The name of the continent holding the dimension where the Blood Fortress resided was Pilatus. It was not a place with many resources or a high density of Hell Aura. As for the concentration of Origin Power, it was mediocre at best.
The few Devil Counts that controlled Pilatus territories had chosen to rule here since they were too weak to survive in a prosperous continent.
Despite all that, the continent had a population that reached the billions. Most of those life forms were devils who had yet to awake their True Souls.
The daily life of these lesser devils was not that interesting. They trained, made deals, betrayed each other, traded tormented souls, and did everything their masters told them to do.
These cunning monsters were going on with their day when they felt the continent's energies going crazy, and a burning light touched their faces.
Everybody in the continent looked at the origin of the light and energy, and they saw a scene that amazed them to the core.
A couple of kilometers above the surface, three suns appeared!. One of them was silvery red, the other was fiery crimson, and the last one black with a grey halo.
Despite the immense distance, every lesser devil could feel the power and energy contained in these suns.
The lesser devils closer to the three suns were admiring their power when they noticed how all the Rank 4 Devils began to fly away while burning their life force to increase their speed.
The cunning devils immediately realized something was wrong when they saw their leaders' behavior and the terror in their faces. Before they could do anything, they heard a thunderous blast so loud and powerful that it made them think the world was going to end.
The black sun with the grey halo and the fiery crimson sun had collided with the silvery red sun.
The instant these mighty heavenly bodies full of energy crashed, every devil in the continent saw an explosion of a magnitude like never before in their lives.
None of the life forms seeing that level of destruction would ever forget it.
A second after the explosion, a flash of light that melted the lesser devils' eyes near the blast was triggered. They felt intense pain, but it lasted little since a wave of superheated air charged with lethal energy reached their location shortly after.
The lesser devils' bodies were destroyed at a molecular level, and only small fragments of their souls remained.
The wave of killing force unleashed by the three suns' collision also harmed some Rank 4 Devils that were too slow to escape. Although they managed to survive, their bodies suffered severe injuries, and poisonous energies infected their souls and consciousness. Without hundreds of years of recovering and divine potions, they would never fully heal.
In a second, dozens of millions of lives ended, and every vertical structure in a radius of five hundred thousand meters from the explosion was reduced to rubble.
That was the might of Soul Law Domain existences!. They were individuals so powerful and full of energy that they could replace the sun of a Low World and destroy continents in a matter of minutes if no one stopped them.
If a Rank 4 life form could compare to a living nuclear weapon, then Rank 6 life forms were extinction-level asteroids.
After the collision that ended the lives of so many lesser devils, the three suns vanished, only to appear hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the sky. They immediately continued their fight.
Despite the immense distance, the ground below the three suns became a death zone for any life form beneath Rank 3.
The Blood Fortress' dimension was right beside the place where the three Devil Dukes performed their first all-out attack.
Luckily the explosion occurred outside the dimension, and the space fortification reduced the collateral damage.
The small portals connecting to the Pilatus continent were now a massive crack in space, granting the Devil Lords an easy way out of the Blood Fortress.
The explosion did not kill any of the Devil Lords. However, the blast sent them flying away, and toxic energies had infected their bodies.
The first to gather enough strength to fly away was the Devil Marquises. None of them bothered in helping the others, and after cloaking their presence, they left under cover of the fiery energies that spread for hundreds of kilometers around them.
Of the Devil Counts, the only one that was able to move was the Shadow Frog. His condition was truly deplorable, and he was having a hard time resisting the destructive energies inside his body.
Severian rose to the sky and focused on the areas where the other Devil Counts had landed. His eyes shone with greed, but after some thinking, he shook his head.
'The Devil Dukes' energies contaminate their devil bloodlines, so I will gain almost nothing by eating them. Every second I spent here puts my life at risk, and the Devil Counts' wealth is not worth it.' The Shadow Frog covered his body with darkness and left the dimension through the crack in space.
One of the strongest Devil Counts, the Hell Lion, saw how the Devil Marquises and the Shadow Frog escaped. His body and soul were severely injured, and he was having a hard time just breathing.
He was about to lose consciousness when he felt someone approaching his location. The Devil Count used all the strength he had to move his head and saw an individual he thought was dead.
'Kenner!. How is he still alive?' The Hell Lion was shocked by the appearance of the blue Devil Lord.
He was sure that Kenner had died before the battle with the Blood Duke started. After all, someone like him should not have been able to hide from Blood Child when not even the Devil Marquises could.
The pitiful Devil Count had his mind plagued by questions when an invisible force struck his True Soul and put him in a coma.
Zatiel stored the Hell Lion in his space ring before capturing another four Devil Counts.
He used the Law of Death to hide his presence and made his body intangible before leaving the dimension and escaped undetected by traveling beneath the earth.
The Neo-Demon did not resurface even after he had left the Pilatus continent. He only appeared above the ground once the three suns formed by the Devil Dukes's Law Domains were no longer visible.
Zatiel took a moment to analyze the great harvest he managed to obtain in this mission, and a smile appeared on his face.
'It was very dangerous, and I came close to dying, but the gains far outweigh the risk.'
While Blood Child and the Devil Lords were fighting the Blood Duke, he had infiltrated the castle and stole everything of value in it.
The Blood Duke had consumed most of the resources. However, he was able to find out some materials useful for rune crafting along with several Rank 5 and two Rank 6 Artifacts.
The greatest harvest was the pool that the Blood Duke had been using to recover, and that contained an ocean of blood energy and life force.
Zatiel could not use those energies directly since they could taint his soul and consciousness, but that did not matter since he already had a perfect use for them.
'Although I can explain my survival by saying one of the Runic Spirits had captured me, it is better if I maintain a low profile for the time being. I am sure the other Devil Lords will do the same since the Devil Dukes will be looking for someone to explain what happened inside the Blood Fortress. I can return in a few years and should have no problem maintaining my Kenner's disguise.'
The Neo-Demon went to the closest city he could find. He captured the Soul Forging existence controlling it, devoured every single lesser devil inside, and used the World Gate to leave Baator.
Like that, the first mission of Zatiel as a Devil Lord came to an end. Two hundred Rank 4 Devils and eighteen Devil Counts vanished from Baator, and two Devil Marquises have fallen.
The casualties among lesser devils had already reached more than fifty million and would only increase as the Blood Duke fought against Duke Krior and the Rank 6 Pit Fiend.
Such bloodshed was bound to become a legend of the Iron City of Dis.
