Year 206 -

Lumoof and Edna was the first to go through. With their abilities, they had little to fear whatever that may be on the other side.

The riftgate hummed in a strange sound, Stella and her team of void mages were excited to fire up the riftgate. Our hope was that we would eventually be able to manufacture these riftgates, but for now, I was content with salvaging and pillaging the demons for their riftgates.

I found it silly that the civilised world was the backward one, that we had to resort to pillaging the demons for their interplanar technology.

The Valthorns wargamed this entire operation about fifteen times, tapping into Patreeck’s mind reading ability and my [Dream Academy] as preparations for this special military operation into the demonic lands.

According to the void mages, the riftgate should theoretically be able to send through about 1,000 guys before it runs out of void mana, at which point Stella and all would have to recharge them.

Stella cannot reach the demon world using her normal void portals, so the rift gate was crucial to ensure that a portal can be opened. Based on what we’ve seen, these demonic portals travel both ways.

It was time, and see whether our plans could survive first contact.

***

I felt a buzz as we travelled through the riftgates. It was similar to that time when I snuck through using my own roots, but this time, it was Lumoof who went first.

The sky was bright, like an extremely sunny day, and the first thing we felt was the incredibly strong sunlight that burned. Literally.

It wasn’t fire, or at least, fire immunity didn’t seem to protect against these harsh rays.

Lumoof instantly activated a wooden shield to serve as an umbrella, and even then, the naturally fire-resistant shield still got warm. Items that were not protected quickly caught fire.

It wasn’t just sunlight too. It was some kind of magical UV that seemed to heat everything up. For Lumoof, it was still tolerable thanks to his wide range of resistances, and Edna, she was protected by a magical shield.

This was not a good development, since it meant the lower leveled, those in the level 80s and 90s would have to sit out from the invasion. The mana cost of sustaining a perpetual sunshield would mean their ability to fight would be severely impaired. Even my beetles, unmodified, would find themselves weakened by the incredibly strong sunlight.

There was a bright, glowing white sun that burned overhead, and the place, at first, was just a vast desert canyon, sand, dirt and rocks of all shapes and sizes.

“Hold.” I told the guys back home, and shared our first findings. Our plans designed around a habitable environment had to be immediately scrapped. We had some plans designed around inhospitable environments, but that meant the strike force was now a much, much smaller one, composed of my level 120+ elites.

Alka was keen to go through, but instead, I sent one of my Treechikomas over. I hoped to use it to conduct some experiments-

It burned to death.

So back to the drawing board. I had to design something with natural shieldings, and so, sent my minds out to scour our archives and Registree for such items and technologies. We should have some kind of natural shields, or design large walkers for it.

Alternatively, we could immediately start tunnelling in the sand to avoid the rays, and try to bring the fight below ground. But Lumoof’s initial assessment wasn’t great. The ground was naturally sandy, and our tunnels would cost a lot more mana to maintain.

“Well, spot any demons?” Lumoof looked around, squinting. The large wooden shield acted like a massive umbrella.

Edna looked around, and then we saw them, camouflaged by the sand and the dirt. Giant-sand-lizards.

“There.” Sand-lizard-demons, their backs looked like rocks, they blended really well against the canyon. The sand-lizards didn’t move, they were frozen, unmoving. The only thing that truly made them demonic was very faint reddish lines that glowed with demonic energy.

Edna didn’t move, not yet, anyway.

All of the sudden, the sand started to shake, and then, wind started to blow. We saw a wall of sand in the distance.

“Sandstorm.” Lumoof walked next to Edna, and a shield went up around them. The sand blasted through the surroundings, and the sand actually dealt damage. These were corrosive sand.

“Well, we’re truly in hostile territory.” Edna smirked.

“Funny.” Lumoof joked as the wooden shields all had sand embedded in them. The sand smashed into the shields repeatedly, and they didn’t do much damage against those powerful shields. “The lizard should be attacking any time now.”

They didn’t.

The sandstorm stopped almost as quickly as it came, The sands, once whipped up by the sudden gusts, now fell back to the ground.

The sand-lizards did not move.

Edna and Lumoof shared a glance, Lumoof asked. “Should we engage?”

“No. Let’s go find the demon king.”

Lumoof and Edna activated their magical artifacts, and started to fly across the terrain. Indeed, moving on foot in this sandy terrain seemed like a huge pain in the ass. Everywhere was sand and rock.

There was no sign of water anywhere, but plenty of sand-lizards. As they flew, they spotted other kinds of demonic creatures too. There were a few sand-serpents and worms, these were more like gigantic wurms with a rocky skin, and then there were these rock-like scorpions and insects too.

