Lucifer: Godless Reawakening-Chapter 271: Escaped

"Haa..." Emma exhaled slowly as she finished healing the last person William had sent over.

The man lay inside one of the containment pods, his body still weak from prolonged exposure. Emma rested her palm against his chest for a moment, letting the final traces of restorative aether flow through him.

One by one, she had treated them all.

Every person William rescued had arrived in the same condition. Pale skin, shallow breathing, and a body that felt hollow when she examined it with her senses.

Their life energy had been draining constantly.

If they had remained trapped inside those pods for even another day, most of them would not have survived.

Emma straightened her back and rolled her shoulders slightly, letting out a quiet breath as the strain of repeated healing settled into her muscles.

Yet her mind was not focused on the exhaustion.

It was focused on the pods.

Something about them felt deeply wrong.

She glanced at the rows of containment units again, her brows knitting together as she analyzed what she had sensed while healing the victims.

The pods were extracting aether.

Not life force. Not blood. Not flesh.

Aether.

Emma frowned.

Since when did Devils need to take aether from humans?

If one spoke purely in terms of availability, Devils already had the advantage. Nyx saturated their world, flowing naturally through the environment. Devils could absorb it from the surroundings with ease.

Humans, on the other hand, had to produce aether within their own bodies. It was a slower and far more demanding process.

From a logical standpoint, stealing aether from humans made little sense.

And beyond that...

Pure aether was practically poison to Devils.

Their bodies were not designed to handle it. The energy clashed with their nature, corroding their essence if they absorbed even a little of it.

The same applied in reverse. Humans could not survive direct exposure to raw Nyx either.

Two opposite forms of power.

Two incompatible forces.

So then...

Why were these pods extracting aether?

Emma was still caught in that line of thought when the world suddenly shook.

BOOOOM

The explosion tore through the air like thunder splitting the sky.

Emma’s eyes widened.

The ground beneath her feet trembled slightly as the shockwave rolled across the island.

Everyone nearby heard it.

The rescued victims froze mid movement. Some of them instinctively looked toward the source of the sound while others simply stared in stunned silence.

Emma quickly turned her head.

Then she saw it.

Far in the distance, above the dark line of trees, something glowed.

At first it looked like a distant star suspended in the sky.

But the shape became clearer with every passing second.

A figure.

Someone was levitating high above the forest canopy.

A human silhouette surrounded by faint light.

Platinum blond hair drifted in the air as if gravity itself had loosened its hold.

Emma did not need to narrow her eyes.

She did not need to feel his aether.

She already knew who it was.

William.

The only person whose safety truly mattered to her.

For a brief moment, relief flickered in her chest.

But then she noticed something else.

The way he hovered.

The stillness in his posture.

The quiet pressure spreading through the air.

Emma’s expression slowly shifted.

If William was in that state...

Then whoever stood against him right now should start praying.

....

The red devil had completely lost his momentum.

Moments ago he had been pressing forward with confidence, every strike filled with the certainty that the human before him would eventually break. But now he simply stood in place, staring at the figure levitating in front of him.

His mind struggled to process everything he had witnessed in such a short span of time.

First, the human’s aether circuits had shocked him.

Then he began using Nyx.

And now...

Now he could even manipulate the magic of others.

The red devil’s eyes narrowed as he studied William more carefully, as if trying to peel away the layers of something that should not exist.

"You do know that you aren’t human, right?" the devil finally asked.

William tilted his head slightly.

The question did not surprise him. If anything, the calm expression on his face made the devil feel even more uneasy.

"Was that supposed to shock me?" William replied.

The red devil let out a short snicker, though the sound carried far less confidence than before.

"Well, you should be worried," he said. "Because whatever you are..."

His gaze sharpened.

"...you shouldn’t exist."

William did not respond with words.

Instead, he slowly raised one hand.

The air around his palm began to distort.

A small orb appeared in front of his hand once again, no larger than a fist at first. Yet the moment it formed, the space around it began to bend unnaturally.

Then the pull began.

Dust lifted from the ground and rushed toward it.

Broken branches slid across the forest floor. Loose stones rolled forward as if dragged by invisible threads. Even the massive corpses of the monsters scattered around the battlefield began to shift.

Everything was being pulled toward the sphere.

The orb looked small, but it devoured space like a newborn world trying to form around its own gravity.

The red devil suddenly felt the force grip him as well.

His body lurched forward.

For a moment, resistance felt pointless. The pull was overwhelming, dragging at every part of his body as if the world itself wanted to swallow him into that singular point.

His feet began sliding across the ground.

But just as he was about to be dragged further, the devil slammed his foot down with explosive force.

The earth beneath him cracked.

A jagged fracture spread across the ground, and from that fracture a dark distortion began to form.

William frowned slightly.

Did it just summon a Death Sink on command?

The red devil glanced at William one last time. His expression carried a strange mix of frustration and calculation, as if he had already abandoned the idea of continuing this fight.

Without another word, he leaped backward.

His body plunged straight into the swirling darkness of the Death Sink.

In the next moment, he vanished.

William’s senses stretched outward, searching the area.

But the devil’s presence had already disappeared.

William clicked his tongue.

The battle had stretched far longer than he intended. Every second spent here had been a distraction when his true focus should have been on searching for his father. Yet the moment the fight began reaching its natural conclusion, the other party simply chose to flee.

Running away like that left an unpleasant taste.

Shaking his head, William slowly descended toward the ground.

His feet touched the shattered earth, and he immediately crouched down. Planting his fingers against the soil, he closed his eyes and let his senses spread outward.

The world beneath the surface slowly unfolded before him.

Layers of soil. Pockets of trapped air. Broken roots twisting through the dirt.

Then he found them.

Several living entities were lodged beneath the ground.

William’s brows knit together as his perception sharpened further.

They were inside pods.

Trapped.

He took a slow breath and tightened his fingers against the ground.

Then he pulled.

The grouns trembled.

One by one, large shapes began forcing their way upward from beneath the soil. Dirt cracked open as the buried pods broke through the surface, dragged upward by an invisible force.

One.

Two.

Three.

Five.

Ten.

More followed.

The ground continued splitting apart as pod after pod emerged from the depths. Some of them were half buried in roots while others were sealed deeper beneath layers of compact surface.

William did not stop.

The air around him stirred as the pods finally cleared the surface and began to rise.

More than forty of them hovered in the air.

For a moment they simply floated there, lined up in the sky like silent coffins. Then, under William’s control, the entire cluster slowly began moving away from the island.

They drifted through the air, heading back toward the mainland.

William remained where he was, watching them disappear into the distance.

The only reason he could use his powers this freely without feeling even the slightest exhaustion was because of Nyx.

The island was heavily polluted with it.

Negative energy saturated the air, seeped into the soil, and clung to every ruined structure scattered across the land. Normally such an environment would have been unbearable for most people.

For William, however, it was like standing beside an endless reservoir.

He could draw upon the energy without restraint.

And right now, there was another advantage.

There was no one here to watch him.

No witnesses who would question why he could wield Nyx.

No one might begin to suspect what he truly was.

"Where are you ..." William muttered under his breath as he failed to locate his father.

He wouldn’t lie to himself. He was anxious...he couldn’t hear his thoughts at all.

Just then,

"Searching for this person?"

A voice came from behind.

He spun on his feet.

There stood a seven feet tall being clad in black.

However, it wasn’t the devil that had his attention.

It was the blond man levitating beside him.

His father.