(3rd Person POV)
Under Gerry's stunned gaze, the two men who had radiated such terrible strength only minutes ago now followed Ilseveire like puppets on a string.
She led them down into the underground, where Arthur and Firfel waited.
'Who in the hell is this woman?' Gerry kept several steps back, watching her. 'She put down two representatives of the Legion Swords like it was nothing.'
"This is wrong... we are Legion Swords." Clark-Clark's mouth moved, but his legs carried him forward without his consent, betraying him with every step. "They will not let this slide, woman. You hear me?"
"Release us," Long-Long bit out, helpless. "Release us at once."
"Quiet, the both of you." Ilseveire's voice stayed soft. "You're about to be presented to the true masters of this gang. Mind your tone."
That stopped them.
Clark-Clark's eyes found the two figures seated at the far end of the chamber. "...What. You're telling me you're not the one running this gang?"
"That's right." Ilseveire dipped her head toward Firfel, a small, respectful bow. "I'm merely a subordinate of Lady Firfel here."
Firfel returned the gesture with a faint nod.
"That can't be." Long-Long's eyes went wide. "Your strength — you could pass for a General-Rank in the Legion Swords. And you serve someone else?"
"If I'm worth a General-Rank to you," Ilseveire said, "then understand that these two sit at a level you couldn't picture if you tried. A level no deity in this world could match."
Clark-Clark snorted. "Lies. You expect us to swallow that garbage? There's no chance in hell these two are anywhere near the level of the gods."
"Yeah!" Long-Long agreed, far too earnestly. "I swear it on the Demon King, that just isn't possible—"
He stopped.
Clark-Clark turned his head and glared at him with the slow, dawning horror of a man watching a friend walk off a cliff.
Arthur's eyes sharpened with sudden interest. "The Demon King? Did I hear that right?"
Long-Long scratched the back of his head, going for clueless and missing by a wide margin. "Forget it. I didn't say anything."
"You clearly swore on a Demon King." Firfel's voice was light, but her gaze had fixed on him.
Clark-Clark looked like he wanted nothing more than to kick his partner across the room. "We're exposed now. Because of your big mouth, Long-Long."
"..." Long-Long lowered his head and said nothing.
Arthur found the whole thing rather entertaining. "And what does it change if I know you revere a Demon King? You're still under us either way."
Clark-Clark seized on the lifeline. "Y — yes. Right. We just revere the Demon King. We admire him, that's all. Isn't that right, Long-Long?"
"R — right." Long-Long nodded hard.
Arthur chuckled at the clumsy patch job. "You two are the first demons I've ever come across in this world. I'll admit, it's interesting."
The words landed.
Ilseveire's head turned sharply toward the pair. Gerry's followed half a beat later.
"They're... demons?" Ilseveire stared at them for a long moment.
Gerry took an unsteady step back.
Caught, fully and completely, Clark-Clark and Long-Long realized there was no patching over this one.
"This is your fault." Clark-Clark's teeth were gritted hard enough to ache.
Long-Long covered his head with both hands.
"Now, now. No need to be so hard on him." Arthur rose from his seat and walked toward the two of them, taking his time. "I find myself wondering what to do with a pair from the Demon Realm."
Clark-Clark's jaw set. "So you know we're demons. So what? I'll just make sure no one who heard it walks out of this room able to talk."
"Y — yeah." Long-Long nodded along. "The world can't know the Legion Swords was founded by the Demon King. We're only one of the many hands he's planted in the human realm, in secret —"
Clark-Clark's glare could have stripped paint. "You."
He gave up on the man entirely.
"No matter." His voice dropped, cold and flat. "I'll just kill everyone here and be done with it."
"Oh?" Arthur stopped a few paces from them, genuinely amused now. "Weren't you the ones who lost? The ones who can't even move? And you're going to kill us."
Clark-Clark's mouth curved into a small, knowing smirk.
Ilseveire's eyes flew wide.
"L — Lord Arthur, look out —!"
She never finished it.
The «Puppet of Fate» binding the two demons shattered like glass under a hammer. The threads Ilseveire had knotted shut tore free all at once, and the bodies they'd held in place began to change.
The ground heaved. Demonic energy erupted out of the pair in a black, roiling tide, thick enough to taste, pressing the lamplight down to dim red embers.
Clark-Clark's fine suit split at the seams as his frame swelled. His skin darkened to the color of old iron, veins of molten crimson cracking up his arms and across his throat. The snake on his cheek peeled off the skin and became real — a living thing of smoke and ember that coiled around his neck and hissed with his breath.
His eyes burned a flat, lightless red, and the lazy boredom that had hung on him this whole time burned away into something cruel and ancient and hungry.
Long-Long's robe fell away entirely, and what stood beneath it had no legs at all — his lower body trailed off into a thick, serpentine mass of shadow that pooled across the floor and held him upright.
His arms, already unnatural, lengthened into clawed limbs that scraped the ceiling. The hood fell back from a face that was all hollow sockets and a too-wide jaw, and his deep voice doubled into a chorus of itself, layered and wrong.
The two of them now filled the chamber with a presence that could have leveled the entire Magicless District without effort.
"You should have killed us when you had the chance," Clark-Clark intoned, his voice rolling out like grinding stone. "Now you'll learn what it means to spit on the Demon King's banner. We were planted in this world a hundred years before you crawled into it. The Legion Swords, the noble houses, the courts — they are roots. And when the harvest comes, this whole kingdom will —"
He never got to finish the sentence.
Arthur's hands moved.
One closed around Clark-Clark's throat. The other around Long-Long's.
The demonic energy that had filled the room — the tide that could have flattened the district — simply stopped. It was as if someone had reached into the room and pinched out a flame.
