In the age of black iron, hot weapons replaced cold steel; muzzle flashes bloomed like brief suns and drowned the rain-like clatter of blades. Resolve, grit, the body’s hard-forged limits—at last they knelt to the bullet’s thunder.

I ask why. Why did guns and powder seize the throne of war like a usurper storming a palace?

Power? Even a round that misses the heart and only kisses an arm can spin like a drill and slam like a hammer, leaving a limb numb as winter wood and willpower bleeding out.

Range? A handgun’s effective reach stretches past five hundred meters like a dry wind across a salt flat, while rifles and sniper guns speak in the language of kilometers, as far as a hawk’s cry.

Morals? A trigger spares you the warmth of viscera and the scrape of bone; you can dump all your guilt into the cold steel, like tossing sins into a river at dusk.

Mass production? A small factory can spit out tens of thousands of guns a day, like an ant nest erupting with identical soldiers.

There are many reasons. But the root is simple as stone: the destruction a gun delivers per coin spent is unmatched. Put plain, guns are cheap, and cheap breaks mountains.

To train a proper knight, you foster a boy in another noble house like a sapling in foreign soil. Ten years of swordplay, spears, manners, poetry, riding—disciplines braided like reeds. Then armor dear as a manor, a steed swift as wind, a company that can scatter ten times their number like wolves through sheep.

And a single crossbow bolt can end a knight, like a hailstone felling a flower. Don’t even bring up firearms, whose bite outstrips the bow.

Honestly, even a dirt-age planet-buster couldn’t kill the Demon King. He commands an Authority Domain, a personified concept cloaked in mist; no weight of iron can cut what lives as an idea.

Gloria, late in the Silver Era, also unlocked a two-stage transformation of her Authority Domain. Without it, mere physical strikes would’ve gotten her kicked from the Hero Squad like a dull blade from a rack.

But the Annihilation Magi-Cannon… whether the Shadow-tuned model or the fully amped Void version, it’s a brutal thing, a spear that can threaten the Demon King, a cheap, handy miracle—one of the Silver civilization’s great leaps, like fire tamed in a clay lamp.

From another angle, it’s taboo. People call it a technique that breaks magical equivalent exchange—paying a pebble to buy a storm, using a crooked cost for an immense effect.

It’s too cheap, cheap enough to insult its own meaning, like a jest at a funeral. It dulls the sense of scale; it teaches you to forget that great gain should demand equal price. It’s like gaming a galaxy into chains and a world into ash; you never smell the smoke that real conquest costs.

Take the Void. The Void has no definition; it’s a silent lake where words sink and don’t ripple. It isn’t “what is,” but precisely “what isn’t”—thus we call it Void.

Light and dark, good and evil, all rise from that empty sea, like islands lifted from a deep tectonic hush.

Touch the Void and you touch a taboo. The Void can’t be harnessed; it knows no leash. That “pillar of Void” wasn’t a beam launched outward. Raven set the line in front of the barrel to revert to chaos, like chalk rubbed back into dust. I don’t know how she did it, and that means it won’t always succeed.

“Raven…”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Don’t use that Magi-Cannon again. I won’t forbid your research, but don’t experiment. Don’t tell anyone. Or you’ll be judged heretical, worse than Demonfolk, and face a hunt from every living thing.”

“That serious?”

“Yes.”

The Heretic Inquisition keeps a strangler’s grip on matters like this, tight as winter ice on a river.

If Demonfolk only plan to invade the mortal world, Void research can, by one slip, erase the world. The Void isn’t a one or a ten thousand; it’s a zero. It might swallow an ant like a dot of ink, or the Demon Realm, the mortal realm, and the divine kingdoms like a tide swallowing coasts.

The Demon King and the gods hold many methods to stop the world from sliding into the Void. But “it could happen” is unforgivable to those whose hands rest on the sky, like a spark in a granary.

“Remember this. Don’t bring up that topic again.”

