Explosive Droppings

Zeeth, watching from the backseat, shouted, 'we don't have to!'

The world slowed down. For a split second, he could see the spike coming at him slower, it reminded him of his first real fight with the monks. They had created a large arena covered with small holes that were filled with liquid metal from Rah. he was faced against a shelled buffalo, a massive horned creature with hard shells on its back.

From one of the holes, the metal spiked up and fell back down. The buffalo charged up and ran at him, its hooves glowed blue to allow faster running using the magic circles he drew on it and its horns glowed red, adding a more powerful punch. He jumped over the bull, barely missing the red horns.

The branch coming at his face kept charging in as he tried to redirect them but at the current trajectory, it would still hit their arm. In his moment of serious concentration, he focused on his arm and turned it into the water, causing the spike to slide through. His arm returned to normal just before he left the range of the spike, creating a cut, but he avoided serious damage. His hand opened up, metal parts clinking apart and allowing a sword to slide from his wrist, ripping into the wood of the demon.

Black jumped one last time and opened the third eye that had been closed the entire time. When the eyelids opened, an overwhelming amount of mana erupted from the eye, sending a massive black beam of energy out and through their body, staying strong for only two seconds, but it tore through its entire body and cut an arm and leg off. He lodged the halberd in their heads. Wood tendrils reached out to grab the body back but the black energy stuck to both sides, eating away at the body, preventing it from healing. Black returned to his sleeping state, building back energy once more.

The demon fell with a thud, unable to get back up. Zeeth sent dozens of spikes from Gul, bedazzling its body with glowing gems. He used Yem the Slime to build up a Demon Laser and blast it into their eyes.

Nrubenchal yelled out, "Poppycock!"

All around him, hundreds of green spores erupted from the ground, growing rapidly into tall black plants. Tiny balls of water hovered around their feet.

The creatures stood on top of one another, building themselves into a tall tower that threw themselves at Zeeth. Many of them missed and the few that nearly hit him were all dodged using Animo. But many of them clung onto Nrubenchal and rushed at Zeeth, waddling towards him. They were all weak, a single punch would fling them away, but most of their body was water, making them very flexible and hard to destroy. And every time he lost one, two more appeared to help it, slowly overwhelming him. Zeeth swung the halberd, splattering many of them.

"Send in my babies too!"

Yem threw water at them, coating them in a layer of her own magic spores. Yellow demons, the first creatures he ever fought from hell, grew from the water and mixed in with the plants. The yellow demons coated them in their shells, hiding with the demons like turtles with another creature in their shell. Zeeth looked at the seemingly endless hoard and hopped away, jumping on the demons and kicking off, killing a few.

Near his sword, Linda was recording its design and trying to lift it. Upon grabbing the hilt, she felt her energy being sapped away, draining her ability to even stand properly. He ran to his sword, which Linda was inspecting, and lifted it with ease. "Don't touch the hilt, it doesn't allow people who don't like to use it."

She watched him run back to the demons, telling the orb, "the sword is alive? Not even the colorful weapons have that level of consciousness. It must be some kind of magic charm. But the sword did drain my energy, yet it doesn't take his."

The past year, he used the Chaos Sword a lot, for things like cutting food evenly or carefully carving away at his material for magic crafting. His original reasoning for the swords was to create a sheath for the sword. If he didn't have a sheath it could accidentally get him in a lot of trouble. And a normal sheath wouldn't work, the properties of the sword would carve away at anything it touched. So he had to create a special sheath and while he was at it, a great idea struck him and he made the sheath a sword, creating layers of swords that acted as sheaths. This allowed him to be extra careful with the Chaos Sword, but because he had been cautious with it, he didn't fully understand the dangers of the sword.

That is until he was using it casually for another session of blacksmithing, cutting apart a few pieces of metal. A single slip of his hand caused the sword to tilt and take away a large chunk of the rare metal he was given and a portion of the mana gem from Bloody Banks. He stared at the missing chunk for a moment in guilt and resentment. "NOOOO!!! Where did they go?"

"What happened?"

"The sides are too fat, they took away my materials! I didn't realize it did that! Where are they?"

Unbeknownst to him, a lanky, spiked figure traversed through the bottom of an ocean, fishes, and sharks avoiding him as he walked by like nothing was wrong. In his right hand, a glowing white sword glowed just a bit brighter in the same areas where Zeeth had just cut the materials and a few chunks of cut metals and gems floated out. With a quick snatch, it took the materials and ate them in one gulp. "Father is back. heheHAHAHA!"

A long arm swung at Zeeth, knocking him aside and into a pile of demons. They climbed over him, covering his entire body in a ball of squirming, armored demon babies. He took one strong swing of his sword and "Ice Spikes" to skewer the demons and knock them aside. But more came, punching, bruising, and cutting him. Metal stitches closed his small wounds and his metal fingers easily grabbed, crushed, and threw demons with great force, taking out several demons with one like a bowling ball. Blood and water covered the land as a single man stood, facing hundreds of demons. Linda kept recording the fight, commentating things like, "excellent control over water, ice spikes grew almost instantly. His strength is absurd."

He still had some fangs leftover from his dragon form and he bit a few demons. Swallowing them didn't cause any texts to appear, they weren't strong enough, but he felt the energy coming back to him. Which was a very strange feeling, ever since he gained a hundred slimes, he never felt a gain in energy, he always stayed at about the same level, either at a hundred percent or near there. He looked over at his slimes, and they were all fighting their own battles, releasing their own jets of high-powered water to cut demons in half or trying to keep Nrubechal down.

