A Titled Demon Pt3

What came next was actually very hard to watch, making me regret not simply leaving while I had the chance to. Traytar actually dove right into the midst of their own demon army and just started swinging its clawed hands around. It was even saying some really twisted shit.

"Prove your loyalty and die for my breakthrough!" Was the very first thing they said after my offer, sweeping aside a hundred demonic bodies as chunks of gore and mist. I kind of stopped listening after that, looking away while hoping that the demons here would be numerous or strong enough to weaken the demon commander more than they were.

I did not imagine that there was any love or any would be lost between the demons, but their readiness to turn on their underlings for the sole sake of fighting me was horrifying. This was a tried and true battle junkie and I somehow had to fight them? Fuck my life.

Saying that I did not consider simply sneaking away once Traytar attacked the other demons would have been a lie. The first thing I thought of once they turned away was running the hell away. Knowing that I would simply be chased and hell itself would follow, I could only stay put and wait to face the music.

Just moments after the fighting started the demons were actually trying to run away rather than fight their commander. They could not get far, though, because the commander's reach was long and their speed was incredible. With a tail that was longer than they were tall, even if their claws missed their tail would turn the targets into a meat paste with a simple flick or sweep.

Some of the demons tried to fight back, such as the ram-head Taurian demons, but their strengths in comparison were as weak as regular people and it would take a group of their attacks just to knock off a few percent. After having witness their defense against not only the chaos lances but also also large numbers of demons at a time, I had a new appreciation not only for Traytar's strengths but also my own.

A single Open Handed strike from me could take between one and three percent of its health away while a cluster of Taurian skills had to stack together to take away between one and two. With my swords my damage was much greater but those weapons had somehow ended up buried deep inside the demon. They did not even seem to know that they were there!

Which was one of the reasons why I could not run away, my first trump card and literal growth weapon was still in their midriffs somewhere. If we were to simply ignore the rest of the outposts and go straight to the manor to complete the dungeon somehow, they would probably end up gone forever. I had JUST finished 'sharpening' the damn things!

Despite the fact that I had trouble calling what took place a fight, the fight itself did not take long before it was over. A few hundred demons overall had managed to 'escape' by retreating back behind the outpost walls. All of the others, though, were little more than a few seconds for their closest comrades to run away in.

Much more than a few hundred tried to run away, closer to half of their overall numbers, but those were the only ones who actually succeeded.

By the end of the fight, Traytar's health had not even gone down to thirty percent yet. However, it did not seem like Traytar had to ability to heal during combat because no matter how they clawed, clubbed, or even ate the other demons they never regenerated or healed. Worse, still, was that I did not even have enough time let Spirit Eruption cool down.

Finding myself facing the demon commander once again with a much smaller distance of fifty yards between us, my mind was reeling while seeking adverse or abstract answers for resolving the situation. "Are you ready to fight me, now?" Traytar asks, sounding no less excited than they had been little more than a minute ago.

"Why do you even want to fight me so bad?!" I ask incredulously, finding myself remembering meeting Dew and how I had almost died because of my cordyceps. Somehow, being powerful had once again come back to bite me in the ass and this time it was probably going to tear me a new one.

"Fighting the strong make me strong!" They suddenly roar, raising their already eerily shrill voice to unspeakable volumes which loosened up my joints with vibrations and threatened to bring me to my knees. "Why else would I waste my time with a mortal like you? I want to experience everything you have to offer, I want your fire to burn me until I cannot be burned and I want your blades to cut me until I cannot be cut again! MAKE! ME! POWERFUL!"

This, at least, explained a little about the demon. Their battle junkie status was the key to their power, not only could they stock and serve the skills that they are struck with but taking damage was what raised their defenses. It was basically an innate form of the attrition physical cultivation that I made everybody take part in.

Even though they had taken it to such extreme levels, they were really only half a masochist. They had no choice but to get beat the hell out of. I could not help but suspect, however, that this particular demon actually enjoyed 'getting stronger'.

"So… you just want me to make you stronger?" I ask curiously, hoping that this was the flag I could raise to save myself. "Why do we even need to fight? You know my power and I know yours, you are capable of crushing me in a single blow and yet you left me half alive."

Spurred on by my own words, I decide to indulge in my speculations and continue with, "All the demons we have faced have only really wanted a single thing. They wanted out of here. Whether it is Reptor, Orion, the chaos fiends, or even just the regular demons, they just want to get out of this hole and whet their blades.

"We could end you without fighting you just by going to the manor, the same way you could end me like swatting a fly," I enthuse as the giant demon's breathing begins regulating as if calming down. "There's no need for us to fight if your only goal is to grow stronger and we both know that I offer life as well as death to my enemies when I can afford to. You… killing you would be as wasteful as fighting you. Join me and I will raise you into a being that not even the gods can touch. Even now divinity is nothing to you, my own sword enriched by and with the powers of the gods are in your stomach and you're taking almost no damage at all."

Still wearing the insane smile that I could imagine was actually a permanent mandarin facial feature, Traytar asks, "Is that all you have to offer? 'Join me and become powerful'. That's the same thing everybody has told me since I manifested existence. I'm so strong I could just wait for you puny mortals at the manor and you will never pass me. I know you, too, as a prideful being who goes around bandying about divine secrets. Traveler?"

Fuck.

