I dropped my hand, and the burning field of debris poured down on the demon. Thousands of tonnes of metal, stone, glass, and flesh, all of it blazing with the light of Heaven’s Verdict and Lightning Edict, causing them to shine like stars fell on the Soul Flayer, and for eleven seconds the hall was the inside of a furnace.
The demon screamed as the darkness around it surged, trying to meet the wave of devastation I was raining down, but the darkness was not fast enough. The burning debris struck Sad like a mountain made of fire, and the demon was thrown backward through the facility, carving a trench of molten metal and shattered stone.
Metal turned to liquid, and stone became glass before they vanished into nothing. The vats in that chamber flashed to steam, and whatever had been dreaming in them for thousands of years stopped living. Maybe they would thank me for freeing them from the nightmares they had been suffering for so long, or maybe not. I just filed it in the place where I keep things I will pay for later.
I followed the screaming demon. Lightning Incarnate carried me through the wreckage, my body a storm of silver and gold. The fox was on my shoulder, her blue eyes bright with bloodlust and joy.
"That was beautiful!" she shouted. "Do it again!"
I laughed, infected by the recklessness of the fox. We were indestructible and powerful, and after we were suppressed, I think both of us went a little mad.
The demon was still tumbling from the force of my strikes as it tried to gain its footing. After spending hours burning itself to get to me, and with the surprising power of my Inscription, it was on the back foot.
I reached it before it could find its feet. My hand, wreathed in Tribunal lightning, closed around its throat, and I drove it into the floor again.
The impact cracked the metal, and the vats around us shattered, their contents spilling across the floor. The demon’s yellow eyes blazed with fury.
"You are going to die for this, there is nothing you can..."
"Save it... I can."
I raised my other hand, Heaven’s Verdict, which had been accumulating in my channels for a while now, and I released it as a column of golden light that descended from the darkness above and struck the demon in the chest.
"Screech... Boom!!!"
The demon screamed again. Its body convulsed. The darkness around it flickered and vanished, and I could see its body fully revealed, and it was a thing of horror.
The body underneath was gaunt, twisted, and filled with sores as if the body of the Sovereign was fighting against the presence of the Soul Flayer like an infection... but the infection was winning, and only the supreme vitality of a Sovereign was keeping this body alive.
More importantly, I could finally see the anchor on its chest, glowing faintly, and with a nudge from my mind, the column of lightning shifted towards the anchor, and the screams of the demons took on a new dimension.
The face of Sad twisted, bones shifted, and tentacles fell from his face, and for a moment, I saw the face of Seed underneath, and one of the yellow eyes went gray, and the voice of Seed erupted from his morphing mouth,
"Release me!"
However, Sad took over the body, and tentacles erupted from the face once more, "No."
A grinding sound emerged from the demon’s chest and its right hand suddenly extended and its claws caught me across the chest with so much force that despite the durability of my body under Titan’s Marrow, I felt my ribs break, and darkness poured from all over the facility and slammed into my body, throwing me into the ceiling, and my body tore through metal and stone.
I was stunned for a second as pain flooded across my body, but my body was already moving, pushing through the pain, and I vanished, causing the next wave of darkness that would have crushed me into paste to tear through the place I had collapsed a moment before.
My laughter rang in the air, "You have the body of a Sovereign foolish demon, and the only thing you can do with it is to throw waves of darkness?... How disappointing."
The demon snarled in rage, and it released a wave of darkness to find me, but its eyes widened in surprise when I appeared in front of it in a flash of lightning, holding my lightning pen, and before it could stop me, I released a bolt of tribulation lightning directly to its face as I wrote a new Join script on the demon’s chest. The script connected to the anchor, and I poured every scrap of Anima I had into it.
The anchor cracked as the Join Inscription began to rip countless pieces of tiny inscriptions from it. The demon screamed, a sound of pure agony, before it was blasted into the distance, and a whole section of the facility collapsed upon it. Shortly after, I collapsed to my knees, sucking long breaths as exhaustion nearly made me collapse.
I pressed my right hand against my side while running threads through my injury to pull my bones back in place and stitch my wounds shut. With a more potent soul, it was easier for me to retrieve memories from the Hollow Avatar and learn the technique it had used to once sew the arm that I lost back to my body.
I had given it my all, and every single drop of Anima was gone from my body; however, I was rapidly regaining my strength, although I don’t know if I could do it quickly enough before the demon recovered... I was also hoping that I had destroyed enough of the anchor to give Seed a fighting chance; if that happened, then half of my problems...
"Whoosh..."
An intense wave of demonic aura washed past me, and goosebumps broke across my skin. I straightened, and a crazy smile washed across my face... as much as I wanted the demon to die, a part of me was not satisfied.
My skills and spells that had been stuck in one place for a few loops were now growing; I could feel it, and exhaustion for me meant that I was pushing myself to the limits, and I loved it.
"Boom!"
A pressure wave shattered the mountain of debris that had covered the demon, and it slowly stood up, but its appearance had changed even more.
What came out of the crater was a knot of borrowed darkness holding a shape together by insistence. There was no face left worth the name, but tentacles fused into a mass, the whole thing compressed down to something dense and wrong.
Looking at this creature, I knew I had just seen the core of what a Soul Flayer was.
"Yes," it said. "That is the flavour I remember. For three months, I drank it and never once did you show me all of it." The mass on its face shivered with something that was almost joy. "Thank you, little mage. I did not know how much I had been missing. You are right, it is time that I fight you."