Chapter 263: Rampage
Elion’s presence was like that of a reaper.
Death, carnage, and chaos followed wherever he moved. Of course, more and more people were bound to notice.
A coalition soldier nearby froze in place for half a second as he watched that happen, his face paling beneath his helmet. "What the hell..." he breathed, and he was not the only one noticing.
As the seconds passed, the area around Elion started to change.
At first, it was hard to notice in the sheer confusion of battle, but little by little, a rough twenty-metre radius around him began to feel... different.
It was isolated and empty in a way that the rest of the battlefield was not.
Every time he moved, that circle moved with him, and everywhere he went, demons died so quickly and so brutally that none of them stayed standing long enough to form a proper press around him.
That patch of earth became a moving dead zone, and everyone, human and demon alike, began to feel it even if they could not yet explain it.
A blue-skinned demon mage with six thin arms hissed in alarm and threw a string of fire bolts toward him from behind a cluster of clashing bodies, "Kill him! Kill that human!" but Elion’s eyes flicked toward the spell pattern before it even fully formed.
His body shifted with eerie smoothness, one bolt passing over his shoulder, another scraping a piece of plate from his side, the rest missing entirely as he broke into a faster run and used a dead demon’s shoulder as a stepping point.
Thud!
Then he launched himself straight toward the caster.
The six-armed demon recoiled and began forming another spell, chanting in panic, but it was too slow and too sloppy.
Shing!
Elion came down on it from above with a descending slash that bit into its collarbone and cut all the way through to its lower ribs, splitting it open diagonally.
For a horrible moment, the demon remained standing, its upper body sliding off the lower at an angle while its glowing eyes trembled in disbelief, then the top half slumped wetly and crashed aside with a gush of dark innards.
He landed in a crouch and rose immediately, cutting the leg off another demon that had tried to spear him from the side.
The creature screamed, stumbled, and he followed through with a second slash that removed its head so cleanly that it stayed upright for a heartbeat before toppling to the ground.
At some point, the internal conversation he had been having with himself only moments ago, about morals, about killing, about whether these enemies were real, had simply vanished.
It was gone. Simply buried and forgotten at some lonely corner somewhere at the back of his mind.
Whether that was Enhanced Cognition doing its work, stripping away hesitation and noise so that only useful thoughts remained, or whether the battlefield had simply devoured all room for philosophy, he did not know.
What was obvious, however, was that he was no longer hesitating.
His face was expressionless, his eyes cold and sharpened to an almost frightening degree, and as the fighting continued, faint wisps of icy smoke began to drift from the edges of his eyes, curling upward in thin pale trails as his focus deepened even further.
[Enhanced cognition - Lv2 activated]
A pair of goat-horned demons rushed him together with hooked blades and snarling faces, and one of them laughed as it lunged, "He’s just one hu—" but the sentence never finished.
Elion’s sword hand snapped out in a short thrust that punched straight into its open mouth and out the back of its neck with a spray of black blood and shattered teeth.
Before the body had even begun to slump, he used it as partial cover, stepping in close enough that the second demon’s hooked blade scraped sparks off his new armor instead of opening his ribs.
Then he slammed his forehead into the demon’s nose with a crack, grabbed the wrist of its weapon arm, and with a savage twist and downward cut, severed that entire arm at the shoulder.
"Ahhhhhhhh!"
The demon shrieked, its severed limb still clutching the blade as it fell, and Elion cut again, lower this time, slicing through its knee so that the leg came free just under the joint.
The creature collapsed sideways, screaming, and only then did Elion finish it by driving the sword down through one eye socket and deep into the skull beneath.
He did not pause, hell, he did not even breathe hard even now. He did not seem to notice that his boots were now slick with blood and ash and pulped flesh.
He moved through a knot of fighting soldiers and demons like a current, helping the coalition line without ever seeming to coordinate with them.
Every demon that crossed into his moving radius simply ceased to remain whole for very long.
One got its spine opened from shoulder to lower back so violently that vertebrae burst loose in a wet spray.
Another lost both hands and then its throat in three crisp movements that looked almost economical.
One especially large brute, plated in natural bone and roaring as it swung a club bigger than a man, managed to force Elion to duck lower than before, but then Elion stepped inside the monster’s reach, planted one hand on its chest for balance, and cut upward beneath its chin.
The blade drove clean through the skull and burst out through the top with a slick, ugly sound, black matter running down the steel as the beast’s whole body convulsed and collapsed like a toppled cart.
