THE VILLAIN'S POV

Chapter 648: The Key of Darkness (1)

The long-awaited battle .. between the strongest champion Earth could muster and the Tenth-High demon ..was over.

And what an ending no one could have predicted.

It felt almost like a mirage, as if the fight had never happened at all... for no one knew what Frey Starlight had faced, nor what kind of foe he had met head-on. But the sky would forever stand as witness to that night.

The moon, constant for thousands of years, had changed .. its great mass cleaved by a final Nameless Judgement, the greatest stroke ever unleashed by Frey Starlight’s blade. Shards of ruin drifted around it; the two sundered halves hovered close, yet everyone knew they would never be one again.

Likewise, the world would not return to what it had been before that battle.

Across the Ultrass continent, clouds gathered anew after being scattered by Frey and Zibar’s blows. Now that the fighting had ended, it was only a matter of time before rain came down harder than before.

In a crater the size of Belgrad itself, Frey Starlight lay unconscious, having spent everything and suffered through it all once more. The Dark Sister had fallen beside him, while Balerion ..that great black sword had lost its shape as well, fused to Frey’s arm in the form of a black armored gauntlet: a demonic hand, as if it belonged to some ancient, unknown creature.

At the crater’s rim, a woman stepped from nothing, rain beading and rolling off her elegant hat.

”Zibar has been defeated,” Beatrice said, her face devoid of expression. ”Even if that was only half the power of a Tenth-Throne great demon, it doesn’t change the fact: he was defeated.”

What had happened had exceeded even the witch’s expectations by leagues. In truth, she could no longer claim to foresee events at all. She had never imagined Zibar would disobey Wesker and enter the war himself. When he did, Beatrice assumed Frey and his companions were doomed—unless the shadowed powers backing them chose to intervene.

Reality proved otherwise. At the end of the battle she had witnessed, with her own eyes, the manifestation of a being she had believed dead long ago.

”I’ve seen Frey Starlight don the mask before, and I took him for a cheap imitation .. an echo unworthy of attention. I was wrong.”

That power... that pressure and dreadful aura she had felt...

Beatrice had never stood before the true Nameless; someone like her would die just by drawing near, given the gulf between their powers. Yet she could still affirm that, if only for a few fleeting moments, Frey Starlight had become Nameless.

”That’s why Wesker is obsessed with him... and why the King showed interest in this world despite his torpor and his loss of interest in all else,” she said quietly, lifting her gaze to the moon Frey’s blade had carved.

In those brief moments, Beatrice recalled what Wesker had once told her. She had always wondered why the Upper Fourth Wesker .. didn’t simply kill Frey. The answer was that he never wanted Frey dead at all .. he wanted him alive. The reason was finally clear.

”After the final battle between the Demon King Agaroth and the shrouded warrior Nameless, the King prevailed, and Nameless fell,” she murmured.

”But in his last moments, Nameless did something... something born of a power that toyed with life and death and broke every law. In that domain, he stood far above Agaroth.”

Exploiting that uncanny mastery, Nameless conjured a phenomenon no creature has since understood. Though he lost, a strange working took shape at the battle’s end, and Agaroth’s soul was bound in chains of abyssal strength. With the wounds he had taken fighting Nameless, the King could not repel that sorcery.

Nameless manipulated souls better than anyone .. better even than Maskith.

Knowing he would lose after clashing with Agaroth time and again, he devised that mad plan. He could move souls into vessels. That was what he tried to do with Agaroth. Yet the King’s power was too vast; there was no vessel capable of holding him.

So Nameless made Helmond—the demons’ world itself—into Agaroth’s vessel, his prison. A prison that held him for a very long time, sparing the rest of existence from his horrors for a while.

That battle marked the beginning of the King’s isolation.

Few knew the truth; even now, many remain ignorant of why Agaroth withdrew. But it didn’t happen without cause .. his final rival was the direct reason.

Agaroth, the Demon King who conquered the world and fought without end, who crushed its titans and claimed the summit, became a prisoner of the very ground where he began.

The blow was so great that the First Seat, Crimson the Red Moon, in his fury, wrought calamities. Yet contrary to expectation, Agaroth did not rage .. he accepted it, and remained in Helmond of his own accord for years upon years, quiet and absent from the field.

Among his followers, reactions split. The First Seat, Crimson the Red Moon, cast down his spear and secluded himself in Helmond as well, remaining by his King’s side as guardian of the heights Agaroth occupied.

Crimson was fearsome in his own right—many likened him to Agaroth himself. Even he laid down his weapon after that last battle between his King and Nameless.

The other High Seats differed. The Second, Agares, and the Third, Vaine, acted on their whims, heedless of their kin. The demon ranks fractured between the power centers of the Fourth, Wesker, and the Fifth, Marvas. A fair number also rallied to the Dukes of Hell, beasts whose might rivals that of the Ten High Seats.

Among them was Gael, the Father of the Abyss, the mightiest of all .. so enraged by Agaroth’s stance that he stormed the Tower of the End, the very place where the Demon King resides.

He broke into the tower and reached its summit, but there he clashed with Crimson. Their ferocious duel ended with Gael’s withdrawal; no matter how he tried, he could not defeat the First Seat.

Thus the Dukes of Hell began acting on their own, and the High Seats split as well—sending the demons into a long retreat.

It was the end of an era ... the Age of Ruin .. the demonic age that kept the world in ceaseless terror.

Demons still raided other races; they had to, for they live on life-force itself. But their pace slowed greatly, and their strength waned with the absence of the King and the First Seat.

And so the other races finally drew breath and lived in peace for a long while, spared the endless, soul-devouring wars against the beast that swallows all.

The demons fell far .. because of a single person.

”Nameless...”