The fortress no longer had a single front.

To the North, the sky remained torn open where the dragon fought for dominance against not one, but now two abyssal demigods.

The Wrath-born demigod pressed in from the front, its domain crashing violently against the dragon's blazing sovereignty. Waves of rage-infused pressure tore through the clouds, grinding them into twisted spirals while light warped and bent under the strain of overlapping domains. Each exchange sent deep tremors racing through the fortress stone beneath Kain's feet, the clash carrying the metallic tang of ozone and blood even at this distance.

Alongside it, the horned abyssal demigod whose presence carried a crushing gravity had committed fully to the assault.

Its focus was absolute.

Not the fortress. Not the defenders. Only the dragon.

After all, Kain remembered when it got its butt kicked by this dragon before...and it clearly remembered as well—harboring a deep, festering grudge.

Its domain folded space inward around the airborne battlefield, dragging debris, shattered weapons, and even the corpses of fallen creatures into slow, spiralling arcs toward the center of its influence. Flight near that region had become impossible for anything short of a demigod-level existence. Even high-grade flying contracts that strayed too close were abruptly pulled off course, wings buckling as invisible weight multiplied around them. Several 8-star tamers had already been forced to retreat from the northern skies entirely, blood seeping from their ears as they struggled simply to remain conscious under the pressure.

It was a coordinated assault—rage and gravity working in tandem, one battering the dragon head-on while the other sought to pin it in place.

And despite the strain, the dragon endured.

To the East, the ground itself had failed.

The semi-liquid abyssal demigod's domain had erased the idea of solidity. Where towers and forests had once stood, there was now a vast expanse of rippling black sludge. The remains of living beings surfaced briefly before sinking back down, armour dissolving alongside flesh. Defensive formations simply sagged and collapsed, their enchantments stretching thin until they lost cohesion and flowed away. Any attempt to advance from that side ended the same way—bodies melting, lines breaking, panic spreading.

To the Southwest, the storm raged without mercy.

The lightning abyssal ruled the skies there, its domain crawling across everything conductive. Bolts slithered over walls and siege engines, racing through ranks of defenders faster than thought. Each strike left behind not just scorched corpses, but twisted replacements—new abyssals crackling with residual energy, their movements jerky and violent. Entire sections of the outer wall glowed white-hot before tearing themselves apart under electrical overload.

And then there was the West.

Kain turned fully toward it, breath catching despite himself.

The earth-attribute abyssal demigod had not moved far since its arrival. It didn't need to.

Its domain spread outward in slow, unstoppable waves. The ground darkened first, stone losing its natural color as veins of black seeped through it like oil through porous rock. The soil softened, then thickened, becoming something halfway between mud and molten stone. Every footstep taken by defenders in that direction sank too deep, boots dragged down as if the land itself wanted to swallow them.

Then the walls began to react.

Sigils carved into the western battlements flickered erratically. Lines meant to stabilize stone and reinforce structure warped, their geometric precision blurring as abyssal influence bled into the enchanted pathways. One by one, the sigils failed—not explosively, but quietly. Their glow dimmed, then went dark, as if something had reached inside and extinguished them.

But that wasn't the truly surprising part.

Kain stared in shock as the stone blocks making up the wall shuddered.

At first, it looked like stress—microfractures forming under pressure. Then the cracks widened, not splitting apart, but pulling inward. Sections of wall twisted against themselves, stone grinding and folding as if it had become malleable. Metal reinforcement bars screamed as they bent, their surfaces blackening, corroding, reshaping into jagged, asymmetrical forms.

And then the wall moved.

Chunks of corrupted stone tore themselves free, dragging lengths of twisted metal with them. They hit the ground with wet, heavy impacts—and rose again.

Golem-like beings covered in abyssal contamination clawed their way upright.

They were crude, uneven things, bodies formed from fortress stone and corrupted steel fused together by writhing black energy. No two looked the same. Some dragged half-melted plates of steel carved with sigils across the ground like shields. Others had limbs that ended in large blocks instead of hands. Varying degrees of red and violet light burned in their 'eyes', pulsing in time with the earth demigod's domain.

Kain's mind reeled.

"These… weren't alive," he muttered. And yet now they were—moving, hunting, killing. Abyssals.

