The banquet at the Drake Estate had not yet concluded. The air was thick with the copper tang of blood from Victor's crippling and the suppressed, jagged gasps of the social elite.
Alex stood in the center of the hall, the lingering warmth of stripped talent still pulsing at his fingertips. Surveying the terrified, contorted faces around him, a morbid sense of satisfaction surged through his chest—this sensation of controlling the destinies of others was more addictive than any poison. He even allowed himself to imagine that after tonight, all the high-level resources of the North District would bear his name.
However, this flash of presumptive euphoria lasted only three seconds.
A deafening roar erupted from the far north, powerful enough to shatter eardrums. The estate's priceless crystal chandelier disintegrated instantly. The earth shuddered in terror, followed by a pillar of crimson light, so thick it bordered on black, piercing the night sky. In an instant, the city's opulence was drowned in a sea of blood-red.
"The Red Gate..." Screams of pure despair broke out among the crowd. "It's the Abyss Gate in the North District! An S-Rank Calamity has descended!"
The power players, who moments ago were immersed in the drama of political succession, instantly lost all semblance of dignity. They shoved and trampled one another, clawing toward the exits. Alex remained where he stood, letting shards of falling crystal lace his cheeks with blood. He stared fixedly at the crimson horizon as God's Eye let out an unprecedented, shrill shriek within his vision.
[Vision Monitored: Energy levels immeasurable.]
[Attribute Determination: Destruction, Annihilation, Infinite Resources.]
"Jack, get the truck! We're going North!" Alex roared into his comms, his voice laced with a frantic, near-maniacal greed.
"Alex, are you insane? That's S-Rank!" Old Jack screamed back through the channel.
"Every powerhouse is fleeing South! That means no one is there to claim the 'corpses' in the North!" Alex shoved through the chaotic crowd and sprinted into the night. "That's the largest junkyard in the city! That's mine!"
Fifteen minutes later.
The modified truck slammed through the North District's perimeter fence, its tires dragging charred streaks of soot across the scorched asphalt. Standing in the truck bed, Alex wasn't hit by air, but by a wall of concentrated sulfur hot enough to sear his lungs.
He looked up at the city center, and his pupils shriveled into pinpricks.
It wasn't a "creature." It was a thirty-meter-tall pillar of shadow standing amidst the ruins, its very existence defying the laws of physics. With every breath the Archdemon took, the surrounding space warped like low-quality glass under extreme heat, emitting a teeth-grinding crunch.
It slowly swung a rusted blade that seemed to span the width of an entire street.
There was no sound of impact. No explosion.
Alex watched as an entire row of reinforced bank buildings, upon contact with that dark red ripple, didn't "collapse"—they molecularized from the inside out. Steel and concrete sublimated directly into gray ash; not a single intact brick remained. The oxygen in the air was instantly sucked dry, creating a massive vacuum pressure differential as the surrounding wreckage was violently pulled into that black center of annihilation.
[Vision Feedback: Environmental elements disintegrating. This area has been flagged as a 'Causal Void Zone'.]
A squad of fully-equipped "Platinum-Rank" Hunters attempted a flanking interception. Expensive magic shields rippled across their bodies; their Saint-Silver claymores drank in the moonlight.
The Archdemon didn't even turn its head.
It simply took one light step forward.
A ring of invisible demonic pressure erupted. Alex watched as those Platinum Hunters, along with armor thick enough to withstand missiles, shriveled and twisted in less than a tenth of a second. They were squeezed like overripe tomatoes, their blood mist and shattered organs vaporizing instantly into a cloud of primordial atoms.
There wasn't even time for a scream; their vocal cords had ceased to exist before they could vibrate.
"No... that's mine... that's my mine!"
Alex's eyes nearly burst from their sockets. He watched as the high-tier mana cores and the talent dregs of the fallen—things that should have belonged to him—were wiped away like dust by the Archdemon. This wasn't a battle; it was a janitor sweeping a floor. This tyranny, which refused to leave him even the "ashes," detonated the madness and greed buried deep in his bones.
He ripped open the heavy obsidian chest at his back.
"Attribute Alchemy—Full-Power Sacrifice!"
He plunged both hands directly into the white vortex spinning violently within. The talents stripped at the banquet, every spiritual elixir he had hoarded, even the vital essence of his own right arm—everything was cast in as fuel for this ultimate gamble.
A spear of pure white, throbbing with the fires of ruin, materialized in the void. The air around it cracked with tiny black spatial fissures, unable to contain the sheer compressed energy.
"Get... out of my territory!!"
Alex bellowed, his muscles rupturing into a mess of bloody gashes from the overload. The White-Fire Spear, carrying every scrap of his life's savings, transformed into a resolute streak of light that cut through a thousand meters of smoke and slammed into the Archdemon's chest.
The white light in an instant suppressed the crimson, forcefully erasing the shadows of the entire city.
Dust hung in a radial pattern at the moment of the blast; sparks stayed suspended in mid-air. On the Archdemon's scales—armor that looked as if it belonged to an ancient god—a tiny crack, less than five centimeters long, finally splintered open.
But that was all.
The Archdemon lowered its head. Those eyes, burning with hellfire that seemed capable of piercing the soul, locked onto this noisy "insect" in the ruins for the first time.
It didn't even use its weapon. It simply raised a single foot over the crumbling clock tower.
In that instant, Alex felt as if the entire sky had collapsed.
The atmosphere was compressed into a physical wall; gravity was magnified a hundredfold. The base of the clock tower beneath him pulverized instantly, its massive stone pillars snapping like straw. Alex desperately thrust out his [Void Hand], trying to snatch even a sliver of a defensive attribute, but in the face of this power level, the concept of "attributes" had vanished from space itself.
The moment the air-wave hit, Alex's left arm—the one he used to brace himself—was like sugarcane shoved through a heavy-duty hydraulic press. The sound of shattering bone condensed into a single pop. The entire limb exploded into a mist of crimson gore; not even a splinter of bone remained.
The violent shockwave sent him flying like a broken kite for hundreds of meters, slamming him into the foul, freezing sewage of the gutters, slick with the blood of the dead.
He had lost. He had lost everything down to his very skin.
As the Archdemon stepped closer to deliver the final blow, a barrage of long-range missiles from the government forces finally blanketed the battlefield.
"Don't you dare die... you haven't taken me into the Inner City yet, you bastard!"
In the filth, Old Jack emerged covered in blood, death-gripping Alex's remaining right hand.
By now, Alex was nothing more than a charred piece of meat, his consciousness a blurred haze. Only his remaining right hand, with fingernails torn completely off, was still deathly locked onto a small, pulsing piece of dark-red tissue he had gouged out of the crack in the demon's armor.
Just like that, like a dead dog, he was dragged by Old Jack into the deepest shadows of the underground.