The Demon King has been laying in wait for an opportunity to burst through Finn Balor and onto the WWE stage. At SummerSlam, it finally happened - and the world was never the same. The terrifying wrestler awakened the evil part of his alter ago in Brooklyn on Sunday night. Once that happened, Bray Wyatt never had a chance. All he could do was sit and take his punishment as a jubilant crowd teemed with excitement about the triumphant return of a lost idol.
Demon King slays Bray Wyatt
Everyone was anticipating the return of the Demon King on Sunday night - it was the type of story that had SummerSlam written all over it.
Still, nobody knew for sure, since Finn Balor can be one of the more unpredictable fighters in the WWE. When smoke began to rise from the floor and a character with dreads hanging all over the place rose with it, fans knew what was happening.
The Demon King has arrived in Brooklyn, New York #SummerSlam pic.twitter.com/c3Apo3147s
— From The Top Rope (@FromTheTop) August 21, 2017
Beyond all the theatrics, there was an actual fight to be waged. That didn't go particularly well for Bray Wyatt, though. Wyatt had one chance to end the match with the Sister Abigail, but Balor reversed the move. From there on out, the Demon King went flying around the ring, risking life and limb to put a hurting on Wyatt.
He spent most of the match intimidating his opponent, when it easily could've been the other way around. Balor eventually ended the SummerSlam match on a Coup de Grâce, proving once and for all that the Demon King was back.
Rise of the Demon King
There was a time when it seemed like the Demon King would never rise again. Balor was one of the quickest rising wrestlers in WWE history.
He owned the NXT Championship for almost 10 months before moving on to the next level. Then, he won a title during his pay-per-view debut, the first wrestler to ever do that. In the process, it took just 27 days for the Demon King to win the first ever WWE Universal Championship.
But at the WWE Universal Championship, Balor suffered a devastating shoulder injury.
He immediately had to relinquish the title and missed over seven months to recover, before slowly being worked back into the rotation. The venue where that injury occurred? The Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the same site of SummerSlam this year. It felt as if Balor was wiping a humongous chip off his shoulder by returning to Brooklyn and dominating like he once did. The rest of the WWE circuit now has to return to the days where they feared the arrival of the Demon King, diabolical wrestler extraordinaire.