Chapter 54: As Many Deaths as It Takes (2)
I waited.
Standing in the middle of the carnage, my fists clenched hard enough to split my palms, I waited for the world to stop and flow backward, for the square to reassemble around me, for Seorin to rise whole again on the first morning of the next loop.
Damn it. Damn it, failed again.
I raised my eyes toward Lazaüs and spat the words through my teeth.
"The next one will be the right one."
He tilted his head slightly, as if those words meant nothing to him.
And nothing happened.
What?
I waited longer, my breath short. The sky stayed red, the shouting went on along the ramparts, and Seorin’s blood kept running between the cobblestones until it wet the toes of my boots. No reset, no going back, nothing at all.
A hero just died. The loop should have started over, like every other time. Why—
Then I saw it.
Her body was moving.
Her two halves were sliding toward one another through the scarlet pool, slowly, as if drawn by a thread I couldn’t see. The torn flesh sought itself and found itself, muscle knitting fiber to fiber while the skin closed over the top, and the blood flowed back into the reopened veins in the reverse of how I’d watched it spray out.
There was a sound with it, wet and dull, that stayed in my ears a long while after.
And Seorin opened her eyes.
She drew in a rasping breath, the kind you take when someone hauls you up from the bottom of a well, then propped herself on one elbow in the earth soaked with her own blood. She turned her head toward me, and she smiled.
"Well? Not too shocked?" She pushed back a strand plastered to her cheek, leaving a red streak across it. "Aren’t I magnificent~?"
She’s joking... she’s actually joking, in a situation like this?
"This is my class, Kuro. The Queen Without a Grave."
Behind me, a click of the tongue.
"Tch."
Alice hadn’t added a word, but I didn’t need to turn around to guess the kind of smile she was wearing at that moment.
And everything fell into place in my head. Chloé, in that alley, her sentences circling the thing without ever naming it. That class she’d called a blessing and a burden in the same breath, and the price to be paid that she’d spoken of without wanting to say more.
A curse dressed up as a gift. The power never to stay dead, and therefore the obligation to die as many times as it took.
"I’ll buy us time," she said, picking up her katanas. "However many times it takes."
So I made up my mind, knowing we had a brand-new card to play and, with it, the chance to buy enough time for Lazaüs to finally sound his retreat.
Maybe this loop will be the right one after all. The last one we’ll ever spend in this endless hell.
"Then we don’t waste it," I said, tightening my grip on Naia and Laia before turning to Alice. "You pull back and recharge everything you can while we keep him busy, because when the moment comes to give it all, you’re the one we’ll need, and I’d rather have you full then than useful now."
She looked at me for a second, then nodded without arguing, her lightning settling around her fingers as she withdrew out of reach. The world’s mana began flowing back into her, rebuilding what the black moon had torn away.
And the fight started again.
Seorin went first.
She crossed the square in a straight line, no feint and no angle, right at him, and Lazaüs raised a hand the way you’d swat a fly. The blade of darkness caught her square in the chest, lifted her off the ground and flung her against a stretch of wall three meters away, where she slid down to the ground, chin on her collarbone, a pool widening beneath her.
Go. While he’s looking at her.
Worldflow took me and I dropped onto his exposed flank, the Arsenal unfolding above me in the same breath — a dozen lances of water that came down on him from every angle while Naia opened his hip. He turned too late, his counter split the air where I was no longer, and the current spat me back out beyond his reach.
Behind him, Seorin was already getting up, and he turned his head toward her with a slowness that had nothing left of the earlier shock.
"You again."
He killed her a second time in the seconds that followed, a black shaft across the throat that dropped her to her knees. She pitched forward, her blades ringing on the cobblestones, and her blood sprayed in a sheet over Alice’s white flowers — which she was still maintaining regardless, to keep everyone healed continuously, spending just little enough that her mana regenerated faster than she burned it.
She was on her feet before he’d finished his next gesture.
