Hajime Nagumo walked to Rimuru's side as his uncovered eye snapped skyward. For a moment, there was nothing—just the yawning crimson maw of the gate hanging in the sky like a wound of the world itself.
Then tiny white dots appeared. Barely visible against the hellish red backdrop.
"They're coming," Hajime said.
"I can see that," Rimuru replied.
Around them, the defensive line had fallen into an eerie quiet. Soldiers gripped their weapons until their knuckles went white. The heroes who'd fought grievous battles before now looked small and fragile in the face of what was descending. Even Tio, in all her draconic majesty, seemed tense.
The dots were growing larger. Slowly. Inexorably.
"How many do you think?" Hajime asked, loading specialized ammunition into his revolvers. The soft click-click of the chambers rotating was unnaturally loud in the silence.
Rimuru's golden eyes narrowed. "Thousands. At least three, maybe five. It's hard to get an exact count when they're—"
"Overlapping," Hajime finished. "Yeah. I see it."
They weren't flying in formation. They were layered, one behind another, a cascading wall of bodies that seemed to go back forever into the depths of that gate. A swarm. A plague, even, given wings and blades.
"Rimuru." Hajime's voice dropped lower. "The plan."
"Right. The plan. I know" Rimuru finally tore his gaze from the sky to look to his side. "You stay here, sweep most of these pests, then follow me through once it's manageable. Standard breach and clear."
"Standard," Hajime repeated dryly. "Right. Because fighting death angels and storming heaven is standard."
The white dots were taking shape now, becoming distinguishable from the mass.
"And Yue?"
"Yow—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than intended. Hajime took a breath, forced himself to meet Rimuru's eyes. "Her safety's non-negotiable, right?"
"Yeah, I know."
"Do you?"
"Of course. Who do you think I am?"
The Apostles were close enough now that individual details were visible. Death angels, the mortals called them. Apostles, Rimuru knew them to be. Either way, they were beautiful, and they were coming to kill everyone here.
"Are we cool?" Rimuru asked, and there was an implicatin to the question that went beyond the words themselves. Do you trust me?
Hajime stared at him. The logical part of his brain—the part that had kept him alive through hell itself—was screaming that this was insane. That splitting up was suicide. That trusting anyone else with Yue's life went against every instinct he'd honed since falling into the abyss.
But.
In this world, in this moment, nobody could fathom the extent of Rimuru's power better than Hajime could. He'd watched "it" end gods. If anyone could do this and come back alive and in one piece, it was him.
"..."
"Hajime. Are we cool?"
"Y-Yeah." The word came out rougher than intended. "So cool."
He hated how uncertain he sounded. Hated the way his hand trembled—barely, but enough that he noticed. Since when did Hajime Nagumo shake?
Rimuru must have seen it, because his expression turned into something aggressively optimistic. "Don't be too worried!" He threw up a thumbs-up that was so cartoonishly enthusiastic it almost hurt to look at. "Your Yue's not going anywhere. She'll be taken care of by me, which means she's in the best possible hands!"
Watching him—that goofy, ridiculous reassurance that was nothing more than words and a move a child might make—Hajime felt his stomach drop. What am I doing? Am I really trusting this doofus with my everything?
But it was too late to back down now. The Apostles were descending in earnest, their wings creating a sound like distant thunder. Even if he wanted to change the plan, there was no time. No alternatives. Just faith—a concept Hajime had thought he'd killed in the abyss—and the clear fact that Rimuru was their best shot.
Their only shot of certain victory.
"Then let's begin," Rimuru said, and the playfulness bled from his voice like water through cupped hands. What remained was something sharper. "Might as well start with something uplifting."
He rose from the ground without apparent effort. The soldiers around them stared up at him with expressions that ranged from awe to terror to desperate hope. To them, he looked like a messiah. A savior wrapped in blue and silver and gold, floating against the backdrop of descending death.
The Apostles were close enough now that Hajime could see their eyes—or the absence of anything resembling consciousness in them. There had to be at least four thousand of them, maybe more, and they were spreading out now.
They had a minute. Maybe less.
Any ideas, Raphael?
<
That sounds disgustingly overpowered.
<
Despite everything, Rimuru smiled It felt good to have his skills back online. Really good. After being suppressed, the sensation of unrestricted power flowing through him was almost intoxicating.
"Let's try this out," he said aloud, and there was something in his voice that made everyone within earshot instinctively take a step back.
The space around Rimuru's right hand began to distort. Space was bending, twisting, folding in on itself in ways that made the eye water and the mind ache.
The world didn't like what he was doing, and it was screaming in protest—but he didn't care.
"Lance Continuum."
The words were so soft and gentle that they had no right to herald what happened next.
