Chapter 198: The Nine Circles of The Lands Of Stone! II
Damian had everything planned out.
He was about to separate the five Dukes into different corners of the Citadel and interrogate them one by one, peeling away their secrets with the patience of soone who had all the leverage and knew it. The solar chains were already flaring in preparation, each Duke being pulled in a different direction, and the Citadel below had settled into the kind of quiet that followed catastrophe, a quiet that would give him the space he needed to extract every piece of information these demons carried about the River of the World and what lay beyond it!
And yet, just as he began, his entire existence buzzed.
HUUM!
He couldn’t fully explain the sensation. It wasn’t pain and it wasn’t Mana and it wasn’t any of the standard warnings his body had learned to produce since his transformation. It felt like a chill settling into the marrow of bones that should have been too dense for chills to reach, a sense of intuition pressing against the inside of his skull with an urgency that had no words attached to it but carried a ssage his body understood before his mind could translate it.
Danger.
Imnse, absolute, unreasonable danger.
He listened to it!
The dense compressed Mana within his body flared in response, surging through every channel and pathway his Prival existence contained, and he pulled upon the power of all three Land and Sky Physiques simultaneously while also drawing boundless waves of solar brilliance inward rather than outward. The Noble Simba Lineage roared through his blood. The Wings of the Radiant Dawn blazed across his fra. The Primordial Beast Sovereignty grounded him with the weight of sothing that predated fear itself!
Solar light wrapped around him in layers so thick the air within them turned to plasma, and a circular radiant barrier of compressed brilliance ford around his body in a span of ti so small that the word instant would have been generous in describing it.
All of this happened in less than a fraction of a second.
And in the next mont, it saved his life.
BOOM!
The sky shattered.
There was no other word for what happened above the Covenant of the First Stone. The blue expanse that Damian’s Solar Sovereignty had cleared of every cloud simply broke, cracking apart the way ice cracked when sothing enormous pressed down upon it from the other side, and through the fractures, sothing looked down.
An eye.
It blood across the broken sky with the slow deliberate patience of sothing that had all the ti in existence and chose to spend a fraction of it here. It was crimson, deep and ancient crimson, the color of blood that had been old when the Sacred Mountains were young, and its pupil burned with a gold so bright it hurt to look at directly. The pupil was serpentine, a vertical slit that held the sa shape as the eyes of the great predators that had walked the Lands of Stone before humans learned to stand upright, but it was not the eye of a beast.
It was the eye of sothing that had consud so many beasts and n and spirits and souls across so many eons that the distinction between predator and prey had ceased to hold aning for it!
The eye was vast.
It stretched across the sky above the Citadel as if the heavens themselves had grown a pupil, and wherever its gaze fell, the air beneath it thickened with a presence so heavy that breathing beca an act of defiance. Crimson-gold light radiated from its surface in waves that pressed downward across the white walls and towers and plazas of the Covenant with the casual authority of sothing that did not need to announce itself because everything beneath it already knew what it was looking at!
The iris held patterns within it, spiraling designs that seed to move and rearrange themselves with each passing heartbeat, and staring into those patterns for too long produced a sensation that the old Shamans had described in their forbidden texts as the feeling of being read.
Not seen. Read. As if every secret and every mory and every scrap of cultivation a being possessed was being cataloged and filed away by sothing that collected such information the way lesser beings collected stones!
A beam of crimson-gold light erupted from the pupil and struck Damian’s enclosed figure with force that exceeded anything he had experienced since his transformation, exceeded anything he had imagined experiencing, exceeded the conceptual frawork his Prival mind had constructed for what power at this level was supposed to feel like!
BOOM!
His solar barrier held, the layers of compressed brilliance absorbing the impact in cascading failures that peeled away one after another, each layer buying him a fraction of a heartbeat before the next one shattered, and the force behind the beam drove him downward through the sky toward the Citadel below at a speed that turned the air around him into a screaming tunnel of displaced atmosphere.
BOOM!
He hit the ground.
The white stone of the Citadel cratered beneath him, sacred inscriptions shattering under the impact, and he lay at the center of the destruction with his body sore from head to sole, every inch of his Prival fra aching with the mory of what had just struck him! His defenses had held. The layered barrier of solar light and Land and Sky Physique power had kept him uninjured in any way that mattered, and the fact that he was conscious and thinking and already gathering Mana for his next move told him that his intuition had been the difference between survival and sothing far worse!
But that was the first terrifyingly critical attack he had faced in what seed like forever!
Then he heard Barbatos.
Her voice rang out across the Citadel with a joy so pure and so ugly that it cut through the ringing in his ears, and when he looked up from the crater, he saw the solar chains that had bound the five Dukes dissolving into nothing. Pillars of crimson-gold light had wrapped around each of the captured demons, and the shackles Damian had forged from compressed sunlight were being broken apart as if they had been made of dried grass rather than the power of a star. The chains didn’t crack or weaken or gradually fail.
They simply ceased to exist, unmade by a power that rendered his own irrelevant through sheer magnitude.
The fear and rage in Barbatos’s eyes was gone.
In its place sat sothing Damian had not seen on any of their faces since he’d chained them, sothing reverent and grateful and deeply, fundantally loyal. All five Dukes turned their gazes upward toward the crimson-gold eye that filled the broken sky, and their expressions matched, the look of soldiers whose commander had arrived on the battlefield at the mont they needed saving most.
Barbatos threw her head back and laughed.
"The Eye of the Demon Emperor!" she scread, her slender fra shaking with manic delight, burns and solar scars and all. "Haha! We greet you and thank you for the aid, Sire!"
BOOM!
On the ground, Damian pushed himself to his feet within the crater and felt the soreness in his body settle into sothing manageable as his Prival recovery went to work. He looked up at the eye filling the sky and felt his gaze beco grave.
The Eye of the Demon Emperor.
Such a thing had actually showed up to save the Dukes!
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