Barbarian's Adventure in a Fantasy World-Chapter 335: Trapped (1)

Ketal tightened his grip on the axe until the haft groaned under the strain. With a single sweeping motion, he carved a long diagonal through the air. The world seemed to split apart. A razor-sharp gust surged outward, cutting down everything within its reach. In that instant, hundreds of monsters fell—erased by a single swing.

New shapes swarmed over the bodies before they finished settling. Ketal crushed a charging beast’s skull in his palm and, while bone powdered between his fingers, measured the field with the coolness of a man counting stones.

There are many, he thought.

The enemy extended past the rim of sight. Even with his senses stretched until his mind thrummed, the edge of the host did not appear. Counting was pointless. The number was not a number anymore; it was a condition.

They are strong, too.

Dozens of demons had the weight of Heroes in their breath. Transcendent-level demons and beasts numbered in the hundreds without effort. In any land of the Mortal Realm, this would have been a war fit to end a line of kings.

Now Ketal understood why the gods had once moved as a matter of course. Each enemy alone was a nuisance, but all of them together were something else. The Hero-class demons in particular mattered. Those blades could cut him. Even a little blood sharpened a field.

Hell had emptied its arsenal. The Tower Master and Helia felt it in their bones and stood as though poise alone could ward off the cold. There was no shame in that. To be human was to understand the weight of overwhelming numbers.

However, Ketal felt none of it as a burden. He had stood inside this situation before. In the White Snowfield, he had fought until the sky forgot it was sky and tried to be stone. He had stood against living swarms that made this crowd look neat.

When I think back to fighting off hundreds of millions of swarming insects, this is nothing, he thought, and let the memory pass like a breeze through a worn pelt.

He had survived those and arrived here. He began to sort, not by fear or pride but by shape.

There are many, he told himself, but not so many that they are all a threat at once.

Space was a physical law even in Hell. However many teeth filled the horizon, only ten at most could strike the same place at the same breath. The rest had to wait. And the Demon Lords were not moving. Caliste, who had crossed blades with him a moment ago, stood with his presence folded, his edge turned, as if some other priority had bound his feet. Perhaps there was a reason. Perhaps there was only a plan.

“And now,” Ketal said, laughter warm in his chest, “when you die, you stay dead!”

He pivoted and struck in three short motions. Three named demons’ necks snapped with the clean sound of green wood breaking. They fell as if their strings had been cut and did not rise.

Here, there was no home to which a demon could be returned. Death had its old meaning again. The rule that had angered so many for so long had been suspended. Hell had come down, and with that descent the easy door had vanished.

Ketal stepped forward and stamped down. Myst surged beneath his heel, sinking into the soil. The earth convulsed like a drum struck by a god. The scattered groves of dead, bloated trees shuddered at the impact—then exploded all at once. Dirt and ash erupted skyward. A thousand monsters were pulverized or ripped apart in the shockwave, and several demons vanished within it, too slow to choose between standing their ground or taking flight.

The emptiness closed instantly. There was no room for pause—no breath between moments. Hell despised a void. Ketal watched that fact reassert itself and chose. Perhaps killing all of them was not the right game. He could do it, given time, but the Tower Master and Helia could not stand inside that calculation without paying a price. Long fights ask for tolls.

He drew a breath through his nose, let it out in one long ribbon, and took the force out of his limbs. He set his mind like cool water. He tightened the flow of Myst until waste disappeared. He did the same with Aura, gathering the edge back from the blade until it lay against the haft.

“Die!” a demon said, because not all words need to be clever to be true.

Ketal caught the speaker by the face and bent the head sideways. Bone, skin, and power yielded in a grunt. This time, he did not finish the job. He broke both arms and both legs, struck the heart once to shut it for a breath and make the body useless, then threw the demon into the nearest press of monsters.

The soon-to-be corpse spun through the air and hit the ground hard. For a brief moment, the horde parted around it, instinctively avoiding the fallen. Nothing stepped on it. Blood was the privilege of the living—and that small, unwilling courtesy opened a gap in the ring.

Ketal took one breath inside it and cut a beast’s throat as it reached across the space.

An ambitious demon saw an opportunity where there was only basic animal respect and leapt. He raised a hand above Ketal’s head and spread his fingers.

“Close!” the demon cried.

The air writhed. A black aperture formed and clapped shut around Ketal like wet stone. The demon laughed with his whole mouth.

“I have him!” he cried. “I have him!”

His name was Lubonos, the Demon of Subjugation, ranked and confident, accustomed to bending a space until a mind yielded. He poured his authority into the hole and made the walls mean.

“I do not believe I can hold you to the end,” Lubonos said, and meant to be honest about it. “But I can make you spend!”

The prison tightened. A ranked demon’s authority would have cut lesser champions into slow pieces. Even for Ketal, the device would not part because he glared at it.

Then a crack appeared, fine as a thread of frost, and a hand pushed through. Ketal had brushed Aura along the seam, leaving a flaw where there had been none, and he caught that flaw with deliberate precision. He did not need Myst for this, not in any forceful or extravagant way, but only a place to set his fingers and the strength of an arm honed and starved by a lifetime of struggle.

