Rise of the Demon Monarch

Prologue

The strong stench of death enveloped me. I could hardly keep my eyes open as I watched the Otherworlder homunculi kill the last living demons in the seemingly endless sea of bodies.

The field was littered with carnage, bodies, and blood. Red, pink, and brown were now the new colors of what once was a marvelous, rich field, which had now become the stage of a ruthless battle.

The air, which would normally be full of nature's sounds, was now a barrage of sounds of explosions, war cries, and the screams of the wounded—a sight of pure nightmares.

I could hardly muster the strength to rise to my feet, and I lost sensation in my right leg and several fingers on my left hand.

'How did it come to this?' I pondered.

In the service of the Demon King of Pride, one of the 72 Demon Kings, I was known as Raphael Langston, the Demon Slayer. Putting all my weight on my good leg, I got to my feet and propped myself up with a random, broken sword.

I cast a despairing gaze around me.

It was a hellish battlefield. I could only see an infinite horizon of dead bodies, my eyes aching from the blood mist and ashes generated by the homunculi's frightening weaponry.

Despair took over my heart. Demons had long ruled the Demon World, but they were too conceited to recognise the threat posed by the Otherworlders, who had crossed dimensions to invade. Unfortunately, by the time they realised their mistake, it was too late. The homunculi, the Otherworlders' engineered life form weapons, were a calamity that fell on their heads. The haughty Demon Kings were devoured and used as fuel for these terrifying machines.

This was the final struggle against the Otherworlders, these weird, mysterious beings that came to overrun both the mortal realm of humans and the immortal realm of demons. The demons had been defeated, and now they were being brutally wiped out. Both humans and other monsters had long since been eradicated.

Curiously, it seemed like a sly grin was on the verge of breaking out on my face.

I was humiliated and despised my entire life for being half demon and half human, with none of the physical characteristics of the demon species. I even wound up in a slave deal, forced to become a death warrior for a Demon King.

Within my mind, a soft voice spoke.

Let them all die in pain.

The Otherworlders had provoked my ire, but it was the Demons who really got under my skin.

"Help me! Please, someone!" 

The frantic cry caught me off guard.

With the help of my sword, I painfully drifted towards the voice. A massive 20-meter-tall homunculus machine of class 4 or 5 was clutching a demon in his palm and opening his mouth.

Although the Demon Kings were the greatest beings in the Demon World, the enemy army contained hundreds of thousands of class 4 and 5 homunculi. Being a Class 3 demon meant I was relatively powerless, making any hope of survival a pipe dream.

I recognised the demon being held by the homunculus's giant metallic hand. 

Sathanas, the Demon King of Wrath.

'Father.'

Someone who neglected me and sold me as a servant, appalled by my half-blood. Someone who murdered my mother shortly after she gave birth to me. As he made his way slowly towards the homunculus's energy core, my black, lifeless eyes glared at him. 

These energy cores were cutting-edge technology that could dissolve materials in order to renew and evolve the machine, providing an infinite source of power.