Free Web NovelChapter 26: A meeting with demons.
As soon as Adrian stood to his feet, he felt the surge of energy pressing in from outside the mansion. freewebnovel.cσ๓
[Notice, a new force has arrived.]
The system made its announcement with its usual indifference.
Adrian frowned slightly, trying to piece together what was unfolding around him.
When he swept his gaze across the room, he found that the others wore the same expression.
Not fear exactly, but something deliberate and held. Caution.
Not even a second later, a rush of wind tore through the window and swept across his face.
"My lord!"
Kara moved without hesitation, dashing forward and planting herself directly in front of him.
A magic veil bloomed from her hands and spread outward, a barrier erected in the span of a single breath.
Adrian, however, remained perfectly still.
He had already seen them.
’So these are the demon lords I was supposed to meet.’
There, standing in the space before the room’s far wall, their backs to the shattered window, were four individuals who had not been there a moment ago.
And the world around them had changed with their arrival.
The sky outside had gone dark, stripped of its sun entirely.
The mansion itself felt swallowed by it, pulled beneath a suffocating darkness that had no business existing in the middle of the day.
It was as though the building had been lifted out of the real world entirely, leaving only the people in this room behind.
Adrian’s gaze settled on the one at the front before he even finished taking stock of the rest.
She was female, her silhouette unmistakably commanding even from a distance. She wore an elegant gown that moved with her as though it had been cut from shadow itself, and two horns curved outward from either side of her forehead.
They did not match.
Each one radiated a distinctly different pressure, a different frequency of power, as if they had been earned rather than born.
The one beside her wore a white outfit that radiated quiet nobility, every line of it deliberate.
The remaining two males dressed as though they had stepped in from a market stall, so thoroughly unadorned that a stranger would have taken them for civilians on a slow afternoon.
The contrast between the four of them was not accidental.
The woman spoke first.
"Hmm. How strange." A faint smile played at the corner of her mouth as she looked the room over. "I expected some sort of display. Did we arrive too early?"
The demon beside her, the one in white, turned and fixed his gaze on Victor without so much as a preamble.
"Why is that human still standing? In the presence of those such as us, does he have a death wish?"
Victor felt the chill before the words finished landing. He was always composed.
He never showed fear when Adrian was in his eyeline.
But something about the weight behind those words made his stomach drop in a way he could neither explain nor stop.
He kept his posture and said nothing, which was the only reasonable thing he could manage. freёwebnovel.com
’Ah. So this is what Kara was talking about.’
Adrian finally understood the shape of what this meeting was going to be.
A demonstration of power.
Slowly, Kara lowered the veil she had raised to protect him and stepped to one side, clearing the path forward.
Valentina stayed where she was, close to her master’s left, her expression unreadable but her attention absolute.
Adrian took a single, unhurried step forward.
"Now that you have made yourselves known, shall we discuss what you came here for? I apologise for the lack of a proper reception. I confess I did not anticipate you would enter through the window rather than the front door."
The four demon lords regarded him with looks that ranged from flat amusement to barely concealed disdain.
The woman smiled.
"Very well. Let us discuss."
She snapped her fingers.
A massive table forced its way into existence, splitting the floor as it grew, shattering anything unfortunate enough to be in its path.
Chairs rose from the ground in its wake, cracking the stone as they pushed up from below, each one seating itself with an indifferent finality.
The destruction was entirely casual. That, more than the table itself, was the point.
Victor’s mouth had been hanging open since the furniture started breaking the room apart.
"Please, sit."
The female demon lowered herself into the first chair at the head of the table. The other three followed without a word exchanged between them.
Adrian did the same. He crossed the room at his own pace and took the seat at the opposite end.
His subordinates filed in around him, settling into the remaining chairs with their eyes trained forward.
"I am grateful for the gesture," Adrian said the moment he was seated, his hands folded in front of him on the table. "However, I would ask that you cover the cost of repairing this room, given that you were the ones who destroyed it."
Silence settled over the table like a stone dropped into still water.
Victor and the others kept their expressions neutral, though none of them could pretend they had not been thinking the exact same thing.
The nerve it took to say it aloud, to these particular guests, was something else entirely.
The demons held the silence long enough that it began to carry its own meaning. Then, finally, the woman spoke.
"You are a bold one." Her finger tapped a slow rhythm against the surface of the table, and the smile on her face sharpened slightly.
"Do not trouble yourself over it. The space you are sitting in was opened with my own magic. Nothing that takes damage here carries over to the real world."
Adrian looked around without moving from his chair.
The cracks in the floor, the broken stone, the shattered corners of furniture. Up close, they had a strange quality to them. Too sharp. Too clean.
Almost like they had been drawn rather than broken, outlines traced on the surface of a place that was not quite real.
’An alternate space,’ he thought. ’Impressive.’
He turned his attention back to the woman without commenting further.
She met his silence with continued ease.
"My name is Yaki Donawa. First of the demon council. The demon of Agnis."
A beat passed. Then the others spoke in sequence.
"Doan Kings. Third of the demon council. The demon of dragons."
"Lugard Rampage. Second of the demon council. The demon of rage."
"Quin Hol Jana. Fourth of the demon council. The demon of authority."
And then, in a unison so precise it had clearly been practiced, all four of them spoke at once.
"We would like you to join the demon council. As the fifth demon lord of the core."
Adrian studied them.
’The demon council. How is it that I have never heard of them before?’
His gaze drifted back to Yaki, who was still watching him with that same patient, amused expression.
"I imagine your confusion is understandable," she said, as though she had read the thought. "Even we find this situation unusual. It is, after all, the first time in recorded history that a human has ascended to become a demon king."
"Then why me?" Adrian asked. "By my own measure, I am barely established. I have just over a hundred demons under my rule. There are far more experienced candidates who would fit that seat better than I would."
"What?!" Lugard’s composure cracked instantly. He leaned forward with the energy of someone who had been waiting for a reason. "Are you really turning down an offer like this?!"
Yaki raised one hand, and Lugard went quiet.
"As I said," she continued, unhurried, "you are the first human in many years to best a demon king in open combat and claim their title outright. It would be stranger if we had not taken an interest in you."
Adrian said nothing.
"Beyond that, my children have told me a great deal about the power you carry. You make a point of concealing it. But we are not ordinary observers." Her eyes did not leave his face. "You possess something that rivals the demon lords of this world. Every one of us at this table can feel it."
"Is that so."
Yaki’s smile deepened.
"You are a difficult person. I expect that is the consequence of trust earned only through results." She tilted her head just slightly. "But the misunderstanding here is a simple one to correct."
She snapped her fingers.
"You believe you have a choice in this matter."
Two of the demon lords moved before the words finished landing. They came out of their chairs in an instant, crossing the distance between them and Adrian in a single fluid motion, hands reaching forward to seize him.
...
[A\N] I understand my update as been poor, that is simply because I just resumed writing after a long break.
It’s hard to get back into it especially with such poor performance.
Please. Your support would mean alot to me, giving me motivation to write even more.