The aperture tore.

“W–wait,” Lubonos said.

Ketal was on him. The head left the neck with no sound at all.

Above, something like a crocodile with wings banked across the sky and stooped. Ketal’s eyes brightened. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

“Leviathan,” he said, pleased. Even in the age of the Divine-Demonic War, the thing had been famous enough to be called by name.

It struck with the assured obedience of a creature that had never needed to be anything but itself. Ketal planted his feet and met the charge with his fist, and the impact folded the Leviathan from snout to spine. Its carcass collapsed in a single, ragged sheet, the shockwave splintering the ground into shards as demons and beasts alike were hurled back in the storming gust.

“W-where did he go?” a demon shouted.

“Find him!”

They spread their senses and found him at once.

“H-he is inside the carcass!”

“He is regenerating in there!”

“Kill him!”

They threw themselves on the body and tore at it with bare hands, teeth, and weapons. Leviathan scales were not kind even to demons. Their desperate work bought Ketal a handful of seconds.

And he used them wisely. He had not been playing at weakness earlier for his own sake. The White Snowfield had taught him to bank small luxuries when time allowed. He drank that breath and set it down where he could reach it.

The demons recognized what he was doing and roared at each other.

“Do not let him breathe!”

“Do not let him have even that!”

They shifted almost everything they had onto Ketal. Helia and the Tower Master felt the weight ease as if an arm had been taken off their shoulders.

“Ketal!” Helia called, power twisting around her like sunlight off the rim of a shield.

He met her eyes. Whatever he had meant to say lived in the look he gave her. She stopped. The Tower Master stopped with her.

“I understand,” the Tower Master said. They sank backward and folded themselves into the shadows of their own shields, and the demons chasing them did not notice because all of Hell had tilted toward a single point.

Ketal answered with as little as he could give. He took the creatures that reached him by the wrist and broke the elbow. He took the ones behind them by the ankle and rolled the knee the wrong way. He put down any demon who truly needed ending and left the rest to trip and scream and clog their own path.

Another ranked demon died anyway, caught in the mix of his own side’s haste and Ketal’s casual readiness. From his hill, Caliste made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“Truly a monster...,” he said softly.

Hell had its hand at Ketal’s throat, yet he kept moving forward, unshaken. He looked like a man who had resolved to carve a path to the sea and had discovered, with quiet certainty, that his legs were strong enough to reach it.

“Are you sure you can do it without me?” Caliste asked, not unkindly.

The demon beside him did not answer. He had meant to speak and found his mouth stayed. He stared instead, jaw tight.

There is a limit, he told himself. There must be.

Strength was no fairy tale—it was a body, and every body had its limits. Even a monster like Ketal would one day run out of sugar and salt. Even he needed sleep, and sleep never asked for permission to come.

So they had folded the realm around him, intending to boil him down until nothing but dust remained. It was a sound plan, elegant in its cruelty, but the flaw was Ketal. They had misjudged the measure of the man.

“I know he defeated Lord Necrobix,” the demon said at last, as if confessing to a priest. “But Necrobix had emptied himself across those puppets. He was not whole. We thought the strain of that fight would have burned Ketal’s reserves. We thought we could finish him here.”

“Then we miscounted,” Caliste said. “The Demon of Calculation will be unhappy with us.”

“We can still do it,” the demon said quickly. “He is controlling himself. He is limiting his movements for the sake of endurance. That means he has a limit. If we have time—”

“We do not,” Caliste said, and his eyes narrowed. “We do not know when the heavens will decide to move. Abyss is holding them for now, but not forever. We must finish before they cross.”

They had at most a week by the demon’s best guess. That was not a week of leisure. That was a week to kill Ketal and secure Hell’s gamble. However, at Ketal’s current pace, it would not happen.

“He is clever,” Caliste said, and clicked his tongue once. The idea of taking the Saintess and the Tower Master hostage had many pleasant edges, but these two were who they were. Even Caliste would have to spend time to pin them, and time was the one thing the plan owned least. In that time, Ketal might do something nobody had accounted for.

“Stand aside,” Caliste decided.

“Lord Caliste,” the demon said, and fear and awe shared his mouth.

“You cannot do it,” Caliste said. “We cannot afford to spend Hell’s strength carelessly. Three ranked demons are dead already.”

The demon shut his mouth and bowed, and Caliste moved—each step drawing the distance taut like a pulled cord. The sword’s tip flashed toward Ketal’s nape, and Ketal bared his teeth as he raised his axe to meet it. The blades collided with a roar, metal screaming against metal, and Caliste adjusted his stance, pressing forward without pause.

“Hahaha! Were you not content to watch?” he asked Caliste, delighted.

“I had hoped Hell alone could kill you,” Caliste said. “We do not have the luxury to hope.”

The sword moved like water and looked at every part of Ketal in turn. The axe moved like a beast that respected no fences. Steel screamed and sent hard air across the field. Monsters ducked without instruction, and demons took wary steps back.

