneath the simple, overwhelming fact of what she was seeing.
She did not notice the viewer count climbing. The show’s already substantial base of eighty-four million had crossed two hundred million in the span of a few minutes and was still rising with no indication of slowing, numbers that under any other circumstances would have demanded her full attention and received it.
She only returned to herself when her supervisor’s voice broke through her earpiece, sharp and urgent, telling her that more was developing across multiple fronts and the viewers needed to be brought along.
Grace cleared her throat.
"Ahem. Well."
She, who had never once been at a loss for words in front of a camera in her professional life, found herself genuinely tongue-tied, her eyes drifting back to the ongoing feeds with the helpless pull of someone watching something they cannot look away from.
She forced herself back, drew a breath, and after nearly a full minute of silence that her viewers would be discussing for weeks, she spoke.
"Viewers, as satisfying a sight as it is to watch these soulless vermin receive exactly what they have earned," she said, her voice finding its footing again, "I believe we have something even more remarkable demanding our attention."
The smoke from the 4D projectors shifted and parted, the existing feeds dissolving as three new visual streams rose from the floor simultaneously.
The first showed a landscape of barren, jagged mountains, their peaks lost in a low-hanging cloud, the ground between them broken and dry and utterly without softness.
The second showed a half-frozen world, biting wind carrying curtains of drifting snow across a terrain that had been fighting the cold for so long it had simply accepted it as a permanent condition.
The third showed open grassland stretching to a distant horizon, the kind of land that looked peaceful until one understood how much space it gave an approaching force before it arrived.
Three different places. Three different environments. And in each of them, there were many, many, many figures, the vast majority running, others chasing after them.
"Of the individuals currently involved in what we have been watching," Grace said, her broadcaster’s instincts reasserting themselves as she found the thread of the story, "we have confirmed identities for Ruinov and Pyrael as known members of the Shadow Oblivion organization."
"The other four remain unknown. They are likely NPCs originating from the Domain itself, though it might just not be true." She paused, watching the three streams with the focused attention of someone reading information as it arrived. "Their status windows, much like those of Ruinov and his people, return as blank, which makes precise assessment impossible."
"Miss Grace."
Aster’s voice cut through the chamber with the clean, cold precision it always carried, drawing focus the way a blade drawn in a quiet room drew focus. She did not raise it. She did not need to.
"There is one detail I would like to draw your attention to," she said, her eyes on the three projections rather than on Grace, the expression of someone delivering an observation they have already fully processed.
"There are six of them." A pause that was not for effect but for precision. "Six individuals, moving to engage eleven Elemental Rulers from the demon armies, alongside thousands of other powerful combatants, some of whom represent the strongest fighters one could expect to encounter on any battlefield in the current age."
She let the arithmetic sit in the air of the chamber.
"At the very least, we have yet to see a single Ninth Rank presence in the open field. Other than the Sin General himself." She added and went silent.
The chamber absorbed this in silence.
On the three feeds, the figures kept moving.
"Good point, Lady Aster," Grace said, the words leaving her mouth with the slightly absent quality of someone whose attention was already elsewhere, pulled toward the three feeds with the same helpless gravity that had been pulling at it since the streams had opened.
She was not alone in the realization that settled through the chamber in the moment after Aster spoke. Every person present, and by extension every one of the two hundred million viewers watching from their screens, had been caught in the same quiet trap.
The sheer weight of what had already been witnessed, the five cities cleansed, the impossibility of what the Architect had done above Nova, the arrival of figures whose status windows returned nothing but blank space, had produced a collective certainty that had slipped in without announcing itself.
They had assumed the outcome.
They had watched what had come before and concluded, without consciously deciding to conclude anything, that what came next would be equally decisive.
The arithmetic Aster had laid out in two calm sentences had punctured that assumption cleanly.
Six. Against eleven Elemental Rulers and thousands of powerful combatants, with no confirmed Ninth Rank presence among them.
However, they did not have to sit with the unease for long. The battle began seconds after the two sides made contact.
"Just in time."
The voice that filled the chamber was gruff and carried the particular satisfaction of someone arriving at exactly the moment they had hoped to arrive.