Stini, wanting to thaw the frozen air, forced a smile like sunlight through fog. “So… do we save those people? Did we just beat the Demon King?”

He’s the Son of the Demon King, not the Demon King.

“Right. Those chains should’ve lost the Lust Authority Domain’s blessing. We can take them off.”

Raven fell silent and used Rapid Alchemy; wire saws coiled into her hands like silver serpents. She passed them to me and Stini.

We cut with a sour mood, slicing the chains like cutting dead vines.

Clack-clack—thin links meant nothing to a metal-cutting wire saw. We only needed to mind the captives’ skin, like trimming fruit without biting the flesh. They hadn’t woken. Good. Among them were pretty girls, plain-faced wives, and burly men uglier than night.

Raven, beside us, shaped softer materials, weaving undergarments for the hundreds like dew knitting spider silk. She formed clothes right on their bodies, a test of an alchemist’s finesse; a headache of a task. If only they’d wake—

Wait. They’re not waking. They’re blushing in their sleep, breaths hot as steam.

So the Lust Domain hasn’t lifted. In his own domain, a Demon King doesn’t die. Yakfarro isn’t a Demon King yet, but if he can maintain the Lust Domain, then he didn’t go home to dust. He’s clinging on with some unknown magic, like a candle guttering but not out.

I stalled, tangled in my gut like vines. Do I tell the girls? No one’s in the mood to cheer. Even victory tastes like ash; favor won’t rise, much less a celebratory tumble in bed.

Fine. Decided. Proper combat and proper flirting both need the old banner: friendship, effort, victory. Let the fight bite; let the road be rough.

I kept sawing, playing the part, while my eyes slid sideways to Stini and Raven like a fox’s flick. Both defenseless, both thinking we’d won. They say don’t relax till you see a corpse; too many allies got killed by an enemy playing dead like a snake in frost.

Not that you find corpses in places the Void has chewed clean.

About three minutes after the Magi-Cannon fired, something went wrong. The rescued people moaned louder, like a tide pulling strong. Stini and Raven didn’t feel it, but I did—their dreams climbed from foreplay to crest, like a drumroll rising.

He’s coming back.

My nerves tightened like bowstrings. If Yakfarro came for me first, I’d be crushed like a clay cup.

I’d just gripped my hilt inside the Shadow when a massive impact boomed from Stini’s side like thunder on stone.

“Stini, you okay?” The lie scraped my tongue; acting still feels like wearing someone else’s skin.

“I’m fine. Watch that thing. Something’s wrong.”

Stini kept coughing blood, red as maple leaves. She clutched her chest—flat before, now dented in—grimacing like she’d swallowed a blade.

Yes. That. Yakfarro’s third-stage transformation turned hideous, shedding any holy perfection, a form that explains “darkness” at a glance, like a nightmare you understand before you wake.

Without Stini’s Hero feature, Immunity Privilege—shielding us from Yakfarro’s Authority—we’d have been slaughtered like bugs.

His fourth-stage berserk was worse. Black gloss crept inward from his flesh toward the chest, or you could say a golden light in his chest clawed outward like dawn under storm clouds. It was what matter could show of a split between absolute order and absolute chaos.

Bone-only wings sprouted on his back like graveyard relics. A curved horn grew on the left side of his head. A single left horn marks a Son of the Demon King. Grow a right horn too, and you are the Demon King. In the material world’s projection, I could see a right-side horn of pure dark mana, a shadow carving itself into real.

He was a step from the throne.

Stini and Raven saw the body his true form cast here. I saw more—him submerged in the Ocean of Darkness, a bulk sinking into roots beyond thought, parts unnameable as deep-sea things.

He roared, trying to speak. But the chaos of the Ocean of Darkness had eaten his language; no wisdom glinted in his eyes, only stormwater.

“Damn it, wasn’t he dead?”

He was—dead here. When the blast hit, it shattered his mortal projection while he was linked to the Ocean of Darkness. What remained was the portion of his soul sunk there. That piece became the whole, and the ocean fed him back stronger, like a river returning in flood.