"Stay. Down." His voice had lost its calm, and he dropped a meter lower, eyes fixed on her. "What are you, in the end? Some kind of undead? A thing that refuses to stay put. Clinging. Filthy."
Seorin picked up her katanas without answering and set herself back on guard.
"Repulsive," he spat. "That’s what you are. A piece of refuse that can’t even die properly."
Isaiah used that second to charge him head-on, shield first, and sent him into the front of a house that exploded under the impact. Adam followed from above, an arrow loosed skyward that split into a rain of luminous shafts and pinned the demon in the rubble for exactly as long as I needed to get there.
I struck twice, opened his shoulder, and Worldflow was already tearing me backward when the counterattack came.
Then he screamed, and his back split open.
The plates of black mana lifted, his flesh parted underneath, and six arms burst out. Six real arms, muscle and tendon and joint, pushing out of his flanks and shoulders with a wet cracking, stretching, unfolding, closing their fists in the empty air as if testing their grip.
The Fleshweaver. Of course. He doesn’t only build monsters.
Eight hands now, and in each one a sword of darkness condensed at once, eight black blades long as men, raised in a crown around him.
He came down on us.
What followed no longer resembled a fight. Eight blades fell together from eight different angles, and there was no space anywhere: the one I dodged pushed me into the path of the next, the one I parried pinned me in place for the third. Isaiah blocked what he could, his shield ringing like a bell, every impact driving him half a step deeper into the ground.
Adam fired without pause from his rampart, turning aside two or three blades a volley. Never enough.
And every time a strike was truly going to kill one of us, Seorin was there.
She threw herself in front of Isaiah when four blades converged on him, and took all four. Her body came apart before my eyes, opened from sternum to hip, and collapsed in pieces into the blood already soaking the earth. By the time she’d stitched herself back together we’d gained three seconds, and those three seconds were enough to tear a cry out of him when my lances went through his side.
She died again when he swept the square with a wave of darkness and Adam, exposed on his wall, had nowhere to go — she leapt, put herself in the way, and the wave shredded her. She came back. She died again pulling a blade out of Isaiah’s shoulder, a ninth one punching through the back of her neck in the same instant.
Slower to get up each time, paler each time, her movements heavier and something dimming a little further behind her eyes, because coming back had a price and it showed on her. No healing of Alice’s could have given back what she left behind in each of those deaths.
She didn’t complain once.
And Lazaüs was going mad.
"Stop that!" His eight blades came down together and reduced her to nothing, and he was still screaming while she reformed. "You have no right! A thing like you has no right to exist!"
He’s not even paying attention to us anymore. He’s more and more fixated on Seorin and her ability.
I took what he was giving us. Worldflow carried me behind his back while he raged at her, the Arsenal spat everything I could hold, and when he spun to cut me down, Isaiah crushed his knee with a two-handed blow. The demon buckled, and Adam emptied a quiver into his face.
We were pushing him back.
It wasn’t idle hope anymore: I could see him giving ground, step by step, his eight arms covering worse and worse, his black blood staining the cobblestones with every exchange. Isaiah held the center, Adam locked down the sky, I bled him in every opening, and Seorin made us untouchable by dying in our place.
Behind us, Alice hadn’t moved, the mana coiling around her in a torrent, gathering, while she watched us work.
We’re going to make it. Hell, we’re actually going to make it.
We tightened the vise with every exchange. A little more. A few more openings, and—
Then he stopped fighting back.
With a single beat he tore himself off the ground and rose out of our reach, so high and so fast that none of us could follow. My lances lost themselves in the emptiness beneath his feet and Adam’s arrows fell short.
The eight swords of darkness dissipated between his fingers, one after another, returned to the nothing he’d drawn them from. His back unfolded, not into wings of flesh but into an immense articulated structure of black mana, mechanical, plates of darkness interlocking one into another like the gears of a machine and spreading open in a fan above the square.
He floated there, untouchable, and he stopped fighting altogether.