From Rimuru's extended right hand unfurled something that cannot be described. It wasn't energy. It wasn't matter. It was absence—a needle-thin rift in the fabric of the world itself that extended outward in a single, silent instant. It moved at impossible speed, yet somehow seemed to hang in the air, seen as a steel-blue seam stitched across the sky.
The first Apostle it touched simply stopped being.
One moment she existed, and the next she was gone, replaced by a fine mist of featureless particles that might have once been matter but had forgotten how.
The effect propagated.
The lance touched the second Apostle. Gone. The third. Gone. It spread through their ranks quickly. They didn't burn or shatter—they simply lost the ability to remain as discrete entities and dissolved into undifferentiated residue.
The radius was massive, too. Hundreds of Apostles caught in the first sweep. Then hundreds more as the effect continued to spread, following the arc of Rimuru's gesture. The steel-blue line carved through the sky, beautiful and terrible, a brushstroke of bluish chaos painted across the reddening heavens.
One thousand Apostles had been descending in that section of sky.
In the span of three heartbeats, fewer than a dozen remained.
The silence that fell over the battlefield was absolute. Even the wind seemed afraid to move. Soldiers who'd prepared themselves for a desperate last stand found themselves staring at empty air where moments before a plague of death had been descending. The few surviving Apostles in that section stopped moving, somehow conveying something that might have been confusion if they'd been capable of emotion.
"Holy shit," someone whispered.
"Did he just—"
"All of them. He killed all of them."
Hajime's expression remained neutral, but his grip on Donner relaxed fractionally. Yeah, he thought. That's why I'm trusting the doofus.
Rimuru, for his part, spared the destruction not a moment's examination. His eyes were already fixed on the gate, on the swirling portal that led to where his prey lie. More Apostles were pouring through—thousands upon thousands—but the path was clear enough now. Clear enough for what needed to happen next.
"Raphael. Combat mode. Full authorization."
<
Rimuru shot forward like a missile, his body blurring as he accelerated toward the gate. The air screamed as he passed, sonic booms rattling the battlefield below. The remaining Apostles tried to intercept him, but they might as well have been trying to catch lightning with their bare hands. He passed between them with contemptuous ease, and then he was through, disappearing into the crimson maw of the portal.
Into the realm of gods.
···—–—⚜—–—···
Ehit, or formerly known as Ehitruje, wasn't always what some might call an "errand boy." He wasn't always an underling, a lackey per se, under the mercy of someone superior. No, he was used to being the absolute dominant force. Even back in his home world, Ehit always strived to be at the top—and at some point, he did accomplish his goal.
Until pretty, handsome, capable, and unsuspecting Keith came. Keith's real name was Keith Sapphire. He was just a lowborn back in their home world, and Ehit was as close to royalty as one can be—being a Highblood or in commonly understood terms, a Grand Duke.
That's why, when Ehit and his cohorts of Enlightened aimed to escape their dying world, Keith was the last person he expected to have been with them when they arrived at Tortus. In fact, he didn't even know Keith at the time.
Condescending as he was, Ehit quickly tried to establish himself the de facto head of the surviving Enlightened from their destroyed world, where they would rule as Gods in Tortus.
But Keith was simply far too strong.
And now...
The silence in the endless white expanse pressed against Ehit's eardrums like a dumbbell. He could feel the heart he possessed—Yue's heart—hammering against his ribs in an erratic rhythm that betrayed every ounce of composure he tried to project.
Keith sat there, legs crossed with infuriating calmness, unwrapping another chocolate bar with a slowness that made Ehit's skin... itch. The crinkling of the wrapper was unbearably loud, each sound amplified a thousandfold in the oppressive quiet.
"You know," Keith said as he broke off a piece of chocolate, "I can practically hear your thoughts churning from here." He popped the chocolate into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. "It's quite loud, actually. All that panic and resentment—it's like listening to a dying animal thrash around in a trap."
Ehit's jaw tightened. His fingers, delicate and feminine in Yue's body, curled into fists at his sides. "You're insufferable."
"That makes you predictable, then." Keith smiled, but there was nothing warm about it. The expression didn't quite reach his eyes, which remained cold and calculating despite their seemingly friendly crinkle. "Come on, Ehitruje, my love. Don't be shy. You've been stewing in your own bitterness for the past ten minutes. Whatever venomous little thought is eating away at you—spit it out already."
The condescension in Keith's tone was palpable, wrapped in fake as fuck friendliness like poison in honey. Ehit felt his poker face slipping, felt the rage building in his chest like molten lava seeking an outlet.
"How can you just sit there?" Ehit finally asked, his voice cracking. "How can you sit there eating sweets like we aren't all about to be erased from existence? That dreaded thing—he's coming for us. You know as well as I that he's beyond what we can handle!"
