Chapter 111: Ch 111 : Intuition
"Deimos, you have already chosen your prey this early?" a weary voice echoed in the grand hall. It was Malakai, the Demon Lord of Despair, a shrouded figure whose very presence seemed to make the shadows in the room deeper. He spoke with a playful tone, but beneath it lay a profound, nihilistic boredom. "Why choose one? In the end, they will all fall into despair anyway. The outcome is predetermined."
"You surely have a plan," Belial, the Lord of Lies, added, his gentle voice a stark contrast to the oppressive atmosphere. "My gut feeling is screaming that this is more than a simple hunt."
"Plan?" Ichor, the Lord of Corrosion, slammed his slimy hand on the bone table, leaving a sizzling, acidic mark. "We can kill them all outright! What’s the point in waiting?"
"What’s the fun in that?" rasped Phobos, the Lord of Fear, a hundred terrified faces swirling within his shadowy form. "A quick death offers a fleeting spark of terror. A long, slow decline... a civilization crumbling under paranoia and suspicion... that is a feast that can last for eons. These new Gods are fragile things; their fear is a delightful vintage I wish to savor."
"You are only trying to increase your own power here! You think we are fools?" Ichor snapped back, his corrosive aura flaring.
"Shut up, both of you," Maledictus, the Lord of Curses, commanded, her melodic voice cutting through the argument with the sharpness of glass. "Deimos, you continue."
Deimos, the Lord of Discord, remained impassive. "What Phobos says is right, but not for the reasons he thinks," he began, his voice calm and absolute. "We must think of the future. What if, in a million years, new Gods emerge who are stronger than these? A cornered animal fights with all its might. A prosperous animal, made to fight its own brother for a bigger share of the spoils, bleeds itself dry without ever seeing the hunter’s knife." He let the sinister wisdom of his words settle over them.
"Thus, we will use our previous arrangement. We will sow discord. We will encourage infighting and plunder. We will make them their own executioners."
His declaration was not a suggestion; it was a verdict. In that moment, the fate of billions of new Gods was sealed.
In the serene void of his personal God space, Sunny was ripped from a state of profound comprehension. He had been on the very precipice of a breakthrough, a single step away from grasping the beginning stages of SSS-Grade mastery over the Law of Manifestation. He had been touching the very fabric of creation.
Then, his Divine Intuition talent screamed.
It was not a thought or a feeling, but a violent, visceral shock to his divine soul. It was a cold, alien pressure, a premonition not of a single battle, but of an age of ruin. His entire being trembled with a dread so profound it felt as if the cosmos itself was holding its breath, waiting for an inevitable, catastrophic end.
He forced himself to calm the storm in his soul, his mind racing to identify the source. "Thea!" his voice was sharp, impatient, stripped of its usual calm. "Analyze everything. Every universe, every planet, every particle. If you find a single thing amiss, contact me immediately!"
[Yes, Master,] Thea’s voice replied in his mind, and he could feel her consciousness expand in an instant. Her countless particles, a celestial nervous system spread across the multiverse, began their scan, a shockwave of pure analysis. A death of a single particle, a flicker of energy—nothing would escape her notice.
Sunny breathed a sigh of relief, but the cold feeling lingered. "What are you demons up to?" he whispered to the void, his senses already pointing him toward the source of this existential dread.
In the castle in Ashgar, a deep and maniacal laugh echoed from Deimos. "He already sensed us. What an interesting God you are."
"Sensed us? A talent for intuition and a talent for evasion?" Ichor scoffed, his fist beating a rhythm on the bone table. "What is he? A Rat God?"
"It is actually a good combination," Maledictus interjected, her analytical mind piecing together the puzzle. "The main thing you didn’t notice, Ichor, is that he possesses at least two distinct high-grade talents, while the other Gods we’ve encountered possess only one."
"That is precisely why he is interesting," Deimos replied, leaning back in his throne. "The first time I saw him, centuries ago, I couldn’t tell he was a new God. His aura... it felt ancient, far too similar to the old ones." He remembered the moment clearly—a brief tear in the fabric of space, and through it, the gaze of a masked being that held the weight of eons. "I thought him a reincarnation, but that cannot be. We have all their souls in the Well of No Return."
"The last time I checked, all twenty-five billion souls were still stuck in the well of no return" Phobos confirmed, a flicker of disappointment in his voice. "Only Adam was missing. They were quite boring, I must say. Not a single scream of fear could I harvest from them."
"Do not worry about Adam," Maledictus said, a cruel pride in her voice. "His soul is bound by my masterpiece, a curse so perfect that not even the God of Growth can outgrow it. He cannot be reborn, nor can he survive much longer." She smiled. "I believe these new Gods are his last, desperate hope, created with that SSS-Grade artifact he managed to hide from us."
"So that artifact is now gone?" a new voice rumbled. It was Beelzebub, the Demon of Gluttony, who had been silently gnawing on a petrified star throughout the meeting. "A pity. I was always curious to find it."
"Oh, want to eat some Demon Gods?" Ichor asked, knowing the Glutton’s habits.
"The taste of Gods is far better than eating planets or stars," Beelzebub replied, his voice a low, hollow groan. "They have a unique flavor... a complex bouquet of power, belief, and eons of existence. Stars are so... bland in comparison." His talent, the ability to gain power by devouring matter and energy, made him potentially the strongest among them.
The only reason he wasn’t was because the other six Demon Lords worked together to keep his insatiable hunger in check, lest he devour the entire multiverse.