The Return Of The Exiled Villain

[This is paradise...]

”Ah, for you, it kinda is.”

Gray took out the Demon Converging Gourd and placed it on his waist, letting it absorb all the Demonic Energy it wanted.

”Now... the underground dungeon, huh? I’ll need to disguise myself as a demon... but the problem is... I don’t have any disguise techniques.”

[Just go inside... no one will suspect you.]

Gray frowned at her words.

”[Spirit Eyes]”

”Oh, I get it now.”

The Demon Converging Gourd on his waist was pulling the ambient demonic energy through his body on its way to storage, using him as a conduit, and the effect of that from the outside was exactly what Jasmine had described.

The demonic energy cycling through his frame looked, to any external observer, identical to the natural demonic energy circulation of a demonized cultivator.

So yeah, at most, they would think that he was a demonized human or something like that, but now... the other problem was how to get access to the underground dungeon.

He deactivated Spirit Eyes and looked at the fortress entrance.

The eastern wall had a secondary access point lower than the main gate, narrower, and surprisingly less guarded.

”...Mark this rock,” he mumbled to himself.

After marking that rock, he moved toward the fortress without hesitation. He needed to act like he had been here before, and things like that.

He reached the secondary entrance, and stopped as in front of him, three low-tier demons stood at the threshold.

The one in the center held out a hand.

”Pass.”

Gray looked at the hand of the demon, and instantly frowned, as he then put his hand in his pocket as if trying to find his pass.

Then, he moved on to his jacket and frowned even more.

”Dammit...”

He looked at the demon in front of him.

”I forgot it...”

”You forgot it? Then you can’t enter the fortress,” the demon stated flatly.

”I know,” he sighed deeply.

He turned around and walked away from the entrance at an unhurried pace, back the way he had come, his hands in his pockets.

The three demons watched him go.

He rounded the corner of the eastern wall, moved along it until he found a section of ground with a loose stone near the base, crouched down, picked it up, and weighed it briefly in his hand.

He looked back toward the entrance, calculating the angle through the wall to a point roughly ten meters inside the threshold.

He flicked the stone.

Tick!

It disappeared through a narrow gap between the wall’s lower edge and the ground, the kind of gap that existed in every structure built quickly and maintained poorly, bouncing once against the interior floor before coming to rest somewhere in the shadows beyond the entrance guards’ immediate sightline.

Gray stood up and brushed off his hands.

Turned and walked back toward the entrance with the same unhurried pace, stopping just before the corner where the guards could see him.

”[✧Swap✧]”

He dissipated from that place, the same rock he threw, appearing in the place he was.

He was inside.

The three demons at the entrance were two meters in front of him, their backs turned, still facing outward toward the spot where he had been standing.

He looked at them for a moment before turning away from them and walking deeper into the fortress without making a sound.

[Smooth~]

Nodding at Jasmine’s words, he looked at the fortress interior around him and started moving east, toward the underground, just like Aurora had said.

”...Mhm.”

The fortress interior was not what Gray would have described as welcoming.

The corridors were wide enough for something considerably larger than a human to move through comfortably, which said multiple things about the average size of the fortress’s regular occupants.

The walls were the same dark glassy stone as the exterior, lit by suspended orbs of condensed demonic energy that hung at irregular intervals from the ceiling and produced a red-tinged light that made everything look slightly more dramatic than it needed to.

And the smell...

It fucking reeked of rotten flesh or something.

Gray walked through it.

A group of mid-tier demons rounded the corner ahead of him, four of them, moving in the loose formation of people returning from somewhere rather than going anywhere.

They were larger than the gate guards and also much stronger, the demonic energy coming off them carrying a faint hint of killing intent.

Gray kept his pace exactly as it was.

They passed each other in the corridor.

One of the demons glanced at him sidelong as they crossed.

Gray looked straight ahead with the flat, mildly preoccupied expression of someone who had somewhere to be.

The demon looked away.

[...Phew.]

Jasmine breathed out for him.

”That demonized human was quite handsome, no?”

”Do you think I’ll get a chance with him if I offer him a lot of Demonic Stones?”

Their murmurs suddenly got to his ears, causing his face to twitch. What the actual fuck were those demons talking about?

He turned left at the next junction, following the slight downward gradient of the floor that suggested a descent was coming, the fortress built into the ground as much as above it.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Something detonated somewhere to his left, deep in the fortress, the shockwave traveling through the walls as vibration rather than sound, dust shaking loose from the ceiling in a thin shower.

Aurora had apparently found somewhere to start.

The fortress responded immediately.

Doors opened along the corridor ahead of him, demons pouring out in varying states of readiness, the organized alarm response of an installation that had protocols for this and was executing them.

