The palace gates came down.
Not from my doing. The demon units holding them had disintegrated the same way the ones on the walls had, and the gates had followed the same logic as the outer gates, reverting to open once the things holding them closed were no longer there.
We walked through.
The palace grounds spread ahead of us. The approach garden, the formal paths, the ornamental trees that the imperial groundskeepers had maintained for three generations. Demon units in formation along every path and stationed at every junction.
I walked and snapped my fingers and they went.
The captain stayed at my left shoulder. He moved the way good fighters moved, without wasted motion, reading the terrain and the positioning without being told to, adjusting his angle when the formations required it. He had not lost what eight years of fighting together had built, the instinct and the timing. He was reading my movement and following it the way he had once led it.
The demon units that disintegrated were the standard units. Mid-tier. The ones the demon lord had seeded through the palace as his standard presence, the mana cost of their maintenance low enough that he could sustain hundreds of them without significant drain.
We cleared the outer garden.
The inner garden was different.
I felt it before we entered it. The mana signature of something that was not a standard unit, not a seeded presence. Something that had its own weight in the mana field, a density that pressed back against my aura instead of simply yielding to it.
We came through the inner garden gate and it was waiting.
Greater demon.
The demon lord's elite. The tier that existed between the standard units and the demon lord himself, the commanders and the champions of the demon realm, the ones that were given form and purpose and sent into specific situations that required more than the standard presence could manage.
This one was large. Not the bone dragon's large, the animated construct scale. This was the large of something that had been alive for a long time and had grown into what it was through existence rather than construction. Four meters tall in its natural form, the armor-like plating of its outer skin carrying the layered quality of something that had calcified over centuries.
It looked at me.
Then at the captain.
Then back at me.
"Mayor of Eryndor." It said. The voice had the quality all upper-tier demons had, the frequency underneath the words that pressed against the inner ear. "The demon lord extends his invitation. He's been expecting you since the border."
"I know." I said.
"He asks that you come alone." It said. "The captain is unnecessary."
"The captain stays." I said.
The greater demon looked at the captain again. At the sword in his hands.
"That's Crescentine Fleur's sword." It said.
"Yes." The captain said.
"You're carrying the Hero of Medalline's sword." It said.
"I'm standing next to him." The captain said. "He lent it to me."
The greater demon looked at me.
Something in its expression shifted. Not fear. The recognition of a calibration that needed adjusting.
"You understand." It said. "That I cannot allow you through."
"Yes." I said.
I reached into the mana field around me.
Not into the item box. Into the air itself, pulling the mana that had been radiating from me since the border and giving it direction and compression and edge. The sword that formed in my right hand was not a physical object. It had no weight that pressed against the palm, no hilt that could be gripped by another person. It was mana given the shape of a blade and held there by intent alone, the construct burning with a cold light that had nothing warm in it.
The greater demon looked at it.
"That's not a mana sword." It said slowly. "That's your aura. You're holding your own aura in a blade shape."
"Yes." I said.
"If that touches me-"
"It will hurt." I said. "In ways that a physical blade doesn't."
A mana blade inflicted damage on multiple levels simultaneously. The physical cutting was the least of it. The mana penetration that came with each strike worked through the target's own mana structure, disrupting the internal pathways, finding the places where the target's energy ran and pressing against them in the specific way that caused sustained, compounding pain rather than clean damage.
I had never built one before.
It turned out to be straightforward.
The greater demon moved first.
Fast for its size. The forward momentum of something that had learned to use its mass as part of the attack rather than despite it, the weight of it adding force to the first strike in a way that smaller opponents couldn't generate.
I moved left.
The strike hit the garden path and the stone cracked in a line extending three meters from the point of impact.
I came in from the left side and put the mana blade across the greater demon's right flank.
The sound it made was not a sound a physical wound produced. The disruption of the mana pathways produced something between a scream and the resonant frequency of a large bell struck too hard, the demon's own internal structure vibrating at the point of contact.
It pulled back.
Looked at the wound.
The cut was not deep by physical standards. The damage visible was surface level. But the mana disruption was running inward from the contact point, finding the pathways and pressing against them, and the greater demon's expression said clearly that whatever it was feeling had very little relationship to the visible depth of the cut.
"That's." It stopped. Started again. "That's not fair."
"No." I said.
It came at me again. Both hands this time, the attack from two angles, trying to force a defensive response that would limit my offensive positioning.
I stepped between the attacks.
This was the part the body knew. Eight years of swordmaster training and three years of farming had not changed what the body knew. The footwork was the same whether the blade in my hand had weight or not. The distance management, the angle reading, the timing. All of it the same.
I put the mana blade across the left flank this time.
The greater demon stumbled.
Not from the physical force. From the compounding disruption, the first strike's damage to the mana pathways combining with the second strike's damage and the interaction between them producing something the single strikes hadn't.
It was breathing differently.
The captain had moved to the side of the garden, reading the engagement, looking for the opening that a secondary fighter watched for rather than the one the primary fighter created. He had the sword ready and the positioning of someone who understood when to hold and when to move.
The greater demon looked at me across the garden.
"You're not trying to kill me." It said. Not a complaint. An observation. The analytical quality of a veteran fighter reading what was happening to it.
"Not yet." I said.
"You're making me feel it." It said.
"Yes." I said.
"Why." It said.
I looked at it.
"Because the demon lord is watching this." I said. "Through you. Through whatever connection he maintains with his elite." I moved the mana blade slowly through the air beside me, the cold light of it steady. "I want him to know what's coming before I get there."
The greater demon was quiet.
"He already knows you're powerful." It said.
"He knows I'm powerful." I said. "He doesn't know what it feels like when I'm angry." I took a step forward. "He's going to find out. I want him to have time to think about it first."
The greater demon looked at the mana blade.
At the two wounds on its flanks, neither deep, both producing compounding disruption that it was managing with increasing difficulty.
"I see." It said.
"Move." I said. "Or I finish this."
It looked at me for a long moment.
The calculation of an elite demon that had been sent to stop something and was standing in front of the thing it had been sent to stop and was arriving at an honest assessment of the gap between its capability and what was required.
It stepped aside.
Not in submission. In the specific acknowledgment of a fighter who has taken accurate measure and made an accurate decision.
I walked past it.
The captain fell into step at my shoulder.
"It let us through." He said quietly.
"It made a choice." I said.
"In our favor." He said.
"In its own favor." I said. "It's still alive."
We walked through the inner garden toward the palace entrance.
Behind us, the greater demon was still standing in the garden path.
Ahead of us, the palace doors.
And somewhere below them, in the lower palace, in the chamber the captain had named without flinching, the five reasons I had walked through a border and an occupied capital and a garden full of demons with a mana sword and no particular interest in making any of it quick.