Villain Rising: My Job In This New World Is To Cuck The Protagonist Chapter 54 - 054. The Beginnings Of Horror [I]

Malakor raised both of his frail bleeding hands high into the air.

He took a deep rattling breath, drawing an unfathomable amount of dark mana into his fragile core.

The veins on his neck bulged glowing with a sickening purple light.

This was the magic that had earned him the title of Demon King.

He wasn’t just going to open a portal... he was going to forcefully link the spatial coordinates of the mountain ridge directly to the deepest most corrupted abyssal dungeon networks located beneath the continent.

"Reality is but a fragile pane of glass," Malakor rasped. "And I am the hamr."

He slamd his hands downward, his fingers curling into claws as if grabbing the very fabric of the air itself.

With a terrifying gut-wrenching scream of physical effort, Malakor violently ripped his hands apart.

KRRAA-KOOOM!

The sound was absolutely deafening.

It sounded like the sky itself was being torn in two... It wasn’t the boom of thunder or the crack of lightning; it was the terrifying sound of reality fracturing.

A massive, jagged spatial crack, radiating with intense, blinding purple and black light, tore open in the air directly above the mountain ridge. It was a wound in the world, stretching over a hundred feet across.

But Malakor didn’t stop there.

He twisted his bloody wrists with his frail body trembling violently from the overwhelming strain of channeling so much spatial mana.

CRACK! CRACK! CRUNCH!

Like a spiderweb of shattered glass, the spatial fractures violently spread.

They cascaded down the sides of the mountain, ripping through the stone, tearing through the air.

Dozens upon dozens of massive unauthorized Dungeon Gates were forcefully ripped open all along the mountain pass facing the valley.

The air pressure plumted.

The sll of rotting at instantly flooded the ridge, washing away the crisp cold of the mountain air.

The gates were stabilized and the connection to the abyss was open. For a terrifying agonizing mont, there was silence and then, the swarm arrived.

It started as a low rumble that shook the very foundations of the earth then, the first wave poured out of the massive central fracture.

They were Obsidian Gargoyles... massive winged horrors made of living, razor-sharp stone.

They shrieked into the night sky with their eyes burning like hot coals as they launched themselves into the air, completely blocking out the moonlight with their sheer numbers.

Hundreds of them circled the peak, creating a swirling vortex of wings and claws.

Next ca the ground forces, erupting from the dozens of gates torn open along the mountainside.

Shadow Beasts... moving like liquid darkness, poured out in a relentless, silent tide as their jaws dripped with acidic venom.

Behind them marched the Armored Orcs, hulking corrupted brutes wielding rusted iron cleavers and clad in thick spiked plate mail.

They roared, beating their weapons against their shields in a deafening, blood-curdling rhythm.

From the largest fractures at the base of the ridge, the heavy hitters erged.

Dire-Trolls, standing twenty feet tall, dragged massive, spiked iron clubs behind them, crushing the rocks beneath their heavy footfalls.

And soaring out of the highest portals ca the Corrupted Wyverns, decaying undead dragons with rotting wings and breath sacks glowing with highly volatile necrotic fire.

The sheer volu of the monsters was unfathomable.

It was an ocean of teeth, claws, and corrupted magic.

They spilled out of the spatial tears, instantly filling the mountain pass with their bodies pressing against each other in a frantic, chaotic frenzy.

Normally, these varied species of monsters would tear each other apart in a blind rage but tonight, they were bound by an absolute, dominating will.

Malakor hovered above the chaotic swirling mass of nightmares.

The strain of opening so many gates simultaneously had taken a severe toll on his frail body.

He was panting heavily with sweat mixing with the blood on his pale face. His hands shook, and a thin line of dark blood trickled from his nose.

But as he looked down at the endless churning tide of destruction he had just summoned into the world, a look of ecstasy washed over his features.

He had bypassed the Kingdom’s armies.

He had bypassed the warning beacons of the borderlands.

He had brought the absolute horror of a monster tide directly to the doorstep of a sleeping vulnerable town.

The Eighth Demon King lowered his shaking hands. He pulled his silk handkerchief from his robes, delicately wiping the blood from his nose and lips.

He looked down at the town of Astelvern in the valley below.

