Visago stared at the slime floating in the sky. His lips didn't move, but inside, he was astonished.
The Silent One was not accustomed to speaking. He had lived in the Abyss for far too long, so long that he couldn't even remember when he had first wound these cloth strips around himself.
When he learned that the summoner was in trouble, countless possibilities had flashed through his mind.
The terrifying ooze of the Star Realm—that was the first thing he thought of. Something capable of making a legendary demon warlock frown should only be that kind of unknown, horrifying entity.
But no.
Before him was merely an ordinary slime.
Aside from being able to fly and wearing a crown, it was no different from those bouncing slimes in the swamp.
In the Abyss's corrosive swamps, such things were everywhere, and they were more commonly called oozes.
Transparent ones, green ones, black ones... bouncing and squirming at the edges of the swamp, surviving by breaking down rotten flesh and moss.
But strictly speaking, Visago himself wasn't a demon either.
He came from the Abyss, but the Abyss was a plane, not a race. It contained numerous different species—some were native like demons, while others had wandered in from outside the plane.
And he was a latecomer, something that had been swallowed by the Abyss.
He didn't belong to the demon race, nor did he have a clear species. According to the understanding of Prime Material Plane casters, the broader term "extraplanar being" would be more fitting to describe him.
Melch beside him was the same.
Not a demon either, but some ancient extraplanar being, born in the deepest darkness of the Abyss, possessing a strange devouring power.
Marzan was even less so.
He had been an undead creature longer than most demons in the Abyss had lived. His bones hadn't grown from flesh; every piece came from a different corpse.
The armor he now wore was crafted from the remains of an entire defeated legion several hundred years ago.
The Hundred-Battle Demons that Casaric had summoned—none of them were strictly demons. For demons, that should have counted as something of a joke.
Visago couldn't understand.
Even if a slime could fly, why would it force a legendary demon warlock into a defensive stance?
Casaric was no ordinary greater demon—he was a legend.
Did even legends have things they feared?
Chen Yu crouched on the Flying Sword, his tiny eyes fixed on the three Hundred-Battle Demons that had been summoned below.
He blinked, then poked Louisa through the Gel Network.
"Louisa."
Louisa stood at the edge of the ruins, raising her staff, ready to strike at any moment. She was momentarily taken aback by Chen Yu's voice.
"Your Majesty?"
"Does he know how to break the Dome of Life?" Chen Yu asked seriously.
"There's no point in tangling with these summons. As long as Casaric is alive, they can be summoned indefinitely."
"The most important thing is to drive Casaric out of this barrier and then personally send this new emperor of the north on his way."
Louisa fell into deep thought.
The Dome of Life, a legendary warlock's signature spell, created an independent demiplane that completely isolated the caster's soul from the Material Plane.
She had only heard of it from the court mages in class, and she didn't know much about this legendary spell.
And that had been many years ago. Even though she had shown astonishing magical talent since childhood at the Royal Magic Academy, so brilliant that she could still remember even such casual classroom chatter...
She was still young back then, her head full of thoughts about going to the stables after class to see her little pony. The latter half of the lesson, she hadn't really listened.
Unfortunately, she didn't know the solution either.
A moment of carelessness from years ago had come back to hit her like a boomerang of fate.
But fortunately, the Slime Kingdom had no shortage of senior figures. Another voice chimed in.
"Your Majesty."
It was Selene's voice.
"We fought against Nature's Foes for centuries. In those battles, we've encountered legendary warlocks before, and we know quite a bit about them."
"The essence of the Dome of Life is creating an independent demiplane, isolating the caster from the rules of the Material Plane."
"It may seem to make the caster completely invulnerable, but in reality, the boundary between the demiplane and the Material Plane is not absolutely stable. The boundary requires the caster's continuous mental energy to maintain. Once the mental energy is cut off, the demiplane collapses."
Her tone grew more serious.
"In other words, there are two ways to break it. First, interfere with an equal-level spell. Legend against legend—use another demiplane to ram into this one, or use space-anchoring spells to pin the demiplane onto the Material Plane. But we have no legendary casters."
"As for the second..."
She paused.
"That is absolute power."