“As expected. Fourth-stage berserk. The ancients didn’t lie.”

I lifted my greatsword. I rooted my feet, drew power from every muscle like cords on a war drum, and cut diagonally, splitting his stabbing hand. Then I swung horizontal, turned the blade into a shield, and slammed into his bulk like a ram into a gate.

The body answers truth like cold water. He was stone.

His cells locked in the theoretically strongest lattice; his skin forged to the highest mix of hardness and toughness; his muscles erupted at the limits of tensile design, like cables at snapping point.

Yakfarro’s Authority Domain doesn’t meddle with physics. So his material form could only push to physical limits. Still, even as a “mortal,” full stats are scandalous—cheats written into flesh.

Now I see why, in my previous life, when Princess Golia entered the field, Yakfarro died. Gloria is basically his superior replacement. Stini and Raven could’ve sat and watched.

Me? On paper, I don’t stack up. I don’t. I can’t.

I can’t match a concept polished to the physical limit. First rule: fix my center of gravity, like planting a post in wind. Don’t stumble. Don’t step back. Let him push me and still look cool while losing ground.

“Heh. So this is your true power?”

“What time do you think it is? Stop muttering nonsense!”

My boots skated backward, throwing sparks like fireflies, until the charge bled off. The pressure crushed me head to heel. Blood seeped like ink; my inner circulation snagged like a jammed millwheel.

No. In this body, I can’t win. Not head-on.

“Andor, right side!”

His huge arm snapped like a whip and hit like a hammer. I smashed my sword’s pommel into Yakfarro’s chest, then hacked at the elbow joint. The greatsword bit rock-hard flesh; the only victory was stopping that one blow, like catching a boulder with both hands.

He’d lost reason. No clever technique, no feints. I could predict the next strike would come left, as clear as a shadow’s drift. Useless. I knew it, but didn’t even have time to turn. Dead.

“Leave it to me! Hah!”

Stini’s voice came from the left, no noble lilt, only a wildland war-cry, iron and wind.

A heavier impact shook the air from the left like a falling tree. She’d saved me. Blood smell tore through like rust. She took the hit and paid flesh for it.

“In this state, got any dirty tricks?”

“No. Unless you can actively use the Hero feature, Immunity Privilege, to strip his conceptual layer. Otherwise we brute-force this berserk.”

We held our guard against his arm’s pounding, then rolled under and away like otters slipping a net. He chased Stini. After tasting his power, she chose footwork and deflections, light as reeds in a stream. I gulped a breath.

“Why is he getting stronger and stronger? He can’t blink anymore, but his basic swings crush me. I can only dodge. What is this?”

I could lecture you on the Ocean of Darkness lending its negative roots as authority. Or on the duel between a sinking soul and a lucid mind, like rope against undertow.

But, Stini, would you understand?

“Think of it as trading reason for power.”

“Which tells me nothing! Aren’t you the one who knows Demonfolk best? Start at the root and give me a fix!”

“You reminded me of a fog in my thinking—I forgot to trace his weakness back to the spring. Right, so we just…”

“You take me for some throwaway sacrifice to push the plot? Half of those extras die at the end. I can’t and I won’t.”

“Quit saying useless stuff. Think of something that actually helps.”

Even if you say that, my mind feels like a stalled wheel.

I harried him from the flank, stinging like a wasp.

Stini weaved up front like wind over grass. I slipped behind Yakfarro to strike, tugging his attention off her. The Greatsword crashed like a waterfall on an iron cliff—no damage.

Even with a full-force cut, I couldn’t break his skin. Each swing boomed like steel on steel.

“Damn it. This boss only goes down to a hard kill.”

“One question. Do we still have a chance?”

Her wounds kept tearing from shockwaves inside her, blood spraying like red rain. She was at the edge.