“You are strong,” Ketal said, honestly. “Strength in another direction than Necrobix. How many years did you feed your sword?”

“My life,” Caliste said, almost absent, and went in again.

Ketal brought his axe down in a strike that landed like the final note of a song. The earth could not bear it. A fault split open and raced outward, swallowing creatures into its widening line before the walls convulsed, trying to remember how to be whole again. And in that remembrance, they crushed everything between them.

Caliste twisted past the head of the blow and arrived within Ketal’s reach. Ketal kicked. Caliste did not parry the leg. He touched it at the right point with the quietest part of his arm and let the force flow along his back and out into the world behind him.

Dozens of monsters were torn apart as the wasted power veered off and found them instead. The sword thrust forward and buried itself in Ketal’s abdomen. Caliste had drawn blood at last. But then his expression shifted. The blade would not come free. The muscles had closed around it, gripping tight, refusing to release what had dared to enter.

“Caught you!” Ketal said and curled his fist. Myst filled his knuckles.

Caliste’s body was no miracle; the sword was. They had fashioned a Lord without granting him the vessel that usually accompanied the title. If Ketal’s fist connected, there would be no skull left to identify—only the echo of what had once worn a face.

Caliste opened his hand and let the sword go. He poured the strength out of his body as if it had been stored in his joints and rode the wake of Ketal’s punch like a leaf. He flew, turned, and captured the ground with both feet as if the fall had never begun.

Ketal laughed again, sincerely pleased.

“Wow, you let yourself become loose so you can flow with force rather than resist,” Ketal commented. “That was perfect. I did not think you would come away without a mark.”

It didn’t matter. The moment Ketal had been waiting for had already taken shape. Caliste’s advance had driven the other demons from the inner ring, and his own evasive leap had flung him far enough that even he would need a breath to cross the distance back.

There was room.

“Tower Master! Helia! Now!”

“Gate of the earth by heaven’s leave,” Helia chanted, voice clear.

“Open. Gate of the Dimension!” the Tower Master intoned.

Mana and holy power intertwined, weaving themselves into the form of a door. It was neither metal nor wood, but a decision given shape. With a soundless motion, it turned on unseen hinges and opened onto the Mortal Realm. Caliste saw it and his expression went flat.

“Stop them.”

Hell answered, but Ketal did not wait to hear what it had to say. He drew in everything he had been holding back and drove his heel into the ground. Cracks burst outward in a widening web as the earth gave way beneath him. A low thunder rolled in every direction, and the floor of Hell turned fluid, shifting like a tide. Even a Hero-class demon hesitated before stepping onto ground that moved like that.

Caliste snatched a spear from a nearby demon and broke into a sprint, intent on pinning Ketal where he stood. Ketal moved to meet him, his axe drinking in Aura like a starved beast until its edge rose, gleaming with hunger. The creature sleeping within the metal stirred and let out a low, guttural snarl.

They collided, and Caliste’s borrowed weapon shattered, splintering like glass against a millstone. The strike’s path could not be turned. Caliste yielded ground without shame.

“That was almost dangerous!” Ketal said, grinning.

Caliste said nothing. He set his sword hand down and let understanding settle.

“You have been acting,” he muttered. “You let us think you were sparing yourself.”

“I would never tire from this,” Ketal said, smiling with his eyes. “Not from this much.”

His endurance was not a tale he told for pride’s sake. In the White Snowfield, he had fought for half a year without the mercy of a full night’s sleep. He had eaten ice, meat, and fury, and taught them all to take the same shape within him. This would not empty him.

“But they would,” he added, and tipped his chin toward the two at the gate.

He had slowed himself and taken narrow cuts not to save his own strength but to make the demons greedy. He had wanted them to pour everything into the one person who could carry the weight and leave the others with hands free to weave a road home.

It had worked. Hell had looked where he told it to look, and in that time, the Tower Master and Helia had built a door from scratch. Caliste clicked his tongue and smiled despite himself.

“I took you for a straightforward bear,” he said. “You are a fox with a thick coat.”

“A bear would not have lived long where I did,” Ketal answered, laughing. “You do not survive the White Snowfield by being brave. You survive by wanting to live more than the land wants you dead.”

The door finished its shape and locked onto the Mortal Realm. Demons hurled themselves at it in a panic, and Ketal brushed them away with his knuckles. The gate did not flicker.

“It is ready!” Helia said.

“Come, Ketal!” the Tower Master said, and the word was both invitation and command.

“Then we part,” Ketal called, and the joy in him made the air taste like iron. “Caliste, was it? You are strong. I am sorry we could not finish this right. Next time, let us do it properly. You and I. Both of us with nothing held back.”

“I will wait,” Caliste said, and meant it. For an instant, something like madness lit Ketal’s face. Caliste felt his skin rise and forbade it. He gave no outward sign.

Ketal threw himself through the gate, and the door closed. Hell remained.

“Lord Caliste,” the demon beside him said, throat tight.

“We failed, but it cannot be helped,” Caliste said, shaking his head. “Prepare yourselves. The Mortal Realm will come to us, and the gods will come with them.”