Andrei’s bright blue eyes were scanning the scene below him with the focused, almost leisurely attention of a predator taking inventory.
Thousands of demons stretched across the ground beneath him, their formations organized and dense, war titans standing at the front like iron monuments to the principle of overwhelming force.
Hundreds of meters beyond them, barely visible through the distance and the dust their flight had raised, the human evacuees ran.
The demon at the helm of the force looked up at the two figures in the sky above him with an expression that moved through several stages before settling on contempt.
His demonic face twisted as he bared his fangs, reading what he saw with the dismissive ease of something that had faced opposition before and found it wanting.
"A filthy Beastwoman and a Human?" His voice carried the specific disdain of something that had expected a threat and received an insult instead. "Quite the bloodlust you’re carrying. And from the look of it, you’ve come to fight."
He tilted his head, the gesture almost curious. "For what? To buy the humans a few more seconds to run?"
The question dropped into a silence it did not occupy for long, the demon’s head dropping low as laughter built and broke from him with the ugly, rolling quality.
"Brother said to leave none of you alive," Andrei said.
His smile was present and entirely without warmth, the expression of something that had already decided how this was going to go and was simply enjoying the distance between the current moment and that conclusion.
As he spoke, his straight human teeth shifted, slowly and without drama, the line of them lengthening and sharpening and interlocking into the predatory snarl of something that wore its human shape the way a weapon wore a sheath.
"But he never said anything about killing you quickly," Andrei growled through clenched teeth.
The demon’s expression shifted from contempt to something with more edges in it.
"Kill us?" The word barely finished forming before his figure simply ceased to be where it had been.
The feed registered the vacancy and then the explosion, a visible shockwave tearing outward in every direction from the point of impact, the ground below cratering under the pressure of whatever had just happened within it. freewёbnoνel.com
The streaming player’s camera swung, searching for the source, and found Andrei still in the sky, exactly where he had been, looking down at the crater and the demon rising from the rubble within it with the same relaxed, almost fond expression.
"Calm down, ugly face," he said. "I just told you, I plan to enjoy this."
He rolled his neck, the joints registering the motion in a clean sequence from one side to the other, and then his body began to change.
The growth was visible, immediate, and purposeful, his frame expanding outward and upward as chitinous carapace plates emerged across his surface, the material dense and layered, catching the available light in tones of deep gold and burning red.
"Syrian," he said, his voice now softer though only a touch, "Make sure none of those people die."
Then he shot forward, like a golden shooting star set aflame by deep crimson.
He crossed the distance between his position and the towering iron titan at the front of the demon formation. The sonic boom arrived at the streaming player’s position a fraction of a second after the strike itself, the sound of it hitting hard enough to drop the player where they stood, the feed lurching sideways and stabilizing into a view of the sky before the player dragged it back to the scene.
What it showed made the chamber go quiet.
The titan’s shield flickered, now visible in the distortion of the impact, a shimmering barrier that had absorbed the first fraction of the force before it simply continued through it. The titan’s chest bore a crater, caved inward with the clean, decisive geometry of something that had met a force it was not built to redirect.
And standing within that crater, framed by the wreckage of what had been the front line of the demon formation, was the thing that Andrei had become.
He was enormous. Chitinous plates, clawed hands, and a horned face carrying the angular, compound geometry of a beetle’s head, the eyes within it burning with the cold, hungry light.
It was a combination of insects and natures from sources too varied to have produced anything unified, and yet the result was unified, the pieces fitting together not despite their variety but because of it.
Awe-inspiring and dreadful in the same breath, the two qualities are inseparable from each other, each one the reason the other was possible.
The demon army looked at it, and the feed captured what that looked like.
Andrei stood atop the fallen titan, the Titan’s iron chest torn open beneath his clawed foot, the demon army stretched out before him in a silence that had replaced everything else.
He looked out at them, his red eyes like two enormous blood moons, all that was visible of his face in the rising steam.
"My brother never said it," Andrei said, his voice carrying through the stunned silence, deep and heavy like the edge of a battle axe, "but if Venedikt is his Executioner..."
He tilted his horned head slowly, the compound eyes catching the light and holding it in their vast, burning depths.
"Then I am his Destroyer."
