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Chapter 187 : Chapter 187
Chapter 187. Eighth Tier! Demigod!
“All right, enough digression.”
Looking at the roomful of people who were all on the verge of laughing themselves into internal injuries, Logaris rapped his knuckles against the table and forcefully dragged the atmosphere back on track. The usual carelessness vanished from his face, replaced once more by the rigor and coldness he wore when doing research.
“I trust everyone here already has a general idea of what happened last night.”
He did not waste words. In a few concise sentences, he reviewed the battle from the previous night—from Ifreles’s sudden ambush, to his being forced into demonization, to the final group assault that secured victory. The process had been dangerous, but the outcome was tolerable.
“The key point is this.” Logaris turned his head, his gaze locking tightly onto the black-haired girl seated in the corner. “Alice, we need to talk.”
All eyes instantly fell on Alice.
“Who is he? What kind of place is Hell, exactly? And…” Logaris pointed at himself. “Do you know what is going on with my bloodline?”
He no longer wanted to keep guessing at riddles. The feeling of losing control of that power last night had unsettled him deeply.
Alice lifted her head and looked around the room.
Sitting here were the governor of the Northern Territory, the commander of the demi-humans, a prince who carried the bloodline of an ancient dragon, and one… older cousin who was hard to classify as either human or demon.
There was not much left to hide.
“All right.” Alice let out a sigh, straightened in her seat, and for the first time wore an expression of complete seriousness. “Let me guess. Your understanding of Hell is still stuck at the level of ‘a dead wasteland full of lava and sulfur,’ or ‘a place where the souls of bad people suffer after death,’ isn’t it?”
Other than Logaris, everyone nodded in unison. That was exactly how the dog-eared tomes of the Holy Church described it.
“Wildly wrong.” Alice curled her lip. “Hell… or rather, the Hell Plane, is a civilization. In certain fields, it is more advanced than your world—and crueler by hundreds of millions of times—a civilization forged in blood and iron.”
“It has giant cities comparable to your Royal Capital, laws so strict they border on madness, and even Magitech beyond your imagination. The only difference is that its energy source is demonic power, and its law is the absolute rule of the strong devouring the weak.”
Alice raised one finger and traced a circle in the air.
“A thousand years ago, there were stable planar passages between Hell and your world. Back then, demons descending into this world was nothing unusual.”
“Then that madman appeared.”
“A madman?” Alectos asked curiously.
“Maxim. The last Eighth-Tier mage in human history. He was also called the Mad King.” When Alice spoke that name, there was even a trace of reverence in her voice.
The moment he heard it, a thoughtful look appeared on Logaris’s face.
Mad King Maxim.
In his mind, Logaris saw the Northern Grand Duke lying on his sickbed—that old fox of a man, sly as an aged wolf—Fenrir Von Winterhold.
Back then, in order to tie him to Sylvia’s war chariot, the old man had confidently painted him a grand and glittering dream, claiming he held clues to the legacy of Mad King Maxim. At the time, Logaris had treated it as nothing more than a tempting legend and had only half believed it.
But now, it seems…
Logaris narrowed his eyes and calculated inwardly. If even the demons of Hell spoke that madman’s name with reverence, then the value of the legacy he left behind was probably far greater than expected. It seemed he ought to find time soon to pay a visit to that “good grandfather” of his.
Given the old man’s current physical condition, who knew when he might suddenly kick his legs out and die? If he took that secret into the coffin with him, it would be an incalculable loss to the entire world of magic.
“According to the records on our side, Maxim wanted to ignite the divine spark and ascend in a single step. But he believed the mana concentration in your world was too low, so he did something unprecedented before or since—something completely insane. He tried to forcefully punch through the crystal wall between the two planes and use Hell as a giant power bank to ‘charge’ the Prime Material Plane!”
A chorus of sharp inhalations filled the room.
Merge planes? Was that even something a human being could do?
“And what happened?” Sylvia could not help asking, her voice still childish and sweet.
“He lost control of it, obviously.” Alice shrugged with a look that plainly said, What else did you expect? “The exact details are treated as taboo even in Hell’s history books. In any case, it ended with an apocalyptic war that swept across both worlds. When it was all over, the Mad King had body and soul obliterated, and the passages between the two planes collapsed completely, becoming enormous and wildly unstable spatial rifts.”
“From that point onward, the laws of the world seemed almost to develop a will of their own, showing extreme rejection toward all life-forms from other planes. The stronger the being, the harsher the suppression—like throwing a red-hot branding iron into a fish tank. Even the tank itself would resist.”
At this point, Alice glanced at Logaris.
“That is why only an avatar came last night. If Ifreles’s true body tried to descend by force, the rejection and suppression of the world’s laws alone would take a brutal toll on him. For him, the risk would be enormous.”
Logaris’s brows drew tightly together.
“So it really was just an avatar?” The last trace of luck in his heart vanished completely.
“Of course.” Alice nodded as if it were self-evident. “Hell has Seven Grand Dukes, each of whom holds the Authority of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Every single one of them is a true Eighth-Tier existence. In your terms, they are the kind of ‘demigods’ that exist only in myth!”
Eighth Tier! Demigod!
Those two words struck every heart in the room like a pair of warhammers.
Everyone immediately sucked in a cold breath.
The strongest beings in this world were people on Leonard’s level, or the headmaster of Saint Arcadia Academy at most—legendary powerhouses at the peak of the Seventh Tier. Eighth Tier… that was a realm that existed only in the dust of history.
Silence.
A deathly silence.
“Then what about my identity?” Logaris broke the oppressive quiet. Pushing up the nonexistent glasses on the bridge of his nose, he asked the most crucial question. “That lunatic Ifreles called me ‘the bloodline of Astaroth.’ Who is Astaroth?”
Alice looked at him, and her expression became a little strange, as though she were staring at some kind of rare life-form.
“Astaroth… is the foremost of Hell’s Seven Grand Dukes, the Supreme Grand Duke who holds the Authority of 【Pride】.”
“At the same time, he is also universally acknowledged throughout Hell as the strongest master of spatial spellcraft in all of history.” Alice paused, seeming to weigh her words. In the end, she chose the most direct method possible, pointing first at herself and then at Logaris. “And he is also Ifreles’s elder brother.”
Click.
Alectos’s mouth dropped open at once. His mind raced as his gaze darted back and forth between the two of them.
Ifreles was Alice’s father. And Astaroth… was in all likelihood Logaris’s father. Those two fathers were brothers.
“What the hell?!” Alectos blurted out before he could stop himself. “Then the two of you… are first cousins?!”
The expression on Logaris’s face froze.
He looked at Alice. Black hair, red eyes, a vile temperament, and a love of stirring up trouble. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. Black hair, red eyes—before the disguise, at least—and a temperament… well, all right, in some people’s eyes, maybe even worse than hers.
That damned sense of déjà vu.
“The world really is small,” Logaris said dryly, obviously at a loss over this sudden, inexplicable new kinship.
“Yes, the world really is small.” Alice sighed as well. “But in Hell, family ties are worth less than toilet paper. Fathers and sons killing each other, brothers turning against brothers, all for the sake of authority and territory—that is daily life there.”