"The stability of a demiplane's boundary is limited. It can withstand a certain degree of attack. But if the attack's intensity exceeds the upper limit the boundary can bear, the boundary will shatter due to instability."
"But this condition is quite harsh. A legendary warlock's demiplane boundary can theoretically withstand any non-legendary level of attack. That means, to shatter it with absolute force..."
"You need legendary-level power."
Chen Yu's tiny eyes blinked.
Legendary-level power...
His gaze pierced through the dust and smoke over the ruins, landing on Casaric.
Casaric stood on the other side of the crater, also looking at Chen Yu.
Their eyes met.
Casaric saw something flicker in the slime's tiny eyes—a kind of gaze he deeply disliked.
He frowned again.
What kind of sinister scheme was this magical creature plotting?
But he quickly relaxed his brow.
A Gold-Rank slime—even if it could turn into a black dragon, even if it had a flying sword—Gold-Rank was still Gold-Rank. Before a legend, Gold and Silver made no difference.
Chen Yu watched his face.
Casaric was right.
Of course, he couldn't be a match for a legend.
Not even a legend—even Casaric's current half-legend state was something he couldn't handle.
Of course, that was for his current self.
A few seconds later, things would be different.
A legend was indeed powerful, but he happened not to be a normal slime either.
[Mana Siphon]
[Magic Muscle]
Chen Yu's gel belly erupted with a powerful suction force. With him at the center, the surrounding mana began to surge toward him.
The commotion was so intense that it even stirred up waves of Mana Tide, lifting small pieces of rubble and sending them flying.
And as massive amounts of mana entered the gel, they wove into Magic Muscle, causing the gel to expand violently.
Amid flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, the green gel gradually transformed into a dark purple.
He was as massive as a mountain, looming over the battlefield, the shadow he cast almost blotting out the sunlight. With a thunderous boom, he broke through the mana dust and crashed down toward the ground.
Casaric instinctively stepped back.
Marzan moved first.
The Bone Lord pulled two blades from his bone armor.
He charged forward.
His bone armor creaked and groaned as he ran, his speed faster than any orc warrior—so fast that his figure left a white afterimage in the air.
[Damage Reduction]
The armor fused with Marzan provided him with powerful defense. The Bone Lord charged at Chen Yu in his Demon King Form, dual blades swinging.
The blades crossed, slashing into the gel.
Marzan had lived for centuries. With these two blades, he had cut through the scales of giant dragons and the molten shells of inferno demons.
Every time he struck, he could gauge the target's defensive strength through the feedback on the blades. Dragon scales had resistance; molten shells had a sticky drag.
But gel had none of these.
The moment the blades sank in, what he felt was softness.
Then he felt terrifying power.
Though bones couldn't show expression, the moment the dual blades touched the gel, his bones trembled. His legs sank deeper into the mud, as if an entire mountain was pressing down on him through the two blades.
The gel, the size of a small mountain, was packed with Magic Muscle. Gravity itself became a weapon.
Marzan couldn't withstand it. His entire body was driven into the ground.
The Demon King rolled over him.
[Dimensional Walk]
[Backstab]
Visago's cloth-wrapped body blurred in the air, then vanished.
He reappeared behind Chen Yu, pulled a small black dagger from his right hand, and stabbed it into the gel.
The piercing damage from the small dagger wasn't high, but the poison it carried was a continuous damage effect, causing Chen Yu's health bar to drop by several thousand points per second.
If an ordinary Extraordinary professional had been stabbed, they'd be dead from poison within a minute.
Even more insidious was that the poison had resistance to purification spells.
The Forest Sage's purification spell landed on Chen Yu but had little effect, only slightly alleviating the poisoning.
Samuel raised his staff from a distance and chanted with his apprentices, casting together—releasing fireballs, rays... trying to support the battlefield.
[Devour Spell]
Melch opened his mouth wide in excitement. A black hole expanded in his maw, and all the spells were devoured into his stomach.
A flash of light in the black hole...
Then all the spells erupted back out of the black hole, smashing into Chen Yu's gel, splashing ripples across the surface.
The damage wasn't insignificant, but Chen Yu didn't care.
He kept moving forward, crushing rubble, crushing broken walls, drawing closer to Casaric.