Keith raised an eyebrow, still munching. "Go on."
"He could arrive any second now!" Ehit's voice rose further, hands gesticulating wildly. "And when he does, we're finished! All of this—everything we've built, everything we've become—it will mean nothing! We'll be less than dust, Keith! Less than—"
"You have something you want to say, don't you?" Keith cut him off, his voice dropping to a more serious register as he stood up from his chair. "I mean, really say. Not just panic and whine about the inevitable. I'm all ears, baby."
Ehit could hardly believe what he was hearing. The sheer audacity, the absolute madness of Keith's composure in the face of their impending journey to nonexistence—it was beyond comprehension. Or maybe, crazy as he was, Ehit still had a rational attachment to life that Keith had long since abandoned. His face, Yue's beautiful adult face, twisted into a grim expression of clear disdain.
The transformation of his expression was gradual—like watching porcelain develop cracks before shattering. First, the slight downturn of lips. Then the narrowing of eyes. Finally, the complete contortion of features into something ugly with contempt. It obviously didn't go unnoticed by the God of Mischief.
Keith tilted his head, eyeing Ehit like a child would to a specimen under glass. "There it is. That look. That's what I've been waiting for."
"...Do you have a death wish?"
For a moment—just a fraction of a second—something dangerous flashed across Keith's face. Then, just as quickly, it was gone. Keith stopped eating his chocolate. He set the half-finished bar down on the chair, the simple act somehow more threatening than anything could have been.
Then, he stood up slowly and walked toward Ehit.
There was nothing overtly malicious in his body language, mind you, no raised fists or hostile posture, but Ehit nonetheless shook in his boots. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to fight, to do something other than stand there frozen.
Keith's footsteps were silent in this impossible space, but Ehit could feel each one resonating with his nerves. The distance between them closed—ten feet, then five, then three—until Keith stood close enough that Ehit could see his own terrified reflection in Keith's unnaturally calm eyes.
"Are you saying I've already lost?"
The question was like a blade suspended over Ehit's neck. He wanted to answer, wanted to scream yes, you've lost, we've all lost, can't you see that?! But the words died in his throat. He swallowed hard, feeling the saliva stick on the way down.
Keith's expression changed then, from serious to almost pitying. "Oh, Ehit. You really don't understand at all, do you?" He reached out and placed his hands on Ehit's shoulders with surprising gentleness. His fingers massaged the tense muscles there in a gesture that might have been comforting under different circumstances.
"Let me explain something to you," Keith continued, his voice taking on an almost pedagogical tone. "About power. About will. About what it means to truly be undefeatable."
Then he backed away, spreading his arms wide as if to embrace the void around them. A smile spread across his face—wide, genuine, and absolutely insane.
"I never yielded! And as you can see—" he gestured to himself with a flourish, "—I am not dead!"
Keith believed what he was saying with every fiber of his being. That belief radiated from him like heat from a sun.
Ehit could only look at Keith with hidden contempt, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide. His face remained carefully neutral, but his eyes betrayed him—burning with resentment and the desperate wish that he possessed the power to end this madman right here and now.
It seemed like he was just one second away from strangling Keith with his bare hands, consequences be damned.
But he knew—oh, he knew—that he would stand no chance. Keith existed on a different level entirely. It was like comparing a candle to a thermonuclear explosion and pretending they were equivalent light sources.
Ehit clenched his fist until his nails dug into Yue's soft palms, drawing small crescents of pain. The tension stretched between them like a rubber band pulled to its breaking point, ready to snap at any moment—
And just then—
"What's the point?"
The new voice cut through the tension. Both Keith and Ehit froze.
The voice was young, almost childlike in its pitch. It was familiar in the worst possible way—the voice that had haunted Ehit's nightmares since he'd first come face to face with its owner's existence.
"You'd be dead sooner or later anyway."
There was Rimuru. Demon Lord Rimuru Tempest.
He stood upside down—or perhaps the world had inverted around him; in this impossible space, it was hard to tell which—like it was the most natural thing in the world. But despite his inverted, upside-down position, his eyes were perfectly level with both Keith's and Ehit's. Those golden eyes stared at them with an ominous, predatory light that made Ehit's blood run cold.
The demon lord's appearance was almost insulting in its cuteness—a delicate and feminine figure that looked no older than a teen on the verge of adulthood, with blue hair that seemed to shimmer with its own inner light. But there was nothing childlike about those eyes.
Ehit felt sweat begin to bead on his forehead, then his temples, then running down the sides of his face in rivulets. Within seconds, he was drenched, Yue's body betraying his terror in ways he couldn't control. His breathing became shallow and rapid, his heart hammering against his ribs like a prisoner beating against cell bars.
