Chapter 188: Forty Meters

Chapter 188: Chapter 188: Forty Meters

Jeremy raised the Order card.

He took a deep breath, forcing his heart rate down, channeling his entire will into a single focal point.

Forty seconds.

The beast exhaled.

Jeremy counted to the thirty-eighth second.

Then he activated it.

"Domain of Order - Silence."

There was no explosion. No light. No burst of magic power.

There was only a sensation - as if the entire space within a two-hundred-meter radius had suddenly thickened.

The magical beast opened its eyes.

All the mouths on that fleshy mass gaped open simultaneously.

But not a single sound could escape.

It shrieked. It roared. The crevices convulsed, but the surrounding space remained absolutely silent.

And in the distance, thousands of magical beasts continued to drift aimlessly, not a single one turning back.

"Success," Evelyn said.

Leon drew his Crescent Blades, his knuckles cracking. "Then let’s begin."

That battle lasted two hours and seventeen minutes.

Later, when Jeremy recalled it, he couldn’t reconstruct it into a seamless sequence. Only fragmented pieces remained.

The first fragment: Leon charged in first, his lunar blades tearing a path along the belly scales - and deflecting, failing to leave even a scratch.

The second fragment: Evelyn fired thirty-two consecutive arrows within ten seconds, all aimed at the exact same spot on the scales. By the twenty-ninth arrow, the scale cracked.

The third fragment: the beast lashed its tail, and the four-hundred-meter-long boulder beneath their feet was cleaved in two.

The fourth fragment: Phoenix erected a healing array in mid-air, blood streaming profusely from both nostrils, but his hands never left his scepter.

The fifth fragment: Lucius teleported right up to the mouth-riddled flesh and was bitten by three mouths simultaneously. He escaped by slicing off a chunk of his own shoulder flesh.

The sixth fragment: Jeremy ran out of magic power for the first time.

The seventh fragment: he drank a potion, and ran out for the second time.

The eighth fragment - the one he remembered most vividly.

The Domain of Order began to fracture.

Sustaining a domain that imposed rules upon a creature four major realms higher than oneself for two hours was something magical theory deemed impossible.

Jeremy could feel it breaking from the inside. Piece by piece.

And he knew, the moment it shattered completely, the beast would vocalize. And those thousands of others would come.

"How much longer?" he yelled.

"Three minutes!" Evelyn replied. "The scale is about to be pierced!"

Three minutes.

Jeremy looked at the card in his hand. It was cracking - fissures running along its golden surface, and through those cracks, he could see the back side.

The black surface. Shackles. Rotting dark purple flowers.

The Devil.

Original Sin Resonance - amplifying all negative emotions of the target, converting them into tangible damage.

But the price was that he himself would be corrupted. His rationality would slip out of control. If he lost control completely, the devil would seize command, and he would become a deranged slaughterer.

With a magical beast enraged to the extreme from being gagged for two hours -

How immense were the negative emotions inside it at this moment?

And if he amplified them, how massive would the backlash rebounding upon him be?

Jeremy had no time to calculate.

He flipped the card.

"Captain!" Phoenix shouted.

Too late.

Jeremy’s pupils dyed crimson in a single breath.

The phantom of the devil rose behind him, three times as tall as the magical beast. Death aura blanketed an entire swath of the purple sky.

"Malum Retorna."

He didn’t yell. He spoke very softly.

But the moment the incantation fell, the entirety of the wrath accumulated over two hours inside the beast’s body turned back to bite it.

The dark purple-tinted black scales bulged from the inside. The six pairs of limbs contorted. The mouth-covered mass of flesh burst open, and from every crevice, black blood sprayed out in jets.

It still couldn’t make a sound.

It died in absolute silence.

And the exact moment it stopped breathing, the Domain of Order completely shattered.

"Magic Soul Crystal!" Leon yelled. "Grab it quickly!"

But Jeremy didn’t hear him.

He was hovering in mid-air, both arms hanging limp, and in his eyes, there was nothing but the color red.

The murderous will screamed, demanding more.

He turned his head.

And the first thing to fall into his vision was Lucius - the one closest to him, covered in blood, missing a chunk of flesh from one shoulder.

The Devil card in Jeremy’s hand spun a circle, sharp as a razor blade.

"Captain."

Lucius didn’t dodge.

He didn’t draw his sword. Didn’t teleport. Didn’t raise a shield.

He just stood there, looking straight into those glowing red eyes, and took a step forward.

Then another step.

"Lucius, get out of the way!" Evelyn shouted, her bow already drawn.

"Don’t shoot," Lucius said without turning his head.

He took a third step.

The card was pressed tight against his throat.

And Lucius, instead of retreating, raised his hand - not to parry the card’s edge, but to grasp Jeremy’s wrist.

His hand was freezing cold.

"You said you were relatively kind-hearted," he said, his voice very light, almost like a joke. "Was that a lie?"

Jeremy didn’t react.

Lucius tightened his grip on Jeremy’s wrist.

"I’ll count to three," he said. "If I reach three and you still haven’t snapped out of it, just cut it. I won’t blame you."

"One."

The card trembled.

"Two."

Inside those glowing red eyes, something flickered - a glint of something trying to surface through the layer of blood.

"Three."

"..."

The card dropped.

It dissolved into light before touching the boulder below.

Jeremy collapsed. Blood oozed from the corners of his eyes, from his ears, from his lips - the price of forcing the Devil to relinquish control.

Lucius caught him before he fully fell.

"Caught you," he said.

Jeremy heard that sentence, but couldn’t muster a reply.

The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the white bone scepter - the very thing still embedded in the middle of the dead magical beast’s back - emitting a glow.

And the totem on the back of his hand, after four years of dormancy, also lit up in response.