Alma 85 The Demon Lord and His Wife

They, who had been compelled to destroy by their masters, had become nothing more than twisted shadows of their former selves.

Beings who no longer possessed a soul and were, as a result, without a will of their own. Eternal slaves and soldiers, forever damned to crusade against the sum of all that would and could ever exist.

There was no greater torment than this — becoming the bane of existence.

To be denied the sweet mercy of death, only to become an abomination and servant for the same entity that tore apart your entire universe.

Unbound from the concept of death, they would continue to persist for as long as their eldritch masters did. Resurrected again and again until their terrible job was done…

Reed detested the Infested down to the core but understood that they were no more than puppets serving a greater will. The more he learned about them from the hooded man, the clearer it all became for him.

It was different now.

He looked past his irrational hatred for the Infested and had honed in on what really angered him about them. What he really hated about them was the… arrogance. Not of the Infested, but of their masters. 

The condescending attitude as if their victory had been assured from the very beginning.

That it was meaningless to resist. That they would, in the end, win.

It was an irritating kind of confidence that could have only been born from winning a countless amount of times.

The Outsiders were not worried at all. To them, this was just another multiverse on their list. Nothing more. They had dismantled countless other realities — too many to count — and would do the same for the one Reed called home.

In the face of an almighty presence, older and wiser than all in creation, what did the futile struggle of two microscopic bacterium mean to it?

Has a human being ever been specifically concerned with the actions of two bacterium on a paper napkin? So tiny and insignificant that they could not even be seen with the naked eye?

Pointless. Utterly pointless.

Bacteria, the single-celled organisms that they were, could not be reasoned with. They would mindlessly follow their primitive instincts until the very end...

The sprawling firestorm that Reed and Lu'um had summoned was working, but it was quickly losing effect.

A seven kilometer-sized storm of pure fire turned everything it touched into ash but there too many of them. Tens of thousands of Infested poured into the firestorm during the beginning but now…

There were hundreds of thousands of them, crawling over each other as they forced themselves into the shrinking tear. They were flooding into the tear at an exponential rate, far more than the massive firestorm could handle.

It was being snuffed out through by the Infested through sheer numbers. They were forcing themselves through the inferno by using the corpses and sometimes their living compatriots as shields from the flames.

Millions of corpses piled onto each other and formed a wall of rotting, charred flesh and bone as the Infested pushed through a raging hellscape to reach them. They would stop at nothing until the job was done.

"What do we do?! They're going to break through! Shiiit!" said Reed. He gathered Anima and poured as much of it as he could into the firestorm but he knew that it was only delaying the inevitable.

They would break through soon enough and then… shit would really hit the fan.

If millions Infested tore through the void onto the continent, it'd spell the end of Mulia. In less than an hour, they'd wipe the entire place clean of life.

Hundreds of millions would die if they did not find a solution with in the next couple of minutes…

God-fucking-dammit! Need a solution fast! Now! Come on, think! THINK!

Lu'um stared at the slowly closing hole and bit her thumb in frustration. She nervously tapped her left heel and said, "There's no time… By the time the tear heals itself, it'll be too late. And I can't use my full strength here. The last thing we want to do is make the hole even bigger than before."

"Then what do we do?! We can't just wait! Look at THEM! They're about to break through!!"

They were inching closer and closer toward the edge of the firestorm. Their delighted laughter echoed even louder than before... as if they were enjoying the little show that the pair had put for them.

Soon their terrible work would commence and they would make all of Mulia suffer.

Lu'um stared at the closing hole and said, "We have to close it now — force it shut, ourselves!"

"Do you know to do that?! Because I sure as hell don't!"

"Yes, but I will need to dedicate my attention to fixing it. …You understand what that means, right? And I can't repair from it here either; I'm going to need to reach the hole itself before I can begin…"

Reed took a long, deep breath and nodded in acknowledgment.

"I will help you push back the horde up until we reach the hole, but then it'll fall on you to hold them back after that. Do you understand? We will only have one opportunity to do this, am I clear? If we fail…"

"We won't."

Reed would not permit himself to fail. Not here. He was partly to blame for the disaster and had put an innumerable amount of lives at stake.

It wasn't as if he wanted to be a hero or anything. In fact, this couldn't even be called an act of heroism.

Cleaning the mess you made wasn't heroic in the slightest. It just meant that you had weren't a mannerless piece of garbage.

He was simply owning up to what he had done. Other people — innocent people were now caught in the middle of his monumental fuck-up. That, he could not stand.

People should take responsibility for their actions. It is only natural to do so.

Lacrima, I'm going to need your help once we get to the hole.

"Naturally. But what are you planning on doing, boy? How are you going to hold them off?"

You'll see... But for now, help me out with the push to the hole. I need more Anima. A lot of it. 

Reed stared the ever-growing, laughing horde of abominations and said, "Let's get this show on the road, then."

Lu'um gathered Anima around herself and said, "Follow my lead and stay close. I'll take care of the front of the horde; you take care of the stragglers on the sides. The firestorm will take care of the remaining scraps, so don't get too focused on clearing them all out."

"Just keep pushing forward and don't stop until we get to the hole."

Reed nodded and gathered as much Anima as he could handle and said, "Making me play second fiddle, eh? That's fine, too."

Lu'um shook her head and said, "You're going to need to preserve as much strength as you can — that's why I'm taking the lead. I can't have you gassing out on me at the finish line…"

She quickly gathered a considerable amount of Anima, enough to have reached Reed's limit twice over, and then fashioned it into what she needed the most.

Reed stepped back a couple of feet when he saw she had created.

Two enormous serpents wreathed in burning feathers formed out of Anima and coiled around the pair like guardians. They hissed out tongues of flames at the Infested and slowly bowed when they in front of Reed and Lu'um. 

They were both at the very least, taller than the firestorm itself. At minimum eight kilometers in height when they stood up, so to speak. But in reality, their true length was probably triple that conservative figure.

Lu'um grabbed Reed and put him atop of one the serpents and said, "I will carve out the main path with them while you take care of the sides. And don't worry, they don't bite… well, usually."

"..."

"That was a joke, Ka'an."

"...Right."

Lu'um rolled her eyes and then gave the command. The two serpents charged into the inferno head first and began their work. Superheated flames flew out of the serpents they doused the screeching horde into ash. They also used their massive tails to pound the mountains of Infested into a fine paste as they pushed themselves into the heart of the swarm.

Reed, on the other hand, had summoned an endless rain of meteors — infused with highly condensed Anima. As soon as they crashed into the Infested swarm, they exploded and vaporized everything in a hundred-meter range. Thousands of terrifying meteors flew down upon the Infested as Reed carpet-bombed the ever-loving hell out of everything on the sides.

The screams, explosions, and flames painted as an incredibly beautiful portrait of carnage. It was as if the demon lord and his wife had descended upon hell itself to judge the damned.

It was a spine-chilling scene to behold as the pair tore through the Infested horde. It would have taken two fleets for the Mulian military to have accomplished what the pair had done.

That was how terrifying they were when they worked together...

Chapter end