Life Delusion Chapter 5: Chapter V : Lord of Demons

Read chapter 5 of Life Delusion by The_lite on NovelPedia.

From far away, the city was already visible—a smear of gray walls against a sky the color of old bruises. Aqua walked toward it barefoot. The ground had turned cold somewhere after the treeline ended, and small stones bit into his soles, but he didn’t register them anymore. Behind him stretched what had once been a forest. Now it was a flat, blackened plain where the stumps of trees jutted up like rotten teeth. Ash moved through the air the way snow does—light, patient, in no hurry to land. He kept walking. The guards on the wall noticed the smoke first. Then they noticed the boy walking through it, alone, with nothing behind him but dead earth and silence. That combination—the alone and the silence—was what made the captain send for the cavalry. By the time the gates opened, they had assembled far more than necessary. Horsemen, infantry, three battle mages in full regalia. It was the kind of force you send when you want someone to understand how badly they’ve miscalculated. The captain rode to the front and looked down at the boy. “Stop where you are. Who are you?” The boy didn’t stop. “I asked you a question.” The horse shifted beneath him, ears flat, reluctant. Animals always knew. “Hey—” The captain’s head left his shoulders between one word and the next. His body sat upright in the saddle for a long, strange moment before gravity remembered it and pulled it down. No one moved. Then someone screamed, and the whole line came apart. The cavalry charged. The mages opened up from the rear—fire arcing low over the heads of the infantry, wind blades cutting parallel furrows into the road. The front riders hit Aqua at full gallop and dissolved. Not knocked aside, not thrown—dissolved, like salt dropped into water, their shapes softening and collapsing into gray powder that the wind scattered before it touched the ground. The soldiers behind them hesitated, stumbled over the ash of the men in front, and then they dissolved too. Aqua walked through the wreckage the way a river walks through stone. Not fighting it. Just continuing. The Hero was standing at the gate when Aqua came up the outer road. He’d had time to hear what happened at the front line. His expression showed it. Still, he stepped forward, because stepping forward was the only thing he knew how to do with his fear. “Stop right there!” Aqua looked at him—or through him, it was difficult to say which. The Hero had aged since they’d last crossed paths. There were lines around his mouth that hadn’t been there before, and his hair had gone gray at the temples. Whatever had made him a Hero once, he’d been living off the reputation of it for a long time. “Do you know who you’re standing in front of?” His voice had the practiced weight of a man used to being obeyed. “Last chance. Kneel.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Cold mana gathered around his fists with a sound like a held breath, and then he released it—a wave of ice that swallowed Aqua whole, the kind of ice that could stop a river. It crept outward from where Aqua stood, spreading frost across the road in long white fingers, and above the crowd on the wall someone started to cheer. The Hero let out a breath. A crack split the silence. The cheering caught in a dozen throats. Another crack. Another. Then the whole structure gave at once, exploding outward in a spray of blue-white shards that clattered across the road like broken crockery. Aqua stepped out from the ruin of it still moving, still at the same unhurried pace, and the Hero’s confidence—the thing he’d been clenching like a fist since this started—finally slipped. He attacked again. And again. Fire this time, so large it caught the trees along the roadside and turned them into torches. The smoke was thick enough to taste, and the heat pushed the crowd back from the walls. When it cleared, a shape came walking out of the ash. His clothes were charred at the edges. A burn ran up the left side of his neck. He was still walking. What are you? The Hero didn’t say it