Chapter 970: Demon City
“Is this… the demons’ city?”
Roland stood at the bottom of the abyss and let the question settle in him.
He had expected the memory to open onto a battlefield. Some decisive engagement, some moment of blood and dust. He had not expected this—the enemy’s actual home. An entire civilization arranged around a lake of Red Mist, carved into the walls of a sinkhole that defied natural formation.
But the scene before him differed in several important ways from the mirage the Witch Cooperation Association had once described.
He had looked in every direction. There was no dominant central tower—no giant Obelisk built from God’s Stone ore that could generate Red Mist and form the living core of a demon city. The Blackstone Pagoda that Agatha and Pasha had spoken of was not here. Or at least, it was not visible.
There were too many towers to rule anything out. Some of them jutted above the cliffline itself, leaning outward over the abyss at angles that should have been structurally impossible. Apartments floating in midair. If the Obelisk was elsewhere in this complex, it could be hidden behind any of them.
Unless this city isn’t the same one Leaf saw at all.
Another site, then. The rumored birthplace of the demons—the original source, somewhere further out, beyond what any scouting vision had reached.
He filed that possibility away and watched the bonfires on the island.
When the Red Mist surged up from the depths, the flames climbed with it—ten meters, twelve, burning brighter in the enriched air, then dropping back when the mist subsided. The pulse of fire had been the first thing visible from the clifftop. It had drawn him down here. Now that he was close enough to feel the heat, he adjusted his earlier assumption: the Red Mist could burn, but not instantaneously. It required the right density of mist and the right conditions. An open flame in the wrong concentration could sustain itself. At the right concentration, it contributed something to the fire’s reach.
He noted that and kept observing.
The ceremony—if that was what it was—had not yet reached its central moment. The tens of thousands of demons gathered on the ramps and platforms and cliff-carved caves were watching the island, their attention fixed. Colored pennants jerked in the updraft. Their howls and cries formed a continuous noise that almost matched the roar of airflow through the pit.
Roland had spent enough time in crowds to recognize anticipation. This was anticipation.
He picked his way closer to the stone bridge.
It was even more precarious up close. A single span of slender stone connecting the cliff base to the circular island—no visible supports, nothing beneath it but the drop to the Red Mist lake. The island itself appeared to float: no foundation, no pillar, the stone bridge seeming to be its only connection to anything solid. He stared at the underside for a long moment and still couldn’t determine how either the bridge or the island maintained their position.
How many hundreds of years did it take to build this entire complex?
He had been asking himself that since the cliff top, and the answer kept growing. The ramps, the carriage-accessible roads, the black stone coating, the towers balanced at impossible angles, the bridges over nothing. Even accounting for whatever structural principles the demons used—principles clearly different from anything in human engineering—the sheer accumulated labor was staggering.
If a civilization’s military capacity could be inferred from its architectural ambitions, then the demons had been underestimated at every turn.
The four kingdoms could not win the Battle of Divine Will through a few well-placed artillery barrages and the courage of the First Army. Not against this. Not against whatever had built this.
He had known that intellectually for some time. Standing here made it felt rather than known.
More demons had appeared on the roads as he descended. Most were unarmed—wearing skins or rough woven fabric, their bodies varying so widely in shape and scale that he kept losing track of which differences were individual and which were categorical. The same questions circled back. Were they all the same species? Were the combat variants born, or made? The Union had captured non-combat demons; Pasha’s reports had raised the question of whether they constituted a separate enslaved population. But looking at the movement here—spontaneous, unhurried, unmonitored—he didn’t see a slave hierarchy. No overseers. No particular deference being paid to the armored figures he passed. They moved like residents in a city, each following their own purpose.
The division between combat and non-combat forms was not just a matter of training or role. The forms themselves were different. Not different degrees of the same thing—different branches, possibly from different origins, with no gradient between them.
Do they reproduce the way we do? Is there even a meaningful masculine and feminine among them?
He didn’t have answers. He would have to look for more.
Just as he reached the base of the bridge, a prolonged blast of horn sound rolled through the pit.
Every demon fell silent at once.
The Red Mist below—which had looked like solid crystal from this distance—began to move. It surged and churned, no longer still, like lava rousing itself. The surface roiled and threw up the mist columns that climbed past the island and dissipated above.
