What should have been a terrifying scene—where everything would be swallowed, torn apart, triggering a localized tectonic tsunami, flinging mountains into the sky, and sending superheated sand at thousands of degrees into the stratosphere—was abruptly intercepted.
The destructive death beam collided with a sudden explosion of radiant, prism-like brilliance, dazzling yet completely devoid of heat.
In the next instant, the radiance that had spilled outward suddenly reversed, like a movie playing backward, being sucked back toward the point of explosion.
At the same time, the destructive death beam that had touched this brilliance was similarly caught and pulled toward that fist-sized point.
In the span of a single breath, the death beam was completely swallowed by that strange point of light.
It was like a black hole? No, it was more like a hole dug through the world—an opening leading to the void at the very edge of existence, a hole that pierced through reality itself.
Just like a basketball suffering a severe leak, everything near the inner mouth of the hole was sucked away first.
"How did he do that...?"
The dreamy murmur came from a massive green dragon—Tohru.
She sensed something strange about that fist-sized hole. Unlike any other rift she had known, and unlike the massive hole in the sky from before, this one was... a passageway.
Earlier, when Icarus launched a black energy bomb, it had also caused spatial distortion that devoured everything around it—but that was pure gravity, pulling and compressing matter together to rupture the space-time barrier of this world.
That attack had forcefully bombed open an entrance to another world, smashing the door open.
Without that entrance, the energy wouldn't have been enough to break through.
But this small hole in front of her—it had started absorbing everything nearby, which should mean it connected to the void beyond the world. Yet, Tohru couldn't sense any void from within the hole.
Instead... she sensed this world on the other side?
That didn't make sense. How could something that was still within the same world behave like this?
If it were a true black hole, maybe... but it wasn't. That hole glowed with radiant light.
Hmm? Tohru noticed Lucoa was sweating nervously.
Oh right—Lucoa had once been a goddess of civilization, possessing terrifying levels of knowledge. She should understand what this meant.
"Lucoa, what is that?"
"That guy... he opened a hole in the one-dimensional plane of a high-dimensional space that had been folded up in that area..."
Beyond the four-dimensional space that all living creatures perceive and exist in, other higher-dimensional spaces also exist. Normally, these spaces are tightly curled up by special force fields and completely inaccessible or undetectable.
These high-dimensional spaces are usually in a closed state.
But when someone opens a hole in the one-dimensional plane of such a space, it causes those compacted, invisible dimensions to unravel and spill out—instantly flipping the world inside out.
That's why they saw such a dazzling, prism-like scene, brilliant yet without any heat—that was a glimpse of higher-dimensional space.
However, the world has self-correcting capabilities.
Even when spatial gravity is disturbed by local supernova explosions or black hole formations, the universe doesn't just collapse.
The released high-dimensional space would eventually fold itself back up. But anything it touched along the way... would be taken with it.
This was a deliberate act of temporarily overturning a local portion of the universe—to trigger the universe's corrective mechanism, thereby dragging the target into sealed high-dimensional space.
Look—just moments later, the area where that high-dimensional space had been released was already folded back in, and there was no trace of the destructive black light anymore.
Likewise, the light stolen away by the death beam was now falling back to the earth, turning night back into day.
The scene before them felt too surreal to most people—like a dream, or a fantasy.
Unbelievable.
Maybe this is what a true mythical war looks like.
"Ugh... I don't understand a thing."
"Put simply—the divine realm, got it?"
The dimension where the gods reside is a space similar to this—only it's not curled up and dormant, but activated and stabilized.
Normally, no one would dare to release these curled-up high-dimensional spaces. If handled improperly, it could trigger a domino collapse effect—a true apocalyptic scenario that could end the entire universe.
That's why Lucoa was so shaken.
She was also confused—because she knew clearly that this wasn't his ability at work. And to casually unravel a sealed high-dimensional space? That's not something just anyone can do.
He used a cube—a magic cube—taken from a hero, and he knew how to use it to trigger such an effect?
How did he know that cube could do this? There was no time to consider that now.
"Tohru, notify every living being on this land—leave immediately. Run as far as possible. I've contacted the gods in the surface world, and they're willing to open gates for people to evacuate."
Never mind whether this world would be destroyed—this continent in the underworld was as good as gone.
Lucoa had seen it in his eyes—he was serious now.
He was determined to dismantle the weapon he once created, and to mercilessly punish the undead hybrid on it.
He could've dodged—but he deliberately intercepted the attack. This was his warning—his way of giving others time to escape. He must have noticed the other lifeforms in this world.
He was still the same as before—not a demon king who would blindly drag countless innocent lives into destruction.
He hadn't lost his sanity.
But after this... their clash would undoubtedly bring about a hellish scene. No one could stop him in this state—unless the gods themselves joined the fight.
But that would only make it worse.
Before Tohru or the others could respond, the second wave of bombardment from the dragon cannons was about to begin. The mouths of the cannons shimmered with magic circles, light converging, light devouring.
At that moment, the demon king whipped upward from the ground a lightning lash—a whip of thunder capable of tearing apart the earth itself. This wasn't an exaggeration—it was the truth.
The ground split apart like tectonic plates in motion, a straight chasm tearing toward Icarus, as if it intended to open the gates of hell and drag her in.
"BOOM—!"
The lightning whip collided with the hemispherical barrier Icarus had deployed. The impact shook the very fabric of the world.
Only now did the heroes understand—this dragon had never used its full power until now.
"Aegis?"
No wonder. That was the absolute defense system he had designed back then.
But damn—that arrogant gaze from above really rubbed him the wrong way.
So, the demon king raised his hand overhead.
The sky split open with a massive magic circle, clouds thickened ominously, and countless lightning serpents danced within.