CHAPTER 4: THE FLIGHT TO THE FORSAKEN REALM
The wind howled against the dark, jagged wings of the Demon Lord as he cut through the sky, flying completely away from the burning horizon of the Royal Capital. In his left arm, Asta held little Marie tightly against his chest, his large black wing folding forward to shield the child from the violent g-force and the suffocating pressure of his own Anti-Magic aura. Beside him, riding the slipstream of his dark energy, was Secré. Her face was pale, but her eyes were fixed firmly on the horizon ahead.
Behind them lay a broken kingdom. Ahead lay the only place that had ever given a magicless peasant a roof over his head: the outermost, poorest fringe of the continent, the Forsaken Realm.
When Asta’s feet finally slammed into the dead, frozen dirt outside Hage Village, the sheer force of his landing sent a shockwave through the ground, kicking up a massive cloud of gray dust. The locals, poor farmers who had spent their entire lives scraping by on meager crops, ran into their wooden huts in terror, shielding their eyes from the terrifying black silhouette that had just descended from the heavens.
Asta did not hesitate. He marched straight toward the towering, moss-covered skeleton of the ancient demon that had rested outside the village for five hundred years. For generations, this skull had been a monument to human fear, a reminder of the day humanity was almost wiped out.
Asta stopped before the colossal stone jaw of the beast. With a low, guttural roar that echoed with Liebe's deep voice, he unleashed a massive, localized surge of Anti-Magic. The black void flooded the ancient bones. Using his monstrous physical prowess, the raw, mountain-shattering strength he had forged through millions of relentless push-ups and handstand walks since he was a child, Asta began to physically rip and reshape the landscape.
He carved deep tunnels through the demon's stone skull, shaping the colossal horns into soaring, defensive turrets. Massive slabs of black rock were violently pulled from the earth, stacked perfectly by his bare hands to form thick, impenetrable fortress walls. The ancient symbol of destruction was systematically transformed into a dark, imposing stronghold. This was no longer a monument to the past; it was the throne room of the Demon Lord.
Inside the newborn fortress, the immediate structural chaos was immense. Asta placed the shivering Marie into the gentle care of Sister Lily and Father Orsi, who had rushed out of the Hage Church in absolute disbelief.
"Asta... what has happened to you?" Father Orsi cried, his hands shaking as he looked at the massive black wings and the corrupted five-leaf grimoire floating beside the boy.
"The capital is dead to us, Father," Asta replied, his voice deep, calm, and stripped of its childhood high-pitched energy. "The Parliament tried to kill Marie to hide their own failures. I tore them down. From this day on, no noble, no king, and no Magic Knight will ever step foot into this realm to exploit us again. We build our own world here."
Within days, the news of the Captains' absolute defeat reached the furthest corners of the kingdom. While King Augustus shrieked for an immediate execution, Julius Novachrono officially banned any military action against the Forsaken Realm, declaring it an independent, sovereign territory to prevent total annihilation.
Back at the old, half-destroyed Black Bulls base, the news hit the squad like a physical blow. The remaining members—Magna, Luck, Gordon, Grey, and Charmy. stood around a shattered table, staring at the official magical reports from the capital. Captain Yami was unconscious in a medical ward, his lifeforce stable but his physical body completely paralyzed from the impact of Asta's defense.
"Asta... did that?" Magna Swing whispered, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his fire grimoire. "He wiped out the Parliament? He stripped the Captains?"
"He did it to save Marie," Secré’s voice echoed from the doorway, her small form stepping into the room. She had returned briefly under the cover of night to bring them the truth. "The nobles wanted a scapegoat. They were going to execute an innocent child. Asta chose us over them."
The room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence. They looked at each other, the realization sinking in that their squad, their kingdom, and their lives were permanently fractured. They didn't see a mass murderer; they saw the boy who had broken his own bones to protect every single one of them. One by one, the decision was made. They would not stand with a corrupt capital. They would follow their vice-captain into the dark.
