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{Chapter: 255: Blood and Memory in the Ruins}
He narrowed his eyes toward the eastern quadrant of the city, where the sky churned with blue fire and arcane storms.
A memory itched at the back of his mind.
With a single pivot, Dex shifted course.
The wind howled around him, smoke trailing from his body like a cape as he rocketed through the skies.
"Looks like I've got one more mess to enjoy before this city dies."
---
The ruins of the City Lord's mansion—once a place of power and prestige—had now collapsed into a vast graveyard of shattered stone, mangled bodies, and scorched ground.
The earth itself was torn open like a butchered animal, deep craters steaming and still pulsing with unstable arcane residue. The nearby buildings were either flattened into rubble or burning like funeral pyres, consumed by leftover spellfire and demonic energy that refused to extinguish.
Though the battle had lasted only minutes, the scale of destruction rivaled that of a full-scale war. With over twenty demigods and dozens of legendary-tier warriors clashing all at once, the area had been transformed into a disaster zone, as if a celestial cataclysm had descended upon Augustus.
Chunks of scorched flesh and limbs lay everywhere—human, elf, demon—indistinguishable from one another, twisted and fused by elemental fury. The very air was thick with blood vapor and magic dust, making it difficult to breathe, let alone survive.
Had both sides fought with their full power and without restraint, the entire city would've already been erased from the map.
Thankfully—or perhaps tragically—one side was still holding back to preserve the ritual and limit collateral damage.
The other side, in a twisted sense of sport, was "restraining" themselves to avoid killing too many civilians too quickly.
Yet even this restrained chaos was like an army of gods destroying a village of ants.
At the edge of a burning stone pillar, Sarah gasped for breath. She dropped to one knee, her body trembling, drenched in sweat, blood, and ash.
Her once-elegant battle gown—royal blue, gilded in enchantments—was now a torn, bloody rag barely hanging onto her scorched skin. Her left pauldron was missing. Her ribs were cracked. Her right arm shook uncontrollably.
Half of her silken black hair had been burned away, the rest clinging to her face like dying vines.
Despite this, her eyes—fierce and golden—still burned with the will to fight.
She gritted her teeth and pulled out a vial of deep crimson potion, one of her last emergency brews. Without hesitation, she poured it down her throat, ignoring the sharp pain in her jaw and the bitter taste of blood in her mouth.
The potion coursed through her veins like molten fire, rapidly sealing wounds and forcefully rejuvenating ruptured organs.
"Damn it…!"
Her voice was hoarse, filled with frustration and fury.
Not far from her, a Middle-Rank Demon, with a whip of boiling magma and a third eye on its forehead, was tearing through a group of Augustus defenders.
Sarah had been holding her own, even gaining the upper hand earlier.
But then it happened.
A blinding white-red light, like the wrath of a dying star, erupted across the battlefield—Dex's earlier explosion.
It turned the sky red. It burned shadows into stone.
The light was so intense it bypassed magic barriers and cooked retinas from the inside. It had thrown the rhythm of every human and elven combatant into disarray.
Although the blinding light was an indiscriminate attack, compared to the native creatures of this world, the demons, who had grown up in harsh environments, undoubtedly had a much higher tolerance.. For them, such a problem was merely a minor accident. After all, meteorites falling from the sky and rainstorms were natural occurrences in the Abyss, so what was a little bit of bright light? It might be a bit dazzling and damage their eyes, but with the demons' innate regenerative abilities, they could recover in a second or two.
While the demons recovered within seconds—their abyss-born resilience laughing at blindness and pain—the indigenous defenders staggered, screamed, and fell.
It wasn't even a direct attack. Just the aftermath.
The creatures of this world, on the other hand, clearly didn't have such a robust physical structure.
Their speed of adapting to the environment and their own recovery speed were far slower than those of the Abyss creatures.
Some even needed potions to restore their vision.
"Gods damn that bastard," Sarah thought, forcing herself back up.
Across the battlefield, dozens of warriors lay moaning, their hands clawing at their blood-filled eyes. Others ran blindly, crashing into rubble or straight into the claws of waiting demons.
Dex, the supposed "ally," had done more to cripple Augustus' defenses in five seconds than the front-line demons had done in twenty minutes.
He had unknowingly—or perhaps gleefully—become the greatest weapon of the Abyss that day.
And yet he didn't care.