They moved past Gray in the opposite direction, toward the source of the disturbance, their attention entirely forward.

He pressed himself against the wall and let them flow past.

Not because he needed to hide specifically, but more because being in the middle of a responding unit heading somewhere he wasn’t going would have required explanation.

The stream of demons thinned.

He kept moving.

KRAAAAABOOOOM!!!

A second detonation, larger than the first, this one close enough that the wall beside him cracked in a thin diagonal line from ceiling to floor.

[...She had indeed said that she was going to make trouble.]

’And it’s working. Every demon moving toward her is one not looking at anything else.’

He found the descending staircase at the end of the corridor, exactly where the floor gradient had suggested it would be.

Its entrance was flanked by two guards who were currently looking at each other with the expression of people trying to decide whether their post required them to respond to the ongoing explosions or stay where they were.

Their training apparently won.

They stayed.

Gray looked at them from the corridor’s shadow.

Then he looked at the ceiling above the staircase entrance.

A large fixture bracket, poorly secured, holding one of the suspended light orbs, the bracket’s mounting visibly compromised by the recent shockwaves.

He picked up a fragment of ceiling debris from the floor at his feet.

Tick!

Threw it, making it hit the bracket.

The fixture came down.

Both guards looked up at exactly the same moment, stepping back from the entrance instinctively as the orb swung and crashed against the wall beside them, the demonic light sputtering and going irregular.

Gray walked past them during the two seconds their eyes were up.

Down the stairs, into the dark below.

[...Dammit. You really are smooth with it~]

Gray rolled his eyes at Jasmine’s words.

As he descended the stairs, the air gradually started getting colder, and the smell was significantly better for some reason.

After descending all of them, he found himself in a narrow corridor.

”Alright...”

Gray moved through it with his right hand near his rapier and his mana sense reading ahead as far as the demonic interference allowed, which was not as far as he would have liked.

[There are holding cells further in. I can feel the containment arrays. Suppression type, similar to the anti-mana zone but constructed rather than creature-generated.]

”Tsk,” Gray clicked his tongue at her words.

That meant that he couldn’t teleport out directly, and instead needed to take Seraph, at least, to the stairs.

”How many cells?”

[Several. Seraph’s mana is coming from the furthest one.]

”Of course it is,” he furrowed his eyebrows.

He kept moving.

The corridor branched twice.

He took the path with the stronger suppression field signature both times, following the containment arrays the way a current followed a drain, and the corridor narrowed further with each branch until the walls were close enough that his shoulders were near both simultaneously.

Then voices.

Two of them, ahead, were talking about something that Gray decided to ignore. He slowed down on his steps, moved to the wall, aooked around the corner.

Two guards.

Mid-tier demons, similar to the ones he had passed in the upper corridor, were seated on low stone outcroppings on either side of a heavy door at the corridor’s end.

The door had a containment array inscribed across its entire surface, the lines of it dense and deliberate and clearly the work of someone who knew what they were doing.

Behind that door was Seraph.

The two guards were discussing something with the animated disagreement of people who had been having the same argument for long enough that neither of them remembered what point they were originally making.

KRAAAAABOOOOMMM!!!

A third detonation from above, this one large enough that the underground corridor shook visibly, loose stone dropping from the ceiling in chunks, the wall-mounted light orbs flickering simultaneously.

Both guards looked up.

Then at each other.

Then, with the resigned expression of people whose protocols had just made a decision for them, they both stood and started moving toward the staircase.

Toward Gray.

He looked at the approaching guards.

At the corridor wall beside him.

At the narrow gap between a collapsed section of old stonework and the active wall, barely wide enough, barely.

He stepped into it and went completely still.

”What the fuck is happening outside?”

”Yeah... are the upper demons fighting against each other or something?”

The two guards passed him at a distance of approximately one meter, their attention on the staircase ahead and the ongoing noise above.

They rounded the corner.

Their voices faded.

Gray stepped out of the gap and walked to the door.

He looked at the containment array inscribed across it.

’Jasmine. Fastest way through this without triggering the alarm inscription in the upper left corner.’

[The array has a gap in its southeastern quadrant. The lines there are slightly less dense. Concentrated mana applied to that specific point will dissolve the array without activating the alarm trigger.]

He pressed two fingers against the southeastern quadrant of the door and pushed a concentrated thread of mana into it, following the gap Jasmine had identified.

The array resisted for three seconds.

Swish...

Then it dissolved, the inscription lines going dark from the southeastern corner outward in a quiet cascade that produced no sound and no light beyond the fading of the array itself.

Creaaack...

The door opened, and Gray stepped inside.