The crimson tether of his tracking spell was still firmly locked onto Astrid’s manor in a glowing red line pointing the way for the horde.

Malakor spread his arms wide, embracing the roaring deafening chaos of the monstrous army surrounding him.

He tilted his head back, his abyssal black eyes locking onto the dark heavens.

"Go forth, my children..." Malakor commanded.

His voice, amplified by his dark mana, bood over the mountainside slicing through the roars of the beasts like a cold blade.

"Follow the blood... Burn their hos... Slaughter their guards... And bring the head of the Twilight Witch!"

As if a dam had burst, the absolute totality of the monster horde surged forward.

The black tsunami of bodies cascaded down the mountain pass in an unstoppable unified force of destruction barreling directly toward the peaceful quiet town in the valley below.

The earth trembled beneath their charge and the sky darkened with their wings...

The calamity had arrived.

...

The southern watchtower of Astelvern Town stood high above the sprawling darkened plains.

It was a solitary pillar of grey stone designed to keep watch for stray, low-tier beasts wandering too close to the comrcial roads and the wall.

It was half past two in the morning.

The air was bitterly cold and a thick blanket of grey clouds had rolled over the valley, completely swallowing the light of the moon and stars.

Leaning heavily against the stone parapet was Guard Captain Vance.

He was a seasoned veteran of the town militia, a man who had spent twenty years dealing with drunk adventurers and minor goblin raids.

He took a sip from a dented tin mug of terrible lukewarm coffee, shivering as the freezing wind bit through his thick woolen cloak.

Standing a few feet away was a fresh-faced rookie, barely nineteen years old, nervously gripping his standard-issue iron spear.

The boy kept shifting his weight with his teeth chattering audibly in the quiet night.

"Stop fidgeting, kid," Vance grumbled, taking another sip of his bitter coffee. "You’re making more noise than the wind... Nothing happens on the southern wall... The closest dungeon is the World Dungeon... We just stand here, freeze our asses off until sunrise, and collect our copper."

"S-Sorry, Captain," the rookie stamred with his breath puffing out in white clouds. "It’s just... does the air feel heavy to you? It feels like it’s going to storm."

Vance frowned.

He set his tin mug down on the stone ledge and looked out over the vast, pitch-black expanse of the plains stretching toward the distant Razorback Ridge.

The rookie was right...

The air didn’t just feel heavy... it felt thick and almost suffocating.

The ambient mana in the atmosphere, usually a calm flowing river felt like it was aggressively vibrating against his skin.

The sll of the approaching storm was wrong, too. It didn’t sll like rain or wet earth.

...It slled like sulfur and rotting at.

Rumble!

A vibration passed through the thick stone of the watchtower, traveling up through the soles of Vance’s heavy leather boots.

Vance stiffened.

He reached down to his belt, unhooking a heavy brass spyglass enchanted with low-tier night vision.

He pulled it up to his right eye, adjusting the arcane lenses, and peered out into the darkness toward the distant mountains.

For a mont, all he saw was the static green-tinted darkness of the plains but then, the horizon moved.

Vance’s breath caught violently in his throat as his blood ran instantly, freezing cold.

It wasn’t a trick of the light.

The actual horizon was moving... Miles away, cascading down the slopes of the Razorback Ridge and spilling out across the flat plains, was a massive undulating wave of absolute darkness.

Through the enchanted lenses, the terrifying details began to resolve.

He saw the hulking, armored silhouettes of Dire-Trolls crushing the trees.

He saw thousands of glowing sickly yellow and burning red eyes swarming like a plague of locusts.

He looked up, shifting the spyglass toward the sky, and saw the heavy grey clouds physically churning as a massive flock of Corrupted Wyverns and Obsidian Gargoyles tore through the air, blocking out whatever faint ambient light remained.

It was a black tsunami!

An ocean of fangs, claws, and corrupted magic and it was moving with a terrifying, unified velocity directly toward Astelvern Town.

Vance lowered the spyglass.

His hands were shaking so violently that the heavy brass instrunt slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the stone floor.

"Captain?" the rookie asked as his voice trembled as he saw the blood completely drain from his superior’s face. "Captain, what is it?"

Vance couldn’t speak.

