As I began to move deeper into the eruption, the Khaaz began to flank me, and I only needed to push more power into my loom to spread the field to surround me, and there was no need to look behind me to know that hundreds were burning before they could even see me clearly with their senses.
The count of Khaaz I killed in the first stretch of the eruption is not a number I can give you. It was thousands, but that did not matter... I still had a long way to go, and every loop was my journey towards that goal.
I walked the field forward for a long while, and the field killed for me, and as the demons died, I learned the shape of how little it mattered.
The Khaaz did not stop coming. That is the thing about an eruption that no one who hasn’t stood in one can hold in their head, that the numbers don’t crest and break the way an army does, and after experiencing the eruption many times, I had come to understand this.
There is no front to push back, and the earth splits, and the dark pours up and keeps pouring, six-limbed, and iron-dark, the pale tendrils reading the air for the warm thing standing in the middle of all that lightning, and the warm thing was me.
As long as the Pale Matron exists, the number of demons shall never end.
So they came, and the Loom took them apart a rank at a time, and I walked, and behind me the ground turned to a long black smear that had been thousands of living things a minute before.
I checked my stored essence twice in that first stretch and stopped checking, as the number crawled like a snail in a vat of glue. Three hundred Khaaz had bought me seven essences, and the next thousand bought me twenty.
It seemed that I had to make peace with the fact that at my present level, the Khaaz were now chaff. The Fourth Earth Gate wanted a hundred thousand, and the Khaaz were going to hand it over in coins so small that I’d be killing for longer than I would ever want to.
So I want to be honest, the slaughter you’re imagining happened. It looked exactly as grand as you think, and... it was almost worthless.
I knew it was almost worthless while I did it, but that is the truth about growth as well as everything else.
I kept the Loom going anyway. Worthless is not the same as pointless. Every Khaaz that turned to ash on the web was a Khaaz not following four wagons west toward a relay post I had to hope was still standing.
The field bought distance for people who couldn’t see me buying it. That was reason enough to keep walking.
Also, I knew that the true fight was coming for me, and I was not in a haste.
I know that I would still die in this loop, but I swore to the stars above, I shall kill enough demons to fill up an ocean.
[Stored Essence 450/100,000]
∞
I had killed these demons long enough for me to feel a Khaazim before I saw it. When you have experienced that unbridled hate for the first time, you could never forget it.
The ground rumbled, and I could see the Khaaz tide thinning around the Khaazim, like water flowing around a stone, and the thing that parts the water is bigger, darker, the chitin thicker and oilier, and it has just enough mind to be wary of a net of lightning hung over the ground.
Its massive body punched into the ground, the earth parting around it like water, and it came at me from under the web. My eyes widened a bit in surprise as hundreds of Khaazim in my sight just seemed to vanish.
The first one to reach me nearly took my leg off, as they moved even faster through the ground than above it.
I pulled my foot back, put a hand down, and opened a channel straight into the floor where it was about to surface. The loaded Anima went out of me nearly instantaneously, and the ground where the Khaazim was coming up turned to light.
I had to give it to the demon; more of its body emerged from the pool of lightning that the floor had become.
Half of its body had turned to ash, including its massive tail. It pushed its massive head towards me; most of it had been burned to the bone... By all right, this thing should be dead many times over, but the hate in its soul fueled it to seek my death until there was nothing in its body left to give.
"You are meaningless," I whispered to the Khaazim before I placed a second channel of lightning through what was left of its skull.
A Khaazim was worth what a few hundred Khaaz were now, which was maybe five.
The ones that followed suffered the same fate, as I knew they were coming for me from below, and I made sure the surrounding ground became a pool of lightning.
The butchery continued as I found my rhythm. The Loom kept eating the Khaaz, and I worked the Khaazim by hand inside the body of the tide, one at a time, then three at a time, then ten at a time, executing those who could swim through the lightning to reach me.
I watched my Anima regeneration, spending them a measure at a time and topping up my channels back up from my Depth in the lulls.
They were strong, against the boy I’d been hundreds of loops ago, even one of them would have been a death. Against what I was now, they were... work; I considered them honest work.
I did not like that the essence I was gaining was not as I had anticipated, but I had a gate to open, and I did the arithmetic between kills and my odds were not great that I would complete the fourth earth gate in this loop, but my targets were not coming from the earth...
"Krshlueki Markash Negrhall..."
They were coming from the sky.