Gonna Be a Demon King!
Chapter 83: Re:Seige

Chapter 83: Re:Seige

The morning of the 25th arrived cloaked in an uneasy silence.

A fine mist hung low over the city of Zlego, the dew unusually persistent as it clung to rooftops, cobblestone streets, and blades of grass well past the morning hours.

A pale stillness settled over everything, and while the world appeared calm on the surface, a suffocating tension churned just beneath.

The people of Zlego moved through the day like ghosts, every glance filled with apprehension, every heartbeat echoing the same dreadful thought: Would the demons attack today?

It was a thought that had haunted their minds every day since the last attack—since the fall of the city’s once-vaunted ’impregnable’ barrier.

During that time, while they were hastily rebuilding their walls in preparation for the next siege, the news of the massacre of the dark elves reached their ears.

Clearly, the demons had not taken kindly to the aid the elves and angels had provided in the defence of Zlego. Worse yet, they had uncovered the truth that the angels from beyond the stars and the giants of the far south had been secretly collaborating with the dark elves.

And so, the demons retaliated. Not with politics, but with slaughter, exterminating the dark elves to break apart their alliances and crush any hopes of a united resistance.

Much like the days that came before, the 25th was yet another day spent holding their breath, another day steeped in unbearable tension.

And then, without warning, the clouds high above parted slightly.

It was a narrow, almost imperceptible gap in the thick, white expanses drifting across the sky, far too high for the human or elf sentries on Zlego’s newly rebuilt walls to notice.

The magic wards cast by the Archmages, powerful as they were, failed to register it either. It wasn’t natural weather nor something like a distortion in space.

It was the angels, otherworldly beings who, like the demons, hailed from far beyond this planet and wielded advanced technology incomprehensible to most of Zlego’s inhabitants, who noticed the anomaly first.

Their orbital satellites picked up the shift in the upper atmosphere almost immediately. And as soon as the readings came in, the alarms were triggered with blaring urgency.

"Incoming missiles! Deploy the interceptors now!"

"Demonic energy missiles incoming!"

The moment those angels began barking orders, the Archmages of Zlego immediately got up from their stations, understanding instantly that the long-dreaded attack had begun.

From the skies above, missiles streaked down towards the ground, eerily silent despite tearing through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds.

There were dozens of them descending at once, each one stuffed with concentrated demonic energy that would no doubt bring disaster were they to reach their targets.

Faced with this, the angels activated their interceptor systems, and the turrets they placed on the city walls pointed towards the sky, launching swarms of miniature projectiles.

These interceptors were engineered to disrupt the targeting systems of the incoming warheads, and collide with them in mid-air to trigger premature detonation and avert destruction on the ground.

Explosions erupted like firework displays of ruin as the interceptors collided with the missiles, detonating them in massive blooms of black fire.

However, not all of the incoming missiles were intercepted in time.

A few of the earliest missiles had already descended too far, their propulsion outpacing the response time.

They slammed into the ground with earth-shattering force, with some impacting in the ravine just before Zlego’s frontlines, blasting open wide scorch marks into the terrain.

Others crashed down just beyond the city’s periphery, carving enormous, smoking craters into the ground and sending shockwaves that splintered trees and cracked the earth, destroying portions of the newly rebuilt walls.

But one, just one, found its way past every defence, past every countermeasure, and landed directly in the heart of a densely populated district within the city walls.

There was no time to evacuate, no moment for alarm. In a split second, the missile struck and detonated in a blaze of demonic energy.

A column of black light pierced the sky, and a radius of annihilation expanded outward, vaporizing every living thing within. The erupting demonic energy radiated omnidirectionally, incinerating stone, steel, and flesh with equal ease.

The sight of the entire district being turned into a smouldering crater was harrowing.

From the city’s magic towers, from the soldiers’ barracks, and from the streets still untouched by the attack, defenders watched in horror as the district vanished before their eyes.

