"HAHA... HAHAHHAHAHA... AAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAH!"

The maniacal laughter tore through the city like a thunderclap, Leviathan rising higher into the sky with his arms stretched wide, his head thrown back, that inhuman sound rolling outward in waves.

It was not merely loud. It carried a weight to it, an oppressiveness that struck the weak-willed like hammer blows, pressing down on the chest, crushing the air from the lungs, driving many throughout the city to their knees without a single hand being laid upon them.

When the laughter finally broke, Leviathan looked down, and his eyes found Emperor Melvin standing atop the palace spire. He let his smile settle into something slower and more deliberate, his eyes pressing thin with quiet, vicious amusement.

"Melvin," he said, drawing the name out almost lazily, as though savoring it. "Did you truly believe that your presence warranted my personal attention?"

He let the question hang in the air for several long seconds, giving it room to breathe.

"You genuinely believed," he continued, his tone shifting into something between disbelief and mockery, "that your puny empire, your weak little flame, required a Demon General like me to personally march to your doorstep?"

"That I would waste such resources pulling your dying protectors away from where they are needed?" He paused, then asked simply, "For what?"

"To kill you? To end your empire?" The questions kept coming, each one landing with the ease of a blade finding an open wound. "What would that even achieve?"

As rageful and insulting as each question was, no one could deny that every question was entirely legitimate.

Melvin knew it himself. He knew it with a clarity that had no comfort in it. Without the warriors of the Malefis Domain standing between his people and annihilation, the White Flame Empire would have long since been reduced to a husk, its citizens transformed into the grotesque, hunger-maddened abominations of the Devourer’s curse.

"Surely you don’t believe," Leviathan went on, his voice carrying the tone of a man explaining something obvious to someone slow, "that on the scale this war is being waged, your continent holds any more worth than being a breeding ground for Devourer armies."

"The only reason you are still standing is because those soft-spined idiots kept coming to save you, delaying the inevitable over and over again."

"So ask yourself." His gaze swept across the walls, across the soldiers, before settling back on the Emperor. "Why would I, Leviathan, the Demon King’s General, the Terror of the Deep, the Envy of the World, personally come to take your head, when I have a far more fruitful opportunity before me, now that those same idiots are conveniently occupied elsewhere?"

Each word was a blade. Each sentence burrowed deeper into the minds of the defenders, and though voices of reason stirred among them, Leviathan allowed no space to recover, no breath to regroup.

"Little King," he said at last, his entire bearing shifting, a tremor moving through him as though some vast and unknowable emotion was building beneath his composed surface, something that looked almost like giddy, uncontainable excitement. "If you haven’t yet reached the answer yourself, allow me to make it clear."

"Your only worth," he said, pausing to savor the taste of the statement as it left him, "is that you are respected by the Domain Ruler."

The words sent a ripple through the defenders, and rightfully so.

Everyone knew the name. Everyone understood what it meant. The Domain Ruler, an immortal adventurer of incomprehensible power, was the reason the warriors of the Malefis Domain stood on the human continent at all.

That single figure was the axis around which all of their survival had turned, the reason help had come every time it came, and as a result, every soul in Nova held that name in the highest possible regard.

At least most did.

"And you know," Leviathan continued, his smile widening into something almost giddy, shimmering with barely restrained excitement, "that today is the day he returns from the Ancestral Realm."

A stillness passed through the city, the kind that preceded catastrophe.

"So, My King, has decided to welcome him home with a grand gift," Leviathan said, raising one arm and extending a single finger toward the radiant figure standing atop the palace spire, "And you, little King, will be part of that welcome."

He let the silence sit, allowing the defenders their curses, their prayers, their fierce declarations that death had already been accepted, that their sacrifice would be avenged, that they would bleed the demons dry before the end.

He let them have all of it.

And then, only when the moment felt precisely right, he let the hammer fall.

"You see this parasitic creature." He tilted his chin toward the expanding mass of bubbling flesh and writhing tendrils still spreading across the surface of the Aegis, growing with every passing second. "It is a gift from my King."

