The demon lord was quiet for a moment.
Then he laughed.
It was the light laugh. The one I had heard through the walls of the capital months ago when I had been invisible in this room and he had been mocking the humans around him. The laugh that had nothing warm in it.
"You want me to act." He said to the emperor. "Under the contract."
"Yes." Karvian said.
"Then I will." The demon lord said. "And you will pay the price the contract specifies for invoking the compulsion clause."
Karvian opened his mouth.
The demon lord moved.
Not toward me.
The pulse that came from him went outward in every direction simultaneously. Not an attack with a target. A consumption. The difference was fundamental. An attack struck. This absorbed, pulling inward, the life force of every human in the palace grounds finding the direction of the pull and moving toward it whether it was asked to or not.
I put the barrier up around the captain in the same breath.
The screaming from the palace grounds lasted four seconds.
Then it stopped.
Not because it ended gradually. Because there was nothing left to produce it.
The demon lord sat back on the throne.
He was different. Visibly, measurably different, the mana around him denser than it had been, the weight of what he had absorbed sitting in him in the way that absorbed life force sat in something that had taken it in, immediate and significant.
The emperor was on the floor.
He was breathing. Barely. The contract had protected him from the worst of it, the compulsion clause requiring the invoker to survive the fulfillment, but what was left of Karvian Von Medalline was considerably less than what had been standing at the side of the throne thirty seconds ago.
The demon lord looked at him.
"Satisfied." He said to the emperor on the floor. Then he looked at me.
I felt the children's artifacts trigger.
All five, simultaneously, the barrier function activating in response to the pressure of the demon lord's absorption wave finding the lower palace and pressing against whatever was down there. The artifacts held. I could feel them holding, the barrier function running at full output, the Frostina-scale construction doing what it had been built to do.
But the pressure the demon lord was now running at, the density of what he had absorbed, was not the pressure the artifacts had been calibrated for.
They would hold.
Not indefinitely.
The demon lord rose from the throne.
He was not lazy anymore.
"Mayor of Eryndor." He said. "You're exactly what I thought you'd be. And exactly what I needed you to be." He looked at the mana sword in my hand. The captain at my shoulder. The destroyed corridor behind me. "You came alone."
"I came for the children." I said.
"I know." He said. "That's why I took them." He tilted his head. "They're still alive, by the way. I wanted you to know that before we started. So you'd have something to lose during the conversation."
I said nothing.
He moved.
The speed of it was not what I had seen from the demon units in the corridor. Not what the greater demon in the garden had produced. This was the speed of something that had been alive for a very long time and had been moving at full capacity for all of it, the reflex and the force and the targeting all operating simultaneously without the sequential processing that younger fighters showed.
I moved with him.
The first exchange was fast. His strike, my deflection, the mana blade's counter absorbed by a barrier he produced with the same ease I produced mine, neither of us gaining or losing position. The second exchange faster. The third faster still, the pace of the engagement accelerating as both sides stopped testing and started committing.
He was strong.
Stronger than the absorbed life force alone accounted for. The demon lord who had broken the seal on the portal and coordinated the fall of two kingdoms was not strong in the way that power was strong. He was strong in the way that intelligence and power combined over a very long time produced something neither quality produced independently.
I was pushing the mana blade against a resistance that required me to push.
That was new.
We separated from the fourth exchange and stood twelve feet apart in the throne room.
He looked at the mana blade.
"I've never seen that construction before." He said. "Who taught you that."
"Nobody." I said.
"You invented it." He said.
"Today." I said.
Something moved in his expression. Not fear. The recalibration of someone updating an estimate.
"Then you're more dangerous than I calculated." He said.
"Yes." I said.
He attacked again.
This time differently. Not the direct exchange. Something layered, the physical attack running alongside a mana working that I felt the shape of a half second before it arrived, the two components designed to force a response to one that left me open to the other.
I responded to the mana working and took the physical strike across the left side.
The impact was significant.
I moved with it, reducing the force by letting it carry me rather than standing against it, but what landed was real, the demon lord's physical strength at full output finding the gap the mana working had created.
I hit the throne room wall.
The stone cracked behind me at the point of impact.
I stood.
The captain was at the edge of the room, held back by the barrier I had kept around him, watching with the expression of a man who had trained the greatest fighter he had ever seen and was watching that fighter get hit and was revising something in his understanding of what was in this room with us.
The demon lord looked at me against the cracked wall.
At the place on my left side where his strike had landed.
"First time." He said. Noting it. The way a fighter noted something significant. "In how long has something hit you."
I looked at him.
At the throne room.
At the artifacts in the lower palace holding at their limit.
I pushed off the wall.