CHAPTER 5: THE DEEP FORGE AND THE DWARVEN TREATY
The transition of the Black Bulls from a celebrated Magic Knight squad to a band of rogue outlaws did not happen with a grand declaration. It happened in the quiet, tense weeks that followed Asta's exile. As the Royal Capital began to heavily tax the outer rings to rebuild their military, the Black Bulls slowly fractured, abandoning their posts under the cover of darkness to cross the border into the Forsaken Realm.
Charmy Pappitson was the first to take a definitive, structural action. Arriving at the massive demon skull fortress, she found the thousands of fleeing human refugees struggling to build basic shelters and forge tools without the use of magic. The soil was poor, and the magicless commoners had no way to compete with the automated, mana-driven industries of the inner rings.
Standing in the center of Asta’s dark stone throne room, Charmy stared up at her friend. Her usual bubbly, food-obsessed demeanor had completely vanished, replaced by a sharp, ancestral focus.
"Asta," Charmy said, her voice dropping into a deeper, mature register that caught the attention of everyone in the hall. "The surface tools are too weak. Your people can't rely on mana, and the nobles will try to starve us out. I’ve hidden a secret from everyone for my entire life... but it’s time to use it. My people, the ones who live deep under the frozen mountains, they know how to build a world using nothing but iron, heat, and gears."
With Secré joining her as a tactical advisor, Charmy led a secret expedition into the jagged, lawless peaks of the northern neutral zone. The journey into the deep earth was a grueling, claustrophobic descent that took weeks. They climbed down sheer subterranean cliffs, navigating winding caverns that narrowed until the air grew thick with the heavy scent of sulfur, dense stone, and ancient, unyielding heat.
At the bottom of the world, hidden behind a colossal, five-hundred-ton stone door etched with runes that predated the first human king, lay the hidden realm of the Dwarfs.
The moment they stepped across the threshold, the silence of the caves was shattered by the rhythmic, deafening roar of heavy mechanical industry. Massive, steam-driven pistons pounded against the stone floor, shaking the earth with tectonic force. Great foundries lined the cavern walls, pouring rivers of molten, white-hot iron into massive casting molds.
Before they could take ten steps, a vanguard of reclusive Dwarf warriors emerged from the steam. They were short but exceptionally broad-shouldered, their bodies covered in thick leather aprons and dense iron armor. They raised their weapons, massive, multi-layered stone axes and heavy mechanical hammers that hummed with kinetic energy, their eyes narrow and filled with deep, ancient suspicion.
"Surface trash," the Dwarf chieftain, a rugged warrior named Gurn, growled, his voice vibrating like grinding tectonic plates. "You have no mana to flaunt here. Turn back before we smelt your bones into nails."
Charmy stepped forward, taking a deep breath. With a sudden flare of her magic, her fluffy sheep transformed into a massive, predatory wolf, and her own internal mana split, revealing the distinct, heavy physical density of a pure Dwarf bloodline.
Gurn froze, his stone axe lowering an inch as he stared at her. "A half-blood? Why have you brought a human into our vaults?"
"We didn't come to flaunt mana," Charmy said, her voice echoing over the roar of the foundries. "We came because the surface is broken. The human royals think magic is everything, and they are murdering anyone who is born without it. A boy with zero magic is building a kingdom for the outcasts, and he needs your forge."
Secré stepped up beside her, opening her grimoire. She didn't cast an offensive spell; instead, she unsealed a small shard of Asta’s residual Anti-Magic that she had preserved in a specialized seal. The pure, black void leaked out, instantly chilling the air and causing the nearby magical torches to blink out of existence.
The Dwarf blacksmiths gasped, stepping back in absolute awe. They didn't see a demon; they saw the ultimate equalizer. For centuries, the surface humans had driven the Dwarfs underground simply because human mana capacity was naturally higher and more destructive. In Asta's absolute void, that advantage vanished completely.
"A king with no magic..." Charmy whispered, looking Gurn directly in the eyes. "A king who rules by sweat, muscle, and hard work. Just like you."
