Seeing something like this was enough to nearly stop my heart, but there was more to this figure than met the eye, and the part of myself that recognized this wrongness was my soul.
You see, as long as you reach the level of an Acolyte, with a more substantial soul, then you begin to perceive the world more with your soul than your body.
A normal person could not touch their soul or manipulate it, but we could, and so a new world was opened to us that was denied to most people.
Most of the time, having a soul that could see more of the world was an advantage. There was so much beauty and wonder in the world that normal people could not see.
A man could admire the sunrise, but for me, I could see so much more. I could feel small pieces of light like little diamonds passing through my body... my soul could see in more colors than my eyes, and there is a certain beauty in everything around me that I cannot describe with words... You only needed to see them for you to get a glimpse of the wonders of creation.
I always thought that there could be no disadvantage to having a soul that was sensitive to Anima and the world, and if there was a drawback, it was worth the price. I never regretted that choice more than at this moment.
I do not have a more precise way to describe this, but as I saw this demon, something like a deep, low note resonated in my soul, except that there was no sound producing it. I know... I know, that does not make much sense, but bear with me for a while.
There was an aura surrounding this demon that only my soul could see, and this aura was pure wrongness. It was extending outward from it in a slow, steady radiation that I could feel from two hundred meters away, the same way you can feel a fire on your face from across a room, but this aura felt like I was being stabbed with countless pins.
The demon was watching the Adepts with what I thought was the patient attention of something that did not need to participate, because it had already decided the outcome.
This scared me because I believed that it could only do that if it was many times stronger than an Adept.
I watched it for the time my body would allow, before my mind started to refuse to keep watching, and I made my mind keep watching anyway, because every detail I could memorize now might be the difference between dying again and not dying.
I had to force myself to acknowledge that I had come here for answers, and this was the way I got them, and that this process did not have to be comfortable... and then, without any warning, it turned toward me.
Looking back now, I should have realized much sooner that it already knew I was there, but hindsight is fifty-fifty.
The world seemed to freeze, and I saw the face of my enemy. This knowledge was known to me the way a baby knew how to breathe when it was born... this thing was the enemy of all life.
Unsurprisingly, the demon had a face; however, there were four eyes on its face, in two pairs.
The upper pair was larger, and the lower pair smaller; all four eyes were the color of fire.
Between the two pairs, where a nose would have been, a vertical fold in the red skin that opened and closed slowly, as if it were only breathing as an afterthought.
Below that was the mouth that was wider than a face the size of the head should have allowed. Even from here, I could see that it was filled with fangs that were long and slightly translucent as the red light of the pyramid’s pulse, which had not yet ended by the way, was visible through the tips of the front ones, like light passing through wet paper.
The face was almost human, and that was what made it more horrifying to me. The arrangement of the features, the way they related to each other across the structure of the skull, was close enough to a human face that my mind kept trying to read it as a human face, but there were so many things wrong with this face that my mind was rebelling against the thought of associating this thing with anything concerning a human.
As if it were aware of my mental dilemma, the demon suddenly grinned, and I wished I had not seen this sight as it burned straight into my mind.
Have you seen hate or pure malice embodied inside something? Like, if you are looking for the meaning of evil, then the moment you see this grin from this demon, you will stop the search.
I froze in place, and I could not move, and I was unaware at the moment that tears of blood were running down my face.
The grin lasted perhaps half a second, and then the demon raised one of its arms in the specific manner of a gesture rather than an attack, the long, thin fingers extending toward me and I felt Demon Slayer flare in me, the weight on the soul, the resistance to demonic forces, all of it suddenly present in a way it had not been present at any point since I had equipped it.
The Epic title surged hot in my chest, a heat that was not the heat of casting but something more fundamental, the title itself rising to meet what the demon was sending.
For one second, I felt the resistance hold, as the title pushed back against whatever was reaching for me, a weird sound emerged from my surroundings as if a choir made from babies were singing at the top of their lungs, and then I felt the title burning.
It was consuming something to maintain itself, and I realized that it was those warm streams of power that had flowed into me anytime I killed a demon. It was this essence that Demon Slayer had absorbed from the kills that were being spent in the resistance.
The title was drawing on the harvested fuel and burning it to hold the line against whatever the larger demon was projecting, and horror filled my soul when I felt the reserve emptying.