85 The Demon Lord and His Wife (1/2)

Incessant, howling laughter filled the void with the timbre of madness. The Infested were delighted; they had not expected this at all but welcomed the unexpected opportunity nonetheless.

They, who had been compelled to destroy by their masters, had become nothing more than twisted shadows of their former selves.

Beings who no longer possessed a soul and were, as a result, without a will of their own. Eternal slaves and soldiers, forever damned to crusade against the sum of all that would and could ever exist.

There was no greater torment than this — becoming the bane of existence.

To be denied the sweet mercy of death, only to become an abomination and servant for the same entity that tore apart your entire universe.

Unbound from the concept of death, they would continue to persist for as long as their eldritch masters did. Resurrected again and again until their terrible job was done…

Reed detested the Infested down to the core but understood that they were no more than puppets serving a greater will. The more he learned about them from the hooded man, the clearer it all became for him.

It was different now.

He looked past his irrational hatred for the Infested and had honed in on what really angered him about them. What he really hated about them was the… arrogance. Not of the Infested, but of their masters.

The condescending attitude as if their victory had been assured from the very beginning.

That it was meaningless to resist. That they would, in the end, win.

It was an irritating kind of confidence that could have only been born from winning a countless amount of times.

The Outsiders were not worried at all. To them, this was just another multiverse on their list. Nothing more. They had dismantled countless other realities — too many to count — and would do the same for the one Reed called home.

In the face of an almighty presence, older and wiser than all in creation, what did the futile struggle of two microscopic bacterium mean to it?

Has a human being ever been specifically concerned with the actions of two bacterium on a paper napkin? So tiny and insignificant that they could not even be seen with the naked eye?

Pointless. Utterly pointless.

Bacteria, the single-celled organisms that they were, could not be reasoned with. They would mindlessly follow their primitive instincts until the very end...

The sprawling firestorm that Reed and Lu'um had summoned was working, but it was quickly losing effect.

A seven kilometer-sized storm of pure fire turned everything it touched into ash but there too many of them. Tens of thousands of Infested poured into the firestorm during the beginning but now…

It was being snuffed out through by the Infested through sheer numbers. They were forcing themselves through the inferno by using the corpses and sometimes their living compatriots as shields from the flames.

Millions of corpses piled onto each other and formed a wall of rotting, charred flesh and bone as the Infested pushed through a raging hellscape to reach them. They would stop at nothing until the job was done.

”What do we do?! They're going to break through! Shiiit!” said Reed. He gathered Anima and poured as much of it as he could into the firestorm but he knew that it was only delaying the inevitable.

They would break through soon enough and then… shit would really hit the fan.

If millions Infested tore through the void onto the continent, it'd spell the end of Mulia. In less than an hour, they'd wipe the entire place clean of life.

Hundreds of millions would die if they did not find a solution with in the next couple of minutes…

God-fucking-dammit! Need a solution fast! Now! Come on, think! THINK!

Lu'um stared at the slowly closing hole and bit her thumb in frustration. She nervously tapped her left heel and said, ”There's no time… By the time the tear heals itself, it'll be too late. And I can't use my full strength here. The last thing we want to do is make the hole even bigger than before.”

”Then what do we do?! We can't just wait! Look at THEM! They're about to break through!!”

They were inching closer and closer toward the edge of the firestorm. Their delighted laughter echoed even louder than before... as if they were enjoying the little show that the pair had put for them.

Soon their terrible work would commence and they would make all of Mulia suffer.

Lu'um stared at the closing hole and said, ”We have to close it now — force it shut, ourselves!”