These were voices of villagers who’d been unnerved by the children who had been different from them, and who had laughed and thrown rocks at them.
The Great Demon King heard them again. The voices continued.
“I beg you, I beg you.”
“Please kill them. Please kill them.”
“Please kill them, please kill them, please kill them, please kill them.”
“Curse them, curse them, curse them, curse them.”
“Reveeenge!”
“Why, why, why, why, why did this happeeeeen?!”
“Everything...should disappear...”
“O Great Darkness, please grant our wish.”
“Please wake up. Please wake up.”
“Please awaken from your slumber.”
“Please listen to our prayers.”
“Please take shape.”
“Please appear once more.”
“And then...”
“Please.”
“Please.”
“Please.”
“Please.”
“Please.”
He could hear their wishes and prayers.
“Please destroy everything.”
Snap.
“Cut it out already, you idiooooots!” The great waterfall of darkness overflowed, seething with rage. After being fed those negative feelings for over a millennium, eaten away by mortals’ grudges as they begged for annihilation, the great embodiment of destruction burned with uncontrollable rage. This was the Great Demon King.
The Great Demon King’s mist spread around him, and the dark humanoid form grew bigger.
“May the heavens split and the earth perish! Let the end of the world come nooow!” One day, one day the world was going to end, no doubt about it. His was a very pure power that could make that one day be today. A giant—the Great Demon King’s second form—had appeared.
“Die, all of youuu!” The roaring, jet-black figure before them was simply too massive. Only the upper half of his body was sticking out of the ground, but his imposing aura still easily towered over castles, mountains, and even the heavens themselves. While one could say that he’d simply grown bigger, if the carnage he could unleash, which only Ferd could withstand, kept growing with him, none would be able to stand up to him...theoretically, anyway.
“Get cruuushed!” Once again, the Great Demon King simply swung down his arm, which was as large as an entire mountain range. Were this the real world, such power could shatter the ground, destroy entire cities, and flatten any nation.
“Light, come forth!” The only thing capable of standing against such thoroughly primal power was an equally primal, high-powered light. As if responding to the great darkness, his polar opposite, Ferd’s light grew even stronger, and with his shield, he managed to block the gigantic fist that was primed to paint the world pitch-black. This collision transcended the laws of physics, letting out not a single shock wave.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” the Great Demon King screamed.
Even in his first form, the Great Demon King’s fist was powerful enough to crush many gods, but in his second form, it was destruction incarnate. With but a blow, he could vanquish all creation. Ferd’s mass was orders of magnitude less than this, so he should have obviously been flattened; and yet, he still stood firm.
At the same moment, Ferd’s sword and shield grew much, much, much brighter. Even seventy years after the end of the great war, a sword he’d merely held and thrown once still held some of his light in its core. So, it was only natural that the equipment he had kept by his side across countless hellish battlefields would harbor unimaginable power.
“You’re nothing but the hope of all those worthless people!” The Great Demon King was infuriated at this display, at coming face-to-face with the brilliance that was the crystallization of all mortals’ prayers, and struck again, but Ferd blocked the attack with his shield and remained unharmed. At the same time, pitch-black flashes and remnants of light scattered all around them, almost destroying the already unstable virtual world. However...
This really is tough! For the first time in seventy years, Ferd clenched his teeth and endured the impact, feeling like it would tear his entire body into tiny pieces. Still, his frail, ninety-year-old body would not be able to keep this up for long.
Ferd!
Hold out just a little longer!
Even though his muscles are inferior to the real one’s, this situation is bad!
We have to finish this quickly!
Elrica, Sazaki, Stein, and Max were also feeling the pressure as they ran toward the Great Demon King, whose body was growing out of the ground. During their fateful encounter, every member of the Hero’s party had just barely survived, so the longer this dragged on, the worse things became.
“Reason, shatter and fall! My name is Annihilation!” A destructive force that even the Great Demon King couldn’t comprehend surged from Lara’s fingers, and an aurora taller than any tower crashed into the Great Demon King’s head.
“Damn you! That freaking hurt!” the Great Demon King cursed, his head bowing back slightly at the magical impact. If any other gods were present, they would surely have shuddered at Lara’s extraordinary feat.
The gods had once launched an all-out attack on the Great Demon King, but they’d been unable to significantly injure even his first form, and they’d all been crushed to death. Thus, to be able to inflict clear pain on the Great Demon King’s second form was truly unimaginable. And Lara’s attack wasn’t the only one.
“Light, come forth!” Elrica’s entire body transformed into a poison that turned everything she touched into light, and she melted the Great Demon King’s body.
Sazaki’s slash—no longer leaving even a red glimmer behind—cut off another part of the Great Demon King.
“Hrah!” Stein continued unleashing the full power of the Null Wave, an ability that only he had achieved, and shaved off parts of the body of darkness as well.
“Raaah!” Max had turned into a blue meteor, his spear piercing the Great Demon King.
Seventy years had passed since the end of the great war. In this modern era where most figures of legend had already fallen, there was perhaps no one left in this world who could receive the full power of the Hero’s party and still remain in one piece. Since they were only up against an inferior reproduction of the Great Demon King, he should have naturally died by now. But even so...even as an inferior version, he was still immensely strong. Even though he wasn’t the real one, he was still this tenacious.
“Out of my waaay!” Not only was the Great Demon King alive and well, he was even rampaging. The Great Demon King could easily topple castles, and he shrugged off relentless attacks that could eliminate entire armies, yet he kept single-mindedly swinging his fists at his archenemy Ferd. As he did, an uncontrollable torrent of darkness burst out from his entire body and dyed the world in deeper darkness.
Seventy long years had passed since the war, and though most people had started thinking of the Great Demon King as a thing of the past, he was an existence who’d inflicted lifelong trauma upon the gods and brought fear and despair to this entire world. No one ever thought that he could be defeated—not even the dragons, nor the war god who’d somehow survived while moving from battlefield to battlefield.
The Arzyna Kingdom hadn’t been foolish for falling into despair. Even the replica second form could have crushed the kingdom and every living being along with it, so defeating the real Great Demon King should have been impossible. Just as the Arzynan astrologers had seen, he possessed inexhaustible stamina and tenacity, and sheer destructive force powerful enough to pulverize all creation; just by taking action, he’d plunged the world into darkness and silence. That had been the undeniable future—if only a certain young man hadn’t been there at the time.
“I’m already so old, people are worried if I’ll be able to eat anything hard when they look at me! What if I end up chipping a tooth, you moron?!”
“You won’t get to grow old!”
“Take a good look—I’m already an old geezer with barely ten years left! And I’ve probably already lost one of those years, thanks to you!”
“What the hell are you talking about, you idiot?!”
“Just look at my face and figure it out, you buffoon!”
The polar opposites kept simply cursing at each other, but the chaos they were causing around them was beyond imagination.
“Liiight, come fooooorth!” Ferd’s state of mind was similar to the one he’d had seventy years ago. When he gripped his sword, light of such high density materialized that every sage would have proclaimed it impossible. As the Great Demon King’s fist came down at Ferd, he struck it with his sword, repelling it. Although the two of them possessed the conflicting powers of light and darkness, their fighting styles were similar: they both used overwhelming mass to force their way forward.