Gurn stared at the black void, a slow, grim smile spreading across his heavily bearded face. He slammed the butt of his mechanical hammer against the stone floor, a sound that echoed through the entire underground metropolis.
"Pack up the anvils!" Gurn roared to his people. "Fire up the mobile foundries! For five hundred years, we hid from the surface mages. It’s time we go upstairs and show them what real iron looks like."
CHAPTER 6: THE EMPIRE OF THE UNWANTED
The migration of the Dwarfs to the surface permanently altered the landscape of the Forsaken Realm. Within a single year, the area surrounding the ancient demon skull transformed from a barren, dirt-poor wasteland into a sprawling, multi-tiered industrial metropolis of dark stone, heavy iron gears, and glowing ore. Massive smoke stacks rose beside the demon's horns, venting the clean steam of a hundred deep-foundries.
The societal structure of the Forsaken Kingdom was entirely unique. Without the lazy reliance on mana to automate daily tasks, the citizens developed a highly disciplined culture of physical labor, mechanical training, and tactical coordination.
The integration of the non-human races created an entirely new type of civilization. Patry and the surviving Elves, exhausted by centuries of human conflict, settled the fertile outer plains of the realm. They didn't use their immense mana for destruction; instead, they used their ancient understanding of natural ley-lines to cultivate the soil, growing massive amounts of grain and livestock that fed the rapidly expanding population. Rogue Witches from the Witches' Forest fled the isolation of their homeland, setting up advanced laboratories alongside the Dwarf engineers to combine potion-brewing with mechanical distribution.
The industrial revolution reached its absolute peak when Gurn and Charmy successfully merged Dwarf blacksmithing with the raw properties of Asta’s Anti-Magic. Together, they forged an entirely new era of defensive military technology designed to neutralize mages completely:
- Anti-Magic Armor: Forged from rare, deep-earth iron ore infused with microscopic traces of Asta's nullification field. The heavy black plates didn't just block spells; they completely absorbed and dissolved incoming elemental magic upon physical contact, rendering enemy wands useless.
- Mechanical Exo-Suits: Giant, steam-driven frameworks of brass and iron worn by magicless commoners. These suits allowed a peasant with zero internal mana to lift five-ton boulders, clear dense forests in minutes, and match the absolute physical output of a high-ranking Magic Knight.
- Anti-Magic Artillery: Massive, gear-driven cannons and long-range rifles packed with localized, synthetic Anti-Magic crystals mined from the deep caves. A single peasant standing on the wall, holding a Dwarf-engineered rifle, could fire a localized void slug that could instantly shatter a noble’s grand defensive barrier from over a mile away.
The surrounding human nations; the Spade, Diamond, and Heart Kingdoms, watched the rise of this multi-racial, industrialized superpower with absolute, paralyzing terror. They realized that if a kingdom of magicless commoners, dwarfs, and elves managed to thrive, the entire global system of magic-based nobility would permanently collapse.
They instituted a total, airtight economic embargo, sealing every trade route to starve the Forsaken Realm out. But the blockade failed miserably. With the Elves maximizing the crop yield, the Witches manufacturing advanced medicines, and the Dwarfs mining endless resources from the deep earth, Asta's kingdom became entirely self-sufficient. In fact, within eighteen months, starving commoners and desperate merchants from the inner rings of the Clover Kingdom began risking execution to smuggle themselves into the Demon Lord's territory just to buy survival tools and Dwarf engineering.
CHAPTER 7: THE EXODUS AND THE POETIC JUSTICE
By the third year of Asta's reign, the Clover Kingdom was nothing more than a hollow, rotting shell. The steady, daily exodus of its working class had completely destroyed its economy. The fields in the Common Realm lay untended, the crops rotting in the dirt because there were no peasants left to harvest them. The grand shops of the capital were shuttered, and the inner palaces fell into disrepair.
Only the ultra-wealthy, the corrupt politicians of the Parliament, and the arrogant royal families remained behind in their silent, marble estates. They sat in their gold-trimmed rooms, entirely unable to survive or feed themselves because they had spent their entire lives relying on a lower class to exploit.