“This entire place is a demonic desert wasteland.” Edna commented, and had to stop as the flying artifact ran out of mana. Somehow flying in this place took a lot out of the place, and Edna noticed the magical artifact seemed to drain out quicker than others.

Which, after a little bit of investigation, was due to the sunlight. The sunlight directly damaged magical items and also drained mana out of them. The sun, as strange as it sounded, had a strong magical-ignition quality to it, such that it weakened everything with mana.

“How does a world like this even hold demons?”

We noticed that the demons frequently hid underground too. Even the massive rockwurms and the serpents all tunneled underground after a while, and they only surfaced momentarily.

I knew that demons were generated by their spawning pools or the spires. But in such a world, where were they?

Edna took out Stella’s void-mana-detector, and it went round and round like a compass faced with magnetic interference.

“This is strange.”

Was there void mana in the air itself? Or was the sun emitting some kind of void energy? I wasn’t sure.

The demons were strangely quiet, and mostly didn’t move.

“Are they... only active at night?” Edna speculated. If the sun was so oppressive during the day, it was entirely possible that these demons would only move at night.

Demons were not exactly the type that adapted to their environment. Lumoof, similarly agreed with that premise, but then he added. “Then again, this world does seem exceptionally inhospitable that some level of adaptation is necessary.”

It was an interesting idea, of course, to kill demons using a solar death ray. If only it didn’t kill everything else in the process. In a way, this was like killing cancer with chemotherapy. It also kills the host, and is used when there’s nothing else that could be done. Even then, demons adapted!

“What kind of demons are these?”

The wind whipped up again, and Edna activated another layer of shields. The sandstorm was not as strong as the first one. No, more importantly, how do they even have rift gates in a world that seemed so hostile? Maybe there are places where there are no sandstorms.

“We wait?” Edna looked at Lumoof, “Or do we keep going?”

Lumoof used a few [Inspection] on the demons, but it didn’t reveal anything useful. “If these demons are nocturnals were true, then it may be a good idea to keep going.”

They kept moving. Edna and Lumoof both had to constantly reinforce their shields. The air was hostile, and I began to suspect that the sun was both anti-magic and some kind of radiation.

Lumoof, while moving, also picked up some of the sand and dirt, which was immediately sent back to our world for testing.

Somehow, it was quite hard to test them, and with stronger prodding, we soon discovered that the sand and dirt of this world had mild anti-magic qualities, and they generally drained and destroyed mana from their environment.

This entire world was an anti-mage world.

***

I had Lumoof enter Avatar mode, and then, though Lumoof, created some trees in the surroundings.

I felt noticeably higher levels of mana loss from each tree, like each of them sucked my mana. This was also a demon world, so the ambient mana generated was low anyway. That meant, each tree took more out of me than I put in. The sun’s strong anti-mana rays also meant my trees were not producing much mana either, unless we adapted our trees to absorb those rays.

That would need a lot of research.

I was really intrigued.

“The invasion’s gotta be scrapped.” Lumoof realised that the sheer amount of anti-magical things in the environment meant even maintaining or sustaining a beetle army which also consumed a bit of mana was going to be difficult. “I think our scope of attack should strictly be to destroy the riftgates... if we can find them.”

Not just that, the idea of sending both Prabu and Colette, two archmages to this world probably had to be scrapped. This was essentially sending them to the place where they are least suited to fight. I didn’t like those kinds of odds, so I wouldn’t risk them.

If my gut feelings were right, we needed some kind of skill-empowered physical strength to defeat these demons. Taking it further, if the demon king was essentially an anti-magic or super-resistant type of demon king, it meant magic as a whole would be largely useless.

If so, do we need barbarian/gladiator type heroes?

Anyway, we tested the anti-magic properties against void and star mana, and noticed it also dispersed them, but at slower rates. That was good news, since, alright, the heroes probably won’t be entirely useless, just fighting with a handicap. They were slightly more effective on star mana than void mana, but only by a little bit.

***

The sun was getting dark. There were no moons in this anti-magic demon world, just stars. The skies were incredibly clear, cloudless as far as we could see.

Then we felt the rumbling of the sands. The demons emerged from the sands as darkness fell on the desert. The first thing we saw was their faintly glowing red eyes.

Edna sighed. “Let’s see how strong they are.”

Lumoof shrugged. “Aeon, why not convert some of them?”

It was a good idea. We had to use some skills in order to see them in the darkness, but these sand-demons didn’t move very fast. Lumoof in avatar mode, extended our roots everywhere, and with each extension I felt a bit more of mana drain on me. Still, I had the mana production of an entire continent, so, it’s not that bad.

