GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

PRIDE fate was sealed. It could call for more clones to rescue it, but it didn't do that for fear of losing more. It has already gambled ten clones and lost just because it couldn't bear to lose one clone. It might be better to admit its loss right now. But PRIDE was lucky. WRATH came to the rescue with clones.

This demon god hates PRIDE, but it hates a devourer even more. When demon gods fight each other, at most, they lose some energy. They can recover that energy easily. But a devourer like Aeternus eats their capacity for power. That means they will lose years of work and fall in power permanently. WRATH couldn't allow such a threat to exist, so it joined the fight against the new demon god.

WRATH did this even though it swore to protect Aeternus and not harm him intentionally until the era of conquest. It was willing to suffer the devastating effects of breaking that oath just to get rid of Aeternus.

But it turns out that WRATH had nothing to fear because the abyss doesn't recognize Aeternus anymore. Aeternus had stolen the mark of sin from it so the abyss wasn't willing to enforce the oath on his behalf.

In fact, he is not a demon at this point. He is a part of a spiritual entity that is most certainly not a demon. At least the abyss doesn't believe that he is the demon that WRATH swore to protect so WRATH didn't face any repercussions for harming Aeternus intentionally.

WRATH called out before reaching him, "Let PRIDE go you fiend!"

Aeternus was not willing to do that. In fact, he would rather give up an arm than let PRIDE go. He used Soverick's eyes to determine how much energy WRATH had before making a decision.

That decision was to create avatars to stall WRATH. WRATH didn't bring much power, so it couldn't send Aeternus running immediately. It couldn't even destroy the avatars. Aeternus was able to resist, which doomed the rescue to failure.

It is because he was growing stronger as time passed while they were weakening. The demon gods learned that as long as they can't kill him at once, they shouldn't bother to fight him. The number of enemies doesn't mean much if none of them can overwhelm his defenses. Unfortunately, they learned this lesson too late.

Aeternus soon changed his tactics from stalling WRATH to actively tearing it apart while simultaneously engorging himself on PRIDE. It was a slaughter fest. Aeternus had to struggle to keep the two demon gods from escaping so that he could have his fill.

It wasn't easy to do because the two demon gods struggled to run in opposite directions. Their struggle was desperate and violent, but he managed them well and successfully devoured a large portion of both PRIDE and WRATH.

He couldn't eat everything they had to offer because more demon gods interfered. LUST, ENVY, GLUTTONY, and even SLOTH came to get rid of the devourer. They brought in higher firepower this time around, so he had to run.

Of course, that was not the end. He continued to lurk around the abyss, ambushing the lone demon gods. The name of the Chaos demon, the herald of Chaos, the devourer of demons, and the slayer of demon gods became known throughout the abyss as a terror.

Even Xander, who had decided to hide away in an abyssal plane, heard about him terrorizing the demon gods and demon kings that he came across.

She thought to herself in nostalgia, "It seems the good old days still continue."

As the first surbodinate of Aeternus, she was there when he went on a rampage in his abyssal plane. She can remember it vividly. He was just a mid-rank demon back then. But he was so powerful and notorious that high-rank demons had to come together to form an army to eliminate him.

Even the demon lord, Beelta, worked together with this coalition to ambush him. She sent her own surbodinates to corner him and kill him. But her surbodinates failed, as did the high rank demons.

In fact, none of the demons who participated in the hunt returned alive. They all died permanently, no matter how good their cloning and life-saving preparations were.

Unfortunately, no one learned their lesson then. Beelta should have given up her throne and escaped with her life. But she didn't learn the lesson that ganging up on Aeternus was a bad idea.

Instead, she doubled down on it by bringing together all the great noble families in the abyssal plane to kill him. This made Aeternus restricted to the domain of high rank demons. He couldn't move on for fear of being surrounded and killed.

No one thought he could escape the fate of dying. Beelta was watching the abyssal portals, so he couldn't escape. But Aeternus didn't give up on resisting. He created an army and a lot of surbodinates. Then he opened an abyssal portal for the first time.

Many thought that he wanted to use this opportunity to escape. Even she, the first surbodinate of the great Chaos King, thought so at that time. She thought it was going to be difficult, but that Aeternus would succeed in escaping.

She chuckled at that thought and said, "I was so blind. I thought I was the hidden one. I thought I knew everything that was going on. But even now, I still don't know how he pulled it off."

Xander was correct to believe that escaping through the portal would have been difficult. Beelta and all her cronies indeed chased after him. What she and Beelta didn't expect was that they would end up at different destinations. It was then that Xander began to suspect that her master was a miracle worker and could do the impossible.

Beelta and her army went into that portal, but only a weakened Beelta returned. None of the others survived the hunt. Again, Beelta didn't learn to give up. She didn't even know that she had already lost because Aeternus became a demon king. She continued to resist until the end.