He looked down on us, and there was a weariness in his gaze, something almost like sorrow.
"Why do you fight?"
The question came down soft, sincere, as if he truly didn’t understand.
"Look at yourselves a moment." Two of his hands opened toward us, palms offered, while two others pressed against his heart. "You bleed, you die, you cling to every breath with a stubbornness that would break my heart if I still had one, and all of it to preserve this, you poor lost sheep."
Four arms swept wide, taking in the burning city, the corpses, the bleeding sky.
"But this does not deserve to be preserved, and somewhere deep down, I think you already know it."
He let the words hang, then went on, his voice warming as he spoke.
"The world ought to be perfect — do you understand what that means? Without a flaw, without a stain, without a single thing out of place; that is what it should have been from the very first day." His eight fists closed together in the empty air. "And look what we have made of it."
A laugh escaped him, low and bitter.
"You humans, inferior creatures born of flesh and mud, you touch something beautiful and it corrupts, you build and it eventually collapses, you love and it rots in your hands, so that everywhere your kind lays a finger, perfection dies a little more." His voice climbed, tightened, vibrating with a passion that had nothing human left in it, and his arms moved with it like a conductor’s. "And do not think I accuse you alone, for every race of this failed world is worth exactly the same, myself first among them."
Six hands came to rest on his own chest, and his face twisted with disgust.
"Me, yes, look at me closely. A high demon before whom entire kingdoms kneel, and yet I am nothing more than a piece of debris, one more imperfect thing crawling through an imperfect world, never able to become anything but what it despises." His wings shivered. "And I have carried that knowledge for millennia."
Then something changed on his face, the hatred receding to make room for an almost luminous ecstasy.
"Except for one."
His voice dropped to a murmur, and his eight hands came slowly together in front of him, fingertip to fingertip, in a gesture of prayer.
"One alone in all of existence, one single being who is truly what everything ought to be, and that being is the Demon King." He spoke the name the way one recites a prayer. "Perfect, absolute, without the slightest defect, the living proof that perfection exists somewhere other than in the dreams of a broken thing like me."
He stayed a moment with his eyes on the sky, as if he’d forgotten us, then his gaze came back down to us, and the smile that came with it chilled me more than anything else.
"And since this world is imperfect, then there is only one thing left to do, and that is to remake it entirely."
Black mana began flowing toward his eight open palms.
"A day will come when I shape a perfect being with my own hands." His hands began working the empty air in front of him, molding an invisible form, like a sculptor over clay only he could see. "A being who will deal with imperfect things one by one, and who will attend most particularly to creatures of your sort, the ones who insist on struggling instead of accepting the only thing we should all accept."
His voice swelled, overflowed.
"I promise you this, little humans." One arm extended toward us, index finger pointed, while the other seven opened like a corolla. "I promise you that this day will come, that this birth will take place, and that a new era will fall upon this world to wash it clean of everything that soils it. An era of perfection."
He let the promise float above us, then paused, his gaze sliding from one of us to the next. Isaiah covered in blood. Adam on his rampart. Seorin, fallen and risen so many times. Alice, held back. Me.
"And I say this to you," he went on, almost gently, "to you who give more than everything to stop me, who exhaust yourselves and bleed and die believing it will change something. You are wasting your time, and you always will, because I am only a piece of refuse and that refuse is more than enough to bar your way. You will never save this world, poor lost sheep, and the saddest part is that you will go on trying."
His wings spread wide, and the black mana began converging on him from the whole horizon, snuffing out the red of the sky.
"So let me at least make you this offering." His eight arms opened, offered, in the posture of a priest at the end of his sermon. "Let me put an end to all of it for you, since you will never manage it yourselves."
The mana rushed in between his hands, gathering, compressing, growling like a storm about to break, vaster than the black moon, vaster than anything he had thrown at us until now, a mass of darkness that swallowed the light and the air and even the noise of the battle.
And he charged at us.