Chapter 226 — 아자젤
Chapter 226
Azazel
“Everyone, fall back!”
At Elric’s urgent shout, the nearby soldiers reflexively sprang well back without even realizing it.
It was my mistake.
Elric ground his teeth.
He should have suspected why Azazel had shown no reaction right up to the Apostle’s death and sealing…!
Yet he’d swallowed the gem without a flicker of hesitation.
All because of the complacent thought that he would simply absorb Azazel’s demonic mana.
From the mana engine, miasma began to seep up, slow and sly.
Black mana started to encroach on his body.
As if he were sinking into turbid water.
Krak-krak-krak!
And so—
Azazel, trying to seize his body,
and Elric, refusing to be taken—
their struggle began.
* * *
Brian and Ate, who had come looking to see if there was any way they could help Elric, could only widen their eyes.
An utterly unexpected aura was coiling around Elric.
Whirr…!
“Th-That’s…!”
“Demonic mana!”
Brian shrieked, and Ate clenched her teeth, hand flashing to the sword at her hip.
By now even they knew Elric could absorb demonic mana.
But.
The miasma wrapping Elric now was something else entirely.
Savage.
And rough.
As if it would skewer Elric any second and kill him on the spot.
It seemed to be sizing him up, biding its time for a chance to tear him apart.
Elric’s face was contorted with pain as he tried to suppress it.
Unlike the demonic mana he’d handled so far—docile in feel and gradually dissipating—
this one flared like a wildfire, ravenous to devour him whole.
Rrrrrr…!
The rougher the miasma tossed, the more colossal the mana shockwaves it hurled in every direction.
It felt as if the entire mountainside were shaking.
Both Brian and Ate now knew what the phrase “can’t breathe” really meant.
And then—
it was as if something invisible was whispering at their ears.
Submit!
Worship!
Split open your hearts and offer them to me!
Do that, and this suffocating weight will vanish. You will be free—so it tempted.
Ate knew all too well what this loathsome mana was.
“Azazel!”
The ancient Demon King so few outside the demons even remembered anymore.
Azazel the Mad had opened his eyes.
“When I first saw you, I couldn’t believe mine. Mervinger, the one I so wanted to rip apart… To think you were strutting around in this era too.”
Azazel’s voice was viscous.
As if he meant to have all the conversations he’d never properly had with anyone until now, there was even laughter threaded through it.
But the mana riding his voice was so overpowering that Elric could only grit his teeth instead of answering.
He felt that if he let even a sliver of his focus slip to reply, his mind might be swallowed whole.
Zing, ziiiiing!
Uuuuuum—
Each time, his Dragonblood whirled violently, forcing strength into his flesh, and the mana stone wrung out more mana to shove back the demonic claws.
However—
Azazel seemed utterly delighted by Elric’s resistance.
Even this was just a game to him.
“The Mervingers I knew lived for their own brilliance, so I assumed they’d eventually be crushed to death by humans, blinded as they always are by envy. Seems I underestimated you. Mervinger. You were a vicious breed.”
What an unpleasant mana.
Then Elric’s shadow rippled and surged up as Hyul’s thought-form took shape.
Grrrr—
The shadow-beast bared a deep fury at Azazel.
So you’re the master of the fools I’ve been chewing on. Your mana had a decent flavor. I wonder what the original tastes like.
Graaah!
Maw yawning wide, the shadow-beast lunged for Elric.
But—
Boom!
It slammed into the barricade of miasma—split into scores upon scores of tendrils coiling around Elric—and was flung back far and hard.
The miasma didn’t even try to target Hyul’s thought-form.
As if something like you isn’t worth my time.
As if it were merely annoyed.
How dare you!
There was no way Hyul’s thought-form failed to grasp Azazel’s intent.
If four Demon Kings had once terrorized the West Continent, then in the East there had been Hyul, who drowned the world in lamentation.
Even if he was a shadow of his fallen self now, his pride had not vanished.
Hyul’s thought-form swelled to twice its size and went to tear into Azazel’s miasma.
Kra-kra-krash!
Rumble—
With things spiraling, Brian and Ate moved in a rush.
They realized this was no time to sit on their hands.
“Radiance of Spreading Splendor!”
“Haaat!”
Brian unleashed white magic to purify demonic mana in a wide-area weave, and Ate dredged up her clan’s art of flame and thunder, hacking at the tendrils of miasma any way she could.
While the Star’s host scrambled into motion—
Tzzzz—
Azazel’s miasma stroked Elric’s jaw like a caress.
“No…!”
Elric, eyes bloodshot, forced his voice up from his throat, but it wouldn’t carry to his subordinates at all.
At this rate, you’ll be in danger too.
Run as far as you can. That’s what he wanted to say, but it was as if they couldn’t hear him at all.
“Anyway. I was wondering what to do with the last cockroach of a Mervinger still scuttling around, and then it hit me. Why not claim it?”
