Did he get him?
Damian did not wait for a second before jumping inside the wormhole and kicking the guy in the back with tremendous force to get him inside the waygate without using any tricks—it could be said it was a bit unnecessary since the Demon Lord was already out cold. They both went through the waygate and came out near a giant magma monster in the lava zone.
But.. Damian, flying in the hot, dry air, saw the body of Land Breaker falling down without any resistance.
‘That is odd.’
A fourth-ranker’s body shouldn’t be that delicate. Damian had no delusions about his strength—he was not powerful enough to knock out Land Breaker in just those few simple attacks. He quickly flew down and grabbed the guy. Damian opened his eyelids and saw normal eyes instead of that dark and red he was used to seeing from the first day he had seen the possessed Land Breaker’s face.
Did the Demon Lord really.. leave a fourth-ranker host to save himself?
It was the most logical choice, but Damian, for some reason, doubted the Demon Lord would have ever left Land Breaker’s body—which he had obtained through so much effort—just to let go of it this easily. What should he do?
Damian immediately took Land Breaker’s ID and also used the Divine Seeker Chains spell on him to seal away his mana. Even if this was another of the Demon Lord’s tricks—with these two spells alone he would have the upper hand. Still, Damian opened another waygate to Earth and placed Land Breaker’s unconscious body on a small island in the middle of nowhere. Without the mana—even if the guy woke up as the Demon Lord with the help of some fucked-up residue darkness hidden inside—he wouldn’t be able to do much.
Still, as a caution, Damian took out one of his condensed steel runic tools he had prepared and activated it. It was a 5×5 square steel solid with only one spell: the Invisible Box spell. Damian waited for a minute and filled two mana containers, which he then connected to the invisible box covering the whole island. The sandy island had barely a couple of trees and a few meters of land. There was nothing anywhere near it for hundreds of kilometers.
Damian had found the island while flying and thought it could serve as a quiet place to sit in the evenings. The view of the sunset was mesmerizing.
The containers should power the invisible box for months without any problem, in case no one broke the box from outside. Land Breaker did not need air to survive, so he shouldn’t suffocate either—not that Damian cared much if he did or not at the moment. He wanted to hurry and go back—Damian had not even closed the waygate he had come through. It wasted mana, but it would save him some time. For the whole duration back on Earth, he had barely spent two minutes.
Damian flew back and returned to the lava zone, then opened another waygate and came out on top of the giant shrine beside Lucian and Maelor. The whole battlefield had changed in just a couple of minutes—thankfully, he was not missing any major mana signature, meaning everyone was all right. But over half the pigmen numbers from inside the shrine city were gone. Hopefully, through the waygates. He had no time to check.
There was a giant legendary black monster right in front of the northern shrine steps—holding a very familiar dark, polished black sword. It was attacking the pigmen king, Heather, Rurik, and Mindseer—the four who were fighting against the monstrosity with all their might.
The side of the western fourth step of the shrine even had a giant fist-sized hole in it—hundreds of flying monsters trying to get in, while lasers after lasers landed on them, killing and injuring them heavily—still, the four sides of the shrine wall laser cannon operators had no additional protection now, and the land-based black army had climbed step after step atop the shrine, currently at the fourth step—just one step more, and they would reach Lucian and Maelor, effectively destroying the mana disperse system and stopping all their cannons.
From the look of it, he had barely been gone for an hour or two, but things were not looking good at all. Waygates were still open in the inner shrine city where Damian did not sense any monsters, only pigmen and a few of his friends.
“Where were you? Shadecaster took Sam somewhere ten minutes ago! I can’t use the waygate right now..” Lucian said from beside him.
Damian also realized he had missed Sam’s changed mana signature completely. He wanted to go get Sam immediately, but the situation here was on the verge of collapse too. If he left again—it would be the end of everyone here. Thankfully, the liquid mana was being constantly generated while he made his quick observation—and Damian had enough to do something.
First of all, Damian sealed the giant hole in the stone shrine with a giant mountain of hard ice—the pigmen warriors fighting inside the city finally getting some rest from protecting their people from constant incoming monsters. Then Damian created over 30 condensed spheres of flame, like the mini sun but the giant version Sulthar had used on him, and launched them all around the four sides of the stone shrine.
The gigantic explosion killing thousands of black ones aside—such a giant body of flames and lava, after exploding on land, left a massive pool of lava, which became craters filled with molten land. Still, it could work as a natural barrier. His ice wall was not completely broken, but many massive holes had appeared in it after he was gone—Damian used the chain of explosions and reinforced his ice wall once again using a giant sphere of water and ice spells.
In the end, he used a large portion of his leftover liquid mana to do a large-scale freezing spell—freezing all the black monsters still climbing the giant stone shrine from the four sides.