His throat was entirely paralyzed by a level of unfathomable terror he had never experienced in his life.

The low rumble of the horde was no longer a vibration in the stone... it was an audible deafening roar rolling across the plains.

The ground shook violently.

The rookie stepped up to the parapet, straining his eyes in the dark.

Without the spyglass, it took him a second longer to process the massive, shifting wall of darkness rapidly devouring the landscape.

When his brain finally registered the sheer scale of the monster tide, his knees simply gave out.

The boy collapsed onto the stone floor, his spear clattering away as a dark warm stain rapidly spread across the front of his uniform trousers.

He completely lost control of his bladder, openly sobbing in pure, unfiltered horror.

"Gods... Gods save us..." Vance choked out with the paralysis finally breaking.

He spun around, lunging desperately toward the center of the watchtower roof.

Suspended from a massive wooden beam was the town’s ergency alarm bell... a massive solid bronze construct thicker than a man’s torso.

Vance grabbed the heavy iron mallet resting against the pillar.

He swung it with every single ounce of desperate, terrified strength in his body.

BONG!

The deep toll of the massive bell shattered the quiet night.

BONG! BONG! BONG!

Vance swung the mallet like a madman with tears streaming down his weathered face.

He didn’t stop... He hit the bronze until his hands bled, sending the frantic warning echoing across the sleeping town of Astelvern.

Several miles ahead of the town walls, deep in the desolate plains, a completely different scene was unfolding.

The Iron Lions, an elite, high-ranking adventurer guild, had been conducting an independent late-night subjugation mission.

They had been tracking a rogue mutated Troll that had wandered too far from its dungeon.

They were currently standing on a small rocky outcropping with their weapons drawn, completely surrounded by the corpses of several Shadow Beasts they had just slaughtered.

Guild Master Rominio, a broad-shouldered man wielding a massive, glowing greatsword, stood at the front of his elite captains.

He was a man defined by his overwhelming arrogance.

He possessed a dense, fiery aura, and his guild was famous for taking on high-risk, high-reward missions that ordinary adventurers fled from.

When the spatial fractures had torn open on the mountain ridge miles away, Rominio hadn’t ordered a retreat.

When the monster tide began spilling out into the plains, he hadn’t fired a warning flare to alert the town guards.

Instead, he had looked at the approaching horde, seen the chaotic mix of high-tier monsters, and smiled a greedy bloodthirsty grin.

"This is it, boys!" Rominio had roared to his captains. "A dungeon break! The town guards will cower behind their walls, but if we carve a path through the vanguard and kill the anomaly summoning them, the Guild Association will elevate us to S-rank! We will be legends!"

It was a staggering fatal miscalculation born of sheer hubris.

Rominio and his captains had charged directly into the path of the incoming horde.

Initially, their high-tier coordination and raw strength had allowed them to cut through the first wave of low-level Shadow Beasts and Armored Orcs with relative ease.

The monsters were packed so tightly together that every swing of Rominio’s greatsword cleaved through multiple bodies, showering the plains in dark corrosive blood.

But as they pushed deeper into the swarm, the reality of the situation began to violently crush them.

The monsters weren’t acting like mindless beasts... They were ignoring the adventurers, rushing past them toward the town, acting under an absolute terrifying command.

And then, Rominio saw him.

Hovering passively fifty feet above the chaotic churning sea of monsters, illuminated by the necrotic fire of the passing Wyverns, was a frail skeletal man in dark flowing velvet robes.

"There!" Rominio shouted, pointing his bloody greatsword toward the sky. "That’s the summoner! Look at him! He’s built like a sickly scholar! He has no physical defense!"

Rominio didn’t hesitate. He channeled every ounce of his blazing red aura into his legs, utilizing a high-tier movent skill... teor Leap.

With a deafening crack that shattered the rocky outcropping beneath his boots, the Guild Master launched himself into the air like a human cannonball.

He soared over the heads of the roaring Dire-Trolls, his greatsword raised high above his head, aiming directly for the frail, pale neck of the hovering summoner.

"Die, you freak!" Rominio roared, a manic, victorious grin stretching across his face.

He was re feet away. He could see the intricate embroidery on the summoner’s velvet robes.

He was going to end the monster tide with a single, legendary strike...

