The three of us charged into the storm of ghost hands, carving forward through a briar of grasping fingers. It went rough, like wading through tar.

Frustration hit first, like a cold splash. We could barely sync up; our fighting systems were different beasts, and we had zero rhythm.

For a blitz, Maki favored hit-and-run at breakneck speed, like lightning skimming a ridge. His steel claws shredded any ghost hand that couldn’t dodge. Then his legendary spell, Stasis Wall, granted Immunity Privilege under a threshold, shrugging off the corrosive black blood like rain off bronze.

Dragon Exorcist fought steady, like a fortress rooted in bedrock. Plate solid as a cliff, a body like a dragon’s, and Immunity Privilege from the gods let her meet the ghost hands head-on. Sometimes she switched her Dragon Slayer Rifle to nail-shot mode. The spike harpoon punched through the black-blooded sky. Chains tightened and hauled her through the air in three-dimensional arcs.

Tension prickled. My transformation time was finite.

Maki’s speed blew past human limits like a falcon breaking cloud. Did he live inside the Godspeed Realm?

Dragon Exorcist had Immunity Privilege, dragging ghost hands into physical rules and grappling them like ox against ox. I couldn’t copy that.

In Andor’s setting, the legendary spell Defiant Death was built to toughen the protagonist, a shield against ending. The pseudo-divine thesis, Divine Filling, turbocharged his stamina like a winter hearth.

High-tier magic, Polarized Thousand Shadows, grafted the concept of Shadow onto the body, turning flesh into near-formless shade. It nearly exempted material harm, like mist ignoring a blade. I rebuilt it heavily, making that spell the spine.

The grand magic Night Watcher at War didn’t just stick a Shadow tag on me. It turned me into Shadow outright.

No organs. No muscle. I kept patching myself with the concept of Shadow—like a person made of idea. Add defiance of death and a drip of divinity. I became a creature godlike in shape, not a god in truth. The side effects cut deep. Without authority at the god-demon level to forge matter from concept, forget turning back into human flesh.

The mental hit was brutal too. As for me—as a Demon King for now—leave that aside. Humans inside pure concept get their self eroded fast, like letters washed from stone, becoming part of the concept itself. Add the mindblight from staring at Aversion Overlord Sylvia, and my math said—

For the final act, we had three hours. Four, at most, before the curtain falls.

I took command. We compared aces. We had none. Silence fell like ash.

Dragon Exorcist only did clean cuts. She relied on pinning a dragon down and letting blood loss finish the job. No decisive super-attack.

Maki had one. But his other legendary spell, Slaughter by Infamy, was half empowered by a Divine Being’s gift. By the primal covenant, gods can’t fight a Demon King head-on. So his trump was sealed.

It came down to me. A chill settled, then steadied. Not bad. The script had only a warrior’s death. A tragic hero is just a longer act.

A graceful farewell sounded good, like lotus falling on a midnight pond. Shadow condensed into my most familiar human shape. I gripped the Greatsword Valor. I stepped forward and broke an unseen border with my face, then entered the Godspeed Realm.

It’s one perk of a mindless Demon King. Abandon persona and reason. Stop human thought. Return to the Infinite. Hold the Absolute. But that state reacts slow, like a glacier noticing a spark. Sylvia’s last will was a single chord: for aversion caged a hundred years, destroy the world. Humans were insects to her. Even when we crossed into the Godspeed Realm, she barely twitched.

Facing a Demon King with reason is different. To them, the Godspeed Realm is just a bias laid over the world. A Demon King can sync with a Hero and keep fighting inside that bias. Unless you suppress them so hard they can’t enter Godspeed at all, you’re just burdening yourself.

I swung the greatsword in a wide arc and let it fly. It cleaved the ghost hands blanketing our view. A tide of black blood fanned out like storm spray.

Dragon Exorcist raised her gun-sword. She fired a nail-shot spike harpoon into the cleaved gap, piercing the curtain of black blood and biting into the distance. The Dragon Slayer Rifle breathed scalding blood-mist. Chains snapped tight and reel-hauled her forward. Her tower shield rammed severed and unsevered ghost hands aside like logs in a flood.

She set her stance. Edge Unleashed.

Maki dropped like a hawk stooping, his greatsword chopping through a ghost hand. He threw the blade again, planting it into the ground like a shield to block a ghost hand lunging at Dragon Exorcist from behind.

“Thanks.”

She picked her landing and blew the harpooned ghost hand. She hit the ground heavy. She spun and cut. The giant blade in sword mode kissed a drop of black blood, then sliced a ghost eye squeezed out by the blast. It cleaved the oncoming ghost hand clean in two. The momentum hurled both halves past her shoulders, plowing trenches in the ground like twin plows.

She snapped the Dragon Slayer Rifle back to portable. She took one breath. Then behind us came a sound like meat torn and bone wrung—enough to raise every hair.