"Not only can it tear through your turtle shell by consuming every last drop of its energy and growing stronger in the process," he paused, letting the silence stretch until many along the walls sucked in a cold, involuntary breath, "but its true purpose is something else entirely."

"It can divide itself," Leviathan said softly, the smile never leaving his face, only deepening, growing more heinous and more delighted with every word.

"It can attach itself to living beings and replicate the great touch of the Devourer. What the silent curse requires years to achieve, the Devourer’s touch will accomplish within hours."

The words did not land like a blow. They landed like the closing of a door. Final. Absolute. Leaving nothing on the other side but darkness.

Leviathan fell silent, and his revelation spread through the city the way fire spreads through dry jungle, fast, consuming, leaving nothing standing in its wake.

Mass panic tore through the ranks. Eyes went wide and hollow with the cold realization that death was not, in fact, the end waiting for them.

Every shred of resolve they had built, every acceptance of sacrifice, every quiet peace made with mortality, was crushed beneath the weight of that single, cruel truth.

"So," Leviathan said pleasantly, as though posing a reasonable question to a reasonable man, "decide how you wish to end your life. And the life of every individual who stayed behind because of your incompetence."

He raised a single finger.

"You can keep the shield standing and allow the parasite to feed on its energy, growing stronger with every passing minute, and when it tears into your city, which it will in a few hours, it will take nearly two-thirds of your people to the Devourer’s embrace."

A second finger joined the first.

"Or, you can drop the shield now, open your gates to the horde outside, and watch two-thirds of your people be consumed by the Devourer Beasts, while the remainder are taken by my King’s gift all the same."

He lowered his hand and smiled warmly.

"The choice is yours to make." He chuckled, soft and unhurried. "But either way, when that boy returns from the Ancestral Realm, what he will find is you and your people remade by the great change. Every last one of you."

He paused as if suddenly remembering something pleasant.

"Oh, and I have not forgotten the promise made in my name. I will have your head before this day is done." His tone was almost conversational. "I do need something of value to present to the Domain Ruler when we meet."

"And I am certain we will meet, sooner or later."

He tilted his head, tapping one finger against his chin in mock contemplation. "Though I have been considering whether to keep you alive instead. Make you my personal hound. I haven’t quite decided on that yet."

All hell broke loose among the ranks.

Those who minutes ago had stood ready and willing to embrace death were no longer so certain. No one among them had ever witnessed a human fall to the Devourer’s curse with their own eyes, but none of them needed to.

The idea alone was enough.

Death and the loss of one’s own mind, one’s own self, being hollowed out and remade into an absolute beast of mindless rage and endless hunger, the two outcomes seemed similar only on the surface.

Beneath that surface, they were nothing alike. Almost no one would willingly choose the second, even if they knew that, just as death, the curse would consume them; almost no one could.

So the defenders began to look at one another with horror-filled eyes, the strength bleeding from their bodies, leaving them standing in place but stripped of direction, stripped of certainty, with no answer waiting for them, no matter where they looked.

If the terror of that truth was not enough, Leviathan had more to say, more cruel truths prepared to crush them.

"I forgot to mention one more thing," Leviathan said, almost absently, shaking his head as though it had genuinely slipped his mind. His gaze drifted downward across the walls, patient and unhurried.

The words alone were enough to drag the defenders back from the edge of the abyss they were sinking into, if only because their minds needed somewhere to go other than down.

"Some of you must be wondering why I brought such a large army, if my true plan had no real need for it."

He let the question hang in the air long enough for every soldier on those walls to feel it pressing against them.

"I brought them," he said simply, "in case one of the guardians was foolish enough to abandon the Domain and come racing here to save you."

He smiled one final time, open and easy, like a man who had already seen the ending and found it satisfying. "Now that it doesn’t seem to be the case, I will unleash them on your running families, so everyone can be together in the afterlife."

"Considering, if you are lucky enough to have an afterlife,"