Chapter 17
“ALL RIGHT, you’ve got nowhere else to run.”
“Just give in; we won’t hurt you.”
Not far from the fierce battle raging in the city, Wallenstein and Barbatos had already managed to corner the dark demon.
While all eyes were on Mira and Meilin’s diversionary attack, the two had been stealthily operating behind the scenes.
They’d managed to flawlessly corner the dark demon, who’d gone to an isolated spot to see whether his minions had gone to join the battle or had fled.
The dark demon had then fled itself, at which point they pursued it while warding off its attacks until they’d driven it to the barrier.
Wallenstein reinforced a portion of the barrier there, ensuring that the dark demon had nowhere else to run.
The first thing they needed to do was knock it out. Then, after the battle, they could have Mira summon Leticia. She would be able to mollify the dark demon’s powers, at which point they could place a seal on it, and that would be that.
Or so Wallenstein was thinking while he tried to put the dark demon to sleep. But right then, something happened.
“As if I’d listen to you!”
Surprisingly, the cornered dark demon did something unexpected.
Working together, Wallenstein and Barbatos should have had the wits and capabilities to deal with whatever he might throw at them.
And yet, the dark demon neither resisted nor counterattacked; instead, he did something that only took a split second.
He produced a small bottle from somewhere and then guzzled down its black contents in a single gulp.
“What did you…?!”
What could he have drunk? Why was he drinking the liquid? Not knowing what to make of this behavior, Wallenstein’s guard was up.
A moment later, Barbatos’s eyes opened wide.
“What in the world is…? He’s overflowing with power.”
And indeed, the moment these words left his mouth, the dark demon let out a scream of agony.
“GAAAAAGH!”
But that wasn’t all. A miasma so thick that it was visible with the naked eye began pouring out of his entire body, which then grew to at least twice its normal size.
“What did he…?!”
He didn’t know what was causing it, but Wallenstein could sense the dark demon’s demonic power suddenly skyrocket.
It shot two, then three times higher. His power kept growing greater and greater until it was finally around ten times what it had been before.
And that was when it happened. The dark demon, which had been desperately thrashing, suddenly went berserk.
“Ngh…!”
Drunk with power, the dark demon released masses of demonic power which were far more powerful than any attack he’d yet unleashed.
“He’s suddenly gotten so powerful… I’m guessing he’s about at the level of a Marquis-rank demon. No, he’s even stronger than that,” Barbatos said. Having determined that the attack was quite dangerous, he’d put up a shield.
And yet, cracks started to show in it very quickly.
Wallenstein had also put up a barrier to reinforce this shield, but it quickly began to dissolve after being hit by the seemingly endless amount of demonic power.
“This might be tricky.”
While they’d been holding back so they could transform him back into a light demon, they were now being pushed onto the defensive.
While they’d somehow managed to withstand its attack, Barbatos predicted that unless they got more aggressive, their defenses would be the first to fall.
“What the hell did it drink…? I don’t know what caused this, but we can’t give up now…!”
The dark demon had drunk a black liquid. That was undoubtedly the cause of all this.
So, what could it have been that’d caused it to dramatically grow in power and go completely berserk? Much was still unclear, and yet that didn’t mean they could give up on turning the dark demon in front of them back into a light demon.
Wallenstein firmly believed that there had to be a way to do it. Killing the dark demon would be their absolute last resort, and they’d only do it when they’d exhausted every other option.
About a minute after this unexpected turn of events had befallen Wallenstein and Barbatos, Mira and Meilin were holding off the lesser demons while trying to defeat the fiends so that they wouldn’t get possessed, and thereby strengthened by the lesser demons, vengeful spirits.
“What the… What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but something feels weird.”
Mira and Meilin had both detected a sudden change.
Perhaps due to some aftereffect of the dark demon’s increase in power, the lesser demons under his command began to mutate.
Currently, they’d managed to defeat all of the monsters as well as several fiends. Right after they detected this ominous sensation, the lesser demons began thrashing about in pain.
What’s more, the way they were doing so was by no means normal. Soon, they let out bizarre howls, at which point they began thrashing about even more.
So, what in the world was going on? Mira and Meilin stood perplexed as they watched the unprecedented turn of events, in which the lesser demons began to violently transform.
Right then, they could feel another power begin to swell, at which point a chorus of agonizing howls erupted and the lesser demons burst into smithereens.
“What the…?!”
Had they self-destructed, or had something else happened? Either way, Mira was quite shocked, as she’d never expected they might take care of themselves.
But, wouldn’t you know it, the lesser demons’ deaths acted as a trigger and their vengeful spirits spawned forth.
And that wasn’t all. For some reason, these particular vengeful spirits were all far denser and bigger than any they’d encountered so far.
“I feel like things are about to get intense.”
Having slain yet another fiend she was fighting, Meilin approached the remaining fiends while staring at the vengeful spirits, a fearless grin spreading on her face.
“Damn… I don’t think we’ll make it in time!” Mira cried, finishing off a fiend that was being approached by a vengeful spirit with a single blow.
There were significantly fewer fiends left. But at this point, regardless of what they did, it’d no doubt prove quite difficult to defeat all the remaining ones before they were possessed by the vengeful spirits.
And so, the vengeful spirits that’d spawned possessed each of the remaining fiends.
The fiends’ transformation was immediate, and the bodies of the possessed ones suddenly turned jet black.
“Now these guys seem pretty tough!”
Meilin seemed to feel how strong their foes were and, if anything, she was quite pleased by this development. Watching them as they transformed, she got back into her fighting stance.
However, something else unusual happened next. The now-transformed fiends transformed yet again. And instead of simply powering up and going berserk, they suddenly mutated in some way.
The fiends lost all of what made them natural, living beings, and they became like machines bent only on destruction. When they changed form, they began their destructive rampage. They began by attacking whatever was directly in front of them.
“No way. Like this, it’s as if they’ve all become upper-level fiends.”
Perhaps because they were an experimental force, the armor spirit team that was standing in the front wasn’t quite a match for upper-level fiends. Though they held on for ten or twenty seconds, they were completely wiped out.
Next, the defensive line she’d set up, a wall of holy knights, was completely smashed through by the fiends. What’s more, the fiends’ charge was so ferocious that they even began to push back the holy lords that comprised the second defensive line.
There were only very few who were capable of such offensive power. One could confidently say each of the fiends was indeed quite high level. The assortment of fiends they were facing down was certainly powerful enough to warrant mobilizing the military.
Jeez, I can’t believe they transformed so much…
The level to which the vengeful spirits had powered them up far surpassed Mira’s expectations. She smiled bitterly to herself that they weren’t just at the level of an A-rank adventurer, but far above even that.
Furthermore, this had happened to all of the remaining fiends, which was a considerable number. The most troublesome of the group was the reichengiebel that Meilin was taking on.
It had originally been an upper-level fiend, so now that it had been powered up, it was about equal in power to a raid-level boss.
And Meilin was fighting this very fiend head-on, by herself. And yet, even she seemed to have her hands full dealing with that fiend alone.
Still, it was fair to say that individually taking on a raid-level boss, which was meant to be fought by multiple parties of players, was actually quite insane.
“We’ll have to do something about these guys. Looks like it’s time to roll up our sleeves.”
The rampaging fiends destroyed whatever around them they could get their claws on. The houses in the village had already been razed, and they’d even started mowing down the trees that stood in the surrounding forest.