They were all draining their own energy and weren't gaining fast enough to support others. For the first time, he felt mildly hopeless and tired. Just as he was swinging his sword slower, Eddie and Nadaho charged in like the cavalry, bashing and slicing demons. Zeeth gave him a dual longsword a while back that also acted like a bow with spring in the center with the hit and holes as the tip of the sword that held a string of tough dragon hair.

Skwil rushed in, drawing circles in the air and shooting various magic attacks at demons. "Hey, your slimes are getting tired! You should back out of this fight!"

"No! We're almost there!"

"You just showed almost all of your cards, and the demons are still alive. Aren't they usually dead by now?"

"Yes, but I can go on!"

"Fine, just don't die!"

Having the smaller demons cleared out, he rushed at Nrubenchal. But before he could reach him, Nru yelled, "Kisik Yehnga Sinqul."

"Why are you chanting the ancient tongue. How can we survive that?" Yem asked.

"By using the lost body. When I say so, split apart. We can blow them to bits."

"Oh. you're a genius. Use the already lost section."

"Yes. now, divide!"

The two demons separated from each other, the wood and water becoming their own. They became whole demons, although much smaller than before. The arm and leg that Black cut off began steaming, tiny black dots appeared on the surface and bubbled up. God's Eye told him, [A demon's body enchanted with a demon's curse. About to explode in a 500-mile radius in (90 seconds), leaving a miasma of demonic energy, thwarting all life from existing.]

'Damn! Explosive droppings!'

Zeeth collected his hundred slimes and had them all create a bubble of water around the bomb, intending on limiting it there.

Eddie charged in, roaring, "kill demons!"

He punched the ground near the bomb, creating a chasm that kept growing. The body fell into the hole, bouncing around further and further. Zeeth covered it with water and ice but Linda put her hand over his, "that isn't going to be strong enough. Allow me."

She created a large black square over the demon body which did the same thing it did before. The four sides expanded, enclosing the demon body inside.

The two demons tried to run away as they were too distracted to notice but Skwil saw them sneaking off and ran to them, drawing a large circle that pushed them back.

'Skwil, don't try to fight them,' Page told her, 'they've been weakened but without some serious magic we can't do much to them.'

'I just wanna push them into the box.'

'They've won this fight. Even all of Zeeth's tricks couldn't do them in. Nothing else at his disposal is good enough to cut them down.'

'What about his teleportation thing? Why didn't he do that?'

'Teleportation isn't so simple, it drains far too much energy, and his specific version isn't strong enough. Let them go, I can feel another demon coming and it's likely to save them.'

Just as Page said, Utha blew through the air, his green glob demon springing him through the air like a jet. The demon opened up just as he blew past Yem and Nru, grabbing them and flying away.

'There's not much we could've done, that demon is a lot stronger than those two. Possibly combined.'

Skwil was shivering from the close encounter with the demon. She spent years of her life learning all she could about mana and she became much more tuned in to energies and sensing this mana. The mana she felt in the green demon was wild and vast, like a forest hidden for centuries, only to be found as a den for the world's wildest creatures.

As Zeeth stood over the expanding box, he remembered something from his past. The woman in the cave continued explaining, "after Ulo blew up the factory and killed nearly everyone, all of us workers were free to go as well. The hold they had over me was loosened and I ran as far as I could. I've lost contact with everyone involved. Until just now when I met you. You were the center of all attention behind the glass. At the center of discussions, when your code was mentioned, people always tuned in. honestly, I was kind of jealous of you."

"Jealous? My life has been horrible!"

"I didn't mean that."

"I started off as a child taken from my parents and forced in some random orphanage that I later found out was a front for screening children to be put in missions, suffering from their constant hypnosis and fake identities. Did you know, I had an identity crisis when I was six. SIX! Six-year-olds are supposed to be making friends and having fun, I was keeping an eye on terrorists and criminals. I had an identity crisis before I even knew what it WAS!" he went through several loving homes and families, some horrible homes, but when his missions were over, he always went back to the uncaring adults of his team of spies.

The hardness and softness of his life made the last him an emotional wreck, greedy for money and materials to fill in the void, jealous of others who had a life he yearned for, and often violent to those who inconvenienced him.

"I was then kidnapped from my spy life and thrown in a government-funded secret project for superhumans and covered with robotics."

"No, the spies and robotics weren't under our jurisdiction. The spying industry was never intended to happen to you. I don't know how you were caught up in that but I know your parents wanted to leave the life of superhumans behind. They promised never to tell anyone about the experiments and agreed to constant supervision as long as they were allowed to live their lives. Both sides agreed, but…"

"But what? Why did you stop?"

"The people I worked for, the people you just escaped from, never intended on following through. They were just waiting for them to conceive a child and take their firstborn before he, or you, gained a perspective on life so they could manipulate you. But something went wrong and the spies took you instead. It took us years and a ton of resources to find you since being a spy is all about secrecy. But when we did, the robotics were already implemented. From your records, I believe it was a joint effort from two parties. The spies first implanted swords and helpful spy gadgets into your body, the basic stuff they give to many of their top spies.

But then some other group must've realized how resilient you were and how compatible your body was to cybernetics and metal parts, taking you to pump you full of this stuff. And they were desperate and sloppy, the robotics were innovative and all but they were executed horribly. From what I could tell, they realized your body was stronger than most and wanted to see how much it could withstand. Surprisingly, a lot more than we predicted you could. It was the scientists here that cleaned it up for you, fixing the skin and recalibrating parts to make it all more efficient and streamlined."

"So three different groups did surgery on me?"

"Yes. but your emotional trauma was all caused by the spies, we have no idea how they knew about you. Although, there is a pretty high chance the president or someone up there helped. The most reasonable theory is that it was an inside job, someone here sold your information and you to the spies."

"Then that settles it."

"What?"

"I'm going to hunt and kill all the spies and everyone who helped them."