Others Summon Dragons, I Summon Legendary Knights

Chapter 537: War Itself

Keres walked back towards his throne, but his ear twitched at the faint sound of cracking stone and his expression immediately grew solemn.

"Leave," he said.

"What? Why?" One of his daughters glared at him, while the other began to notice the cracks spreading across the petrified Unknown King. The stone covering his right eye suddenly broke away, causing her to take a startled step back.

"Leave!" Keres bellowed.

His daughters scrambled out of the hall while Keres sat upon his throne, watching the cracks continue to spread and flakes of stone fall from the Unknown King’s body.

"You just terrified my daughters," Keres said coldly.

The Unknown King shrugged off the last pieces of stone clinging to him. "As they should be. Even demons do not stand beyond my judgment. They will learn from you."

Keres laughed. "You speak of judgment. You came all this way because of a few humans. I can almost feel your fury, but where were you..."

He leaned forward as his body began to change.

The faint red skin and golden, wavelike markings were natural traits of a Shifter, and now the Unknown King watched as Keres shifted before his eyes. His skin, clothes and armour morphed inward and outward in a transformation so strange and sudden that, within moments, there was almost nothing left of the Demon King who had been sitting before him.

Keres grinned when he saw the Unknown King’s golden eyes widen.

"Where were you, O King?" His voice had become slightly muffled as he spoke through a golden helm.

The Unknown King stared at the golden-armoured Pathan knight Keres had become, and pain pierced his heart as his gaze descended towards the staff, which had transformed along with him into a golden metal standard.

"Where were you when we tore through your knights and finally reached your Flag Bearer? Oh, he stood like a mountain while we took turns ripping through him." Keres rose to his feet. "Where was your vengeance then? I wasn’t even this powerful four hundred years ago. You know, I remember that day. I saw loyalty unlike anything I had witnessed before, and I was astounded, but loyalty to what?"

Keres descended the short flight of steps from his dais with his arms spread wide.

"He died that day, and now, four hundred years later, you finally step into this world, not for him, but for humans who will not even find you in their dreams four hundred years from now. I am grieved. Leave this place, peasant. You are no king worth respecting."

Keres tilted his head as he studied the Unknown King, then a grin slowly spread across his face. "I cannot believe this. Is that anger I smell?"

The flames of the countless candles throughout the hall flared, and Keres’s energy began to climb. Yet it wasn’t merely the amount of power radiating from him that was increasing.

His tier was rising.

Keres chuckled hysterically. "I suppose your visit has benefited me in some way."

Now he would take advantage of it and strike at the wound while it was still fresh.

"Where—!"

There was a sudden explosion, and before Keres could finish, the Unknown King’s dark gauntleted hand fastened around the lower half of his face, compressing the golden armour beneath his fingers. Keres was ripped from his feet and thrown through the air, then, in the next moment, his body crashed through the throne.

The throne had been made to withstand forces capable of shattering a mountain.

"You would strike his face! You would strike the face of the man who died in your name!" Keres roared hysterically, wanting his voice to echo through the hall and every word to cut deeper into the Unknown King so that he could feed upon the pain.

The Unknown King stood upon the ruins of his throne with his golden sword drawn.

Keres blocked the first strike with his staff, but the next came with enough force to launch him across the hall and into the wall. The Unknown King followed like a force of nature, refusing to give him even a moment to recover.

"You’ll kill him a second time! Hahaha! I knew you weren’t any better!"

The Unknown King swung his sword again and Keres retaliated with his staff. Their weapons collided with enough force to produce a catastrophic explosion, launching Keres through the wall while the Unknown King was hurled backwards through the entrance.

The blast sent cracks racing through the pillars, and by the time the Unknown King rose to his feet outside, the temple-like palace had begun collapsing before him.

He looked to his left and then his right, taking in the demons surrounding the ruined structure. Miasma now billowed from their bodies with almost ten times the intensity it had when he first entered the city, and even those who had previously seemed capable of restraining it were growling like beasts beneath its influence.

Their tiers were surging tremendously.

The Unknown King recognized the power. This was his Bannerman’s ability, which meant Keres had planted the transformed standard somewhere among the demons.

"I thought this would remain between us," he said as he raised his golden sword.

The demons lunged at him, clawing and shoving at one another so violently that some were ripping into their own kind simply to reach him. Within a breath, the Unknown King found himself surrounded by powerfully malevolent creatures whose strength continued to rise beneath the Bannerman’s influence.

He assumed his stance, spreading his legs across the broken earth and raising his sword until its point faced the sky.

Keres’s gleeful expression slowly crumbled as he watched the Unknown King carve through demons several times their normal strength.

Like a skilled painter dancing before a wall and spreading paint with every sweep of his brush, so moved the Unknown King through the battlefield. His gait remained stable and his movements fluid, never seeming rushed even as demons fell around him and blood spilled across the ground.

He was something else.

It was... it was like war itself had taken the reins, showing warriors who had spent their lives fighting that they were merely fledglings at the game.

There was nothing in that man Keres could connect to a being from Earth. No, it couldn’t be. Something like this could not have come from there.

This had to be an Absolute.

Keres had heard of them—creatures made and kept in isolation during the dawn of life. This being had to be one of them because this... this was unexplainable.

Demons fell around him like puppets whose strings had been cut. Houses crumbled in the wake of the battle, while blood gathered into streams that snaked through the maze of bodies littering the streets.

At some point, Keres realized that if this continued, his city would be driven to extinction.

And the Unknown King had yet to use his mana.

Not even once.

It was just him and his sword.

Keres could shift into a Hellhound, but doing so would mean abandoning his current form, and his demons would lose the influence of the Bannerman’s ability. Yet even that influence was beginning to falter. Some of the demons had stopped throwing themselves at the Unknown King and were beginning to back away.

Keres’s expression hardened.

He would have to use his Rule of Law.

"If I had known you were an Absolute, I would have done this earlier."

Keres’s jaws clamped shut.