eurekapd Chapter 179 : Chapter 179
Chapter 179 : Chapter 179
Chapter 179. The Demonized One
Ifreles’s figure appeared before him like a phantom, the two now standing almost face to face. The Grand Duke of Hell tightened his grip on the hilt ever so slightly and cruelly twisted the sword once inside Logaris’s heart.
“Urgh...” Logaris’s body convulsed violently. Mouthful after mouthful of blood mixed with fragments of his internal organs poured from his lips, staining the carefully tailored research robe across his chest.
Ifreles leaned close to Logaris’s slowly cooling ear, his tone gentle, but every word pierced straight into the soul.
“Your anger is far too cheap. It reeks of the stale blood and weakness of prey.”
“Emotion on this level is not even worthy of the lesser demons in Hell who scrub the toilets.”
“How... boring.”
Logaris’s body shuddered violently, and the light in his eyes began to scatter.
But he did not fall. As if he could not feel that it was a mortal wound at all, he trembled as he raised both hands and clamped them tightly around the burning-hot blade that had pierced his heart.
Riiip—
With no energy protecting him, the flesh of his palms was instantly sliced open by the sharp edge. Blood streamed wildly along the sword and dripped onto the ruins below, each drop landing with a sound that made the heart quake.
With great difficulty, Logaris lifted his head.
Those pale blue eyes, usually hidden behind his lenses and always so calm and rational, were now locked stubbornly, unyieldingly, on Ifreles.
One second. Two seconds.
Gradually, the light inside those pale blue pupils began to fade. The last glimmer that signified life at the bottom of his eyes went out completely.
And yet he remained standing, like a statue that refused to close its eyes in death, both hands still clenched around the blade.
“Is it over?”
Looking into those unfocused eyes, Ifreles revealed a bored, disappointed expression. “So this is your limit? How... disappointing.”
He shook his head, took hold of the hilt, and casually pulled backward, intending to withdraw the sword and put an end to this tedious farce.
It did not move at all.
Ifreles’s brow lifted slightly in surprise. The muscles in his arm tensed as he put in more force.
It still did not move.
It was as though the sword were not lodged inside a corpse, but had been cast into the very foundation of the world itself and locked in place by some irresistible law.
A strange sense of wrongness crept into Ifreles’s heart.
“Hm?”
At last, he dropped that carefree expression and lowered his eyes to where the two of them were joined.
At that very moment—
THUD—!
A deep, heavy impact exploded between heaven and earth without the slightest warning.
Violent. Oppressive. Like the very first pulse of some ancient primordial beast stirring awake.
Ifreles’s pupils shrank violently. He looked down at his own hand in shock.
The blood of Logaris splashed across the back of his hand and running down the hilt between his fingers suddenly erupted into a bizarre flame of black and crimson, as if it were some impossibly potent accelerant set alight.
“This is...?”
Sizzle—!
A sharp pain shot across the back of Ifreles’s hand. The demonic keratin layer he had always been proud of was melting before that black flame like softened wax.
Worse still, while it burned his flesh, the fire was devouring and distorting the surrounding space along with it.
Flames with spatial properties?!
“Get off me!”
Ifreles roared. It was the instinctive reaction of a living creature facing a natural predator.
He had no choice but to let go of the sword. The whole of his body shot backward dozens of meters as he flung the black fire from his hand with frantic force. He even went so far as to use magic to shave away an entire layer of flesh from the back of his hand.
THUD—!
THUD—!
THUD—!
The heartbeat grew faster and faster, louder and louder, like war drums pounding deep within the soul.
Freed from Ifreles’s suppression, the sword lodged in Logaris’s chest began to tremble violently, letting out a strained metallic hum.
The blood pouring from the wound transformed into towering black-red flames. Those flames moved as though alive, wrapping themselves around Logaris’s body.
In the blink of an eye, Logaris was sealed inside a massive sphere of black-red fire, like a cocoon in the middle of hatching.
The surrounding space, unable to bear such power, began letting out cracking sounds of strain. Countless black spatial fissures flickered in and out of existence around the flaming sphere.