And he could sense that they weren't just puppets controlled by the enemy; each was an independent, newly born life form.

This went far beyond the environmental corruption he was familiar with. Normally, abyssal influence on inanimate objects would not cause the objects to develop sentience and become abyssals. Rather, a corrupted terrain would be more like a poisoned land, twisting flesh and will until nothing uncontaminated could survive nearby for long. Terrain might become hostile, unstable, dangerous—but it remained terrain. Stone stayed stone. Earth stayed earth.

He had never once needed to worry about the ground itself rising up to murder him.

There was no lifeforce there to exploit. No dormant vitality waiting to be twisted. Before corruption, this had been nothing more than inert matter.

And yet, in moments, it had become an army.

Creating life on this scale—combat-ready entities with their own will and independent movement—was not something most demigods could accomplish. At least not instantly. Not without years of preparation and experimentation, perhaps. Unless, of course, their very domain was tied to the concept of creation itself.

The realization sent a chill through Kain that had nothing to do with fear.

And this was the creation of life. Twisted and obscene, but creation all the same.

The earth demigod's domain did not just destroy matter.

It rewrote it.

The ground continued to change. Stone beneath the golems softened and flowed upward, feeding into their bodies. Fallen weapons sank into the blackened earth and vanished, only to reemerge moments later embedded in new forms, reforged into crude appendages. The fortress wall groaned as more of its structure was consumed, converted piece by piece into something hostile.

Kain's breathing slowed as understanding began to dawn.

Before corruption, this creature must have been an extremely special existence. Even amongst demigods.

His thoughts drifted to old records, half-remembered lectures, fragmented myths he may have read after being recruited into the Order.

He remembered a tidbit of information: this world they lived on was not isolated. It had never been. Countless sub-realms had once been connected to it—worlds layered alongside their own, touching at thin points of reality.

The Underworld, a realm with an intimate connection with the Blackheart Noble family, was the most infamous. A realm filled with infernal bloodlines, sealed off deliberately after repeated invasions threatened to drown the surface world in demonic hordes.

But there were other realms as well.

It was said that the last of the ancient dwarves and elves had fled to various sub-realms they controlled during the last abyssal invasion, choosing exile over extinction.

But that could just be speculation. Nobody could prove whether such realms existed since most sub-realms were not fully explored, or even found, by humans.

However, there is another realm, aside from the Underworld, with quite detailed notes on its existence.

The Elemental Realm.

A place of pure environmental extremes, where elementals were as plentiful as insects were here. Fire, water, wind, earth. Centuries ago, elementals had been everywhere and were quite cheap if one wanted to contract one.

But elementals required precise conditions to be born. Conditions almost impossible to maintain in this world to consistently produce them.

But that was not the case in the Elemental Realm.

Ninety-nine percent of elementals, the old texts claimed, originated there.

And then the connection vanished.

No record of a sealing ritual. No account of a war. Just… absence.

Within the records of the Elemental Realm, there were rulers—beings spoken of in the same breath as the 'Seven Great Demons' of the Underworld.

'Elemental Kings.'

Kain's gaze locked back onto the abyssal golem demigod.

Kain swallowed.

"If that thing was what I think it was…" he murmured.

A fallen Wrath Great Demon was bad enough.

A fallen Elemental King?

His chest tightened as a darker possibility surfaced.

What if the sub-realms hadn't disappeared?

What if they had fallen?

What if the reason no one could reach them anymore wasn't because the paths were closed—but because what waited on the other side had become something else entirely?

Kain forced himself to look away from the earth demigod and studied the others again. The crushing gravity. The storm sovereign. The liquefying demigod.

He had an eerie feeling. What if the powerful creatures that had once assisted mankind and the main world in resisting the abyssal invasion...were now part of the enemy ranks?

What if all of the abyssal demigods he was seeing now were their world's reinforcements that had been turned?

He tried to see if any others looked familiar based on texts he'd read.

But unfortunately, the shallow knowledge remaining from that time failed him. Humanity had never truly understood those various sub-realms. They had lacked the knowledge and the means to catalogue beings that existed at the top of such realms. Whatever truths once existed had been lost long before Kain was reborn.

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