Imp to Demon King: A Journey of Conquest
Chapter 434: Mortals Above Gods

Chapter 434: Mortals Above Gods

"Your vain resistance wouldn’t have lasted as long against him. Now you’ll suffer, physically, mentally, forced out of your delusions—forced to see your beliefs crumble under our assault. There won’t be a tomorrow for the great dragon king. Only death."

Shihan’s words lingered as she vanished into her shadow, Bahamut’s palm brushing her hair.

Far from the dignified poise characterising him, he curled his clawed fingers and growled like a beast maddened by its wounds. His golden eyes darted down, searching for the accursed demoness.

And when he saw her reappear on Atlantis’ pale gold platform, catching two children into a hug as thousands roared her name like a hero’s anthem, his fangs sank into his lips, the last sliver of sanity he clung to, snapping.

Divine mana instantly bloated his throat again, his voice thundering. "I can breathe thousands of times, bunch of crawling bastards." Light coated his claws, turning them ethereal. "Since you can accept a powerless but quick death, I’ll give you a slow and miserable one."

The sky trembled under the might of his wings as he dove, claws out. He swung from mid-air, five gashes, from which chilly dark gases swirled, sundering reality itself.

His breath followed. However, instead of a broad pillar of loose flames, it was an aberration of condensed energy.

From the ground, Garduck watched the dragon god strike, the beam so fast that when he thought he saw it, it had already passed. Yet, his lips curled into a smirk.

Divine energy or impossible physical might, they were ready—and they did not need divine help.

He raised his fist overhead, crushing a dark gem. Space rippled like a disturbed lake above his head, hulking silhouettes beginning to appear one after another in a nightmare of orichalcum and forgotten craftsmanship. Their outlines solidified into hulls shaped like beasts of the deep, each shimmering with blue, violet, or green mana lines connected to horrifying cannons. Atop their command centers, standards rustled in the chaotic winds of the battlefield, claiming this realm as Adam’s before Bahamut’s widening eyes.

A voice cut through his shock. Not because of its grandeur. The opposite. It was guttural, as if coming from a sub-species of creature whose vocal cords hadn’t developed. And vulgar...

"Atlantis’ armada: airships one to fifteen in operation. Let’s plow that dragon’s fat ass, boys. Alcohol, and bards warbling our triumph, and a divine dragon’s meat awaits us!"

Standing inside a colossal flying shark, his eyes barely reaching the bottom edge of the steering wheel, Gork, the goblin engineer roared in the speakers clutched in his hand.

"We’ve spent a while charging those baddies up there, boys. Time to activate formation: mortals above gods."

"Activating formation: mortals above gods!"

The other airships echoed Gork’s order as Garduck rolled his eyes at the formation’s name... even if Ifrit, slouched broken on the ground, struggled to raise his fist. "With a name like that, Bahamut is done for! Well done Gork, it’s fierce and fitting for our territory."

Grinning, he observed the shockwave that blasted outward from the ship’s formation. The air crackled with raw energy harvested for months close to the sun. And now, it flared, finally free of the ship’s shackles, but not their guidance.

It shot from the first ship to the second, then third, drawing sprawling patterns over the city. Magic symbols, the same Merlin had engraved on the territory’s obelisk, formed into a dazzling circle—right as Bahamut’s breath crashed on it.

BOOM

He groaned, wishing he could plug his ears to escape the deafening buzzing of the collision. But his heart drummed in his ears. Would the circle that Garduck relied on work against an ancient god?

The cloud of vapor shrouding the sky drifted too slowly for his bated breath to calm. Slowly, it unravelled strings of symbols, unbroken, blazing with stolen power. Bahamut’s breath, however, was thinning by the second.

His eyes widened, his voice hoarse. "It absorbs mana like the obelisk. No, it traps it!"

Garduck smirked beside him. "Only divine energies. And since it’s like the obelisk."

"It’ll work autonomously until the ships break formation. Genius!" Ifrit cut him off, his grin widening.

Before he could continue, however, a grimace twisted his features as Garduck pulled him up. "Or until the divinity pressures the formation into failure. We don’t have time, Ifrit, and I know you want to fight on the front line. Hold on tight."

Without asking for permission, Garduck hoisted him onto his back. He wrapped his hands around the demon’s shoulders reflexively, torn between the humiliation and his hunger to fight until Bahamut died. Eventually, he snorted. "You’d better not drop me."

"I will, right above his open maws." They exchanged a knowing glance before chuckling.

As they lunged toward the weakening Bahamut, Achilles, Karna, Gawain, Shihan, and Bart soared from the portal, weapons tightly clutched, eyes blazing with defiance.

Weapons streaked dark or green, solar and cursed arrows raining on the god’s scales. Ifrit’s flames erupted, and Garduck’s blade whistled relentlessly.

Bahamut faced the attack, his jaw clenched, and his hands trembling for the first time. What unholy sorcery could continuously devour his energy even when he didn’t use it? It surely wouldn’t last. All he had to do was to crush them with his superior physique and kill the bitch to stop his wounds from aggravating.

But the moment he moved to strike, rumbles reverberated across the sky and lights flashed from fifteen directions.

BOOM

An ocean of flames and lightning engulfed him, slamming against his scales and making him groan. His eyes darted to the culprits: the fifteen airships’ cannons—Atlantis’ forbidden technology. He’ll get rid of these first. Better still, destroying a ship would threaten the circle’s integrity. Two would probably destroy it.

However, another volley of lights flashed from the ground this time. The olive skin of thousand amazons glistened beneath the circle as they fired magical cannons behind Mimi’s roaring figure.

"Don’t hold back, sisters, for the moment of truth has come! Will we return home as god slayers or fail like hundreds of heroes before us?" She condensed a fiery sphere four times her size and hurled it at Bahamut. "I know the answer. We will win!"

"We will win!" Hippolyta struck her spear against her round shield, emboldening the soldiers with a war cry.

Besides their organised formation, Gilgamesh leaned over his broad, golden axe, his dark hair fluttering over his tall figure. "You know what to do," he said, his deep voice sounding larger than most men, yet a slight crack betrayed his excitement. "Make your king proud by bringing that overgrown lizard to its rightful place: beneath us."

Djinns roared in dark glee, their demonic essence painting the sky with elemental fury. The twang of the dark elves’ bows echoed relentlessly as minotaurs hurled giant spikes like living artillery. Finally, humans chanted the spells they had learned in Mimir’s academy, each more terrifying than the last.

Faced with the omnidirectional onslaught, Bahamut merely sneered. Most attacks rolled off his scales like mere drops of rain. But things changed the next moment.

BAM

The pommel of Garduck’s broadsword crashed against his wounded neck, broadening the already horrible hole.

"RAAH!" He wailed, swatting down, only to feel flames devour the wound again, and see two scalding pillars erupt from Ifrit’s hands, both wounding him and propelling Garduck away from his palm.