The black pressure collapsed inward, sucked back into the two demons and then held there, choked off at the source, unable to so much as flicker.
Clark-Clark's burning eyes bulged. His clawed hands scrabbled at Arthur's wrist and found it immovable, like grasping a mountain.
Long-Long's chorus of voices cut out into a thin, strangled silence.
Whatever grand declaration the two had been building toward died unspoken in their throats. They hung in Arthur's grip, transformed, monstrous, capable of trampling a city — and utterly, completely helpless.
Neither of them could find a single word.
---
In his residence, the Mage Guardian Profellie's eyes snapped open.
The demonic energy had hit his senses like a struck bell. His gaze hardened, and he was already rising, already turning toward the Magicless District, power gathering at his fingertips to cross the city in an instant —
And then it was gone.
Vanished. No fade, no retreat. There one breath, absent the next, as if it had never bloomed at all.
"...What just happened?" He stroked his beard slowly.
He knew the alarm had been real. An aura like that did not announce itself by accident, and it did not simply evaporate. Something had snuffed it out — fast, and with a control that unsettled him more than the energy itself had.
He went anyway. Just in case.
As he rose into the air and turned toward the district, he caught sight of another figure already moving the same way.
Principal Saza.
She had felt it too.
And they were not the only ones. Across the city, other senses had pricked up at that brief, violent surge — figures pausing mid-step, heads turning toward the Magicless District.
The Legion Swords had certainly felt it; the aura had belonged to their own men, and somewhere in the city, someone was already burning to find out who had dared lay hands on them. The energy had vanished too quickly for any of them to fix on its source.
But it had been more than enough to stir the whole of Eisen City into quiet, watchful alarm.
It did not take long for Profellie, Saza, and a contingent of city mages to converge on the Axe Warriors' base. They ringed the building from every angle, mana coiling at the ready, waiting only for the signal to move in.
Before any of them could act, a thread of telepathy reached Profellie and Saza both.
It was Arthur.
Profellie's stern expression flickered. He raised a hand and called the mages back, telling them the matter was already resolved.
The murmurs started immediately. Demons, some of them whispered — demons, already inside the city walls, inside the Magicless District where no one ever bothered to look. Fear ran through the ranks in a low current.
But they withdrew anyway. Whatever unease they carried, they trusted the Mage Guardian's word over their own instincts. One by one they peeled away from the building and dispersed into the streets.
Once the last of them was gone, Profellie and Saza exchanged a single look.
Then they descended.
The underground chamber opened before them, and inside it they found Arthur, Firfel, the hooded woman, and a visibly shaken Gerry. On the floor lay two men, motionless.
Arthur spoke before either of them could.
"There's no cause for alarm. The demons are already dealt with. These two were careless enough to reveal their origins themselves."
Profellie's gaze sharpened as it moved over the bodies. "How did you come to capture demons? Here, of all places?"
"And these aren't common rabble." Saza crouched slightly, studying the pair with a practiced eye. "From the residue alone — high-ranking. Soldiers, not stragglers."
Arthur offered an easy smile. "I came down here on a bit of business. These two showed up to collect dues, claiming to be representatives of the Legion Swords."
The name landed.
Profellie and Saza both went still.
Arthur filled in the rest without being asked: that the Legion Swords, the organization that had been quietly sinking its hooks into the kingdom's nobility and courts, had been founded by the Demon King himself. One of many hands planted in the human realm, masked as a mercenary order.
Profellie's face hardened into something grave. "This is critical. The capital needs to hear it at once."
"Agreed." Saza was already rising. "If the Legion Swords answer to the Demon King, then half the noble houses they've courted are compromised. This can't wait."
The two of them turned and left in a hurry — so focused on the weight of what they'd just learned that they swept past the two unconscious demons on the floor without a backward glance.
Saza paused at the threshold, though.
Her eyes settled on the hooded woman for a moment longer than the rest. Something about the figure tugged at her, familiar in a way she couldn't immediately place.
She didn't press it. There were larger matters in front of her. She followed Profellie up and out.
Arthur watched them go, unbothered by the loose ends they'd left behind. He turned to Firfel.
"Well. I'd say it's about time we headed home, wouldn't you?"
Firfel nodded. "Yeah. I'll admit I'm curious how the Simulated World the Architect's been building is coming along."
Arthur agreed. The Matrix had been running in his absence, and a part of him had been itching to see what the Architect had managed to construct with the staggering volume of consciousness he'd handed him.
But before any of that, he turned to the hooded woman.
"While we're away, the demons and the Legion Swords situation are yours to manage." He gestured at the two prone figures. "Keep them contained. Watch how the city reacts. And don't let anyone follow the thread back to this gang."
Ilseveire inclined her head beneath the hood. "It will be handled. Go without worry."
With that settled, Arthur made his way back to the residence where they were staying.
By the next morning, he woke Sylwen, Apollonia, and the others, telling them it was time to return to their own world. The news was met with open delight — they had enjoyed this world well enough, but home was home, and the curiosity of what awaited them on the other side had been building for weeks.
They gathered their things and set out for the academy.
Saza met them there. Despite the urgency of the demon report, she made time for this; a promise was a promise, and the array would not activate itself.
The chamber beneath the academy held the «Temporal Confluence Array», its lines still faintly stained with the deep crimson of Thanokai's blood. Saza fed the magic cores into it and began the activation.
The array drank the energy and ignited, red light flooding the chamber, the air folding strangely as the link between the two worlds woke from its standby. The portal yawned open at the center, deepening, stabilizing.
One by one, they stepped through.
The pull took them — sharp, total, like being drawn through the eye of a needle — and then deposited them, all at once, back into the world they had left.
Home.