I turned around, but I was surprised that the demons had not crowded over me, tearing me to pieces... too many mistakes had been made before, and I should have paid, but surprisingly, the demons had held back.
Overhead, a second foghorn blew, and the clouds in the red sky rippled: I don’t know the meaning of beauty, but there was something beautiful about the red sky and the horned demon overhead, with four burning eyes grinning down at me.
This was the demon that drove me to madness in the last loop, and it was a good thing that I had no more ego or soul to burn.
I looked away from the demon and focused on the immediate danger before me.
For a single breath, maybe two, the surviving chitin demons pulled back to the bowl’s eastern lip.
I blinked as I counted. One thousand and sixty-seven of the demons had crested the ridge, and I had killed seven in close combat.
Too pitiful, but the rest had seen what happened to their kind when they got close to me, and they were learning. That could be very bad for me.
I did not wait, and I charged.
The half-staff in my hand was no longer a focus for magic; now it was a club.
My Anima Depth was creating Anima, but I had destroyed all my channels, and my Anima Depth was cracked. Even if I was regenerating Anima, I could not use it.
The last whispers of lightning still clung to the wood like static before a storm, and when I swung it, the air itself seemed to remember what had just happened here, and there were tiny residual arcs, too weak to kill, emerging from it.
I reached the demon closest to me, and I swept its legs out from under it and, with a swing of my staff, reversed it and stabbed through its soft belly before it hit the ground.
"You have the body of a Nascent Archon, you fight like a Maker," the calm voice of the demon floating a dozen feet above me reached my ears, "When you should fight like a Daemon."
Those words meant nothing to me as I reached for the ninth demon I was going to butcher, and the demon tried to run.
I caught it by the hind leg and pulled it back into range, pulling it apart as I brought it closer to me.
As I was tearing it apart, it gave a demon behind me the opportunity to bite my right forearm, and its teeth scraped across the blackened skin and found purchase.
I felt the muscle tear and the bone finally give out.
The demon took the chance and began tearing into me, causing skin and flesh to fly. I did not bleed much; casting so much powerful magic before now had dried the blood in my veins.
I dropped the half-staff, grabbed the demon’s head with both hands, twisted, and the head came off with a sound like wet wood snapping.
I picked up the half-staff again. My right arm was hanging funny now. The tendon was gone, the hand still worked, but the arm moved at angles that were a bit unnatural, as Mortal Shell was moving my arm as if an invisible string was controlling it.
The closest demon to me learned that a missing tendon did not make me slower. I killed it with a one-handed thrust through the mouth.
Mortal Shell had grown, and it disregarded minor inconveniences like tendons and ligaments, and it could force my limbs to move by the fibers of my muscles alone.
This obviously caused great pain, but in my state, I did not care about pain.
I was bleeding slowly from a dozen places now, my body slowly beginning to remake blood to flow through my veins; however, the warmth from the slain demons was still pouring into me, but it was a distraction because I was too weak to take advantage of this resource, and it could only flow into the second Earth Gate.
A demon thought I was distracted and came towards me from the side, but I killed it by falling on it; the half-staff went through its carapace on pure momentum. I rolled off its body and came up swinging at the demon behind it.
The demon died with the half-staff buried in its skull, and I could not pull it free. The wood was wedged between two plates of chitin, and my grip strength was fading, in addition to the annoying fact that there was another demon biting my left shoulder.
I let go of the broken staff, sensing that my end was near, and I killed the demon who came at me from the front with my bare hands.
Its heavy jaws bit down on my shoulder, and with my left hand, I punched through the head of the demon and kept going until my fingers touched something soft and wet at the back of its skull cavity. The demon went limp, its jaws remained locked on my shoulder.
I did not have time to pry them loose; there was no time as another demon hit me from behind.
Its weight drove me face-first into the charred ground. I rolled, and it was on top of me, all six legs scrabbling at my chest, its mouth opening and closing inches from my face.
I grabbed its jaws with both hands and pulled them apart. The demon screamed, and I pulled harder. The lower jaw separated from the head with a wet crack, and the demon’s blood flooded over my hands and face and into my open mouth.
I drank all the demon blood; it would kill me in time, but my body was adapting, causing my skills to grow. If I return from death, I would be a different beast.
I pushed the body off and stood up, like I was a puppet being pulled by strings. My body was too broken to move, and yet I still moved.
My left shoulder was still being chewed on by the demon’s corpse. The jaws were locked deep in my flesh and bone, and I could not feel the arm anymore, which meant the arm was probably not long for this world.
I reached across my body with my right hand and grabbed the upper jaw of the dead demon, pulled, and the jaw came free, leaving a large chunk of it remaining inside my flesh.