Chapter 198: Beginning of Ruin
The deafening roar of the crumbling earth slowly faded into a hollow, ringing silence. The colossal crater in the center of the cobblestone street smoked with residual, corrupted mana. Down below, through the shattered crust of the floating island, the endless, freezing expanse of the ocean violently churned, swallowing the broken body of Ren Sihue.
Standing at the jagged edge of the abyss, the Joker did not look down to confirm the kill. He didn’t need to. The output of his final strike had been more than enough to vaporize the assassin’s internal organs.
Instead, the Joker dropped to his knees, his entire body trembling violently. He raised his remaining, blood-soaked hand to his face, his fingers curling agonizingly around the edges of his pristine white porcelain mask. The right side of the mask was completely shattered, a jagged, gaping hole where the painted diamond eye used to be.
With a sickening, wet sound, the Joker tore the ruined mask away from his face and tossed it carelessly onto the cracked pavement.
Beneath the porcelain, the reality of his injury was horrific. Ren’s concealed throwing spike had bypassed every layer of his physical defense, embedding itself deep into his optical cavity, mere millimeters away from piercing his brain.
Blood—thick, dark, and endless—poured freely from the ruined socket, streaming down his pale cheek and dripping off his chin in heavy crimson droplets. As he lowered his head, his meticulously styled, pure white hair fell forward, the pristine locks instantly soaking up the cascading blood until the front of his hair was dyed a vibrant, sickening crimson.
The pain was blinding, white-hot agony that completely short-circuited his higher reasoning. He could not remember the last time a mere human had managed to push him to this level of physical deterioration.
Gritting his teeth, the Joker raised his trembling hand and snapped his fingers.
The space directly behind him warped and tore open. A swirling, pitch-black spatial gate materialized in the dead city. Heavy, majestic hooves clattered against the stone as the towering, deer-like Calamity Beast stepped out from the void. The magnificent creature, radiating a suffocating aura paused. Its glowing, intelligent eyes swept over the pulverized street, the shattered buildings, and finally locked onto the kneeling figure of the Joker.
The majestic beast lowered its massive, antlered head, its voice echoing telepathically in the Joker’s mind, laced with genuine, profound shock.
"What happened, My King? How did that bug hurt you so much?" it asked.
The Joker’s remaining eye twitched. His jaw locked into a tight, furious line. He didn’t appreciate the condescension, however unintentional it was.
"That does not matter... do your work," the Joker grumbled, his melodic voice completely devoid of its usual theatrical cheerfulness, replaced by a dark, venomous rasp.
The deer-beast didn’t say anything further. It understood the psychotic nature of its master better than anything else in existence. It took a slow step forward, lowering its massive snout directly to the Joker’s face. The beast extended its long, glowing, ethereal tongue and gently dragged it across the Joker’s ruined eye socket.
The sensation was profoundly repulsive, yet the results were instantaneous. As the beast’s healing saliva coated the wound, the Joker gasped. The agonizing, white-hot pain spiked tenfold before rapidly cooling. He could physically feel the severed optical nerves forcefully reattaching themselves. He felt the shattered bone of his orbital cavity knitting back together, the torn muscle fibers weaving into place, and the fluid of his eye miraculously regenerating from nothingness.
Once the eye was whole, the beast moved lower. It shifted its massive head down to the Joker’s right arm, gently lapping at the spurting, severed stump of his wrist where Ren had sheared his hand clean off. Bone forcefully extruded from the stump, followed by rapid, twisting vines of muscle and pale skin, until a perfectly flawless, unblemished hand materialized.
The Joker flexed his new fingers. They moved perfectly, but the phantom ache remained. The entire process had been agonizing. He could not remember the last time he had been forced to endure such comprehensive, humiliating cellular reconstruction.
Suddenly, the weight of his failure crashed down upon him.
The Joker clenched his newly healed right fist and violently slammed his arm into the cracked cobblestone ground in absolute frustration. The impact shattered the remaining pavement, sending a spiderweb of cracks outward.
"And yet... I couldn’t get anything out of that bastard," he grumbled, his voice dripping with a rare, unfiltered bitterness.
He had played the game perfectly. He had isolated the Sihue Patriarch. He had broken his limbs, crushed his defenses, and offered him every opportunity to spill the truth. But Ren Sihue had chosen to take Erin Volter’s secrets to a watery grave.
The Joker stared at his blood-stained knuckles for a long, silent moment. The quiet wind of the dimension howled through the ruined buildings, pulling at his crimson-dyed white hair.
Then, slowly, a low sound escaped his throat. He sighed, the heavy frustration evaporating into the cold air. The corners of his mouth twitched, curving upward. He smiled again.
"I have failed twice now," the Joker whispered to the empty street, his voice regaining that familiar, chillingly melodic cadence. "First with finding that Doom Overseer, and now Ren Sihue."
His mind raced through the pieces on the board. The Doom Overseer—the A-Rank psychic behemoth that held the coordinates to the ultimate artifact—had vanished from the Sihue estate, plucked right out from under his nose by some unknown variable. And now, Ren Sihue, the only human who possessed the knowledge was dead.
"Both my ways to get the damn artifact are closed," the Joker continued, his smile widening unnaturally, stretching the pale skin of his cheeks. He tilted his head back, looking up at the bruised-purple, churning clouds of the false sky. "I guess... he is the only one."