Azazel didn’t spare a thought for outside interference.
What does a man care if ants wriggle at his feet?
To Azazel, Brian, Ate, and the rest were less than ants.
Ants he could crush any time he was bored.
“My faithful have offered me a few ‘vessels’ over the years, but to my eyes they were all defective trash. You, though—”
“…”
“—you were perfect. Perfect! A vessel so exquisitely crafted for me it made me wonder who had done the making!”
“…!”
“In truth, perhaps it was only natural. Mervinger. You lot were never that different from us to begin with.”
Thump!
Thump!
At those words, Elric’s heart began to thunder madly for some reason.
There lay the old puzzle he’d once wrestled with—the origin of the Mervingers who ripped demonic sigils from their owners.
“You may wear a human mask now. Heh, heh-heh-heh! But how could I call you ‘human’ when our roots are the same?”
“…!”
“So I figured switching you over would be easy. Except… mm, what’s this? Seems there’s already a guest where I mean to go.”
The laughter in Azazel’s voice slowly curdled into madness. With dripping scorn, his miasma wagged a friendly little wave—as if greeting someone right at Elric’s side.
“Isn’t that right, Mephistopheles?”
“…”
Mephisto hadn’t said a single word since the moment Azazel’s consciousness had surfaced.
He just stared down Azazel’s miasma, eyes gone frigid.
“How does it feel to be a dog with a Mervinger’s leash around your neck, wagging your tail?”
Why had Azazel never shown himself through all the recent chain of events—Leda’s death, Belot’s flight, the High Priest’s sealing?
Partly, he’d been waiting for Elric to finish ripening the body into a perfect prize for himself.
But more than that, he’d noticed Mephisto, who had lunged for Elric early and gotten scorched.
Charge in carelessly, and he might end up the same way—that was his read.
So he watched for his chance, and now, here it was.
Azazel and Mephisto.
The two were often bundled together under categories like “Archdemon” or “the Demon God’s vassals.”
In truth, the two didn’t get along at all.
There were political reasons—they competed for the Demon God’s favor—but their ideals and temperaments also clashed too much.
Mephisto was always aloof.
He disliked mingling, and he often mocked the other Demon Kings who paraded around with their hordes of underlings, calling it an obsession with toy soldiers.
Of all of them, he openly sneered at Azazel—fond of pecking orders and led by emotion—saying you couldn’t find a trace of dignity on him even if you scoured him clean.
Azazel, for his part, despised Mephisto as stupid and weak.
The Demon God tended to look the other way while those two crossed and bickered.
Thus—
the moment Azazel opened his eyes after a thousand years, he howled with laughter at Mephisto’s pathetic state.
He was curious what excuse the man would offer.
What would he say, showing such a disgraceful face to the one he loathed and hated most?
But—
“Get off.”
“What?”
“Get off. From there.”
“Puhahah! What? Get off? The great Mephistopheles—what, the Archdemon of Original Sin—worrying about a human? A Mervinger, at that?”
“That is what this king intended to claim. And you dare lay your foul hand on it?”
Azazel’s laughter swelled. If they’d been face to face, he’d have curled his lip.
“And if I won’t?”
“In that case—”
Mephisto unfolded his arms.
A baleful demonic gleam flashed across his eyes.
“I’ll make you.”
In an instant, Elric’s mana stone rang raucously, and a portion of his mana slipped free of his control.
It slammed directly into Azazel’s miasma, which had been slowly wresting control of the mana engine, and began to shove it back hard.
Krak-krak-krak…!
With Elric no longer fully in control of his body, Mephisto reclaimed part of the reins.
Azazel’s demonic mana and Mephisto’s collided upon the stage of Elric’s flesh, and the shockwaves hurled outward grew even more violent.
In that moment, Brian, Ate, and the others had no choice but to retreat farther from Elric.
No—by then they had to almost completely quit the mountainside where the Grigori Order’s grand citadel had once stood.
Far away—
a colossal onyx pillar was lancing up from the mountain’s middle slopes to the sky.
It punched through the clouds and stretched on and on, to who knew where.
These damned Demon Kings!
Elric was thoroughly fed up with the two Archdemons brawling over his body.
“Try it. If you can.”
“So be it.”
With Mephisto’s words—
Fwoom!
The world around Elric was suddenly swathed in a pitch-black curtain.
And when he opened his eyes again—
he realized he was no longer where he had been, but in a place entirely different.
A ruined city of toppled walls and buildings. A wasteland as if the world had ended.
A mindscape?
Elric grasped that he’d been pulled into his unconscious—and then a massive surge of mana rolled from the heavens, and he snapped his head up.
High above, choked with sooty black smoke—
two men glared at each other.
Both had black hair and black eyes; one wore a cold expression, the other grinned as if he couldn’t have been happier.
Mephisto and Azazel.
Two Archdemons.
The Mage Who Devoured Talents