Devouring Monarch: Rebirth of the Profane Phoenix

His eyes narrowed with a strange feeling inside his chest. Despite their knights winning without casualties and effort, this tight feeling in his chest made him doubt the situation.

'Something feels wrong.'

Asura slashed across his chest, killing another enemy soldier. His blade tore the black leech apart.

However, the heavy feeling in his chest only grew larger.

"Asura, this battle is almost over. We're going to win!"

Akkrum looked at Asura, holding a bloody weapon with a wide smile on his tired face. There were traces of blood and flesh discolouring his silver armour, which looked horrible.

"You should wash your armour." Asura didn't hate Akkrum and gave a simple reply. Their unit's orders were to push towards the Lord's quarters, where they last spotted Duke Aldric.

He knew Akkrum's actions were to distract himself from the feeling of killing the first humans in his life, and his laughter wasn't distasteful. Yet the feeling in his chest didn't disappear. It became more intense with time.

'Maybe it's because we're moving towards this place?'

"The Scarlet Flame is a brilliant tactician!"

Asura remained silent after listening to Akkrum while entering the broken wooden doors.

The walls were dusty, created with pale bricks. The decorations on the wall were also in disarray because of the fighting. There were even bodies of the knights lying around with their weapons still held. Asura walked towards them and checked their bodies—several penetration wounds and widened eyes filled with confusion now faded after death.

'Their eyes look shocked as if they don't realise they died...'

"Strange. Where did the ambush come from?" Asura whispered, his eyes searching the knights, only to find the attacks came from all directions.

"Clarice, Akkrum, get out!" He roared.

However, Asura's call came far too late.

Hundreds of black tentacles tore through the foundation of reality, their sharp tips penetrating the bodies of dozens of knights, both seasoned and students.

The slimy purple flesh penetrated their bodies from various angles, appearing from thin air with no clue of origin.

'Akkrum? Clarice?'

"Gukh..."

Asura's crimson eyes overlapped Clarice's, and the boy's face turned pale as he tried to mouth something to Asura, no longer showing a face of hatred or disgust.

"F.....fo.....give... me...."

"P.....ple.....ase.... K.....ll...me...."

The tentacle penetrating his body seemed to move, squirm and tear at his wounds, and then black fluids seemed to spread from the wound across the skin like an infection. Asura could see the flesh retracting into thin air, pulling the knights somewhere.

Asura unsheathed his sword and slashed, slicing the tentacle away and freeing Clarice.

Yet when he looked into the boy's eyes, he only saw a pool of madness slowly consuming him as blood pooled in his chest and throat.

Clarice tried to speak while Asura placed his hand on the wounds, thick Animus flowing through his body as he tried to heal them.

"I....don't want to die! I'm not like this. It's my fault! I know you save us...."

"Don't speak, save your strength. It's fine! I will help you."

However, the moment Asura's Animus surged towards his palm, the black marks and fluid inside Clarice suddenly started moving, spreading faster than his healing rate. The boy's expression changed to one of shock, horror, and pain as he grabbed Asura's hands.

"P-Please! End it. I cannot bear it."

"NO, I won't do that!"

"KILL ME! PLEASE!"

Clarice's pupils shrunk, his body contorting into a position no human could bend in. The boy screamed in pain and begged for release, his arms growing rapidly before transforming into a black fleshy mass.

Asura held the boy's arms, his fingers becoming softer, like putty, while his expression filled with terror.

"I cannot save you... I cannot save you!"

From the moment of rebirth, Asura's mind began changing.

He lost the remorse he felt when taking his life. However, the one thing that never changed was the inborn fear of losing the people he cared for or knew.

Asura experienced eight lives before his current life, which instilled memories and the fear he felt at this moment.

"Clairce!"

The more he desperately used his Animus to repair the wounds, the faster Clarice became transformed into a deformed monster, begging for death.

Asura saw a similar situation in one of his previous lives, and even then, he was powerless to prevent the deaths.

"It's all my fault."

A tear fell from his eye as he pulled Clarice's weapon towards his neck and pushed it through the young man's throat. Clarice's last look of clarity showed a thankful expression, with relaxed eyebrows, soft eyes and a gurgling sound as he tried to say the words.

"I'm sorry...."

Asura muttered as dozens of tentacles broke through his defence, reaching and tearing through Clarice, ripping his body apart.

The world distorted, turning blurry in his eyes as he leaned back on his knees, blood and flesh floating in the air, disappearing from existence as if they were illusions.

The boy's last cry for mercy and forgiveness faded in his ears.

Asura watched the scene of hundreds of black tentacles piercing and pulling the knights into thin air, and the cries of the innocent dying in terror and madness awoke Asura from his daze.