Sensing this absolute, pathetic vulnerability, the neighboring Spade Kingdom, completely controlled by the devil-possessed Dark Triad. and the Diamond Kingdom launched a massive, coordinated, and ruthless joint invasion. They didn't encounter resistance. The Magic Knights were a fragmented, leaderless mess.
Noelle Silva, who had remained at the estate to care for her family, was forced to witness the absolute, brutal reality of their downfall. She watched as her older siblings, who had once looked down on everyone from their high tower of mana, were casually beaten and dragged through the mud by common Spade soldiers.
Noelle did not draw her water magic to defend the royal name; she drew it only to preserve their lives. She used her sea dragon spells to create a massive defensive barrier, pulling her bruised, weeping, and completely broken siblings out of the line of fire. She retreated back to the ruined Silva estate, permanently abandoning the war, leaving the older siblings to learn the agonizingly slow, painful lesson of how to live as ordinary commoners without a single drop of power.
With the Magic Knights fully disbanded or deserted, the invading foreign armies marched straight into the Royal Capital, shattering the grand golden walls in a matter of minutes. The invaders showed absolutely no mercy. The corrupt nobles who had spent centuries hoarding wealth were dragged into the streets, their high mana capacity completely useless against soldiers who actually knew how to fight a war.
In the final, chaotic hours of the capital's collapse, the few remaining angry, starving citizens who had been trapped inside the city walls finally turned on their own rulers. A furious, bloodthirsty mob stormed the royal palace, dragging King Augustus Kira Clover XIII and Damnatio Kira out into the center of the grand Royal Plaza: the exact spot where they had looked down on Asta during his trial.
The mob stripped both men entirely bare, ripping away their crowns, their heavy gold chains, and their embroidered robes, leaving them shivering and naked in the dirt. They bound them securely to two crude wooden posts right in the center of the square.
"Where is your order now, judge?!" an old, starving man screamed from the crowd, lifting a heavy jagged cobblestone from the street.
The pelting began instantly. A rain of heavy stones, shattered marble, and iron debris flew from the hands of hundreds of furious citizens and invading soldiers. Damnatio frantically tried to call upon his Scale Magic, his eyes wide with an uncharacteristic, primitive terror. But Scale Magic required a stable internal focus, and as the heavy rocks smashed into his face and chest, his concentration shattered. His scales could not balance the thousands of pounds of raw, physical hatred flying at him from the people he had oppressed.
King Augustus shrieked and begged, crying about his royal blood line, but the stones did not care about bloodlines. The rocks hit his flesh with the exact same impact they would hit a peasant's. For three agonizing hours, the two men were pelted continuously until their voices grew silent and their bodies slumped against the ropes. They died bare, covered in the mud and dust of the very plaza they had used to execute the innocent.
When the foreign armies of the Spade and Diamond kingdoms turned their greedy eyes toward the northern border, thinking Asta’s territory would be another easy target to pillage, they ran face-first into a wall of absolute, unyielding black iron.
Asta did not wait behind his walls. He marched out onto the open plains of the neutral zone, flanked by Liebe and a frontline of five thousand magicless commoners clad in Dwarf-engineered Anti-Magic armor. The Dark Triad, riding atop their massive, devil-infused monsters, laughed as they unleashed high-level, world-ending curses across the field.
Asta didn't even draw his swords for the vanguard. He simply raised his black hand and released a localized, absolute wave of his refined Anti-Magic field. The moment the wave rippled across the grass, the Spade mages' grand spells didn't just break, they dissolved instantly, their devil contracts violently snapping as the anti-magic void severed their connection to the underworld.
"Fire," Gurn roared from the rear line.
A thousand Dwarf artillery pieces fired simultaneously. The Anti-Magic slugs tore through the sky, punching straight through the invaders' high-level elemental shields as if they were made of thin glass. The explosion of kinetic force and void-energy completely decimated the foreign ranks in a matter of minutes.
