Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

He didn’t care about tearing her through the bars; he intended to obliterate her.

Because his soul rejected the ominous power he felt within the girl.

He threw his hand forward, intending to blast the cage into molten slag.

But his magic never reached the iron bars.

The moment the Trickster channeled his mana, Seraphina’s head snapped up.

Her eyes were no longer dark brown. The entire sclera had turned as black as pitch, and the irises were glowing with a violent, radioactive, blinding violet light, the exact, terrifying shade of the Reaper’s rage, amplified by the purity of a Supreme Core.

Her wrath had completely overridden her child’s body; her soul, fueled by absolute disgust, surrendered to pure, feral instinct.

She didn’t cast a spell or weave an incantation.

The dark mana pooling around her acted like a metaphysical vacuum. The massive orb of emerald-green destruction magic hovering in the Trickster’s hand didn’t launch forward; it was sucked out of his palm. The green fire was dragged through the air, stretching into a thin, screaming ribbon of light, before it was swallowed by the black void surrounding Seraphina.

It didn’t even cause a spark.

The void ate it whole.

The Trickster gasped, staggering backward, clutching his own wrist. It wasn’t just his spell that had been absorbed.

He felt a terrifying tug deep within his own chest.

His core.

The gravity of her dark mana was so overwhelmingly superior that it wasn’t just absorbing ambient magic. It was actively, forcefully attempting to rip the demonic core directly out of the Trickster’s physical body.

”AARGH!” the demon shrieked, a sound of genuine, physical pain. He clawed at his own chest, digging his blood-stained fingernails into his garish coat. He could feel his life force, his ancient, hoarded mana, being siphoned away, dragged across the room toward the tiny, glowing-eyed anomaly in the cage.

”Stop!” he roared, terror finally, truly piercing his arrogant facade.

He lashed out with a desperate surge of telekinetic magic. He didn’t attack her; he grabbed her.

An invisible hand wrapped around Seraphina’s small body. With a violent jerk, the demon ripped her physically through the bars of the cage, just as he had done with the boy, intending to hurl her against the far wall to break her concentration.

The iron bars shrieked as she passed through them, her small body hitting the polished obsidian dais with a heavy thud.

The kinetic throw broke her focus for a fraction of a second. The pulling sensation on the Trickster’s core snapped.

The demon gasped, falling to his knees, panting heavily, clutching his chest. He looked up, his blood-red eyes wide with disbelief.

He had survived for centuries, feasted on thousands of souls. The only being existing that had ever made him feel this level of helpless, suffocating insignificance was the Archdemon Lord he served.

And now, a six-year-old human child had nearly consumed his soul by simply looking at him.

”You...” the Trickster hissed, wiping the blood from his chin, his face twisting into a mask of pure, humiliated rage. ”What are you?!”

Seraphina did not answer.

She slowly stood up from the cold obsidian floor. Her crimson dress was stained with the merchant boy’s blood. Her knees were bruised.

But she felt no pain.

Her consciousness had detached from the physical limitations of her toddler body. She was floating in a sea of absolute, raging dark mana. It whispered to her, responded to her disgust, and begged to be unleashed to eradicate the filthy, rotten thing kneeling in front of her.

’Kill it,’ her mind demanded, stripping away all hesitation. ’Erase it.’

Seraphina raised her tiny, pale hand.

She didn’t know martial arts, because she had never been trained in magical combat. She was acting entirely based on the primal, instinctual knowledge embedded in her Supreme Core.

She swung her arm in a harsh, horizontal arc.

A massive, crescent-shaped blade of condensed, liquid shadow detached itself from the pool of mana surrounding her. It wasn’t an illusion; it was a physical manifestation of gravitational force, sharper than mythril. It launched forward with the speed of a fired cannonball, screaming through the air, aimed directly at the Trickster’s neck.

The demon’s survival instincts flared. He threw himself backward, contorting his long, spindly spine into an impossible, unnatural backbend.

The shadow-blade missed his throat by a millimeter.

It sailed past him, striking the colossal mountain of gold coins and armor behind the dais.

KABOOM!!!

The impact was deafening.

The shadow-blade didn’t just cut the treasure; it detonated with concussive force. Hundreds of pounds of gold coins, silver breastplates, and shattered skull chalices were violently thrown into the air, raining down across the grand hall like lethal shrapnel. The entire subterranean castle shook, dust falling from the vaulted ceilings.

The Trickster scrambled to his feet, his peacock hat tumbling to the floor, trampled beneath his own boots.

He stared at the crater blown into his hoard.

’If that had hit me...’ the demon realized, a cold sweat breaking out across his bone-pale skin. ’I would have been cut in half. My regeneration wouldn’t have saved me. The density of that mana... it destroys the very concept of matter.’

He looked back at the tiny girl.

She was walking toward him.

She didn’t run, but walked with a slow, mechanical, terrifyingly relentless stride. The shadows in the room were physically stretching toward her, drawn into her orbit. The glowing violet light in her black eyes left faint, lagging trails of luminosity in the air as she moved.

”Die,” Seraphina whispered. The voice that came out of her mouth was not her own. It was a distorted, overlapping echo, the combined resonance of her adult soul and the absolute authority of the Dark Core.

She thrust her hands forward, palms open.

Dozens of jagged, spear-like projectiles forged from solid darkness erupted from the surrounding air, launching themselves at the demon in a relentless, overwhelming barrage.

The Trickster shrieked, abandoning all theatrical grace.