Alex knew that Ahrimon had acquired the Devourer’s legacy from the Ancestral Realm. Unlike ordinary legacies, his had come in the form of a bloodline belonging to a species so rare and so singular in nature that the cosmos had given them a name that was less a title and more a warning.

The Apocalypse Bringers.

A bloodline of extraordinary power that carried its own absolute restriction. Endless hunger.

The consuming desire to devour, grow, and destroy, not as an impulse that could be managed or set aside, but as the only nature remaining to the one who carried it. Every other pleasure, every other drive, erased entirely and replaced by a single, bottomless appetite.

But acquiring the legacy was not the true test it presented. Surviving it was.

In ordinary circumstances, a Devourer bloodline could be accepted by any individual of any race, and over time, the person would change, the bloodline reshaping them into something genuine.

A true Devourer.

And it was at that point that the cosmos rendered its verdict.

Either it acknowledged the individual as worthy, accepting them into the framework of legitimate existence and completing their true devourer race change, or it did not, and the slow process of erasure began, the legacy returning to the state it had been found in as though the attempt had never been made.

Ahrimon was the latter. Deemed unworthy by the cosmos and sentenced to slow erasure, he had survived anyway by killing and consuming others in numbers that defied easy reckoning.

He would still have died eventually had it not been for his brother, Ahura, the previous Domain Ruler, from whom he had acquired an artifact with cosmic origin, one capable of isolating him from the laws that were quietly unmaking him.

This last detail remained unconfirmed, but Alex was certain enough of it to treat it as fact.

So Ahrimon had secured a continuation, a way to prolong his existence, the death sentence deferred rather than lifted.

The destination had not changed. Only the timeline had. Which meant he needed a way to survive his own inevitable end.

Alex was that way.

Not merely a resource to consume in the straightforward sense. Alex represented something far more specific.

Alex was on the path to becoming a Zenith Mortal, a status that only a handful of beings across all of existence had ever achieved, requiring both the natural potential to reach it and the resources to cultivate that potential to its absolute limit.

Alex had both.

The potential was his own, something he had been born carrying. The resources had been provided by the outer-world organization that had selected the Ancient World as a cultivation ground for exactly this kind of individual, calling them Domain Rulers, each one brought to the very peak of what mortality could contain.

Consumed at that peak, Ahrimon would gain all its qualities, and that would force the cosmic acknowledgment that had been withheld from him, not merely continue existing but transcend his current state entirely and be reborn as a true Devourer, an apex being with unlimited potential, free of the laws that had been hunting him since before Alex had drawn his first breath.

The discovery had left Alex in a state that was the closest available word for traumatized, though it did not fully cover it.

He had considered, in the time immediately after, simply walking away. Returning to Earth and letting Ahrimon run out of time on his own, because the plan was now in motion, and a plan of this scale would draw the attention of the world’s laws eventually.

The Devourer Beasts, the spreading curse, were sure to make the law find the hidden existence of Ahrimon. At the most generous estimate, Ahrimon had a decade, and possibly less.

But the same truth that made walking away appealing was the truth that made it impossible.

If Ahrimon had started the plan, he had the confidence to see it through. Alex was the final key, yes, and technically, the key could be made unavailable. He could stop progressing entirely, since what Ahrimon needed was Alex at the peak of the Ninth Rank with every aspect of his potential developed to its natural maximum. Denying him that would deny him the mechanism of his ascension.

Yet, it would not stop him.

Ahrimon would burn the Ancient World. He would reach into Earth and burn that too, doing whatever was necessary to give Alex the grief and the rage and the motivation to grow and come to the final meeting regardless of whether he had chosen it willingly.

He would manufacture the necessity of it until there was no remaining alternative.

So, unless Alex was willing to let two worlds and their countless billions pay the price of his refusal, he had no real choice but to grow as Ahrimon wanted and face him at the end of it.

His life or Ahrimon’s.

Since he was left with no other choice, Alex had decided to make the absence of choice work in his favor as well and prepare using every means available.

The demands he had placed before Ahrimon were constructed around a single principle, keeping himself as the hostage that enforced them.

Silencing the Sin Generals, the Demon Generals, the armies, and the sleeper agents was equivalent to telling Ahrimon to stand still and watch as Alex and his allies dismantled the Eldravian Empire, turned their attention to the Elves who had abandoned their ancient allegiances, the beast continent factions, the dwarven clans, and the demon cultists embedded through every civilization like rot through old timber.

The one deliberate concession, allowing Ahrimon to continue unleashing his Devourer Beast legions, was not generosity.

With the curse inactive and no new infections taking root, the beast population would only diminish. It would diminish at the hands of players for whom each kill was fuel for growth, the legions serving as an enormous, self-depleting resource that would feed an entire generation of immortal adventurers while gradually reducing the demons’ most numerous weapon to a fraction of its current strength.

By the time the final war arrived, the playing field would have shifted in ways Ahrimon’s original plan had never accounted for, or maybe it did...It definitely did.

But beneath all of the planning, beneath every calculation and every contingency, one truth remained that nothing else could change.

Unless Alex killed Ahrimon, none of it mattered.

The Ancient World was doomed to complete planetary death if he failed. Not conquest, and not subjugation, definitely pure erasure.

Ahrimon would not leave the world that had served as his prison, standing once he was free of it. And that was not cruelty or vengeance, it was simply the nature of what he was.

And Earth might not be spared either.

----

"You done?"

Alex’s voice cut through the thick tension and the laughter that still hung in the arena’s air like smoke after a fire, clean and direct and carrying none of the emotions the question might have been expected to carry.

No annoyance. No anger. If anything, a faint trace of something that might have been amusement, barely present, slipping away before it could be confirmed.

Ahrimon’s laughter settled.

"I am," he said, the wide smile remaining across his face with the comfortable permanence of something that had found its home there.

His eyes held Alex’s with the same quality they had held them throughout, bottomless and vile and moving through their perpetual shifting hunger without pause or interruption. "But are you?"

He did not wait for the answer.

"Because you have come a considerable distance," he continued, his tone finding the particular register of someone raising a practical point they genuinely want addressed, "And we do not meet often. It seems to me that if you have gone to this much trouble to arrange an audience, you might want to make the most of it."

The smile shifted slightly, finding a new angle on whatever it was expressing. "So while we are here, in the same place at the same time, perhaps there are other arrangements worth discussing."

He leaned back in the throne of abyssal black with the ease of something settling into a position it intended to hold for a while, and took on the expression of a being genuinely applying its considerable intelligence to a problem it was finding enjoyable.

"Let me think about what I could offer that would be worth your time." The pondering quality of his expression was either genuine or a performance of the highest order, and Alex had long since stopped believing the two were always distinguishable in this particular face.

"It would have to be something of real value, naturally. Otherwise, you might think less of me, and I cannot have that." His eyes warmed with something that was not warmth. "Not given the great fate that connects us."