The two personal guards saw them coming and tried to fight, which was about as useful as trying to stop a landslide with outstretched hands.
The guards were dead before Jorik had taken three more steps.
Jorik stopped running.
He turned to face the Demon-Lords, and for a mont, Reidar saw the old man's expression through the eyes of his summons. He understood he was done for.
"You were never struggling," Jorik said, more to himself than to Reidar, also because the man wasn't exactly there, only his summons. "The Behemoth. The portals. You had this whole thing ready the entire ti."
Reidar didn't hear him.
He was two kiloters away, riding on a condor and watching through the Overmind Consciousness what was happening inside the city. He didn't even care much about Jorik.
Sure, the fucker had to die; his stunt back then caused the death of many people and the swelling of the Church of Unbinding. Maybe the most important one, since the church was rather small at the ti, with Silas having done most of the heavy lifting.
However, Jorik was not a threat to Reidar, and as such, knowing his summons would take care of him was enough.
But the monsters were still there, and they demanded Reidar's utmost focus. The good thing was that with so many summons around, it wasn't going to take a lot of ti before Reidar could purge them all.
Jorik, though, raised one hand. He wasn't going to give up without at least trying to put up a fight.
Mana flickered around his fingers. It was a vain attempt to cast a last spell or use his trait. But against level 700 Demon Lords, it was useless.
The Inferno Tyrants fired.
A dozen beams of concentrated fla converged on Jorik's position. Each beam was several ters wide, glowing white-hot at the core with edges that rippled between orange and blue. The air itself warped and glowed as the temperature spiked to thousands of degrees in an instant. The stone beneath Jorik's feet began to lt before the beams even made contact.
The attacks hit him from every direction at once. Front, back, left, right, above. There was no escape, no gap to slip through. The beams struck all at once, and the light was so bright it turned the surrounding area white for half a second.
When the light faded, Jorik was gone. There was no corpse. No remains.
Just a scorch mark on the stone, a small crater, and a cloud of ash that the wind scattered before it had finished rising.
[Jorik Malden—defeated.]
Reidar didn't feel satisfied with the death of the man. He didn't even feel relief because what Jorik did was in the past already, and there was no way to change that.
For a year, he'd fought, sched, and clawed his way through an endless gauntlet of threats. Every day had been survival. Every victory had led to another battle. And now, with the Church of Unbinding dismantled and the world-carver behemoth finally dead, he'd expected to feel… sothing. Relief, maybe. Triumph.
Instead, he just felt worn out.
The monsters were still out there. The planet was still a death trap. But the two biggest existential threats—the ones that had hung over everyone like guillotines—were gone. And all he could muster was this hollow, grinding fatigue that settled into his bones like lead.
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