Damian was once again trapped in the darkness. His mana armor was slowly being chipped away by the all-absorbing black void. But.. Damian noticed that the mana cubes inside his bulging mana armor were working perfectly—they hadn't stopped functioning like before. The armor was protecting them.
Damian smiled. Half the mana being generated was used to maintain the armor, but there was still enough liquid mana to launch a few spells. The mana cube needed environmental air filled with natural mana to work. It would stop working soon in this abyssal void.
Damian launched a small, body-sized laser beam to preserve mana and flew in one direction. The mana was depleting quickly. Damian thinned his armor but kept it stable. The cubes slowed down and, after a few minutes, stopped working. But the darkness didn't end. Damian couldn't sense anything in the void at all—it blocked all external mana and prevented any from escaping his body.
It took a whole three minutes before Damian saw the end of the dark tunnel and finally broke free. He inhaled deeply—only now realizing he had been holding his breath because there had been no air inside. Damian flew higher and higher, his mana cubes restarting, generating mana and refilling his almost-depleted manapool. His mana armor had broken a minute ago. That bastard had really tricked him.
When Damian looked down, his eyes almost popped out of their sockets. A gigantic pitch-black dragon—ten times the size of the giant Demon Lord's previous form—was the thing that had captured him inside. He was lucky to have exited from the top—had he gone straight by chance, he might never have made it out.
'I thought the giant humanoid form was his limit.. What fucked up esper power is this?!'
Damian didn't make any hasty moves and just kept flying higher and higher. Where in that giant lizard form was this guy hiding? Not being able to sense him was a pain in the ass.
If the Demon Lord was going to give him a target, Damian would happily oblige. Enough liquid mana had been generated, floating around the mana cubes. Damian spammed hundreds of runic circles, all forming various sizes of light constructs that rained down all over the massive, titanic figure of the monstrous Demon Lord. It couldn't move either—Damian noticed that. It may have become the largest thing he had ever seen, but it still had limits. Damian took advantage of its weakness and bombarded it with so many light structures from all directions that the chain of explosions went on for minutes.
Damian also opened a giant waygate and used a massive wormhole after wormhole with his spare mana to transport all the unconscious blue and red pigmen back to the shrine city. He had no idea if they would ever wake up, but he couldn't just let them be crushed beneath the feet of the charging black army—not when he had the time and the resources to do something about it. Many had already died beneath the army's advance.
At last, the giant form shattered, and once again, Land Breaker was revealed. This time, Damian took a second and used a long wormhole to reach him—he had learned his lesson and kept a waygate spell ready in case the darkness tried to trap him again. Once again clad in mana armor, Damian charged straight at Land Breaker with a giant steel sword held by his armored body.
Land Breaker, now a demon lord, stood his ground and created a polished black arched wall in the air to block Damian's sword. Then the Demon Lord made a strange imitation of punching from behind the wall—seconds later, a giant dark hand materialized to the side, turning into a fist that rushed toward Damian. Before it landed, the Demon Lord created a second one, then a third and a fourth—bombarding him from all sides.
Damian's mana armor held strong for a few hits; others he cut down with his giant golden mana-structure sword. In the end, he powered the golden shield spell etched on his body to block the rest. Seeing the Demon Lord standing just meters away in mid-air, Damian unleashed his hellfire without a second thought—breaking through all the dark hands and swords attacking him.
But that strange, void-like pitch-black polished shield the Demon Lord had used earlier—and that even Shadecaster had used—absorbed the full might of his hellfire without even cracking.
There were two types of darkness the Demon Lord used, Damian had noticed. The first was the one he could control in large quantities, like his dark clouds and the solid structures of that slightly grey-black substance. And then there was this—shiny, pitch-black, polished, half-solid, half-liquid darkness that absorbed everything and protected the Demon Lord and his lackeys from powerful attacks.
"You have exceeded my expectations, kid," came the deep, grueling voice of the Demon Lord from Land Breaker's red smoky-eyed face. "Even without the Lightbringer's seed, you can put up a fight. Even became a third ranker.. Took a century to do it, but still an admirable effort. Without any enlightenment from the gods, even."
Damian used the pause in the fight to weave hundreds of light laser spells and other attacks while replying, "Did you find your chaos god? Or is he still missing?"
The red smoky eyes narrowed. "This is a foreign world. I can't reach him.. but you can."
Damian kept up the bullshit. "You know they'll never let you ascend, right? Seeing the power you've gathered, he might even see you as something he must get rid of.."
"Hahahah.." The deep, terrifying sound of laughter was something that belonged in a nightmare. "You have no idea who my liege is. For the God of Chaos, my strength will be the greatest weapon he could use against those hypocrites.."
"The other gods?" Damian asked, this time genuinely interested in the information.
"Everything in the world eventually dies, kid. Bright days, giant waves, and even thousand-year-old trees. Only chaos.. Only chaos is and will always be an eternal force—immortal for ages to come."