Then the lizards spat out acid, and I felt that acid pull mana from the air.

The acid smashed into our wooden shields, and though the acidic qualities itself didn’t get past the shields, the acid itself seemed to absorb magic from whatever it contacted. It was bizarre to see a shield crumble because it’s magical energies were siphoned out of it.

Luckily we had multiple layers of shields, and this time, we channeled a bit more mana into the shields. The acids didn’t get through them now, but fighting in this world was going to be very taxing magically.

My roots immediately caught one of the lizard-demons, and I noticed that it was exceptionally tough on the top half, but quite soft at the bottom. It would be quite difficult for a conventional fighter to get to the soft part.

I pumped mana into the lizard, and I kept pumping mana into it. The hard-scales of the lizard started to glow, then it exploded. It ate up a lot more mana than I expected.

My first attempt to capture failed.

Edna noticed something strange, as she rotated through her different kinds of shields. “Magical shields suck, but skill-reinforced shields work just fine. The more mana goes into the shield, their acids seem to react against it. A simple steel shield enhanced with non-mana skill would be able to block it just fine.”

That’s weird. In truth, the lines between what is a ‘skill’ and what is a ‘spell’ is really... well, non-existent. There are spells that are also skills, and vice-versa. There are skills that created spell-like effects, like there are [Fireballs] generated purely out of skill, and [Fireballs] out of mana.

There are skills that used mana, spells that didn’t use mana, and instead used ambient mana. It’s a contentious topic.

“As long as we didn’t use mana, then it’s natural qualities didn’t react to it.” Edna said, as she deftly cut through the lizard-demon. She had to fight like a close-combat brawler, and used spears to lift the lizards upward, in order to expose their soft, vulnerable bottoms.

It wasn’t the worst matchup for us, since Edna was more skill-based, and we had the ability to make more non-mana items. The heroes’ hero items though, were essentially made with mana, and would experience weaker performance.

I wrapped my vines around another of the sand-lizards and once more, pumped mana through it. This time, not as much, and I pierced my roots into its soft belly, and attempted to look for its core or heart, if it had one.

The sand and earth trembled. The skies seemed the shift abruptly.

My vines snuck into the body. There was something like a demon’s core. A stone, really, and it was made of the same rocks of the world. My roots snuck and caught it. Then, I pumped mana through my roots and attempted to takeover the lizard. The lizard struggled, and it was physically very strong. The stone’s demonic mana resisted my mana, and I felt like half of my mana was wasted by the mana-absorbing substances that made up most of it’s body.

For all it’s strength, it was no champion. It put up a fight, but my mana still overwhelmed it.

This time, I knew when to stop, and stopped when I felt like it was going to blow. I slowed down the rate at which my mana entered the demon, and instead circulated my mana within the demon, and began to ‘take control’ of the body.

It tingled, honestly. It’s as if there was a demonic pianist playing a tune, and I was trying to kick the demonic pianist off, while not destroying the piano in the process. It took a bit of holding back, but not everything needs to be hammered by my overwhelming mana.

[Natural Mana Overwhelming has assimilated the demonic sand-lizard. Mana-absorbing demonic sand lizard has transformed into Mana-absorbing sand lizard].

The lizard whimpered as its reddish glow was replaced by a greenish one. The other sand lizards struggled, and Edna killed them easily once she got used to their movement patterns. These were demons, and they all had a style.

The earth shook, and we looked around. “Well?” Edna asked as she stood in the midst of thirty demonic corpses. “Hmm... they don’t decay as quickly as the other demons.”

Lumoof nodded, and the whimpering sand lizard crouched. “Strange. Demonic bodies should begin to fade within minutes.”

There was a reason why it’s difficult to harvest or recover demonic parts. From what we’ve seen some demon champions leave their bodies behind, but all began decaying and reverting to demonic mana within minutes, even if that process took a while.

“Do you think it’s the anti-mana qualities?” Edna speculated. “That it’s interfering with their natural process of returning to demonic mana?”

Lumoof shrugged. “No idea. Maybe these demons are made of real materials, and the decaying parts are only-” Lumoof flipped one of the bodies over, and noticed some of the softer underbelly decaying as normal. “Yeah. Only parts sustained by demonic mana?”

Edna was quiet as she stared. “Mountain-eater demons? I recall something similar in the really old archives.” She immediately began to close her eyes and expanded her senses. In the darkness of the night, we felt the ground and the sand tremble and shake. I stretched out my senses, and realised something had just gone underneath us during the fight, and it was moving. It was as if the entire desert moved.

