Chapter 18 The Daemonguard #3
Thunderbreak was the second ghost sword that hung from his belt.
It was not an everyday weapon; it required immense mana to activate the sword, more than the average Luminary soldier could channel.
Elias had had it custom shined for his remarkable talents.
Its thunderous strikes were deadly to the most towering behemoths of the Abyss.
He had demonstrated only a small flick of the sword’s power to Celise.
Thunderbreak could take out a horde of daemons by summoning a storm of mana bolts from the sky.
But he didn’t expect to find that many monsters around the castle grounds—at least, he hoped not.
The soldiers of the Daemonguard, clad in black-blue leathers with gold insignia, drew their weapons as well, following his lead. They walked behind Kiran with their swords drawn, their blades glimmering with mana.
They entered the Zodiac Gardens without incident and continued past the ruined trellis and trampled garden beds. If the soldiers took note of the chaos, they didn’t react except by shared glances. They moved in complete silence, mere shadows across the ground.
On the other side of the courtyard, they passed through a grove of black maple trees and a rusted gate into the forbidden ruins of the old castle.
With Elias in the lead, they took a different route that skirted around the pond and the old shrine.
They traveled uphill for a ways, then through a grove of manawood trees and tangled hawthorn bushes.
Celise hadn’t traveled this deep into the abandoned grounds—she hadn’t seen the proper ruins of the old fortress, just what remained of the gardens.
Buried within those ruins was the Blackwood family tomb.
The soldiers passed through a labyrinth of crumbling stone archways and broken statuary, weathered smooth by rain and neglect.
The walls of the old castle looked like a dream left to rot.
Touches of beauty still existed amidst the crumbling stone.
Pale flowers—lumenblooms and Ironclad Aster—glowed faintly in the silver light of the twin moons.
Glowbells grew in mossy clusters between the cracked stone walls, like little pockets of earthbound stars.
The soldiers passed by overturned benches and collapsed gazebos. Their feet crossed over ancient foyers and trod through rooms overtaken by ivy.
Senior Officer Kiran Kindale followed closely behind Elias with an amulet in hand.
Not dissimilar in size and shape to Dr. Forrest’s medical discs—which the doctor used to treat Celise’s mana body—Kiran’s amulet was created for a different purpose.
The circle of shined metal was meant to detect daemonic dust, similar to mold spores or dandruff, that constantly shed from the monsters’ bodies.
The residue was harmless in small amounts, but walking through a cloud of it could damage the lungs.
Elias had encountered such conditions on the deepest levels of the Abyss. Special breathing masks with filters had been developed to protect against the daemonic residue, similar to plague masks, but many soldiers lost their lives to infection.
Technically, the daemons themselves were like spores cast off by the Daemon King.
The comparison had come to Elias’s mind often while campaigning in the depths of the Abyss.
Although called the “Daemon King” due to ancient superstition and folklore, the beast of ancient lore was more like a mother plant spawning endless copies of itself to infest the world.
It governed no city, it declared no law, and daemons themselves were far from sentient beings with a culture or society.
From what he could tell, they were mindless mutations driven by incessant hunger, with no more sense of self than a mosquito.
Modern scientists had autopsied thousands of daemon corpses over the last two centuries.
Until recently, researchers hadn’t been able to locate anything like a brain or traditional nervous system within the creatures.
Their anatomy was far from human. Each monster was spawned individually from the Daemon King’s flesh, so each daemon was unique—although they seemed to follow certain patterns.
The acidity of their blood seemed to exist on a scale that correlated to the intensity of their power.
This also seemed to relate to the depth of the Abyss they chose to haunt, with stronger daemons lurking farther inside, while the weaker specimens remained closer to the surface.
As for the Daemon King itself—only a handful of warriors over the years had come anywhere close to observing it.
Elias was one of those few. Since returning home from the war, he had been interviewed dozens of times by the realm’s leading researchers, yet besides a few flashes of chaos and violence, his memories of the final battle were tragically absent.
What did the Daemon King look like? Could he draw a picture?
What was its size, shape and color? He only remembered the creature’s fire and rage.
Just breaching the monster’s chamber had cost the lives of a hundred men.
He thought of those men’s sacrifice each morning as he donned his uniform.
Kiran’s eyes remained on the shined amulet in his hand as various different colors moved across its surface. As the group of soldiers traveled deeper into the abandoned ruins, the amulet’s colors began to glow with a definitive strength: a sure sign that Elias’s hunch was correct.
“Commander,” murmured Kiran, as the amulet flashed from green to purple. “Something ahead.”
Elias held up a gloved hand. His squadron slowed down, boots muffled by moss and wild grass.
Between swaying vines and overgrown laurels, a low gate appeared—iron, ornate, half-swallowed by creeping lumenblooms. The rusted chains that once secured it were broken.
He knelt down and picked up a length from the ground.
The old iron looked melted and distorted in some areas.
Acid.
He and Kiran exchanged a glance.
He dropped the chain on the ground and motioned to the Daemonguard with an open-palmed gesture: a warning to stay alert.
In single file, they entered the Blackwood tomb.