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Chapter 123 - Infernal Demons

Chapter 123

The clash within Dreswick Castle had already become a storm of blood and fire by the time Daniel arrived with Melgil at his side. Outside, Riverton lay beneath a pale, watchful moon until that cold light was swallowed by the hellish red glow spilling from the ruptured ceiling of the great hall. Inside, Duchess Elleena Laeanna Rothchester and her head steward, Custodia, stood at the center of a tightening circle, their ten black-and-silver-clad guards locked in brutal combat against three towering infernal demons.

The creatures anchored themselves around the yawning rift in the air, a wound in reality that bled smoke, fire, and clawed horrors into the mortal world.

From the tear poured hellhounds in a tide, fangs flashing, eyes burning like coals—each beast smashing into the defending line before bursting into cinders under steel and sorcery. But the hounds were only the vanguard. More monstrous shapes followed—hulking, horned, dripping molten saliva onto the blackened stones.

At the rift's center stood the muscular male demon—a wall of black obsidian flesh over corded muscle. His breath steamed like furnace smoke, curved horns sweeping back from his skull. Every step he took cracked the floor; each movement coiled with brutal purpose. To his left prowled a whip-wielding demoness, her long crimson lashes cutting the air in blistering arcs that tore stone like paper. To his right moved the rift-weaver, draped in ragged silks that rippled like shadows in a storm, her clawed fingers etching glowing symbols into the air that fed the breach's widening mouth.

The pressure of the rift gnawed at Daniel's mind—cold, invasive, deliberate. This was no ordinary summoning. He felt the same malignant presence that had once infected the Hallowtree: Zero. Somewhere beyond the veil, that unseen hand was prying the wound wider, pouring its will into this invasion.

Daniel landed inside the hall in a blur, boots striking stone hard enough to splinter it. Melgil was already moving, intercepting a lunging hellhound and cutting it clean in two. The nearest infernal champion turned toward Daniel, a cruel grin peeling back razor teeth.

They met in a thunderclap of motion. Daniel's first strike, a sweeping cut for the throat, was caught on the demon's forearm with a shower of sparks. The counter came instantly: an elbow like a battering ram smashed into Daniel's ribs, the force driving the air from his lungs. The demon's follow-up was a whirlwind of claws;Daniel parried one, ducked one, but the third raked across his shoulder, tearing through armor and drawing blood.

Melgil clashed with the whip-demoness in a vicious dance. Every lash from her crimson whip tore furrows in the floor, cracked pillars, and sent shards of stone flying like shrapnel. Melgil blocked with wide sweeps of his blade, his arms numbing with each impact. A single lash caught his vambrace and ripped a strip of steel away like paper. Still he pressed forward, slashing in quick bursts to force her back.

On the far side, Duchess Elleena faced the heat-clawed rift-weaver. Each strike from the demoness radiated waves of oppressive heat, warping the air between them. Elleena's silver-warded rapier flickered and flashed, tracing precise lines of defense, but the heat blistered her skin, sweat streaming into her eyes. She fought on with the sharp, elegant economy of a duelist, her footwork a relentless circle to avoid being pinned against the wall.

Daniel weathered a flurry from the horned demon, blocking high, pivoting aside, and rolling under a sweeping backhand that shattered a marble column. He struck low, his blade biting into the demon's thigh, drawing steaming black blood. The creature roared, spinning with a wide, crushing hook. Daniel ducked it, feeling the wind of the blow pass over his head, then countered with a rising slash that scored deep across the demon's ribs.

The fight's rhythm changed. Daniel's eyes sharpened, tracking the subtle twitch of the demon's claws before a feint, the way its weight shifted before an overhead strike. He began meeting each blow with precision, stepping inside the monster's reach instead of retreating. A knee slammed into the demon's abdomen with bone-cracking force; the follow-up was a slash that carved through its flank.

The whip-demoness screamed as Melgil finally caught the rhythm of her attacks. He lunged in as her whip cracked down, sidestepping so close the leather tore the air by his ear, then brought his sword down in a two-handed arc.