The anti-magical qualities interfered with our senses, and we didn’t sense it’s movement beneath us. It was deep, but the ground moved. At its’ size it was probably a demon champion, but it lumbered slowly. I wasn’t sure because of all the natural dirt and rock really messed with my senses, and I wasn’t sure whether it was pure rock, or part-demon.

Still, I believe it was like a supermassive lizard that took a step every half an hour. It was almost a stationary target.

“Oh great. Mountain-sized anti-magical rock demons.” Edna cursed. “We’ll need miners and magical pickaxes.”

Lumoof squinted his eyes to look in the distance.. “I say it’s a good opportunity for Alka to test out his bombs. He always lamented that the demons are too small, or move too quickly. I say one of his bigger ones would take this one out. A bomb’s a good way to level a mountain, especially one that probably seems to be a moving mountain range.”

“It’ll take a lot of mana to get it to work- wait. There’s more?” Edna turned and focused her senses even further. This world didn’t have moons, so it was really, really dark. But she could still feel it, the seemingly synchronised movements.

Lumoof laughed. “Eh, he just gotta wrap up the bomb in one of Aeon’s massive anti-demon spears. Or just get our two new domain holders to pop the bomb right under it’s belly.”

I wondered inwardly whether this was a good time for strategic banter between my two domainholders.

Edna clapped her hands together. “That’s a good idea! I suppose it’s time for Roon and Johann to display their new domain skills anyway!”

I had to interrupt. “Guys, where’s the riftgate?”

More importantly, how are these things going to get through the rift gates? They were way larger than the largest demon champions I’ve seen so far, unless the rift gate had some kind of temporary-shrinkage ability?

Lumoof took out the device again, and it was similarly jammed. “Nope. Not working. Maybe we need Stella here, but that’s a risk.”

A small one since Stella also has my Court of the Deitree ability, so I could pull her back if needed.

“Stella?”

Stella paused. “Are these creatures... captured and converted zaratans?”

Huh?

“There’s an uncanny similarity in their nature as moving mountains, and zaratans as moving islands.”

“Are you saying these monsters don’t need rift gates because they can tap into the astral pathways directly?”

“That’s a good point, but no. I’m saying these guys may be former zaratans. Maybe this world was a zaratan world.”

“I don’t see the similarity, honestly. Other than their size.” I honestly don’t see it. Maybe that they may be reptile-inspired creatures?

***

“Anti-magical demons. Is that a first?” Chung asked through the magical device. He was somewhere else, we were not sure where. Probably somewhere in the Southern Continent.

“Apparently no.” Colette said as she read the dossier my Valthorns had compiled. “There was something similar many, many years ago. About... 1,200 years ago. But those were regular sized creatures. Apparently these ones are massive stuff.”

“The demons are out to get us. How’d they know we have two archmages on the team?”

Colette and Prabu collectively shrugged. “Random chance I suppose, or perhaps through the arrangement of demon king types? I mean, if you know what kind of demon kings you will introduce in a series, and what kind powers work against earlier demon kings, you could, without knowing what exactly is deployed, arrange subsequent demon kings to be counters of what countered the earlier demon kings.”

“So you’re saying this is purely from the demon’s end, and that this arrangement, or sequence of demon kings is pre-set. They predicted that the previous king would be countered, and thus set subsequent demon kings to be counters of the hero counters.”

“Yeah. LIke, pokemon. If you’re going to play a Grass-type, and you predict the enemy will make a counter, perhaps Fire type, then you could, without knowing whether it’s actually a Fire type, set that the pokemon that follows is a Water-type.”

“...that makes sense.”

At which point, Prabu added. “This makes Ken’s idea of a League of Heroes even more compelling, honestly. We could essentially theorise what’s a counter for the counter of the current generation?”

Chung paused and thought about it for a moment. “But, how are parasites our counters?”

“Maybe there’s a sequential pattern, or paired patterns, that only three successive sets of demon kings follow this counter-of-counter pattern. The ones in between are all randomised.”

Chung sighed. “Are we attributing actual intelligence and predictive ability to the demons now?”

“They are intelligent. They can talk. And they can think. They have strategic ability.” Prabu responded. “Even if it’s just concentrated on each demon king. From what we’ve seen, they are not purely stupid.”

Colette smiled and just stretched. “Maybe the demons’ just some kind of ancient self-replicating war-program.”

Chung actually laughed. “That’s my theory too!”

“Did I tell you Ken thought the demons sounded like some kind of multiverse-wide Life-Harvesting system?”

Chung’s face straightened. “Don’t tell me you believe that.”

“It’s possible, I think. Even though we don’t see any evidence of harvesting...”

“Maybe we lack the tools to see what exactly they are harvesting?”

“What, they’re harvesting war-energy like Ares?”

“Possible!”