CHAPTER 630: 630

The mages exchanged glances, understanding in silence that no amount of planning, no amount of effort, could prepare them for such a force. For now, all they could do was endure, and hope that their existence, fragile as it was, could somehow leave a trace long after they were gone.

Meanwhile, back at the abyss, Ikenga and Keles knew nothing of what was unfolding elsewhere. Their minds were fixed only on the nearing end of their long, harrowing journey.

Once they plunged through the gaping maw and into the abyss, the entire layer shuddered violently as though the world itself convulsed. The moment of passage was disorienting like being pulled through the breath of a living thing. In the chaos, Zarvok, who had flown beside them like a steady shadow, was gone before either of them could register his absence.

From above, Ikenga and Keles tried to take in their bearings. He had expected the familiar sight of mountains turned upon their heads, rubble scattered across an endless void, debris from conquered world swallowed and broken apart. That was what the abyss always was to him a graveyard of collapse.

But the sight that greeted him instead made his eyes curl up in a frown. The abyss had... grown. The space itself had expanded, stretching outward into impossible breadth. And all the wreckage, all the mountains, cities, forests, and nameless fragments swallowed by the maw had been woven seamlessly into the fabric of this layer. It was as if they had always been here, planted and rooted since the beginning of time. Not chaotic, not discarded, but absorbed into a larger design.

The goblins stared wide-eyed, their shrill voices catching in their throats. The ratmen squeaked nervously, huddling together. Even Rattan, who had carried himself with bitter certainty, found his jaw slack. For them, plunging into the maw had meant death, obliteration, an end to fear. Yet now they found themselves standing where they had been before, as though no passage had occurred at all.

One moment they were swallowed whole by darkness.

The next, they were back again, their surroundings eerily unchanged except for the undeniable sense that the world around them was larger.

Something had taken them in. Something had claimed them. The streets looked the same. The buildings looked the same. But the air once calm, humming with a soothing presence of mana that seeped into their very bones was long gone, only a pervesive energy that seems to want to drill into them forcefully. And when their eyes turned skyward, the celestial body of the world, the sun they had always known, that reassuring marker of time was gone.

In its place stretched the abyss-layer’s sky: vast, formless, and endless, as if no boundary could hold it. It was a ceiling without light, yet not without weight, pressing down on them with the reminder that they were far from the world they once belonged to.

Confusion gnawed at their minds. Whispers spread among goblins and ratmen alike, a rising storm of questions without answers. How could the streets remain, the buildings remain, when the sky had been stolen? Had they been returned, or had their world been rewritten?

Desperate for guidance, they turned their gaze toward the palace, hoping their newly crowned emperor might explain the unfathomable.

But Rattan was no longer among them.

Deep within the core of this abyssal layer, hidden from sight, Zarvok slumbered inside a vast egg of shifting black stone and glowing veins of crimson light. His small impish body had dissolved, unmade, as the blessing of ascension wrapped him in silence. Within that cocoon, he was left to shape his future self crafting a body worthy of his throne. The past was behind him: impish weakness, the sneers of others, the scraps of survival. Now he dreamed of grandeur, and could at will sculp his flesh into something divine.

With the transformation came memories and knowledge not his own, fragments of truths whispered by the abyss itself. Each vision drew him deeper into the design of his new form, each secret strengthening the foundations of his status.

For Zarvok, it was but a sleep a long, tranquil dreaming.

But for those left outside, it was a prison of time. Months passed in his absence. Months of silence. Months where the emperor gave no command, save one: the demons were bound by his will to restrain themselves, forced to obey his final order before he withdrew.

It was an unnatural law. Demons, who thrived in cruelty and bloodlust, were made to stay in their claws and hold back their fangs. The repression gnawed at them like rot beneath the skin.

The goblins, ratfolk, and ogres were quick to sense it. Fear, once their leash, was gone. They tested the limits, at first timidly, then boldly striking, jeering, provoking. And the demons, bound by Zarvok’s will, did not answer. No matter what insult or wound was given, not a blade nor claw was raised in retaliation.

What began as confusion soon twisted into aggression. Without the demons to keep them in check, the conquered creatures spiraled out of control. Violence turned inward, tribe against tribe, clan against clan, as the fragile order Rattan had imposed began to unravel.

The most they ever drew from the demons was a glare or a guttural snarl. No more, no less. That was the extent of their menace, bound and muzzled by Zarvok’s last command.

The breaking point came when the goblins, ratfolk, and ogres all gathered at the palace gates, desperate for order. They sought out Rattan, their old anchor, but he was nowhere to be found. In his absence, something else filled the void.

Greed.

Whispers turned to shouts, shouts to accusations, and accusations to bloodshed. Each race claimed the throne, each proclaimed their right to lead in this new world. The palace steps became a battlefield.

The irony was cruel. Once, each had wielded mana, or unnatural gifts that set them apart. Now, all of that was gone. The abyss had sealed away their strength, leaving them stripped bare, reduced to nothing but flesh, bone, and what meager experience they carried. For the first time, they were equals forced back to the same starting line. The throne they fought for was nothing but a seat in a broken hall, yet it was enough to drive them into frenzy.

Meanwhile, Rattan the very one they had sought—was rotting in a dungeon below the new obsidian castle raised by the demons for Zarvok. Shackled in the dark, he waited, unwilling and uncertain, for his own fate.

Months bled into one another, until the day the air itself changed.

A suffocating weight rolled across the abyss-layer like a black tide. Every creature, goblin, ratman, ogre, demon felt it press against their skulls and spines. None could resist. One by one, they collapsed to their knees, foreheads pressed into the earth. Fear, reverence, and instinct bound them in place.

From the depths of the ground, the egg rose.

Vast, luminous veins of crimson energy pulsed across its surface as it floated upward, towering above the trembling masses. It climbed higher and higher until it hung in the abyssal sky like a second sun, a world unto itself.

Then it cracked.

Fragments fell away in shards of burning light. And from within, Zarvok emerged. He looked unchanged, still the same impish frame, the crooked horns, the too-small body that seemed almost pitiful before. But none dared laugh. None dared scoff. His very presence was an ocean pressing down upon them, drowning thought, crushing will.

Zarvok’s eyes slid open. A meaningless gesture now, for he no longer required them. The layer itself was his gaze, his hearing, his touch. Every stone, every ripple of air, every trembling figure pressed to the ground was known to him as if they were etched into his very being. There was no corner of this abyss hidden from his sight.

A slow smile curved across his lips. After all the scorn, all the clawing and crawling, he had finally reached the height he had dreamt of. He was no longer the runt of the pit, he was its sovereign.

In an instant, his form dissolved from the sky and reappeared before Ikenga and Keles. Unlike the others, they had not bent their knees. Their divinity was sealed, their power smothered, and yet they stood defiant.

The figure that greeted them was not the impish demon they remembered. Zarvok now wore the guise of a man, dressed immaculately in a white suit that gleamed unnaturally against the abyss’s dim light. His smile lingered, sharp and knowing, as he regarded them.

"It is no disgrace," he said softly, his voice both velvet and steel, "to bow before a Demon Lord."

But Ikenga’s and Keles’s expressions did not change. No awe. No fear. Only a cold, unyielding glare that cut through his words.

Zarvok’s smile did not falter. With a flicker of will, he loosened the binds that chained their strength. Power rushed back into their veins, not as full as before, but enough to remind them their current position.