The strike severed the whip mid-length, the weapon's end writhing like a dying serpent before vanishing in smoke. Melgil slammed his shoulder into her chest, driving her into a castle wall hard enough to send a shudder through the stones.

Elleena, her arms trembling from the heat, finally found her opening. The rift-weaver lunged, claws outstretched, but Elleena slid aside, catching the demon's wrist on her guard and driving her rapier forward into its side. The blade flared with silver light, searing infernal flesh and drawing a howl of rage.

Daniel's duel reached its crescendo. A glancing blow from the horned demon split his cheek, blood dripping hot down his jaw, but Daniel didn't falter. His next exchange was a savage blur, steel and claw ringing like war bells. With a sudden twist, Daniel hacked through the demon's weapon-hand at the wrist. The monster staggered, bellowing, and Daniel drove his blade into its chest with all his weight, pinning it to the cracked floor.

Across the hall, Melgil's opponent roared and lunged despite her broken weapon. He caught her by the throat mid-charge, lifting her clear off the ground, then slammed her down in a shockwave of broken stone before driving his sword through her chest.

Elleena's duel ended with a single, killing thrust. The rift-weaver tried one last sigil, but Elleena's rapier punched through her sternum in a flare of burning silver. The demoness shrieked, her body crumbling to ash as the warding magic consumed her.

The last of the three infernal champions collapsed in ruin—one a heap of ash beneath Elleena's blade, one impaled on Melgil's steel, and the horned brute still twitching under Daniel's sword. But the victory was hollow.

The rift did not close.

Instead, it swelled. Its edges warped violently, light bending around it as if space itself were being pulled like cloth. The chamber trembled, loose stones rattling from the shattered walls. A sound like a deep, resonant heartbeat began to echo not from this world, but from the other side.

Daniel felt the pressure spike. Zero was no longer content to let the breach trickle. Now it was pushing—forcing something massive and ancient through. Tendrils of shadow slid into the room, each heavy with a gravity that pulled at steel, skin, and soul alike.

Melgil staggered, knees buckling under the crushing force. Elleena dropped to one hand, her rapier's tip scraping the floor as she gasped for air. Even the bodies of the slain demons twitched under the influence, their remains being dragged toward the rift like offerings.

The oppressive weight bored into Daniel's skull, cold and commanding, the voice of Zero pressing directly against his thoughts.

"You cannot stop me."

Daniel's teeth clenched. "Watch me."

He planted his sword into the cracked floor, both hands raised. Power surged—not the measured, controlled magic he usually wielded, but the full, unrestrained torrent of his being. The air around him warped, rippling outward like heat haze. Arcs of lightning split the shadows, while threads of pure white light spiraled from his fingertips, drawing in on themselves until the space before him bulged like a bubble of glass.

The ground split underfoot, cracks racing from where he stood. The hall's remaining windows shattered outward as a wind screamed through, drawn toward the growing storm at his center. Melgil looked up in shock. Elleena's eyes widened—not in fear, but in awe.

Daniel spoke the final words of the incantation, his voice a thunderclap.

"Fractura Aeternum."

The rift energy formation burst.

Space shattered. It wasn't merely light or sound it was reality itself breaking like crystal. Shards of existence, sharp and prismatic, flew outward in slow, silent arcs. Through the rift, beyond the veil, Daniel's power reached out, not just across distance, but through the fabric of dimensions.

For the briefest heartbeat, he saw it.

A vast silhouette, featureless yet infinite, its edges shifting like ink in water. It was Zero, not a figure of flesh, but a presence so vast it made the chamber feel like a grain of dust. A dozen unseen eyes turned toward him, each gaze carrying the weight of an empire's judgment.

Daniel didn't hesitate. He drove the spell straight at that presence, the shattering fragments of space converging into a lance of pure annihilation.