He realised the enemy wasn't some Duke from Romantica. This monster was something from the Abyss.

'To fight them, I must peer into my past. Azoth, you felt I wasn't ready, but do we really have such a leisure to wait for my preparation?'

Asura closed his eyes as his brows knitted tightly, entering a deep state of meditation.

After several minutes, the knights fighting on the battlefield seemed to be a distant noise that faded. He wondered why the tentacles never attacked him and where the monster's true body lay, and then a realisation came to his mind.

'Devil Shroud.'

"Monsters in the Abyss fear those with a more potent shroud, with the true Abyss Monarchs and Emperors, not the false imitations like Auros having the most dense and powerful shrouds."

The deep voice of a man suddenly appeared in Asura's mind as if he heard it when he was a child.

Asura never questioned it—the presence of the voice being so familiar—as if it was a part of him.

—Those who walk within the Abyss can never escape its grasp. Asura, we will one day fight these monstrous beings as one. Now, you must learn about the Abyss and keep this information with you until the right moment.

He recognised the voice because it was so familiar to him.

It was the voice of Azoth, speaking to a young Asura in both lifetimes as a child with no magic. This one voice would speak to him like a kind old man and help him read the hard books that the maids couldn't read because the strange, runic language was too hard to translate.

'I knew you for so long yet forgot your help?'

Asura felt a tear form in his eyes. Because more memories appeared from the view of Azoth, the one who helped his body become one that would learn faster and more efficiently was Azoth.

The books and language he taught him, along with infusing a small portion of his Devil Shroud into Asura when he was young, focused on his brain, eyes and heart to help Asura adapt and evolve faster.

"Azoth, you are always there for me."

Asura whispered as his mind fell into a deep meditative state, allowing his mind to travel through the depths of the world.

He could feel Lorem's blazing magic, Barbatos, and his ferocious earth spells empowering his flesh, the students flinging weaker spells and filled with a sense of victory.

His mind travelled around the village like an astral projection. However, what Asura saw shocked him.

"How many tentacles? This is one being?"

His eyes moved around the village, spotting tens of thousands of tentacles hidden inside a destroyed building that spread through the underground dungeons.

'This is beneath me?'

The tentacles were everywhere, infecting, slaughtering, and transforming the soldiers into terrifying creatures.

Their skin turned into a black tentacle with purple runes, and their flesh melted and fell off, becoming Abyss wraiths, those without souls and will who only followed their master's call.

"I remember everything, Azoth. Why were you so kind, despite being an Abyss Monarch?"

Honestly, Asura knew the answer.

Despite being the same person, Azoth chose another belief. Instead, he viewed each life that followed him as his kin or spawn.

Thus, in Azoth's mind, Asura became his great-grandson.

He taught Asura the many theories and ideas that would allow him to meet Verana and fall in love despite being a no-mag, even the abyss ceremony to break the seal on his core to use magic again.

'However, I never used this method. Maybe Helliana could tell me about that one day.'

Asura's mind returned to his body.

Now aware of the scope and size of the abyss fiend he needed to hunt, he grasped his silver sword with a faint smile.

The blade slowly transformed into a black blade as his Devil Shroud enveloped his body, transforming his figure as if entering his liberación form.

"This form, and why I could use it. All because of Azoth. To think that damn old man was Azoth, haha."

It turned out that the strange form that used his various bloodlines like a manifestation was something all Devils would use.

Those born of high standing in the Abyss could manifest their Devil's Shroud in mysterious ways.

Asura's liberación was actually fusing his Devil's Mantle with his bloodlines, basically the Devil's version of Manifestation, however unique to Asura himself.

No other creature would manifest their shroud the same as he would.

Thus, the transformation was gentle, and there wasn't a sense of pain or discomfort.

Two long horns curled from his forehead, one white and the other black, as the twin plumes wrapped around the horns with the same colour as if his phoenix bloodline finally saw this transformation as worthy of its acceptance.

'Damn proud bird bloodline.'

The left half of Asura formed black, metallic armour with sharp claws, a blade that could extend from his elbow, and dark red runes that wrote magic absorption spells.

His right side created white-coloured armour that felt more smooth and human, with the black lines from before creating protection spells in the ancient language that Azoth taught him.

In the past Asura couldn't read the runes and ancient language due to them being incomplete and distorted.

Now, he could feel the world in a different light, as if the breeze brought him copious amounts of magic to devour and the power given by the protective spells like nothing he had felt before.

"So this would be called my Ultima liberación?"

'The perfect fusion of my Devil and Asura bloodlines as if Azoth knew, rather was it because of the pure human bloodline he could help me?'

One day, Asura would beat the truth out of the old man that made him into someone who loved older maids with a plump ass because of the old man's training.