Dex, high in the air, observed the battlefield with the casual indifference of a man watching ants drown in a puddle.
"Hmm… my teammates are still alive? That's a shame."
He didn't hope for cooperation. He hoped they'd die. The fewer survivors, the more loot to salvage.
If his allies fell, he could swoop in and offer to "recover their corpses"—of course, he'd salvage any valuables first.
And if he caught a few enemies unaware during cleanup? Even better. Two birds, one demonic soulstone.
Below, Sarah clenched her fists, newly energized from the potion.
The battlefield was still swarming with enemy elites, but she had no choice. Retreating meant death. Not for her—but for those she swore to protect.
"If I don't fight now, my comrades will fall."
It wasn't that she was particularly dedicated, but the current situation was special; infighting or short-sightedness was unwise, and she had to ensure the condition of her teammates.
Otherwise, they would be picked off one by one by the enemy.
From this perspective, she could be considered a good teammate, at least better than the demons present.
The demons' mentality of hoping for their teammates' deaths was truly bizarre in the entire multiverse.
Whatever flaws Sarah had—pride, impulsiveness—she wasn't a coward. She turned toward the battle, determination flaring in her heart like a phoenix…
…only for it to vanish in a flash of red.
A sudden gust of pressure—like the flap of an ancient dragon's wings—rushed past her.
She instinctively spun—
But it was already too late.
Her head never even realized it had been severed.
Dex hovered silently, one hand extended, and in it—dripping warm blood—was Sarah's head.
Her face, frozen mid-expression, still carried that grim defiance, even as life left her golden eyes.
He tilted his head, surprised.
"Isn't this the pretty one I saw earlier?"
He blinked, then gave an exaggerated sigh.
"Tsk. The angle was just a bit off… I didn't mean to take the head off. What a waste of beauty."
Then a wicked grin crept across his face.
"Well, since I've got it… might as well read her memories."
With one clawed finger, he tapped her forehead.
Black tendrils slithered from his nail into the skull like smoke, burrowing into the brain.
"Let's see what your boss is like… and what kind of juicy intel you had locked in there."
Beneath him, the battlefield raged on.
Screams of the dying.
Steel clashing with bone.
Magic detonating like miniature suns.
The ruins of Augustus burned with war, and yet Dex simply floated there, smiling like a child opening a new book.
After spending a few seconds sorting through Sarah's fragmented memories, Dex let out a small, unsatisfied sigh. He'd hoped for some intelligence—something valuable, even a clue to her faction's hidden strategies or the true nature of their god.
But all he saw was fanaticism, not strategy. Blind belief, not insight.
"How disappointing..."
The visions in her mind were like reading a children's book filled with divine propaganda:
"Born from the void..."
"...possesses power to destroy worlds..."
"...those who believe in Him will be granted
eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven..."
Dex had read hundreds of these same delusions before. With his experience, he could have written hundreds of holy scriptures more convincing than the garbage swirling in her skull.
"So this is what passes for faith?" he muttered.
Whether it was brainwashing from birth or the aftereffect of a god's influence rewriting her very soul, Sarah's memories were no more useful than smoldering paper ash.
No location. No hidden god-name. No divine plan.
"Useless," he declared flatly.
Without ceremony, the nails of his right hand elongated—black, hooked, and pulsing with abyssal energy. They sank into her skull, and with a sickening slurp, drained every ounce of soul-juice and remaining nutrients left in her gray matter.
Her head shriveled instantly, turning brittle and dry like ancient parchment left in fire. It could no longer be called a face—just a crumbling, eyeless skull with patches of leather-dry skin still clinging to the bone.
Dex tilted his head, inspecting it for one last time.
"You were a transcendent, and yet you chained your hope to some unseen god? How pathetic," he whispered, flames licking up his hand.
"Even I—born of demons and rot—know better than to place my soul in the hands of another."
With a flick of his wrist, the skull ignited, reduced to ash in a heartbeat. The flames danced with mocking joy, twirling in the wind like a funeral dirge.
His eyes then drifted toward the rubble-strewn battlefield below, where a man stood—if he could still be called that.
Gruul.
His shape resembled a humanoid, but his flesh was long gone. Now it was armored in jagged, volcanic scales, every muscle fiber vibrating with unnatural force. Horns jutted from his spine, and his eyes—when visible—were blood-red whirlpools of madness.
He wasn't a demon.
He was something far worse.
A Wild Evil God.