A seasoned fighter doesn’t flinch at gore. She thanks the comrade guarding her back, like a lantern saluted in storm.

I wrenched Valor free. Maki flicked black blood off his claws. We regrouped, backs together, forming a circle facing out.

We checked each other fast. Then we turned clockwise, cutting the ghost hands pressing in. We met the rain of black blood and pushed this wave back like breakers meeting breakers.

“Okay, task check. Maki, get us to the trunk of the tree. Dragon Exorcist, open a hole in the trunk. Me, I’ll give the Demon King a gift she won’t forget. Questions?”

“That simple?” Maki mused, voice like gravel under rain.

“We’re the last line that can stall the Demon King. After you drop us at the trunk, please keep her busy.”

“Hmph. Taking the hit for young blood’s impulse—that’s one burden of the old. Go be your Hero.”

His tone was cool, but Maki was solid as iron when it counted.

“Or do we stretch this longer?”

“Save your strength to stay alive. I’m not so old I need youth to die just to buy me time.” He paused, then continued. “I’ll take you up now. Stay close.”

“But your hair’s turned completely white. Can you keep going?”

“…I don’t see a reason I should die before you do.”

He leaped out of our triangle, a spearpoint leading the charge toward the Eerie Tree. Speed, strength, and skill crushed the ghost hands like crows swatted from the sky, opening our road.

He’d been harrying the Demon King from the start. When tired or wounded, he’d fall back to rest. Then he’d return to harry again, a cycle like tides on rock.

Some wounds heal with rest. Others don’t. The mindblight from the Demon King is one of the latter.

Without a Hero fighting beside them, most heroes facing a Demon King are doomed. Even if they win, they often die anyway. That delayed mindblight is a core reason.

It isn’t even malice. It’s the poison of knowing what a mortal shouldn’t—knowledge above rank, sights beyond the world. Those truths should be sealed outside human reach. They burn like acid.

Even if we slay the Demon King today, Maki probably won’t live long.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dragon Exorcist’s iron boots hammered down a road paved in flesh, crunching meat into paste. She ran and asked me on the wind.

A pang, then calm. “You don’t need to get it. You’re not susceptible.”

Immunity Privilege largely blocks the Demon King’s parting curse—or blessing—on the Hero, letting them keep walking as human and keep fighting.

“…Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Punch a hole through that trunk. Big enough for me to go in. That helps me and Maki the most.”

“His name is Maki?”

“Yeah. Former chairman of the Heretic Inquisition. ‘Strongest of the Mortal World’ candidate. He came carrying all their grudges, hoping to die here and pay them back. He’s Maki—Maki the Mad.”

“I’ll remember his name.”

“Andor, what are you two dawdling at?! If you want to date or flirt, do it after this is over! It’s bad out here!”

Maki’s voice slammed from ahead like thunder cracking a ridge. It jolted us all.

We cut through ghost hands and blood rain, pushed through layers of mess, and found him standing still.

“Chairman, what happened?”

“The world twisted. Looks like Her Majesty the Demon King saw through our little trick. She went for the Great Seal directly.”

“I can’t see it. It looks like nothing at all.”

Dragon Exorcist’s spirit-sight fell short.

But I could see it.

Valor’s tip touched the ground. I had nothing left to swing at. Severed ghost hands, unsevered ghost hands—lost interest in us. Even their eyes stopped aiming our way.

This wasn’t good. It was terrible.

Before us, the mortal world, built on concept, was flooded with Aversion. It swelled and broke like a river over its banks. A single concept in excess threatened to turn the world into a conceptual field. Normally it would join an Authority Domain. Sylvia didn’t plan to cut a territory loose and stop.

She kept pouring her self—Aversion—into the world. Matter stopped being matter. Air and soil grew thick and viscous, like paste, like chaos. Shape was lost.

Only the Eerie Tree swayed free in the hollow, drinking the world’s slurry like nectar. It grew lush, like a nightmare orchard.

“She’s planning a single-person apocalypse—crush the mortal world with Aversion. Bold handwriting. She won’t even look at bugs like us.”

“The Demon King is the Infinite. She can do it.” Maki’s claws tightened. His face set hard as steel. “We must stop her. If the Great Seal pops, the world dissolves below it.”

My mood leveled, then cooled. “It’s bad enough not to be funny. Looks like my whim might be the only right answer.”

Maki, of all times, clapped my shoulder. First time I’d seen this iron man smile, like sun through ash.

“Don’t carry that weight alone, Andor. The world won’t die easy. We have many ways to guard what we love—costly ways, hurting ways, pain so big it makes you think ‘Maybe let the world end.’”

He clapped me again, heavier.

“I hope humans never touch those last-resort tools. So for now, this place is yours. Only yours. I’ll give you everything I can. Kid, the plan’s still the same, right?”

“You can break through that field of Aversion up ahead? You won’t get assimilated into concept or crushed as foreign matter?”

“I can.”

He looked to the distance and checked himself again.

“I can do it.”