Hide Volter.
The Joker’s face twisted more and more, the absurdity of the cosmic joke wrapping around his mind. The smile literally reached his eyes, crinkling the corners of his newly healed vision, and he threw his head back. He laughed. It was a loud maniacal laugh that echoed off the dead, empty buildings of the floating island, a sound of pure madness.
But suddenly, his unhinged laughter was violently ruptured.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!
A catastrophic, earth-shattering blast echoed throughout the entire floating island. The sound was so overwhelmingly loud it didn’t just hurt the ears; it vibrated directly through the marrow of his bones.
The very foundation of the island tilted violently, a massive shockwave of displaced air tore through the city, flattening the ancient, petrified trees in the garden far above.
The Joker stumbled, catching his balance. His mismatched, manic eyes widened in shock as he whipped his head in the direction of the main castle.
What he saw was impossible.
The colossal, obsidian-like structure that housed the Lich’s throne room—a fortress forged from corrupted, indestructible dark mana—was failing. A massive, jagged fissure had torn horizontally across the entire circumference of the structure. With a groaning, apocalyptic screech of tearing stone, the entire upper half of the goddamn castle was sliding off its foundation.
Thousands of tons of corrupted rock, vaulted ceilings, and towering spires plummeted from the sky. They crashed into the raised plateau with the force of a meteor strike, sending a blinding, suffocating tidal wave of dust and pulverized stone into the ocean.
The Joker could not believe it. He stood completely frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs. He pushed himself up from his crouch, automatically bracing his body for the secondary shockwave that ripped through the city below.
His hand and eye had been perfectly healed; the beast’s work was completely done, and it had only taken a few seconds. Without taking his eyes off the collapsing castle, the Joker raised his hand and snapped his fingers. The spatial gates tore open behind him, and with a swift, telepathic command, he sent the majestic deer and the remaining hordes of Calamity Beasts he had previously called back into the void. The gates snapped shut, leaving him entirely alone.
He analyzed the trajectory of the falling debris. Fortunately, the upper half of the castle had sheared off and fallen on the far side of the plateau, entirely away from his current position in the lower city. He wasn’t in danger of being crushed.
But it was not a good sign. It was a catastrophic, horrifying sign.
The Joker gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw bulging as pure panic finally pierced his theatrical veil. He raised his hand, channeling a massive density of his corrupted mana, and violently tore open a direct gate to the interior of the remaining lower half of the castle.
"He is a fucking S-Rank Calamity Lord," the Joker complained bitterly, his voice trembling with furious anxiety as he stared into the swirling black portal. "He better not lose to that human. I will have to finish the job otherwise, and it would ruin all the plan!"
He had poured entirely too much time into this. He had manipulated the Exterminator agencies, guided the pieces, and set up this specific dimensional trap over the course of decades. The Supreme Calamity Lord sealed inside that throne room was a critical, irreplaceable asset for the coming war. He absolutely could not let Commander James Maddox ruin it all with his ridiculous, overwhelming brute force.
Without another second of hesitation, the Joker stepped through the gate.
The spatial transfer was instantaneous. But the moment his polished shoes touched the cold stone of the castle’s interior corridor, his breath violently hitched.
Every single strand of hair on the Joker’s body suddenly stood on end. A suffocating, primal chill ran directly down his spine. The gravity in the corridor hadn’t been magically altered, but it felt as though the entire world was pressing down on his shoulders. Even he—a being of immense, catastrophic power—felt the sheer, oppressive weight of the mana radiating from the human Commander deeper inside the stronghold. It was a presence so overwhelmingly dense it felt like standing at the epicenter of a dying star.
This is the Chain Breaker, the Joker thought, a bead of cold sweat trailing down his pale neck. The absolute peak of human evolution. There was a reason this monster was alive for more than 200 years.
He had deliberately placed the exit of his spatial gate at a good, safe distance from the main throne room to avoid materializing directly into the crossfire. Swallowing the heavy lump of dread in his throat, the Joker hurried forward. He moved with silent precision, utilizing his terrifying speed to blur down the ruined, trembling corridors until he reached the massive, shattered archway that led into the Lich’s main hall.
He ducked behind a massive, fractured obsidian pillar, holding his breath as he carefully peered around the edge to see what was happening.
What he saw made him grit his teeth so hard he almost cracked his own molars in frustration.
The massive throne room was entirely unrecognizable. The floor had been reduced to a pulverized crater of molten rock and shattered bone. The walls were scorched, and the ceiling was completely gone, ripped away to reveal the bruised, chaotic sky of the dimension.
But that wasn’t what infuriated him.
Lying scattered across the ruined, burning floor were the colossal, mangled corpses of three distinct, nightmarish monsters. One was a towering, heavily armored arachnid whose carapace had been completely caved in. Another was a multi-headed serpentine beast, its necks cleanly severed and burned.
They were Lesser and Higher Calamity Lords. The Joker had personally sent them into the throne room just minutes ago to act as heavy vanguard support to help the dark Lord overwhelm the human.
And Commander James Maddox, standing entirely alone in the center of the devastation, his vest torn and his body covered in their dark blood, had already effortlessly killed all three of them.