A short series of growls were heard, and the head of a kobold exploded, painting half of the walls of the room in dark crimson. Much blood splattered on the magical tool that produced light, reddening the light it cast in the room.
Demon Knight Raoul was pissed. Two weeks remained, and the vanguard force would depart to establish a foothold in human territory, and he would finally leave the underground castle for the first time in hundreds of years.
Demon Knight Raoul was part of the force responsible for taking the weak minor nations, and thus the force only had a demon baron as the highest ranking officer. It was relatively weak compared to the others in charge of taking the major nations. Yet, they had an important job.
The demons had their own methods of espionage, and had found out about the deployment of the Heroes to other sites. It was no exaggeration to say that it was the force Demon Knight Raoul was part of that was most likely to be able to establish the foothold the demons wanted in Human territory.
The kobold that Demon Knight Raoul just killed had come to report the continued silence of two out of four of his fellow demon knights. With two weeks left, almost all preparations were complete. This was a crucial time. This was not a time where such things could not be allowed to happen.
Demon Knight Raoul knew that demon nobility had gone silent for two hundred years, and thus, most of them found no problems with periods of extended reticence. After all, in those two hundred years, they had been in no hurry. It was annoying, but he trusted in the power of the Lord's demiplane that influenced demonkind's thoughts to forcefully break the other demon knights out of their reclusive behaviour soon, even if he couldn't.
Demon Knight Raoul was from the monster tribe that lived near the heart of the Calysta continent. The monster tribe was a group of monsters that had, over many generations, evolved to forsake their innate hostility. He had grand plans of converting the monster tribe, which contained enough power to rival a major nation if they bothered to actively militarize, into a demonic ally. Since the day he accepted the embrace of the demonic, he had joined the silently growing demonic faction within the monster tribe.
It was unfortunate, however, that the day before any movement could be made, Hero Medeus had shown up and swept them like a storm. Demon Knight Raoul, by some miracle, had managed to escape, though he was the only one. By order of the higher-ups within the demons, no demonic forces were allowed to be posted there again, aside from the occasional useless bait to keep the Hero stationed there to lock his movements.
Growling, Demonic Knight Raoul, the demonic Gnoll Lord, a once-in-a-century variant monster four times the size of the usual half-meter, hyena-like Gnoll, looked down and glared at the headless corpse of the kobold. He then turned and headed for the door. He needed to vent, and he needed to do it now.
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Without bothering to open the thin stone door, he walked straight through it, leaving an outline of his figure in the door.
Walking down the corridors of the underground castle, Demon Knight Raoul grunted with every step. Whenever he got as angry as he was now, it was not at all strange for him to burst the skull of every monster he came across. As a matter of fact, he enjoyed it and even looked forward to it.
And yet, of the dozens that usually did at any given time, not a single demonic monster currently traveled the corridors. The place was silent.
Eerily so.
It was right when he came to that thought that the lights flickered and shut off. Immediately, in response, he began to curse out a long chain of foul expletives while banging on the walls, mostly in anger. He was already pissed and did not want to be further aggravated. Usually, the demons in charge of the light magic tool would rush to fix the enchantment when they heard the banging on the walls which threatened to collapse the entire castle under its strength, and have it fixed immediately. But not today.
This gave him pause. Demon Knight Raoul was resourceful. He had almost let his anger consume him, but there were too many things that did not make sense now, too many coincidences occurring back to back.
He was no idiot. There was a reason why he was the only person who survived the storm that swept up the demons in the monster tribe. Compared to the ranks of demon nobility, he may not have been the most powerful, but he prided himself on being among the resourceful. He knew what he had to do!
Wasting no time, he assumed a runner’s starting pose and then exploded out of the window. A hyena’s trademark sneer and laughter escaped his throat. Someone really believed they could assassinate him! Was this what actually happened to the other two? Not just a period of reticence, but an assassination? Hah! How foolish! Not him, though; he was better than the res-
He did not complete that thought.
His body, cleanly sliced through over a dozen times, fell apart in cube-sized chunks.
A few moments of silence later, a man with green eyes and ten white threads extending from his fingers walked out and looked down at his prey, retracting the bloody spiderweb as he did, while two women floated down beside him.
He then cast his gaze to the strings wrapped around his forearms like a gauntlet without showing a hint of skin, ending on his fingertips.
“To think a change in mindset and approach was all it took to reach SSS-rank. Though not quite the same level as Mia and Noah, huh?”
He cast his gaze back to the demon’s corpse with an inscrutable gaze. He then looked upwards to the towering demon castle, deep in thought about the assassination he had just completed, where every last movement of the demon had been predicted beforehand. He turned and walked away.
Evan was a man who researched his targets.
Gone was the man who fought just to feel included. He had begun to make strides towards conquering himself, and with the support of an unquestionably bright light by his side, he was ready to prove himself as the man worthy of one who had received it. Haldor was where he resolved to take a stand. With the surprisingly more efficient way of utilizing his skill of absolute dexterity that he had discovered, his strength had been elevated to a new level.
Without hesitation, as soon as Elara and Seraphina cleaned up the crime scene, they immediately made moves towards their next target.