Keith, by contrast, grinned ear to ear.
That smile—that horrible, ecstatic smile—stretched across his face like a wound. His eyes lit up, the kind of manic enthusiasm that only the truly unhinged could muster when facing certain death.
"I've been waiting for you~" Keith sang out flirtatiously.
"Oh have you now?"
"Oh, absolutely!" Keith clapped his hands together like a delighted child receiving a present. "You have no idea how boring it's been, waiting here. Just me and grumpy pants over here." He jerked a thumb toward Ehit without looking away from Rimuru. "Not exactly stimulating company, if you catch my drift."
"Keith—" Ehit tried to talk, but—
"Shush." Keith waved him off dismissively. "The adults are talking."
Rimuru's lips curved into something that might have been a smile, though it held no warmth.
"You're either incredibly brave or monumentally stupid. I haven't decided which yet."
"Why not both?" Keith suggested cheerfully.
The easy banter felt surreal, like watching two old friends catch up over coffee rather than an ancient god confronting a singularity. Ehit knew he had to act. Waiting, watching, letting these two exchange pleasantries—it was intolerable. He was many things, but passive had never been one of them.
Without warning, Ehit channeled every ounce of power he could muster into his palms. Light gathered there, brilliant and searing, condensed into rays of destructive magic. He thrust both hands forward, unleashing a barrage of magical rays at Rimuru—hundreds of them, each capable of punching through mountains, each moving at speeds that made sound seem sluggish.
Simultaneously, he dashed backward, his body moving with supernatural speed as he tried to create distance. Keep away, stay mobile, don't let him get close—these were the basic principles of combat that had been drilled into as a sorcerer.
The rays screamed through the white spacef, leaving trails of distorted space in their wake. They converged on Rimuru's position from multiple angles, a killing pattern designed to leave no escape route, no safe haven.
Rimuru didn't move.
He simply stretched out one hand, palm forward, fingers slightly splayed.
The rays stopped.
Not deflected. Not blocked. Simply stopped, frozen in mid-air like insects preserved in amber. They hung there, crackling and writhing, still radiating lethal energy but completely immobile. The sight was impossible, defying every law of physics and magic that Ehit understood.
"That's it?" Rimuru asked, sounding genuinely disappointed. "That's your opening move? As a supposed god who's been terrorizing this world in the shadows for millennia, you seem incredibly underwhelming."
Ehit didn't get a chance to respond.
Without any visible movement, without any detectable magic, an invisible force seized Ehit's head in an iron grip. The pressure was immense, crushing, irresistible.
Then, his head was brutally slammed into the ground.
The impact was devastating. Despite the ground being nothing more than white void, Ehit felt his skull crack against it with sickeningly solid force. Pain exploded through his consciousness, white-hot and all-consuming. The world spun, fragments of broken thoughts scattering like shattered glass.
He tried to move, to push himself up, but the force held him pinned as easily as a human might hold down an insect.
Humiliating.
Crushing.
Absolute.
Above him—or below him, or beside him; direction had lost all meaning—Keith remained standing exactly where he'd been. He hadn't moved a single inch. Hadn't tried to help, hadn't tried to flee, hadn't even flinched.
He just stayed rooted to the spot, that same insane smile plastered across his face, looking at Rimuru with the kind of rapturous attention usually reserved for religious experiences.
"Beautiful," Keith breathed, his eyes wide and gleaming. "That was absolutely beautiful. The way you controlled space without even a ripple of magic—the raw efficiency of it. Magnificent."
Rimuru's golden eyes turned from Ehit's prone form to Keith's standing one.
"You're not going to try to save him?"
"Oh?" Keith laughed. "Oh no, no, no. You misunderstand. The guy isn't even my companion. He's more like... a pet that followed me home. Useful sometimes, mostly just there."
"You—" Ehit tried to speak, but the pressure on his head increased, pushing his face harder against the non-ground, cutting off his words.
"The question is," Keith continued, taking a step forward now, closer to Rimuru, "are you going to make this any more interesting? Because if you're just going to crush us without any ceremony, well... that would be rather anticlimactic, wouldn't it?"
Rimuru studied Keith for a long moment.
"You just want to fight me."
Keith's smile widened impossibly further.
"I want to see if you're everything I expected you to be."
And then just as tension was born, the air seemed to crack and strain. Ehit, still pinned and helpless, could only watch as these two monsters prepared to clash.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice whispered what he'd known all along: he was utterly, completely, hopelessly outmatched. This wasn't his fight. This had never been his fight.
This was a confrontation between beings who existed on a plane of power that he could scarcely comprehend.
And he was just unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle.