CH1153 Other Perspectives

Deep in the woods, the demon ran.

It didn’t know why it was running; it didn’t have the leeway to think about such things. Everything it was was devoted to its destination as what had started as its casual walk through the forest, looking for food of a meatier variety than any of the plants around with the rest of it kin under it, turned into a mad dash to some distant destination that consumed them all.

Not even its space magic came to mind to help bridge the gap between where it was and where every fibre of its being swore it needed to be, nor did it notice the others around it as more of its kind that it had personally gathered, both near and far all slowly converged on the same central point. All it could do was follow the call like all the others, with no way to escape.

Nothing changed when it entered a clearing, and nothing changed when more demons around it vanished after they jumped at the few other creatures sleeping at the heart of it. It didn’t notice any of its kin, and that left it to make the same lunge, feeling as its powerful legs left it soaring through the air towards that waiting meat, about to land on top of them with fangs and claws outstretched until-

Nothing.

No feeling of contact, no thud as it hit the ground, and no flesh to sate its appetite after it had been consumed by days of running. Where its prey or even just the dirt should have been, the demon passed through, still too consumed to understand what had happened until it was too late. Without warning, it passed through the gate and into the void beyond.

The air ripped from its lungs and heat sapped away from its flesh, snapping itself back to awareness enough to realize how horribly wrong something was as it fumbled around, unbound by gravity, to see all of the other demons that hadn’t already been killed doing the same.

A trap, it was able to think, swearing in its head as it realized the horror it had run into, still not able to completely understand the nature of it yet knew how bad things had to be, given the swarm of bodies around it.

It couldn’t move, there was nothing for it to push off of, and it couldn’t breathe with no air to suck in. The demon’s limbs swelled in a way that made them feel like they were going to burst, and even as it felt itself freeze, the fluids filling its body boiled away at the same time, creating an unimaginable hell that left it cursing in its mind at the injustice of it all.

It was powerful. It had grown to a height far beyond any others of its yolk, yet still it was going to die, damned by a trap it couldn’t comprehend, tossed into a mad plane that seemed as if by design to inflict as much pain and misery on it before it could expire as possible. No matter how strong it was and how adaptable its nature, without air, it could last a few minutes at most, and feeling the liquids filling its body boil away in its still living flesh, it knew the real span was likely to be less than one.

Still it tossed and still it turned, trying to find a way out but seeing none. All there was around it was the sun and stars amidst an endless backdrop of black, no sort of solution as it drove itself mad while feeling its thoughts start to cloud. After everything it had wanted, everything it had desired, there was no way out. Unless it wanted to spend its magic to throw itself into the sun, there were no options.

Even without a society to help it learn such basic things, it knew something hot enough to heat a world would give it no salvation but, fighting against its fate the best it could as its remaining seconds ticked down, eventually, it found only a single thread of hope to cling to.

There.

A ball, smaller than its pupil, had been hidden by the sun’s rays, mostly blue and white in colour and far enough away that the demon could only pray to Oaun that it was larger than it looked as it did the only thing it could. Welling all of its mana, the demon cast its spell and teleported towards it as far as it could go, bending space itself with the act to propel it at the same time, shortening the distance to the planet while throwing itself through the void.

Neither act alone could have been enough, but together, they created a chance. Ogilt and Abrus may have positioned the gate a seemingly impossible distance for any mortal to hope to return from, but that demon was no mere mortal and, with all of its power spent, its soul left to suck up more, it found itself at the planet’s edge. With the momentum it had given itself, it began to plummet down to the world below.

In space, it had felt its body freeze and boil, but shooting through an atmosphere, its flesh began to burn as it finally understood that it had shot itself at a world, the ground growing larger and larger until in only seconds it took up all of its view.

The heat burned away its scales and flesh, and while it singed its lungs too, the little oxygen it was able to take in cleared its mind as well, letting it know just how doomed it was once more, only in a different way than in had been moments prior as the ground grew infinitely close. Even if it had survived the void, that was more a matter of prolonging the inevitable, and even then, not by much. Its only hope was its mana, but with its pool nearly entirely emptied, all it could rely on was what little it could regain before it would become nothing more than a crater on the world, while trying to maintain enough focus to cast a spell while its body burned.

Seconds stretched on, feeling far longer than they were, while the ground came rushing towards it. It tried to estimate how long it could last, knowing that the closer down it let itself get, the better its odds of survival, no matter how slim they might have been, but with its speed shooting it at the planet, a part of the demon had to accept that ultimately, it would come down to luck. Hold off for too long and it would hit the world, nothing of its body to remain, and casting too early would be death as well, even if its chances of leaving an intact corpse improved.

Ultimately, even if it got the timing right, there was no way to be certain that it would be enough, but as a few more seconds passed, bringing its time spent plummeting up to a minute, that no longer mattered. With the ground feeling right in front of its face, the demon cast its spell, opening a portal directly beneath it, with the exit to said portal directly at its side, taking on a near right angle instead as it passed through.

Doing exactly what it needed to. The exit warped the demon’s orientation, turning downward momentum into angular, letting its speed throw it up and sideways while making it sail through the air and lose some of the force behind it as it crashed down, a sound of snapping filling those woods as its bones broke and its organs ruptured.

But through it all, it was alive, leaving a maddening laugh on its lips that tasted like blood. Whatever mad trap the citizens of that world had created, it had survived, and it started to crawl, only to stop again in horror.

Moving was the wrong choice. It was obviously so, yet it had done it anyway, all because of the same thing that had gotten it into that position. A call, beckoning it deeper into the woods which left it more afraid than its plummet had left it. Something insidious was pulling it and its kind in. Something it couldn’t escape, only able to hold back at all thanks to the state of its body and the horrors it had just gone through, with that discovery making its next move simple, at least once it returned to the point where it could move.

It needed to find what regions of the world were safe from that terrible call, and then it needed to save as many of its kin from it as it could. Not out of any sort of loyalty to its people; far from it. It was pure necessity. The creatures swarming that world had learned to fight against the demons in a way that it had never encountered before, and to devastating effect. Feeling the call where it landed, nowhere near where it had first been pulled in proved the danger of it, which shaped the only future it could choose. That world was dangerous, but hiding away was doing it nothing. No, it and the others needed to do exactly what they’d been sent there for. Eat what they could, destroy the rest, and make the world their own and, in doing so, hopefully weaken whatever it was that had been making the people there grow so much better at killing them.

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” Yotu chuckled to himself as he sat in a tree at the edge of a clearing, watching as demons threw themselves to their death. “How charming.”

The discovery had been accidental, more than anything. The death god had simply found a demonic swarm in his hunt for more souls and decided to follow it, hoping that they might lead it to a bigger harvest, not having guessed the true scale of what he was going to receive until he reached the end.

A trap designed to kill, more perfect than any he had encountered before, even he couldn’t help marvel at it in all of its perfection. Bait and disposal, all in one, and for a death god like himself, it felt like an infinite source of power.

In the past few days, Yotu had become aware of divine eyes trying to find him, but with his every growing strength taken from the souls of the world, he could just barely avoid them without giving himself away. With that find, though, the need to do so disappeared. Jumping down from the tree, he moved towards the hidden gate’s edge and, with his divinity, felt beyond it where the exit to so many other gates were gathered, all of them spitting out demons to die in the void.

And as they died, he called back their souls. Not letting them pass, not letting them rest, the endless swarm of demons that had invaded the world was pulled back after being expelled, turned into ghosts under his power that could defy the barrier meant to keep their flesh out, only to sink into his own, hidden away where they could endlessly give him the faith he craved.

With care, he ran his fingers along the gate’s edge, feeling a beauty in the work that rarely spoke to him. As the demons of the world all killed themselves, he would make them his own, and even if it wasn’t to the same extent as killing a world, they would help his power balloon to the point where he’d no longer need to worry about the divine living there.

“I wonder just who I owe for such a gift,” he mused for a moment before the thought passed. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. It was a winning weapon in a losing war, but within his domain, he alone would reap the true benefits of it.