“In theory, yes. Yakfarro had his body blasted off by Raven’s shot and lost the right to invade the mortal realm. The Primordial Pact between gods and demon hordes no longer binds him. If a god descends, he’s done. But we don’t have clergy to call the gods. And this place is shrouded by the Domain of Lust, a violet veil the gods can’t sense…”

“Point.”

Miss Raven’s one shot dropped a phase-two boss from seventy percent HP to five, skipped phase three, and forced a phase-four berserk.

He’s low. It’s hard kill, or nothing.

“Yakfarro leaned too far into the Ocean of Darkness. He lost martial arts and magic. His authority-control is nullified by your Immunity Privilege passive. What’s left is a fully reinforced physical manifestation… So, in theory, we can beat him. But—”

“That’s enough.”

Battle-light rekindled on Stini’s face. She raised her sword like dawn splitting cloud.

“But with just that possibility, I can give you a dozen arguments to crush it—”

“I said that’s enough.”

She glanced back at me with a smile. I’d never seen that bewitching curve of lips on her. Hard to imagine a girl that frank could be that alluring—like moonlight rippling a lake.

“How many people are here?”

“What?”

“Three hundred fifty-one—captured civilians, teachers, students. I will protect them.”

She didn’t say “we.” She said “I.” She leapt far, met my eyes in a gap between blows, and laughed:

“Andor Mephy, will you come with me?”

She didn’t say, “If we leave them, a berserk monster will kill them,” that heavy-handed plea.

She didn’t say, “Will you abandon me and leave me alone?” that forcing line.

She didn’t say, “Please save them, I’m begging you,” that clinging sweetness.

She didn’t say, “Are you even a man, Andor? I despise you,” that anger meant to wound.

She didn’t say, “So I misjudged you,” that sentence that stabs the heart.

She said:

“Will you come with me?”

I could see it: if I chose the hard path and fled with Raven, she’d give me a shy smile and say, “It can’t be helped, don’t mind it,” then turn back and fight with a broken body.

For the three hundred fifty-one behind her.

No blame, no complaints, no demands. She looked at death with open eyes, and with her greatness wrapped all our smallness.

I’m Demonfolk, bloodless and tearless, yet in that instant a bell rang in my chest.

Moved? Not quite. Admiration? No. Envy? Not it.

Closest word might be respect—respect for a resolve I’ll never truly own.

I had planned to wait until Yakfarro maimed everyone, then break my seal and save the field. I’d spin a tragic story—say I was the Son of the Demon King forced to descend—or a forgivable reason—say the Hero Squad would accept me because I had human kin. Heroes are often big-hearted.

Or I’d punch my own eye, fake blood tears, and drag them away, shouting, “You matter more than those people,” shouldering the sin to raise their favor.

But I changed my mind.

I want to believe in the possibility of Heroes.

Until now I’ve acted from egoism, choosing whatever had the highest odds, strings tight on my limbs like a puppet. It made me restless.

“I’ll go with you,” I said. Maybe not desire or anything you’d call “beauty,” but something in me stirred.

This time—let me choose to believe.

“Mm. Do your best.”

She nodded lightly. That smile alone warmed me like sunlight after rain.

I clenched my teeth. Will couldn’t staunch the wound. Blood seeped through the bite, tasting of rust.

I almost laughed. Like a mortal under the pull of the earth, grieving my smallness, pushing my will past its red line. How long has it been?

The joy of an all-in gamble—I haven’t felt it in ages.

“Win or lose, it’s this battle!” “Life or death, it’s this battle!”

We shouted together and shared a grin. Savage, wild—yet it felt like the best wage for all my pain today.

Neither of us knew the perfect way to fight. Neither had confidence in a clean win. It was nine deaths, one life. Even so—

It was enough.

Foul black light pooled in Yakfarro’s eyes. I didn’t remember laser-eye in his skill list. Right as we tensed, chains slithered like iron serpents, wrapped his head, and hauled him backward.

Behind him, a massive octopus-shaped Construct etched with magitek runes tugged him into the air. He flailed, not yet understanding.

