Agares's expression twisted with fury.
Every strand of her black hair brimmed with Aura, floating as though it possessed a life of its own. With a deep, splitting crack, the ground beneath her feet collapsed another layer. Trenches opened across the earth like a drought-parched rice field, then spread in a spiderweb pattern in the blink of an eye.
"Mountain Faction, you damn monkey children."
The beautiful Demon Lord was gone. In her place stood a wrathful fiend.
"How dare you confuse where you should and shouldn't meddle."
Even the Demon Lords who had surrounded Agares gasped and held their breath at the Aura radiating from her. Their bodies went numb, tingling as though struck by paralysis. Every single one of them was a Demon Lord who had honed their life on the battlefield for over three hundred years. Even they found themselves choking under the pressure.
Wasn't this far too overwhelming? They could hardly believe that the Demon Lord standing before them was of the same race. She appeared as something entirely different—an entirely different order of being. Now they understood why she had so brazenly declared herself the one and only true Demon Lord.
And yet, there was one person who charged straight toward that overwhelming power.
"——Before the Colossus that stands before us, I swear an oath."
The eighth-ranked Demon Lord, Barbatos. She became a streak of light and surged forward.
Her great scythe scattered black Mana and plunged straight toward the space between Agares' brows. But just a centimeter short of its mark, the scythe struck something and came to a dead halt. Agares' entire body was cloaked in Aura, and it had blocked the blow completely.
To stop an attack with nothing but raw, unadorned Aura—no technique, no finesse. Barbatos' lips curled at the sheer brute force of it, but she kept chanting her spell without pause.
"I pledge loyalty, I pledge blood, I pledge a war that thirsts ceaselessly."
"You worthless piece of fly shit!"
Agares roared in fury and swung her halberd down.
A sharp clang—the halberd was blocked. Seven great swords erupted from Barbatos's shadow to defend against the strike. Six of them shattered into fragments. But the last remaining sword managed to hold.
The incantation continued to pour from Barbatos's small mouth.
"I shall serve as hound to a kingdom without peer. As an eagle soaring through tempest and thunder, I shall prophesy and take flight."
"Barbatos!"
Agares unleashed attacks without rest, like a storm. Each time, great black swords surged from the shadows.
Had any being of higher repose witnessed the battle, they would have marveled — and been horrified — at a duel of extraordinarily elevated caliber.
One side wielded overwhelming might. It struck down with the force to crush all things. Without any finesse required, it simply became a tempest and ravaged forward — no different from a natural disaster. "One-person army" was the word made for her.
The other side, by contrast — pure finesse.
Once, Barbatos had been a warrior. She had roamed the battlefield relying on nothing but a single blade. It was to resurrect her fallen subordinates that she had taken up dark magic, making her the world's only one of her kind: a warrior who was also a dark mage.
She raised her battle scythe and clashed directly with her opponent.
Her limbs never ceased moving the weapons. Through it all, magic incantations flowed ceaselessly through the gaps in her lips. Spells unfolded that dulled her opponent's movements, blurred their vision, made them misjudge their balance, and conjured illusions before their eyes.
Escorting this dark-mage warrior were hundreds of familiars — each one a Death Knight, counted among the most elite forces.
The Death Knights intercepted spear strikes aimed at their master. Agares's attacks overturned the earth, but the Death Knights stood as an unyielding wall and held the line. There, defended by a warrior, a mage, and knights alike, stood one colossal fortress.
The duel between the one-person army and the one-person fortress escalated to determine which was truly suited to be the stronger — and then —
The two Demon Lords elevated their duel into the realm of battle. And beyond that, into the realm of war.
"You fly-specked whelp! Fight with your own strength!"
"This is 'me,' Agares."
Barbatos's entire body was drenched in sweat.
The white strands of hair on her forehead clung to her skin with perspiration. She was burning through every last drop of her remaining mana. As mana was consumed at an excessively rapid pace, her heart — her entire body — screamed in protest.
Barbatos forced a strained smile.
'You little bastard Dantalion!'
Just before entering battle, Barbatos had communicated with Dantalion. Through images projected in a crystal ball, Dantalion had said he'd "prepared a small gift so she could win this time." That was precisely where Dantalion was honest.
He might lie, but he never spoke empty words.
'This sure as hell isn't a "small gift," you son of a bitch!'
She had managed to drag the Mountain Faction in as reinforcements, though she couldn't say what method she'd used. What's more, the one leading those reinforcements was Sitri, ranked twelfth among the Demon Lords—the most powerful warrior in the Mountain Faction. Sitri's forces would undoubtedly crush Agares's army in a pincer attack.
Barbatos had to buy time until then.
Barbatos instinctively understood her role.
Until now, she had been conserving her mana. She had never expended more than half of it. In her estimation, the only way to win this civil war was to drag it out over a long campaign. She planned to whittle down Agares's army gradually through six, seven battles.
But the moment she spotted Sitri's banner, Barbatos burned every last drop of mana. The long-campaign plan went straight into the trash. She could feel it in her gut—this was the decisive moment, and she had to pour everything she had into it.
"You filthy half-breed, even the way you struggle is nauseating!"
Agares roared.