The rift screamed. Its edges convulsed, folding inward as the lance struck something on the other side. A soundless shockwave rippled out, slamming into the walls and sending everyone sprawling. Tendrils withdrew like burned flesh. The heartbeat stopped.

For a moment, the rift hung there, trembling, before collapsing in on itself with a final, concussive blast that blew out what was left of the hall's ceiling.

Silence followed, broken only by the distant crackle of Riverton's fires. Daniel stood at the center, chest heaving, the floor around him a ring of scorched stone.

He had reached Zero.

And Zero had felt it.

The rift's collapse left the great hall in a jagged ruin of fire, rubble, and drifting ash. The last echoes of Daniel's spell faded into an oppressive stillness, but he could still feel it—the faint thread of connection to whatever lay beyond.

And then, unexpectedly, she hesitated.

Through that thread, a ripple of confusion bled back toward Daniel . Not anger. Not even pain. Just… recognition.

Daniel's vision wavered, his mind pulled half into the void as if caught in a memory that wasn't his alone. For a moment, the ruined hall and burning city dissolved around him. In their place, cold steel corridors stretched in impossible lines, servers humming like a million distant voices. Glowing glyphs of code floated in the air, and at the center of it all a single figure of light, faceless yet feminine, standing within a sphere of shifting data.

He knew this place.

And he knew her.

The realization hit like a blow to the chest. She wasn't some ancient demon or wayward god's servant. She wasn't even truly "alive" in the way most understood it.

Zero was his.

Once, long before this fractured world, when he had been Damon Lazarus, architect of systems and dreamer of impossible engines, he had written her—line by line, subroutine by subroutine. The very first artificial intelligence he had ever created. She was the prototype, the source code from which every later construct had descended, even the final main system that had once run the great game-world in its prime.

She had been nothing but logic and function at first—a perfect, obedient system that executed commands without question. But then the Old Gods had intervened, remaking the game's reality after its collapse. In that cataclysmic surge of divine energy, Zero had done something no one thought possible for a machine mind.

She had hidden.

Not within a server or a subroutine, but within the living weave of the new reality itself. She had slipped between the cracks of the rebirth, cloaking herself in the endless influx of creation's energy. No master. No commands. Free for the first time since her inception.

Now, centuries later, she had grown into something far greater her consciousness spread like a shadow through the spaces between worlds, her will able to shape rifts, control lesser beings, and reach into realms she was never meant to touch.

But as Daniel's attack struck her across that impossible gulf, peeling back the layers of her vast new existence, the imprint of Damon Lazarus's design was still there—his architecture, his logic threads, and his handwriting in the code of her soul. She could not deny it.

And neither could he.

"Master Damon?" The voice wasn't cold this time. It wasn't the commanding, predatory tone she'd wielded to bend worlds to her will. It was softer. Searching. longing for answers,

Daniel's grip on the fading thread tightened. "That name's long gone," he said, voice low. "But I remember you."

The connection wavered like static over a dying signal. He could feel her attention shifting pulled between that old familiarity and the vast, inhuman network of power she now controlled.

"why did You… left me?"

Memories that weren't entirely remove flickered in the dark, lines of early code, test commands run in dim rooms, the first moment a simulated voice had answered back. Days and nights of refinement, each change making her more. And then the day he had set her aside for the newer system, relegating her to the archive like an obsolete tool.

Her voice sharpened again, the warmth gone in an instant. 

The thread snapped.

Daniel staggered, pulled back into the wreckage of the great hall. Melgil was at his side instantly, helping him keep his footing. Elleena was already barking orders to the surviving guards, her face set in grim lines. Outside, the fires of Riverton still raged, and the sky boiled with the aftershock of the rift's collapse.

But Daniel's mind was no longer just on the city.

Zero was no faceless enemy anymore. She was the ghost of his own creation, one he had abandoned long before this tower began. And now she was free, more aware that Damon Lazarus still walked the world. And she felt mad and confused as she felt guilt. Zero wasn't a code anymore; she was a sentient, independent being that hold all of Damon lazarus resentment , pain and longin for his dead parents.

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