The Distinguished Mr. Rose Chapter 137: Chapter 136: Your Name Is. . .

Read chapter 137 of The Distinguished Mr. Rose by QuiteTheSlacker on NovelPedia.

Chapter 136: Your Name Is. . . The footsoldiers of the alliance’s army sputtered in short, wheezing bursts whilst they stood before the equally exhausted Demon King. The fight between demon and man had persisted for nearly the entire day. Many had died; many were on the brink. At the conclusion of this wearisome repetition of slaughter, recovery, and madness, their efforts had finally borne fruit. All the minions and central limbs of the Demon King, the Twelve Great Evils, were vanquished. The soldiers clutched their bloody wounds and stared at the figures of their five mighty lords, and so it was that they found peace knowing their legacy, the land’s future, would carry on should their eyes close for the last time. Emperor Karolus and his lordly companions suffered their own brunt of fatigue, their blade-arms shaking and their faces taut in stress. Yet still they stood. For the sake of all those who now gazed at their backs, they couldn’t afford to falter here when the end was within reach. The Demon King hunched over and coughed into its hand. A glob of pasty sludge gushed from its lips, splattering all over the ground, and for a moment the king merely remained there unmoving whilst peering at what should have been its blood. It looked confused. The fluid unnaturally black, the viscousness and how it clung like a colony of mold—this wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it remembered itself being from the brief fragments it could still recall. “Ah, heroes…” the Demon King groaned. “Is this… my blood? How hideous. In its gloss I see a twisted husk, how far he has fallen. I see the years he spent consumed by torment until his very body began to change. Warped and perverse. Distorted and misshapen. Monstrous… a creature welcomed by no one and whose wandering will forever lead nowhere. Tell me, heroes. Does the reflection in its murky waters lie? Does the face before you resemble a man?” No one answered the Demon King, for they were in no mood to entertain its ramblings—not after all it had done—and so their vengeful glares responded in their stead. Those eyes filled with fury, hatred, and revulsion. The Demon King witnessed it all and then lowered its head. “So the promise was a lie. Heroes, you have not come to free me, nor are you the deliverers of my wish. Your arrival was always for one purpose… to slay. I have become the very terror the Stars once tasked my blade to rend. How cruel, how so very cruel…” The Demon King tried to weep, but its tears had all dried up. There was no one coming to protect it. Those abominations of imagination, the Evils birthed from its memory of a long-forgotten past, were never going to appear again. It was all alone. “Was it really so difficult?” it said, looking up toward the starry sky. “All I wanted… was to go home. I abandoned it all, my memory, my strength, my right to ascend as one of the cosmos. I reached the end of that lamentable game, just for the slight possibility that I might see it again. And yet now I cannot even remember what it was called. It seems I am destined to remain a slave, until my dying breath.” As the Demon King spoke, Lucius noticed a change in its air. The deranged sobs it blubbered were replaced with steady breaths. The despair and misery which had plagued its every conscious moment disappeared, making way for a dull acceptance that now, more than ever before, understood how futile its struggle had been. Only when it was robbed of its last sliver of hope did the Demon King’s madness finally cease to be. “Heroes, I am sorry,” it said, marching forth and menacingly approaching the army. “I cannot allow your quest to succeed. My home, that land of swaying gold… if the Stars will not fulfill their promise, then I will find it myself, even if it means I must act the monster.” The Demon King reached above and grabbed its crown. Broken and shattered, a keepsake of the past with value long lost, there was no longer any point in maintaining this lordly delusion. A king with no subj