With every step, the gel's volume swelled another circle, Magic Muscle still growing.
The dark purple gel was even gradually turning pitch black.
Though reluctant to admit it, as a legendary demon, Casaric did step back, silently maintaining distance from Chen Yu.
This was not fear, but a cautious response to the unknown.
Just then, the Sky Oath's main cannon finished charging. Silver Sparrow's calm voice echoed inside the fortress.
"Target locked, angle correction complete. Fire."
A beam of light fell from the sky, slamming into the Dome of Life—but it passed straight through, grazing the ruins of the Royal Palace and carving a half-melted trench into the ground.
The allied forces' long-range spells and arrows followed suit. A rain of arrows, fireballs, Arcane Missiles, Ice Storms...
Casaric didn't even raise his head. With just a wave of his hand, the spells exploded one by one in midair before they could even approach the Dome of Life. Even Nolan's Golden Arrow shot from the flank shattered into pieces.
Faced with a legend, numbers no longer held meaning. Their attacks only slightly distracted Casaric's attention—nothing more.
On the other side, the three Hundred-Battle Demons were indeed different from those ordinary greater demons.
The Bone Lord Marzan's health bar wasn't thick, but his defense made up for everything.
His bone armor absorbed most physical damage, Damage Reduction allowed him to endure more, and Regeneration let broken bones re-knit themselves. Every time he was crushed by the gel, he recovered quickly.
The Silent One, Visago, was the frailest-looking among the three Hundred-Battle Demons, yet he dealt the most damage to Chen Yu.
Dimensional Walk let him appear anywhere, and each small piercing strike accumulated tens of thousands of damage.
The Maw of Famine, Melch, was the weakest of the three. His Devour Spell was almost useless against Chen Yu, and he could only float about dazedly on the sidelines.
But the three Hundred-Battle Demons' coordinated assault had indeed put Chen Yu in a difficult position.
More importantly, his sixteen gel avatars had taken thirty percent of his mana and attributes, yet none of them were here.
The Demon King Form was no longer sufficient to handle such powerful opponents.
But who said this was the true Demon King Form?
The final piece of the Demon King Form was called the Will.
The effect of Mana Will was simple: it could absorb some negative emotions and convert them into mana, limited only to the emotions generated by oneself.
But as Mana Will was gradually upgraded to Lv.7, the range of negative emotions it could sense and absorb grew larger and larger.
This talent was no longer confined to himself. As long as it was within the range covered by the Demon King's Will, all living beings' negative emotions could be absorbed and converted into mana.
Most importantly, negative emotions like pain and fear were essentially perceptible mental fluctuations.
They weren't restricted by the Split Growth Limit.
They could be shared between all bodies and gel avatars through the same Will.
That meant every gel avatar would be an extension of his Will's coverage. The negative emotions absorbed by the sixteen gel avatars and the main body would be shared and stacked with each other.
He had been stepping on his own feet to rise, but it was still too slow.
But what if it were seventeen slimes?
The negative emotions felt by the gel avatars would ultimately be sensed by his Will, then stacked layer upon layer and all converted into mana. How immense would that be?
Even more terrifying was that all this mana could be efficiently siphoned by Mana Siphon, then condensed into Magic Muscle.
And the growth of Magic Muscle would give him even greater strength and a thicker health bar. Greater strength would bring more fear. More fear would be absorbed by the Will, converting into even more mana...
This was the true definition of stepping on one's own feet.
This was the true Slime Demon King.
In the days he had been away from the Kingdom, no one knew where he had gone.
No one knew how those gel avatars had disappeared one by one.
But the answer lay in the Deep Mountains, in those Dungeons filled with Magical Creatures.
The Corrupted Miasma Mountains.
Wyverns flew in flocks over the dense forest, their wing membranes glinting dark green under the sunlight.
A wyvern's gaze swept across the mountains, and its attention was suddenly drawn to a high peak.
On the peak, something was glowing.
A small slime that had been napping on a rock yawned and opened its eyes.
The Swamp Dungeon, the Valley Dungeon, the ruins of the Dark Realm... pairs of tiny eyes opened simultaneously and blinked.