Malakor, the Eighth Demon King, didn’t even flinch, hell he didn’t attempt to dodge. He didn’t raise a magical barrier.

He simply turned his abyssal black eyes toward the incoming screaming human.

"The absolute arrogance of your species," Malakor sighed with his rasping voice echoing directly inside Rominio’s skull, completely drowning out the noise of the battlefield below. "You mistake frailty for weakness."

Rominio swung the massive, glowing greatsword downward with all his might but before the blade could even co close to Malakor’s skin, the frail Demon King casually flicked his wrist.

A tiny, razor-thin spatial gate... no larger than a dinner plate instantly tore open in the empty air directly in the trajectory of Rominio’s swing.

Rominio’s eyes widened, but he was moving too fast. He couldn’t halt his montum.

From the tiny, jagged spatial portal, a horror from the deepest most corrupted abyssal trench erupted outward.

It wasn’t a full monster... it was just the jaws.

A horrific mass of shifting, purple flesh lined with hundreds of jagged rapidly spinning, razor-sharp teeth shot out of the portal at blinding speed.

It didn’t bite the sword... instead it bit the swordsman.

CRUNCH!

The sound was sickeningly wet and loud.

The spinning abyssal jaws clamped shut directly over Rominio’s torso, effortlessly snapping through his enchanted steel armor, his dense aura, and his spine in a single fluid motion.

The portal instantly snapped shut, cleanly severing the connection.

The top half of Guild Master Rominio... his head, his shoulders, and his arms still gripping the greatsword completely vanished into the abyss.

His lower half, from the stomach down, continued its upward trajectory for a fraction of a second, propelled by the sheer montum of his leap, before gravity took hold.

The bisected, wildly bleeding legs fell out of the sky, plumting down into the churning sea of monsters below.

Down on the rocky outcropping, the remaining captains of the Iron Lions froze in absolute mind-shattering horror.

They watched their invincible arrogant leader get instantly, casually erased from existence by a frail man who hadn’t even moved from his spot.

"Guild Master..." one of the captains whispered, dropping his twin axes.

They didn’t get the chance to retreat.

From the shadows behind the outcropping, the Void-Stalker phased effortlessly through the solid stone.

The ethereal mass of living shadows materialized directly behind the dual-wielding captain.

Two massive, shadow-forged claws slid seamlessly into the back of the man’s neck violently ripping his spine out through his throat before he could even scream.

Simultaneously, the massive, twelve-foot-tall Dread-Minotaur crashed into the center of their formation like a furry armored teor.

It swung its colossal iron greataxe in a devastating horizontal arc, instantly turning the remaining three elite captains into a spray of pulverized bone and red mist.

Malakor didn’t even look down at the slaughter.

He simply pulled his silk handkerchief from his robes, wiped a speck of Rominio’s blood from his cheek, and continued to drift forward... following his army toward the distant ringing bells of the town.

Inside the sprawling, opulent estate of the Vice Guild Leader...

The thick enchanted stone walls of the manor completely isolated the interior from the noise of the outside world.

The grand hallways were bathed in the soft warm glow of ambient magical lamps.

In the library, the romance novel Astrid had been reading rested peacefully on a side table.

In the eastern wing, Lyra slept soundly, her new masterwork sword resting on the nightstand beside her bed.

The distant frantic tolling of the town’s outer alarm bells was completely muffled by the manor’s acoustic wards.

But physical sound was not the only way the estate communicated danger.

Astrid was fast asleep in her massive plush bed with her golden hair spread across the silk pillows.

She was dreaming of a quiet life with Ren, far removed from the grueling, bloody realities of the Adventurer’s Guild.

Suddenly, the ambient temperature in the room spiked.

VWOOM!

A massive pulse of A-rank defensive magic violently detonated throughout the entire manor as the invisible highly complex wards woven into the very foundation of the estate registered a massive overwhelmingly hostile surge of corrupted mana rapidly approaching the town borders.

The soft warm magical lamps lining the hallways and bedrooms instantly snapped from a soothing amber to a blinding violent crimson red.

A sharp piercing high-frequency magical siren began to blare directly inside the walls, designed to wake anyone inside instantly.

Astrid’s blue eyes snapped open.