The Runic Alchemist

The Demon Lord only had his giant form and his fucked-up decay energy spheres. Both Sam and Lucian had wormhole spells etched into their Sacrium swords—dodging them was no big deal. Sam could even release so much mana-filled blinding radiance that the darkness of the Demon Lord's dark cloud couldn't even touch it.

The Demon Lord knew something seriously fucked-up was happening, but he could do nothing. The black pigmen had scattered over the long time they were gone from this place. The Demon Lord had already recalled over thousands, but they were nowhere near the crazy numbers from before.

A few spells here and there managed to block them out of the giant carving of the runic circle he was making. It wasn't even completely necessary to keep them all out. As long as his carved runic circle retained its shape somewhat and was filled with liquid mana, it should work just fine. He could repair any damage in seconds.

The dirt was not a good medium for the spell—but at the scale he was drawing this runic spell, only dirt could handle it. His pure, overwhelmingly powerful liquid mana should more than make up for the lack of a good medium. This was not just a few-meters-big mana powder spell—the power contained in this was probably tens of times greater than even nuclear bombs.

The radius of the runic circle he was drawing alone was 5 km. It was a simple laser beam spell, aimed towards the land instead of the sky. The runic circle was 10 km in diameter, but the laser itself was going to be 20 km in diameter. Just one tank of liquid mana was enough to launch a laser this big, but the point was not just the size—the power from a 10 km-wide runic circle, filled with a meter-deep layer of liquid mana, should keep the laser powered enough to go down into the planet's crust at least 200 kilometers. He was going to fill it with over fifty meters of liquid mana—as much as his leftover raw liquid mana generating materials allowed him. Hopefully, it exceeded that.

That would be millions of liters. Filling it would take some time.

Sam and Lucian held off the Demon Lord without any trouble—Damian finished drawing the runic circle. The liquid mana generated till now had barely reached halfway through the 10 km-diameter circle. But the busy work was done. Now he just had to stand still, generate liquid mana, and use a wormhole to send it all down the 700-meter-deep canal. Damian changed his position to stand behind Sam and Lucian.

Other than keeping most of the pigmen out of range of his canals by creating earth and ice walls around them, Damian also supported the two fighters once in a while. The Demon Lord had disappeared mid-fight many times—but not once had he managed to capture any of them in his darkness or overpower them with physical strength.

At last, after 20 minutes of fighting, the Demon Lord finally stopped. Damian had used these 20 minutes wisely and used up all the steel he had stored to make hundreds and hundreds of liquid mana cubes. With his Sigil Replication skill, he just had to copy-paste them after melting the steel ingots into the right shape—of which he had many casts. He had stopped before the number reached ridiculous levels, though—not because he couldn't, but because his aura wouldn't reach that many mana cubes.

He was generating thousands and thousands of liters of liquid mana per second—the giant runic circle finally looked like it was filling up a bit. Seeing this scene was another reason the Demon Lord lost all hope. He had already seen what Damian could do with a fraction of the liquid mana compared to what was available right in front of his eyes. To put a final nail in the coffin, Damian even used many giant pillars with environment-mana-gathering spells to build a huge barrier dome around the 10 km-wide runic circle.

The Demon Lord's flying army—the one he had called with so much effort—had been rendered useless in their attempt to interrupt any of Damian's intricate carvings.

All the black pigmen, who had been making so much noise trying to break the barrier, suddenly stopped at once. A comfortable peace returned to the familiar sight. The giant humanoid dark figure scattered, revealing only a seven-foot-tall, grey-skinned, monster-like human. The same man Damian and Sam had seen in the Astral Plane of the Demon Lord. There was no sword in his hand this time. The darkness that had formed his coat seemed to push him forward as he simply walked near them.

Sam and Lucian kept their guard up but did not stop him. The Demon Lord passed them and stood right across the barrier—on the other side from where Damian and Sam were, busy generating tons of liquid mana and filling the giant runic spell.

"What are you doing?" the grey-skinned man asked, as if there was no enmity between them at all.

"What do you think?" Damian replied.

"There is no spell, no matter how strong, that can kill me, mortal. The Lord Chaos personally made me immortal."

"We'll find out soon enough how immortal you are."

"It's another of those damned sealing spells, isn't it? I knew I should've killed the seedling of Lightbringer the second I laid eyes on his— Where is he? Did my children kill him?" The horrifying face somehow twisted into an even more horrifying one as the Demon Lord actually smiled.

"What the hell was that trap we were stuck in? Is that how you control all these people?" Damian asked, since they were chatting anyway.

"Will you stop if I answer?" the Demon Lord asked with a straight face.

Seeing the deadpan expression on Damian's face, the Demon Lord closed his eyes for a second. He had answered without saying a word. He was just wasting time anyway—over 70% of the materials had been used and converted into liquid mana already. It was a matter of minutes now.