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The voice struck Soul Scale like a blade of ice against his ear.
He was terrified. Burning through his innate Magic Power, he threw himself into the Black Abyss's blood-colored mist and fled as fast as his body would carry him. He could already feel the suffocating force gathering at his back, bearing down on him with every passing second.
Noah watched him scramble away without giving chase. He simply raised one hand and made a slow, deliberate grasping motion in the direction Soul Scale had run.
Three hundred thousand units of power!
Demonic Martial Arts: Vacuum Blade!
The space within a thousand-meter radius solidified in an instant, then twisted and compressed like shattering glass. Countless vacuum blades, each one packed with extreme force, converged from every direction, poised to pierce Soul Scale through from all sides at once.
He was a breath away from being torn apart.
Then an aura dropped onto the battlefield.
It was vaster than the combined power of Soul Scale, the Wind Demon, and the Thunder Demon put together, and it arrived with the weight of something absolute.
Time seemed to stop.
The churning crimson mist went still. The scattered energy hanging in the air froze in place. Even Noah's killing blow lost much of its force, pressed down and smothered by an invisible, supreme power.
A blurred figure woven from gray mist appeared silently between Soul Scale and Noah.
Soul Scale felt that aura and nearly wept with relief. The figure standing between him and death was the leader of the Eighteen Demon War Gods, the one they called the Wheel of Fate.
One by one, the remaining fourteen Demon War Gods tore through the blood mist and took shape, including the Flame Demon, the Earth Demon, and the Ice Demon, whose clones Noah had destroyed back in Veronica. Together with the Thunder Demon, who had been killed with a single punch, the half-dead Wind Demon, and Soul Scale himself, who had barely escaped with his life, the Eighteen Demon War Gods were now gathered in full.
Noah raised an eyebrow. For the first time since arriving in the Black Abyss, a flicker of genuine interest crossed his face.
Not because of the other demons, whose power was no different from Soul Scale's. The only one worth his attention was the one standing at the front: the Wheel of Fate.
"Human, you are very strong," the Wheel of Fate said. Its voice was measured, unhurried, utterly indifferent to the Thunder Demon who now lay dead somewhere behind it. Its body was formless gray mist, its aura rising and falling in a way that made it nearly impossible to read. "But fate has already decided. You will die here, by our hands."
Noah lowered his hand slowly and studied the Wheel of Fate in silence for a moment. "My fate isn't yours to decide," he said. "Though I can tell you how today ends for you. Would you like to hear it?"
"Arrogant."
Two words. That was all the Wheel of Fate offered.
The next moment, a wave of malice ten times denser and a hundred times colder than anything before it crashed down on Noah like a breaking wave. The grayish-white mist rolled outward in all directions, letting out a high, keening shriek as it moved. The air itself seemed to buckle under the pressure, twisting into countless formless, invisible blades.
Noah raised his hand and fired back.
Vacuum Blade, three hundred and fifty thousand units of power.
The two forces met in the space between them.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A rapid series of muffled impacts rang out as Noah's Vacuum Blade punched straight through the Wheel of Fate's advancing mist. The Wheel of Fate's body, always so composed and unreadable, lurched violently. It looked down at the empty space where it had been pierced, and something that might have been disbelief passed through its expression.
It was a minor wound. Barely worth noting, by any reasonable measure. And yet the Wheel of Fate found it utterly unacceptable. Outside of that half-dead god and the Celestial Spirit King, no being in this world had ever managed to touch its true form. And now a human had done it.
This child could not be allowed to live.
No words were spoken, but the other Demon War Gods seemed to understand their leader's intent without needing any. All of them launched themselves at Noah at once.
With the Black Abyss's negative energy feeding them a steady stream of recovery, even Soul Scale and the Wind Demon had recovered enough to rejoin the fight.
Sixteen demons attacking in unison. The force behind it dwarfed what the previous three had brought to bear. Even before their attacks reached him, the layered pressure alone would have been enough to shatter an ordinary mage's mind.
To Noah, however, they were little more than punching bags. He worked through them methodically, sending one flying with each strike, only for two more to close in immediately and buy time for their fallen brethren to recover. The Black Abyss's regeneration made them stubborn and relentless, like weeds that refused to stay pulled.
The Wheel of Fate did not join in. It stood apart from the others, facing a different direction entirely, and spoke in a quiet, unhurried tone. "Ankhseram. How much longer do you plan to stay hidden?"
The words had barely left it when an indescribable stillness fell over the entire battlefield, something that went beyond mere silence, something that felt like the boundary between life and death made manifest.
A new figure appeared above the battle without a sound.
It was a robed, humanoid shape, hovering motionless in the sky. One half of its body gave off a faint, quiet white light. The other half was wrapped in slowly drifting black particles. The two halves existed together in something that felt like a contradiction, and yet there it was.
It carried no overwhelming aura, no crushing wave of pressure. And yet the moment it appeared, every single Demon War God that had been pressing the attack pulled back, falling in behind the Wheel of Fate without a word. Not one of them dared to speak.
Because there were those whose presence alone made it clear that only an equal had any right to address them.
The one who had arrived was Ankhseram, the God of Life and Death.
Ankhseram's gaze moved slowly across the battlefield, pausing on Noah for just a moment. It was hard to say whether the look held any real scrutiny or whether it was simply the way he looked at everything.
"Noah," he said, his voice carrying the unhurried calm of something that had existed long before any of them. "Your existence has disturbed the balance of life and death. It has also thrown predetermined fate into disorder."
Noah scoffed. He met Ankhseram's gaze without flinching. "You lot," he said, "neither gods nor ghosts, lurking in the shadows all this time, and you want to talk to me about balance and fate? About what's been predetermined?"
"Laughable."
Ankhseram did not react to the defiance. "The existence of demons is also part of that balance," he said. "Which means your transgression must be corrected."
He raised one hand, and an aura of death began to gather around it, quiet but immense, the kind of force that suggested an ending rather than merely destruction. Every Demon War God except the Wheel of Fate watched with a mixture of awe and barely contained excitement.
Noah's muscles tightened. He centered himself and prepared to meet whatever the God of Life and Death was about to throw at him.
Then something happened that none of them had seen coming.
Ankhseram's hand, brimming with the power of death, did not move toward Noah.
It swung toward the Demon War Gods.
The power of death swept through the bodies of ten Demon War Gods like a quiet breeze passing through tall grass. There were no screams. No explosions. No final expressions of shock or desperation. Ten immensely powerful beings simply vanished, as completely and silently as marks wiped from a page.
"Ankhseram! How dare you!"
For the first time, the Wheel of Fate lost its composure entirely. Its voice was raw with fury. Ankhseram's sudden turn had been devastating. If the Wheel of Fate hadn't reacted fast enough to shield the remaining six, the title of Demon War God might well have been left to it alone.
Noah's expression shifted as well. His pupils contracted slightly, a rare, genuine surprise surfacing in his eyes. He had thought through countless possible ways this encounter with Ankhseram might unfold. Not once had he imagined this.
The god had declared Noah a threat that needed to be eliminated, then turned around and buried a blade in the back of his own supposed allies.
What exactly was going on here?