Two demons emerged from the gathered crowd and stepped onto the bridge.
Roland found the contrast immediately striking. One was clearly a Mad Demon—larger than any he had encountered on the battlefield, but still recognizable by its bone armor and the particular aggressive set of its frame. The other was something he had only heard described: a Lord of Hell, the kind Agatha had mentioned, shaped like a massive crawler. No armor on either of them.
The relationship between the two was confrontational. They moved toward the island together, but they were pushing at each other the entire way—deliberate jostling, each testing the other’s footing on the narrow bridge, neither giving ground. Yet the crowd watching them showed no alarm. If anything, the energy of it sharpened. A murmur ran through the assembled tens of thousands like a wave.
It’s a duel.
He understood immediately. A ceremonial combat of the type common to many cultures that organized themselves around demonstrated strength. A contest to the death, probably—or at least to submission—with the survivor elevated as proof of superior capability. The demons around the pit hadn’t been surprised because they had expected this. They’d been waiting for it.
The island was large enough to hold it. The bonfires were the audience’s reference point—the flames their marker of significant action.
Roland had always found these kinds of ritual duels philosophically unimpressive. Not because of anything specific to the demons. Simply because the logic led nowhere useful: the combat provided entertainment and established dominance, but the death of a capable individual—or even two—accomplished nothing that couldn’t be achieved more efficiently. Human civilization had outgrown the practice for good reasons. The ancient practice of forcing captives to fight animals at least had the cold efficiency of ensuring that the surviving party was someone expendable. A duel between equals merely removed whoever lost.
But as an observer with no stake in the outcome and no way to be seen, he was willing to set his opinions aside. He walked directly through the crowd—his hands passing through shoulders without contact—followed the two demons onto the bridge, and stepped onto the island.
And stopped.
Someone was already on the island.
He had not seen her from the bridge approach. She was standing near the center of the circular space, robed in white, and the sight of her hit him with a kind of cognitive arrest that took a moment to parse.
A female demon.
He was not certain of that impression at first. But the more he looked, the more it held. The proportions. The set of the shoulders and waist. The particular structure of the face beneath the three eyes—two where a human’s would be, a third set centrally in the forehead. Livid skin. Prominent horns. Bony spurs running the length of her shoulders and down her arms. By any ordinary measure, she should have been difficult to look at.
She wasn’t.
Wait—that’s not scientifically reasonable.
He caught himself and thought it through. An alien species with no genetic overlap with humanity producing an individual who read as conventionally attractive. The upright posture could be explained by evolutionary pressure—height advantages for predators, better sightlines, practical hunting benefits. But that level of convergence? That was not a random result.
Others would not agree with his reaction, probably. Most people encountering this figure for the first time would not register attraction—they would register threat, revulsion, the visceral alarm that came from something almost-human but wrong. The three eyes. The spurs. The horns. Anyone who hadn’t spent months studying demons and mapping their biology would simply be frightened.
But he had spent those months, and he had arrived here from a world with a different baseline for strangeness.
He filed the observation and watched.
Before the duel began, both demons—the Mad Demon and the Lord of Hell—turned and bowed to the white-robed figure. Then each moved to one end of the island, their backs to the lake, facing each other across the open space.
The female demon walked slowly to the island’s edge.
She opened her mouth and began to sing.
Roland had heard demons communicate. The sounds they produced were functional, dense with information, not musical—at least not to a human ear. This was different. What she was producing was not speech and not noise. It was a sustained soprano, the notes rising and bending in a scale he couldn’t map onto anything familiar, and it carried across the entire pit with an effortlessness that suggested the acoustics of the space had been built with this in mind.
The Red Mist lake responded.
The surface shuddered and began to push upward, more violently than the wind-driven surges he had seen since descending. Something was rising from the depths—or the depths themselves were rising to meet something. The mist columns shot higher, the bonfires snapped and roared, and the assembled tens of thousands of demons, packed into every available surface of the pit walls, erupted into sound.
Roland stood at the edge of the island and watched, the heat of the mist on his face, the soprano moving through the air around him like a current.
What are they preparing for?