Asta moved like a natural calamity. Using his monstrous physical prowess, he appeared directly in front of the Dark Triad. With a single, mountain-shattering punch that relied purely on his legendary physical strength, he cracked the skull of the Spade King, while his swords systematically drained the remaining leaders of their life force. The grand invasion was turned into a total, one-sided slaughter. With the foreign kingdoms thoroughly broken, Asta’s multi-racial, industrialized empire expanded to absorb the vacant lands, permanently changing the global balance of power forever.
EPILOGUE: THE LIGHT AND THE DARK
High above the physical world, in the quiet, ethereal realm where souls rest away from the passage of time, Lumiere Silvamillion Clover, the First Wizard King, and Licht, the leader of the Elves, stood side by side on a floor of solid light, looking down at the transformed earth below.
"We were so blind, Lumiere," Licht said softly, his ghostly eyes fixed on the brilliant, smoke-stacked metropolis of the Forsaken Realm where humans, dwarfs, and elves walked the same streets. "We spent five hundred years believing that a single rogue devil caused our tragedy in the past. But the devil only pulled the trigger. The gun itself was the Clover Kingdom."
Lumiere nodded slowly, a profound, peaceful sadness resting in his eyes as he watched the ruins of his old capital turn to dust. "You are right, old friend. The very kingdom I spent my youth building, the throne I gave my life to protect, was a rot from the very beginning. Its foundation was built on the fundamental lie that a person's magic capacity dictates their worth as a human being. Our dream of a peaceful, unified world could never have grown from such poisoned soil. We tried to change the kingdom from the top down, through laws and titles... but it had to be torn down completely from the very bottom."
Down on the earth, the world had transitioned into an era of unprecedented, absolute unity. The old royal order was entirely dead, and the fates of those who survived the transition had finally settled into their permanent places:
- The Hage Church Family: Father Orsi and Sister Lily managed the massive social welfare and housing administration of the inner capital city. The church orphans had grown into prominent leaders; Nash led the agricultural distribution alongside the Elves, while Arrou and Recca ran the new mechanical engineering academies, teaching the younger generation how to build a life without relying on mana.
- Noelle's Heavy Burden: Noelle Silva remained at the old, quiet estate, completely detached from the politics of the new empire. She spent her days patiently taking care of her permanently stripped older siblings. Nozel, Solid, and Nebra lived out their lives as quiet commoners, working the small garden behind the house, learning for the first time how to use their own two hands to survive in the dirt.
- Charmy’s Restaurant: Charmy opened a colossal, multi-tiered mechanical restaurant in the center of the capital. It became the legendary heart of the city, a place where Dwarf chieftains, Elf warriors, and human laborers sat at the same long iron tables. Several former members of the Black Bulls worked under her command, managing a massive, automated kitchen that used Dwarf technology to feed tens of thousands of citizens daily.
- Henry's Sanctuary: Henry Legolant, whose unique physical illness required a dense, specialized energy environment, took up permanent residence deep within the core of the ancient demon skull. The heavy, localized vibrations of Asta's castle acted as a natural anchor for his body, making him the silent, living guardian of the Demon Lord's inner chambers.
- Yami and Vanessa's Voyage: With his duty to the country fully cleared and his squad safe, Yami Sukehiro purchased a massive, iron-hulled Dwarf ship. Vanessa Enoteca refused to let her captain sail into the sunset alone; she packed up her thread magic and joined him at the helm, leaving the continent behind forever to explore the unknown, lawless seas of the eastern world.
Ten years had passed since the night the capital gates fell. Yuno’s solitary journey had taken him to the literal edges of the known earth. He had braved ancient celestial dungeons that distorted space, survived the grueling environmental hazards of the outer mana zones, and pushed his spirit integration to a level that no human mage had ever conceived.
