Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

The Trickster had escaped the executioner’s block today.

But as Kaelus held his tiny, miraculously uninjured Sovereign against his heart, he knew with a terrifying certainty that the demon’s days were numbered.

The hunt was no longer just a duty. It was personal.

And the Reaper of the North would not stop until the entire Abyss was burned to ash.

.

.

.

The fabric of physical reality does not tear cleanly.

When high-tier spatial displacement magic is executed under conditions of extreme panic, without the proper stabilizing runic arrays or anchoring chalk circles, the resulting portal is not a doorway.

It is a jagged, violent wound punched directly through the dimensions, held open for a fraction of a second by the desperate willpower of the caster.

For the ancient demon known as the Trickster, throwing his physical body into that unstable spatial tear was an act of desperation.

The transition through the dimensional fold was agonizing. The sensation was akin to being dragged naked through a tunnel lined with broken glass and freezing acid. The intense, crushing gravitational pressure of the dark mana that Seraphina had unleashed upon the grand hall tried to anchor him, grabbing at his coat, his boots, his very soul, fighting the pull of the teleportation spell.

But the demon poured every single remaining drop of his ancient, hoarded life force into the spatial jump. His core screamed in protest, burning hot and toxic green as he ripped himself away from the terrifying singularity of the tiny girl in the crimson dress.

With a deafening, thunderous CRACK of displaced air, the Trickster was violently spat out the other side of the portal.

He did not land gracefully.

He was launched out of the sickly green vortex like a projectile, crashing heavily through the thick, broad leaves of an ancient jungle fern, hitting the damp, loamy soil of the Verdant Reach with a sickening thud, tumbling end-over-end across the muddy ground, snapping roots, and crushing toxic fungi beneath his weight.

And he finally came to a halt, slamming back-first against the colossal, moss-covered trunk of a massive banyan tree.

For a long moment, the demon could do nothing but lie there in the mud, gasping for air. His chest heaved violently, his lungs burning as if he were inhaling crushed glass. The humid, stifling atmosphere of the deep jungle enveloped him, but he couldn’t feel the heat.

He was shivering uncontrollably, his supernatural physiology in a state of shock.

He slowly pushed himself up onto his knees, coughing up a spatter of thick, black, corrupted blood onto the vibrant green moss.

His physical condition was atrocious.

His garish, patchwork coat of crimson, gold, and deep violet, previously a symbol of his arrogant, theatrical vanity, was in absolute ruins. It was scorched, torn, and heavily singed by the near-misses of Seraphina’s devastating shadow blades.

But worst of all was his left arm.

The Trickster looked down at the wrist where the tiny, dark-haired anomaly had touched him. The flesh had not regenerated. The dark mana had acted as a metaphysical acid, burning through the pale, bone-white skin, dissolving the muscle, and leaving the radius and ulna bones completely exposed to the humid jungle air.

The blackened, charred edges of the wound were still smoking faintly, the residual dark magic actively fighting his demonic healing factor, preventing the cells from knitting back together.

The pain was excruciating, a constant, throbbing agony that threatened to blind him.

But as the Trickster knelt there in the dark, isolated, unpopulated depths of the Verdant Reach, miles away from the underground catacombs of the city... the pain slowly began to recede, overridden by a surging wave of relief.

He had survived.

He had stared directly into the maw of an impossible, world-ending abyss; he had faced the terrifying, explosive wrath of the Reaper of the North; and he had escaped them both.

A low, grating, wet chuckle bubbled up from the Trickster’s throat. The sound echoed through the silent, oppressive canopy of the jungle, startling a flock of nocturnal birds into the sky. The chuckle grew louder, escalating into a chaotic, manic, breathless cackle of absolute triumph.

”I live,” the demon hissed, his voice echoing with overlapping, multi-tonal madness. He threw his head back, staring up at the slivers of bruised purple sky visible through the thick jungle canopy. ”I live! The great Kaelus von Nacht, the slayer of anomalies... he arrived too late! He was too slow!”

He forced himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the ancient banyan tree for support. His legs were shaking, but his arrogant pride was rapidly returning, patching the cracks in his shattered ego.

He closed his slit, blood-red eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath of the humid air. He was alone.

His magical senses, weakened but still functional, swept the surrounding mile of dense foliage. There were no human auras, no knights, no angry fathers charging through the brush with mythril swords.

He was safe.

And more importantly, he was currently in possession of the single most valuable piece of intelligence in the history of the demonic realm.

’The child,’ the Trickster thought, his mind racing with dizzying calculations. The black, jagged curse marks winding down his pale neck pulsed with a renewed, toxic green luminosity. ’She is not a human. She is not a mere mortal prodigy! She is a singularity of absolute Abyssal power. A Supreme Dark Core housed in the fragile, breakable body of a six-year-old human.’

He replayed the encounter in the grand hall.

He remembered the way her eyes had turned pitch-black, glowing with that terrifying violet light, remembered the way the shadows had bowed to her, altering gravity, absorbing his high-tier destruction magic as if it were nothing more than a passing breeze.

But he also remembered how sloppy she was.

How unrefined.

’She swung that power like a club,’ the Trickster sneered, his fear mutating into boundless, towering greed. ’She has no technique, no control. She is a walking, talking nuclear core that doesn’t know how to detonate properly.’