Morale, already strained by the tension and dread, teetered dangerously on the brink of crashing. Whispers of fear became shouts of despair, and for a moment, it seemed like their will to fight had cracked.

Seeing this, the Grandmaster angels and the Archmages quickly acted. They rallied with the experience of multiple battles behind them, amplifying their voices with magic.

[This is not the end!] they shouted.

[More are coming! If we do not stand now, none of us will stand again!]

Their words did a good job of cutting through the cloud of fear that had blanketed the city, reigniting the will to fight in the hearts of the combatants stationed throughout Zlego.

And they needed that resolve, because from the clouds above, following the missile barrage, came the next wave: airships.

They removed their veils of concealment and revealed themselves as they descended.

At the same time, on the land beyond the ravine—the natural divide that split the northern and southern halves of the Ohlion continent—the earth trembled as thousands of armoured trucks rushed forward in formation.

Trees were levelled under their advance, and stone outcroppings were shattered beneath the wheels of these trucks that carried dozens of demon soldiers in each one.

As they neared the ravine, the trucks began to slow, and like a wave crashing against a shore, the demons began to pour out.

Row after row of demon soldiers leapt from the vehicles and sprinted toward the edge, weapons drawn and battle roars filling the air.

But all the bridges over the ravine were destroyed during the previous invasion. How would the demons cross without fear of being shot down from the air by the sentries on the city walls?

The answer came moments later, descending from the sky.

From one of the lead airships, a single figure dropped to the ground.

In mere seconds, hundreds of magic projectiles were hurled toward them by the angels, but the figure, a Mid-Rank demon brushed aside the attacks with a wave of his hand, as though swatting away flies.

He continued his descent unhindered, accelerating past the sound barrier before slamming into the earth at the centre of the ravine.

There, in the middle of the crater created by their landing, the demon exhaled a cold breath, releasing streams of icy air that spread out and froze the long river flowing through the centre of the ravine.

From the river’s source to its farthest downstream reach, the waters turned to solid ice in seconds, forming a glistening, unnatural pathway.

With another gesture, the demon summoned the frozen mass upward, transforming it into an enormous wave of jagged, gleaming ice that surged high into the air, before coming crashing down toward Zlego’s walls like a tsunami carved from winter’s wrath.

The defenders reacted instantly, conjuring multi-layered protective barriers to protect the city walls, but it wasn’t enough.

The icy barrage slammed into the defences with overwhelming force, the demonic energy within it destabilizing the spells and shattering the physical wall beneath.

The dust clouds rising from the gaping breaches in Zlego’s fortifications hadn’t even cleared up when a second presence dropped from the sky, hitting the ravine floor with a thunderous boom.

It was another Mid-Rank demon, and one whose face Xaren would recognize instantly—the commander responsible for the previous invasion: Lieutenant Colonel Gorgre.

His boots crunched against the earth as he moved, each stomp of his foot sending pulses of demonic energy surging into the earth.

The ground at the bottom of the ravine groaned in response, and tremors rippled outward as the terrain began to rise, starting from Zlego’s side.

With every stomp, more and more masses of land stretched out from the ground, and when the rising ground finally reached Gorgre’s position, one more stomp caused the earth beneath him—and the Frost Demon beside him—to lift upward, elevating them high into the air.

The platforms climbed until they matched the height of the ravine’s cliffs, towering 500 meters tall, effectively flattening what was once a deep natural barrier that separated the two sides of the continent.

Even the frozen river was buried beneath this newly created land, sealed beneath multiple layers of the reinforced earth.

The power of the laws of the world that made the earth had been channelled into every inch, granting the newly raised ground an almost unbreakable durability.

And then, Gorgre extended his arm forward and gave a single order to the demon soldiers.

[CHARGE!!]

The soldiers were already moving even before his magically amplified voice boomed across the land.

With their war cries echoing through the air, they stormed across the newly raised land in unison, racing toward the broken walls of Zlego like a tide crashing onto a shore.