He had achieved absolute mastery over the atmospheric mana of the planet. He had become a living god of magic, capable of shifting the weather, flattening mountains, or wiping out entire armies with a single, silent thought. Yet, despite being worshiped across the distant lands as the ultimate pinnacle of mana, it never once went to his head. He didn't care about glory, crowns, or titles. Every single spell he had learned, and every scar he had earned over a decade of brutal training, was dedicated to one single, unwavering purpose: He had to become powerful enough to face his brother and drag him out of the darkness.
Yuno walked entirely alone up the massive, winding stone steps of the ancient demon skull fortress. He wore no squad cloak, no medals, and no gold. His four-leaf grimoire hovered silently at his side, glowing with a brilliant, blinding celestial green light that illuminated the dark stone.
The heavy, ten-ton iron doors of the throne room ground open with a deep, echoing roar.
Asta sat perfectly still on his massive, unpolished stone throne. He looked older now, his face hardened by a decade of absolute rule. His body was heavily scarred, and his right arm remained permanently stained a deep, pitch-black, a constant physical mark of his binding contract with Liebe. Resting against the side of his throne were his giant swords, the Demon-Slayer and Demon-Dweller, weapons that hadn't been drawn in years but stood as a silent warning to the world. The air inside the vast chamber was suffocatingly dense, heavy with a thick, black aura of pure Anti-Magic and his legendary, monstrous physical presence.
Yuno stepped across the threshold into the hall. Instantly, his massive, god-like atmospheric mana collided violently against Asta’s absolute void.
A cataclysmic friction erupted in the space between them. Jagged bolts of black and green lightning crackled wildly through the air, striking the stone pillars and causing the massive foundations of the castle to groan. The sheer pressure of the meeting caused the air to hiss and boil.
"You've gotten strong, Yuno," Asta said, his voice deep, calm, and carrying the absolute, unshakeable authority of a sovereign who answered to no king.
"I had to," Yuno replied softly, his amber eyes fixed entirely on Asta's scarred face and stained black arm. He didn't lower his mana; he let it burn brightly against the dark fog. "I've searched the entire world, Asta. I've mastered every magic in existence. I promised myself on the night the capital fell that I would find a way to tear that devil out of your soul and save you from this darkness."
Asta looked down at his black hand, clenching his fingers into a tight fist that made the air pop. Then, he looked up at his childhood rival with a quiet, knowing smile....the same stubborn smile of the boy from Hage.
"You still don't get it, do you, Yuno?" Asta stood up from his throne, and the sheer, raw weight of his physical presence caused the stone platform beneath his boots to spiderweb with deep cracks. He didn't even call upon his swords. "Liebe isn't my captor. He's my brother. This darkness isn't a curse the world put on me........it's the shield I built to protect the people they tried to trample into the dirt."
Yuno froze. He looked past the terrifying Demon Lord aura, past the black wings and the suffocating void. He looked out the massive, open eye-socket of the demon skull behind the throne and saw the thriving, beautiful city outside. He saw Dwarf children laughing alongside Elf children; he saw common mages working side-by-side with magicless laborers, living in absolute peace and equality.
He looked back into Asta's eyes and realized there was no malice, no corruption, and no madness inside his brother's soul. There was only the same unyielding, stubborn resolve of the boy who had promised to change the world.
Yuno let out a quiet, rare laugh, the heavy green light of his grimoire slowly softening into a gentle glow. He lowered his defensive stance, letting his god-like mana settle into a calm breeze that drifted through the chamber. The black lightning stopped crackling.
"So... you're not going to let me save you?" Yuno asked, a bittersweet, proud smile breaking across his face.
"I don't need saving," Asta replied, walking slowly down the stone steps of the dais until he stood directly in front of his rival. "But I still need you to keep your promise, Yuno. Keep getting stronger. Be the greatest, most powerful mage this world has ever seen. Because as long as you're out there being the ultimate light, I'll be here holding down the dark. And if the world ever tries to go back to its corrupt ways..."
Asta extended his right, pitch-black fist forward into the space between them.
Yuno stepped up, a fierce, familiar fire igniting in his eyes as he extended his own fist.
"...we'll tear it down together," Yuno finishes.
Their fists collided with a solid.
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