“S-sorry. This kind of Construct takes prep time. I had to warm it up. I’m no fighter. I can only cheer from the side, so please…”

Raven walked up, all her usual swagger gone, stammering as she pinched her skirt hem, timid as a sparrow.

“What are you saying? You saved our lives. Thanks, Raven.” Stini held out a hand, its tiger’s-mouth torn raw.

“Let’s go. Final round, no time to explain!” I held out my own trembling, blood-slicked hand.

Raven froze for a beat, pinched her own cheek, and wiped away doubt. Pride bloomed back on her face, her signature puffed-cheek look returning like a cresting wave.

“I’m the student council president. I won’t dump the danger on my students and hide. Leave support and baiting to me. Watch the hand-speed micro-ops of a master!”

She pointed like a queen giving orders. Red dots flared behind her—the eyes of a Construct army—and the steel tide charged.

Yakfarro traced a thick chain to the octopus Construct’s control core and smashed it. Then he saw a high-morale legion lifting long swords to the sky.

High-tier Reinforcement magic: Iron Fortification—power and defense surging like iron trees.

High-tier Reinforcement magic: War God Unparalleled—reaction sped, all resistance shaved away like water off oil.

High-tier Destruction magic: Radiance of the Daystar—light element etched on blades, erosion by concept, a sunbitten edge.

Almost useless.

To Yakfarro, our magic was rules scribbled on paper—easy to tear.

Yet even staring at death, we still sang proud. In the Silver Era, noble heroes layered their names under history’s dust. Unknown, but never stopping.

One swung the sword. One guarded like a mountain. We swapped when the wind changed. The third stood atop the giant Construct and steered the battle like a helmsman.

I’m happy—with you.

Here, I don’t need cold arithmetic or cold-blooded sacrifice. I only need to fight.

Cuts? Let them carve rivers. Internal wounds? Let them drum in the dark. No effect? Fine. Vomit blood, run dry, and keep going.

Battle intent undimmed. Hot blood uncooled. Fighting spirit unextinguished.

For art’s sake, I swing with abandon and dance like rain over stone.

I won’t stop before the last ounce of strength is spent. I won’t give up before the last drop of blood runs clear.

Death? We sing the splendor before it closes in.

After who knows how long, the curtain fell. The gigantic, relentless body crashed down like a felled mountain and never stood again. We kept striking, as if striking the echo, and only much later realized what we had felled.

We won. We actually won.

The fight itself was joy enough—more than the result.

I thought Stini and Raven would push until they dropped, and I’d have to show my true form to finish Yakfarro.

“Unbelievable. We actually won. I thought I’d die handsome.”

Stini stood straight inside that wrecked body and slid the Holy Sword Yingfeng home. Her voice was calm, like wind after storm.

“If you’re tired, lie down. Don’t force it. The fact you’re standing is a miracle.”

I sat down hard. Too much blood gone, bones hollowed by fatigue. I’d held on by one breath. Now that we’d finished, I decided to rest for days.

“Yeah, a miracle.” Raven climbed down from the Construct, smiling with delight and surprise. “Didn’t think a theory worker like me could fight this hard.”

“Born toward death? Too interesting. But I’m sleeping now.”

The only one not wrecked in body, Raven eased the exhausted Stini down to the ground.

“Agreed. Any celebration, or a Balo cake eating contest, can wait till we wake…”

Her head fell into Raven’s arms, her voice a soft murmur.

“…after we wake, we’ll have so much to talk about…”

“Yeah, and if there’s some post-battle rolling in the sheets, even better…”

I watched their cute faces and drifted toward sleep like a leaf on a slow stream.

“…no way…”

Before I fell fully under, I caught Raven’s puffed-cheek protest, adorable as a sparrow peck.

But today I’m too tired. Tomorrow—tomorrow we’ll trade jokes again.

Any schemes, plots, plans, or cruel fate—

We’ll talk tomorrow. Today we’ll savor this wildness.

After all, we still have a future. Future plots, future schemes—tomorrow.