"So this is your way—a king cowering behind subordinates to preserve her own life and safety! Is this what it means to be master of ten thousand demons?! You wave your sword without even a shred of shame or disgrace! Barbatos—you are the one defiling the name of a Demon Lord!"
A tempest of attacks rained down. Blow after blow, enough to kill the wielder of a single strike, swept through dozens, hundreds of times in succession.
Barbatos took one step forward into the heart of that storm.
"Let me correct your misconception, Agares."
The greatswords shattered miserably under Agares's assault.
Clang, clang—the sound of metal on metal rang out like a thunderstorm. Steel fragments bursting from the broken greatswords tore across Barbatos's cheek. Blood splattered. Yet the smile on her lips didn't falter.
"I'm not surrounded by subordinates."
Barbatos swung her great scythe upward. She had read the timing perfectly and struck with everything she had, yet Agares blocked it with absurd ease. The scythe bounced off his aura. Even so, Barbatos—as though she had expected exactly that—took another step forward.
"They're the ones 'following behind' me."
Agares swung his halberd.
"Oh, so you're playing mother hen now? How laughable. A Demon Lord is one who brings about ruin! One who harvests a terror no one can resist and no one can defy through a strength no one can match! A Demon Lord needs no subordinates—only overwhelming power!"
"No."
Six greatswords moved to block his path. They failed to stop the halberd entirely. But Barbatos caught the weakened strike with her great scythe—the attack had lost its force from having to break through six greatswords first.
Barbatos burned through her last remaining mana.
One step. She took another.
"A king is simply one who walks one step ahead of everyone else."
The Death Knights guarding her from the shadows were all her comrades. They remained by her side even after death. They had sworn never to stop fighting until the day their ideals were realized. Barbatos and they were one.
That was why the single step Barbatos took was more than just a single step.
She wished for the day when the Demonkin could live singing songs of peace. She wished for the day when a nation would come where fathers didn't have to sell their sons, and mothers didn't have to sell their daughters. — It was the footsteps of everyone who had entrusted their lives, their deaths, and everything beyond to a girl named Barbatos.
"The path does not remain a mere footpath, but shall one day become the road upon which all walk. I am unique, yet I am not alone."
Barbatos swung her great scythe upward.
"That is the path a king walks, Agares!"
The moment the halberd moved to block it, the greatswords from the shadows — until now purely on the defensive — surged forward offensively for the first time. Eighteen greatswords drove their tips toward Agares all at once.
Agares did not falter.
He spun the halberd like a windmill, deflecting ten sword strikes in a single sweep. He knocked one greatsword aside with his elbow, twisted his body to dodge two more, and the remaining five strikes were pushed off-course by the wind pressure. It was movement bordering on the supernatural.
But the greatswords had merely cleared a path for their lord.
The black great scythe carved through the air with a vicious hiss. It screamed upward from below with a piercing whistle, racing through the single corridor that eighteen greatswords had barely opened.
*Shk.*
Blood sprayed through the air. Something was severed from a body, drifting through the void for a brief moment before losing its force and falling to the ground.
"..."
Agares scowled, looking down at it.
There lay his left ear, drenched in red blood.
For the past two thousand years, no one had managed to wound Agares's body. The tip of a blade had never even grazed his skin. Facing the first wound he had received in thousands of years, Agares found it utterly alien.
Slowly.
As the realization of what it felt like to be wounded sank in, Agares's expression slowly twisted.
"You... you mongrel bastard."
"Now that's a face worth looking at."
Barbatos grinned through ragged breaths. She spread her middle and ring fingers apart — the gesture that told someone to go shove it.
"That suits you just fine — the face of a defeated cur, you one-eared wench."
"————————!"
Agares roared.
It was a roar that no beast could replicate. She raged with the fury of a god striking down the mortal who had dared to wound her. The earth and air trembled. The sound was so violent that even the monsters fighting far in the distance turned their heads in shock.
Dark crimson Aura erupted like a volcano.
The shockwave from the exploding Aura swept across the battlefield with ease. Goblins were lifted off their feet by the blast, while Orcs had to raise their arms to shield themselves from the wind. Agares, now reduced to a wild beast, charged at Barbatos.
Then eight Demon Lords of the Plains Faction, led by Beleth, intervened. The Demon Lords coordinated with practiced ease as they withstood Agares's onslaught. In the midst of a torrent of attacks that could decapitate them with the slightest misstep, Beleth laughed fearlessly.
"I'm afraid you'll have to play with me, Agares."
"GRAAAH! Get out of my way, runt!"
"That won't do. I may not know much, but I always repay what I owe. You took my arm three times, so you'll have to sacrifice three of yours in return!"
That day, the Plains Faction held the line against the one-man army known as Agares until the very end.
Agares, who could only be barely stopped once nine Demon Lords swarmed him, was truly terrifying. But while Agares was pinned down, Demon Lord Zepar of the Plains Faction and Demon Lord Sitri of the Mountain Faction launched a coordinated assault on the enemy forces.
The battle between Agares and the Demon Lords ended in a draw, but the war between armies brought Agares defeat. Agares retreated, weeping blood, screaming that he would break Barbatos's neck — you bitch, just you wait.
The one called the most powerful Demon Lord was defeated just like that.