He not only had the potential scripting to guard the manor against us but he even knew we come back to life. I would not even be surprised if he called me his whetstone the same way I did to the original Trollbone. I had to work on my negotiation skills.

Breaking my own bank in the decision to take a gamble, I literally just say, "How about we make a bet?"

The demon actually narrowed its eyes in a bored glare while I could swear that the corner of its eye and mouth on one side twitched in irritation from my words. I was just making myself look bad at this point. Reaching two clawed fingers into a gaping hole in the side of its stomach, the demon withdraws two gory swords with different glow effects showing through the coating of fluids.

Tossing them to the ground between us, the demon watches the swords bounce and clatter cruelly over the ground toward me while saying, "Weak. Your body will always be your greatest weapon yet you cripple yourself with tools. There, your swords, are you ready now?"

"I appreciate this gesture, but this was only a small part of the bargain I intended," I reply while doing my best to casually shrug. "I would use my strongest healing on you in exchange for my weapons and preparation to display the strongest attack at my disposal. If you survived my strongest attack with more than half of your health at the time of the attack, I would sacrifice three lives of myself in sparring with you to earn your allegiance. If you only just survive my strongest attack, then you accept my Blood Binding."

"Blood Binding?" Traytar suddenly asks with a slight tilt of its head. "What human would be foolish enough to use such a method for contracting demons such as yours and myself? This… I do not think you understand what you're doing."

The descriptions for Blood Binding not only in the skill, results, but even in the description of the familiars I used it on usually said that the participants were made into equals. Even though Cweeper and the rest all followed my orders and deferred to me, they did not technically have to. This was probably what he was talking about.

"I'm not human anymore," I reply with my best attempt at a smiling gaze. "Trust me, after you witness my current ultimate attack you will think twice in the future about the morality of your choices and defying me once we're outside."

Now that my swords were out of the demon's body, they were no longer taking damage every other second but they had managed to drop just below thirty percent in their health bar with no signs of healing on their own. With my First-Aid on another entity being worth around twenty-five percent physical recovery, they would go up to around fifty percent.

If they asked for- "Heal my twice," he says in response to my offered gambit while I was still working math in my head while awaiting his response. "What preparation do you need?"

"Just time, part of the skill I used earlier is part of my strongest attack and I need to wait for several of my skills," I reply honestly, finally reaching down to pick up my swords.

Dropping to the ground then and there in a cross-legged sitting position right in front of me with a brief flicker of movement, Traytar says, "Do everything you need and get it over with. I am impatient to see how you spend your next three lives."

Copying the demon, I simply drop to the ground and attempt meditating and breathing exercises then and there in the hopes that it will let me cool my skills faster while quickly casting First-Aid on the demon. It would only take a couple of minutes normally, but I was honestly stressed out more than a farm animal looking at the slaughterhouse. I could not even keep my breathing steady.

When Spirit Eruption was finally refreshed, I simply bolted up and flew straight up into the air. After reaching the ceiling a couple hundred feet into the air, I leveled out with a slow hovering flapping of my wings to consider all of my options. For a brief moment, the idea of actually fleeing came to my mind and it was hard to push away.

"Help me, Melpomene, you're my only hope," I say while taking a deep and slow breath to steady myself, I decide to run through my applicable skills while adhering my swords together with silk and verbally casting, "Flying Force Elemental Shadowmancy Soulfire Mana Eruption Guillotine Geist THROW!"

By the time the first word left my mouth, I was already flipping down through the air at blurred speeds, dropping almost twenty feet per word toward Traytar who was now on their feet and at the ready. With every word afterward, my sword started glowing vague and then increasingly dramatic magical effects as the different energies of my different masteries, magics, and skills took effect.

Every point of my MP was poured equally into either of my swords that had been reattached along their spines with cordycep silk, causing the weapons to become like a shining star lighting up most of the underground dungeon with myriad colors and flames. When it finally left my hands from the forced skill use at the very end, the looping star held by my flipping body suddenly became a solid streak of brilliance as it shot to the ground like a meteor.

Everything in the world suddenly went dark and quiet a split second later when my sword struck Traytar below, as if life itself was a candle that had just puffed out and reality had stopped existing. All sound vanished as if sucked into the vacuum of space surrounding the black hole that had just consumed existence.

Then, like the Big Bang itself, light existed. It started from a single pinprick point below me before expanding with the force and brilliance of a small nuclear explosion. Everything below me was suddenly a massive dome of energy and light that reach for a hundred feet in the air and hundreds of yards all the way around. The outpost itself simply ceased to exist.

When the explosion of light went out, so too did the rest of the world before my vision started slowly clearing up from blindness like a flash grenade had just gone off in my face. When I could finally see again, everything below me was a shady cloud of dust that stretched above my head back toward the ceiling.

The ground below was a massive crater the exact size of the explosion as if the 'boom' had formed a perfect sphere despite the deep rock that made up the ground.

Standing at the very center of this were my swords, no longer attached but planted almost up to their hilts in the ground while crossing one another. Only a few yards away from my Hauntings lay Traytar the Defiler. Near the top of the demon commander's head as if braced between the points of its horns was its health bar.

Regardless of the fact that their health had been brought up a little over seventy-five percent by my First-Aid, all that remained now was a single sliver of color at the very edge. If I so much as sneezed on this guy, he would be snuffed out like a candle.

*