BOOM!!!
A vast aura, impossible to imagine in magnitude, ancient and noble and filled with absolute arrogance, erupted from the depths of the sphere and shot straight into the sky.
“ROAR...!!!”
A nonhuman howl came from inside the flaming sphere.
Then, accompanied by the horrifying crack and pop of bones breaking and reforming, the cocoon of flame exploded apart.
Logaris’s figure reappeared.
But the elegant and refined human body he had once possessed was gone.
Within the flames, his body swelled violently and stretched upward, surpassing two meters in the span of a breath.
His once pale skin rapidly hardened, layering over with a dark, cold surface like obsidian—smooth, solid, and inhuman.
Beneath that hard black shell, lines of scorching red energy spread madly across his body like molten magma, as though they meant to ignite the entire vessel from within.
Crack!
The rimless glasses on the bridge of his nose were reduced to dust. When those tightly shut eyes opened again, the pale blue that had once symbolized reason was nowhere to be seen.
In its place were two roiling pools of crimson blood.
Savage. Mad. Cold. Lofty beyond reach.
Not a trace of human feeling remained.
The skin on the right side of his forehead split apart, and a jagged, twisted black horn slowly pushed its way out, pointing toward the heavens. With a tearing burst, liquefied magic forced its way through the clothes on his back and surged outward, condensing into two pairs of tattered Aether wings in midair.
The sword that had pierced his heart was now slowly being forced outward by freshly grown muscle and bone from within his chest, until it finally clattered to the ground. As for that horrifying wound through his torso, the churning magma-like patterns filled it in and healed it within the span of a few breaths.
“Hah... hahahaha!”
Seeing the shocking transformation before him, Ifreles was stunned for an instant. Then a wildly ecstatic laugh spread across his face—the excitement of a hunter finally beholding the legendary prey he had always dreamed of.
“That nauseating aura of arrogance... it really is you! The bloodline of Astaroth! Yes! This is it! This is the scene I was waiting for!”
Ifreles did not bother picking up the sword that had fallen. Instead, his figure flashed, and with a sonic boom he appeared before Logaris in an instant.
“Let me see what you’re worth now!”
A punch powerful enough to shatter mountains, wrapped in dark red hellfire, smashed straight toward Logaris’s face.
Even with the physical strength Logaris had now, there was no way he could withstand that blow head-on.
But at the very instant the fist was about to touch the tip of his nose—
Hummm—
Logaris’s body suddenly flickered strangely, like a hologram with a bad signal.
【Void Phase · Attunement】
Ifreles’s fist passed straight through Logaris’s head without the slightest resistance, as though it had punched through a mass of black smoke. That feeling of throwing his full strength into empty air caused Ifreles’s movement to falter for an instant.
At the same time, from within Logaris’s “insubstantial” body came a low chant in an obscure, ancient, malicious language:
“‘Ash'talo... Kree...’” (Demonic Tongue)
The black smoke instantly solidified behind him. Logaris raised his right hand, now covered in obsidian claws, and slashed through empty air toward Ifreles’s completely exposed back.
Riiip!
A black dimensional fissure appeared out of nowhere, like the scythe of death. In an instant, it cut through the hard keratin on Ifreles’s back, opening a wound so deep the bone beneath was visible, and blood burst outward.
“High Demonic Tongue?! You’re chanting True Speech?!”
After being struck, Ifreles instantly pulled back and opened the distance between them. He stared at the half-demonized young man before him in utter disbelief, the shock in his heart even outweighing the pain.
This was the mortal world, the Prime Material Plane, protected by strict and inviolable laws. As an outsider, the body Ifreles currently inhabited was under constant rejection and suppression from the rules of the world itself. He could not even fully release his Demonic Form, let alone chant an ancient High Demonic Tongue capable of directly prying open the laws of reality.
And yet this half-blood brat was chanting the language of Hell without restraint in the mortal world?
And the laws of the world were acting as though they saw nothing at all?!