The shift was instantaneous. One moment, the heir was a roaring inferno of malicious authority, flames licking the sky as if he were about to split the world open. The next, his infernal blaze guttered out like a candle in a storm.

The black fire that had devoured the [Divine Bladestorm] winked out. The glaive, still poised at Damon's chest, lowered ever so slightly, its flames shriveling into harmless embers. The heir's pupils, once molten coals, were now flat grey, and lifeless as stone.

The heir's body twitched once, then stiffened. Instead of the powerful attacks that the demon tossed one after the other, the body now raised its hand to cast a simple demonic fire explosion skill.

The aftermath was no doubt deadly, but it was not remotely as powerful as the heir's attack. Damon's grin widened. His shadow clone had done it! It had finally come through for him in the clutch!

He immediately emptied a healing potion and melded into the shadows.

The explosion blossomed like a flower of black fire, swallowing the street in a thunderous wave. Stone cracked, walls collapsed, and the night sky lit up with a plume of smoke and flame. Yet Damon, already dissolved into the shadows, slipped away like mist before the blast could devour him.

The heat grazed his form, searing his already tattered health, but compared to what he had just endured, it was almost laughable. From his vantage point in the gloom of a shattered alley, he watched.

The demon heir moved stiffly now, as though strings guided his limbs. The aura of crushing supremacy was gone, replaced by a hollow emptiness. His grey eyes stared ahead without focus, and he cast another fire explosion into the ruins, again devastating, but crude, shallow, and mechanical.

The vampiress crawled out of the rubble, coughing blood, eyes flashing in disbelief. She, too, seemed to notice the difference. "He… he's weakened," she whispered hoarsely, her voice trembling with both fear and exhilaration.

Damon's fangs bared in a bloody grin. "Weakened?" He shook his head. "No. He's broken. You got a minute. Maybe only seconds. Can you kill him or not? Make your decision quickly. If you can't kill, then at least activate the portal to the crimson mountains. We need to get out of here."

The vampiress staggered upright, leaning heavily on her shattered blood sword. Her crimson eyes flickered with fury and hesitation, the weight of centuries of ambition warring with the stark reality before her.

"Kill him? In this state, even broken, he's still a demon heir. If I fail, neither of us will leave this city alive."

The vampiress clenched her jaw, then pressed her hand against the cracked sigil-stone at her waist. A blood portal shimmered faintly, unstable, half-formed. "The portal will take time. I can hold it open for thirty seconds at most. But I need to get the others. I cannot simply let them all perish for my mistake. I need to get back to the auction hall."

Damon's eyes suddenly widened as he remembered the elven slave. "Fine. Let's go. Do you have a way to get us there faster?"

The vampiress appeared at his side in a blink. Before he could even take another breath, her hand gripped his shoulder, and the world warped around them. In the next instant, the two of them vanished in a blur of blood.

They reappeared in front of the auction hall. Damon stumbled, barely keeping his balance, while the vampiress dropped to one knee, breathing hard. Blood trickled from her nose.

She then began opening up the portal. "You got 30 seconds."

Damon immediately dashed into the auction hall, which was pretty much ruined now. On his way in, he saw several corpses lying around, blood essence everywhere. He helped himself to all the essence he could gather while at the same time dashing inside.

So many corpses were littered all around, his poisonous aura wafting out of many of them. It looked like even though his poison domain did not work against the demon lord's heir, it still worked well enough against many of the other demonkin and beastkin.

Damon immediately knew who was responsible for this. Amidst all the carnage, drained bodies were slumped all over the place. The vampires seemed to have made a comeback after his intervention, but unfortunately, even they were not completely immune to his poison.

As he reached further inside the wreckage of the auditorium, he could clearly see even the vampires scattered around, some paralyzed and some writhing from the effects of the poison.

Damon thought for a moment and then quickly removed the effects of his poison essence selectively from their bodies. He then proceeded to look around hurriedly. Unexpectedly, he couldn't find the elven slave anywhere.

Was she dead? Damon double-checked the system interface, and it confirmed that she was indeed still alive. Then where the hell was she hiding? If the elf was alive, she had to be close. He forced himself to focus, letting his heightened senses expand outward.

At first, he did not sense anything at all, except for the blood and gore everywhere, but when he tried for a second time, he sensed a weak aura coming from one of the collapsed heaps.

Without wasting time, Damon immediately dashed towards the pile of rubble. When he was closer, he noticed the obvious anomaly. Inside the heap of rubble, there was a space where there was nothing at all. Everything seemed to be floating around this empty space.

Rubble and debris should have crushed anything beneath, yet here, stones and splintered beams hovered slightly off the ground. Damon raised a brow. A faint shimmer lined the edges of the space, almost invisible unless you stared directly at it.

Damon did not have the time right now to get into this. "Come out. That is an order."

All of a sudden, stones and debris clattered down, and curled in the center was the elven slave. Dust covered her hair, and her skin was streaked with blood and grime. Her emerald eyes, wide and frightened, locked on Damon.

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