"Stay near him!" someone from the humanity’s side shouted suddenly, a bloodied elf with torn sleeves and a cracked wand in hand, because by now even the coalition fighters had noticed the pattern.
Where Elion was, demons died.
Where Elion moved, pressure eased.
Men who should have been overrun found themselves breathing for another few seconds because the demon pressing them had suddenly lost an arm, a head, or most of its internal organs.
But that same realization had also reached the other side.
"There!" a scaled demon captain screamed from somewhere deeper in the line, pointing with a hooked spear. "That human! Kill that one first!"
A fresh wave shifted toward him almost immediately, and Elion felt the pressure change around him as more and more hostile intent began to angle in his direction.
Three demon swordsmen crashed in from the front while two beastlike hulks pounded in from the side, and a rearline caster began building a larger spell overhead, but by now his focus had become so refined that all of it seemed almost simple.
He stepped left, parried one blade, let the second cut past his shoulder, caught the third on the guard, and kicked the wielder’s knee backward until the joint folded the wrong way with a crack, then spun.
His sword left trails of frost and blood as he cut a broad line across the stomachs of the two incoming hulks, opening both at the belly so that loops of dark intestines spilled forward as they staggered and tried stupidly to hold themselves together.
The spell overhead released.
A rain of black spikes.
Elion looked up once, then cast an Earth Wall at an angle while dashing through the gap before the spikes fully descended.
The wall took the barrage with a rapid series of thunks and cracks, then shattered, but he was already beyond it, already inside the caster’s comfort zone, and the demon mage barely had time to inhale before Elion’s sword cut both of its legs off just above the knees.
It dropped shrieking, clawing at the ground, and Elion passed it without mercy, taking the head a step later as if swatting an insect.
The battlefield around him became more and more warped by his presence, because now the twenty-metre radius was impossible to ignore.
Coalition fighters were deliberately drifting toward it whenever they could, not because anyone had ordered them to, but because instinct told them it was the safest patch of earth in this burning forest, and demons, conversely, were starting to enter it with visible reluctance.
Their natural aggression was battling with the growing understanding that something in there was chewing through them at an unnatural rate.
Elion’s breathing remained measured.
His feet remained smooth, and his strikes remained clean.
Yet there was a cruelty to the efficiency now, because the more he killed, the less human hesitation there seemed to be in him, and the icy smoke at the edges of his eyes only thickened with time, the thin pale wisps trailing backward every time he turned his head.
A horned demon woman with red-black skin and twin daggers lunged from his blind side with admirable speed, aiming for the gap beneath his raised arm, and for the first time in a while, a coalition soldier nearby shouted, "Behind you!" but Elion had already moved before the warning finished.
His body dipped and rotated in one seamless motion so that her daggers missed his flesh by less than an inch.
Their faces passed close for a breath, close enough for him to see her widening eyes and split-second panic, and then his left hand seized her wrist while his right drove the sword through her lower jaw from beneath.
The point burst out through the top of her head in a spray of black blood and fragments, and when he ripped it free, the corpse dropped so limply that it looked boneless.
Another demon roared and came from directly ahead with a shield and mace, perhaps thinking bulk and aggression would break the pattern, but Elion lowered his center of gravity and rushed in instead of meeting the charge head-on.
The mace came down. He angled away from it. There seemed to be no blind spots in his vision.
Bam!
The weapon smashed the earth. He stepped onto the shield, used it as a platform, and vaulted upward so that he was suddenly eye level with the demon.
For one absurd instant, they stared at each other. Then Elion drew the blade sideways through the thing’s face from ear to ear.
The top of the skull separated crookedly and slid backward while the body remained standing just long enough for him to kick off it and land behind.
There was no room left for moral panic now. There was no room even for disgust.
If the thought had come to him then, if some distant echo of the man he had been before all this had asked whether this was too much, whether this was monstrous, whether this made him something ugly, it found no purchase.
Maybe Enhanced Cognition had swallowed all of it. Maybe the battlefield had. Maybe blood and necessity had a way of simplifying the soul. Whatever the reason, Elion did not stop.
And as more demons died and more heads turned toward that shifting circle of death moving across the battlefield, it became clear to everyone watching, soldier and commander alike, that a new variable had entered the first battle of the Great Forest, and wherever that young human in mismatched armor went, the demon line came apart in wet pieces.
Unbeknownst to Elion, each time he took a life, he gained a little bit of XP.
[You have slain a lesser demon +300xp]
[You have slain a lesser demon +180xp]
[You have slain a lesser demon +250xp]
[You have slain a lesser demon +330xp]