Chapter 495: The Verdict of Titans

I gripped the lightning in my palm and condensed it into a spear of blue-white fire so dense that it looked solid. The Death Stone drank the death around me, and the spear grew heavier, and then it began to burn red.

A dull thumping sound came out of it, as if I had shoved my head into a pool of water, and the spear flashed, and for a moment it was as if I was holding a spear made of a million shrieking skulls. It flashed again and vanished from my hand, crossing the mile between me and the nearest Titan in less than a heartbeat.

It struck the Titan in the centre of its chest, and the Abyssal shield that had shrugged off my Heaven’s Verdict shattered like glass. The spear carried on through, punching through chitin and flesh and bone, and the Titan looked down at the hole in its chest with an expression of genuine surprise.

I was moving before the spear had finished piercing it. I got my left hand into the hole the lightning had made and my right on its shoulder, and then I pulled in two directions with a roar.

Its hands came up to stop me, and it was too weak. The hole in its chest began to tear down towards its stomach, and its insides came out in a flood that would have filled a lake.

It reached out to me with one shaking hand. "You..."

"Are dead," I said, and all the lightning in my body converged on my arms and ignited, and I stood in a burning spray of the demon’s guts up to my knees and wrenched the two halves further apart until the spine let go with a crack like thunder.

It tried to regrow. I could feel its flesh squirming around my fingers, and then the Death Stone pulsed in my fist and the reaching stopped. The eyes all over its body went dark, and I felt an explosion of lifeforce pour out of it into the stone.

For a moment I was frozen in place as a chill filled my veins from the sheer volume of essence pouring into my body from the dead Titan. Then a harsh scream resounded in my consciousness, filled with rage, and the flood ceased.

[ Stored Essence: 1,452,906 → 1,742,106 ]

I shuddered in shock. For a moment it had been as if I was connected to an endless ocean of demon essence, before it was cut off, and in that moment I had gained almost three hundred thousand.

I was in a battle, though, and being distracted like that was a mistake.

A massive blow slammed into my back, and I felt my spine break in two places and something in my hip tear completely free. A second Titan caught my right arm and broke it backwards at the elbow, and another put its fist through my stomach and out the other side, and for a moment I was lifted off the ground on the end of its arm with my own blood coming down on its shoulders in a red rain.

I was bleeding red, and the sight of it shocked me out of my daze.

Twisting around like a serpent, I took hold of the head of the Titan whose hand was inside my body, and I pushed my thumbs into the eyes in its face and kept pushing until they went through.

When I could push no further, I twisted my hands and tore the skull in half along the line my thumbs had made. The Titan collapsed, and I fell with it.

The Law of Flesh put my spine back while I was still falling. It was slower than it should have been, and it hurt more than it should have, and I did not care, as another flood of essence threatened to shatter my mind in bliss.

[ Stored Essence: 1,742,106 → 1,955,480 ]

The rush from killing lesser demons was nothing. What I was feeling from the deaths of these Titans was almost transcendental, and if I had not tasted something like it in the past when I killed the Thulls, my mind might have come undone, and I would have become a raving lunatic whose only goal was to find more demons to kill.

I was aware that my status screen was vibrating harshly. I had set it to display only the essence I was gaining, and I knew instinctively that Demon Slayer, my second Title, had just changed in some way.

I would have loved to look at it. I could also be dead in the next moment if I lost focus, so I pushed it aside and went back to surviving and killing.

∞

I surged up and grabbed the nearest Titan by the neck, and broke that neck over my knee as I rose, and used the body as a club on the Titans around me until it came apart in my hands.

These Titans could heal from injuries that should have killed them in the blink of an eye, and the Death Stone took that privilege away from them.

I was in the same position. I could come back from almost any injury, and if my heart and my head were destroyed, I would die almost instantly.

In fact I was in more danger than they were, since I was fighting multiple opponents who could reach either. Fighting several of them at once was difficult enough. Without the advantage of my godlike tenacity, it was an almost impossible affair.

Almost.

The next several moments were an unforgiving clash of flesh and magic, as our bodies shattered the earth and the heavens for miles and we trampled lesser demons into ash as we fought.

I lost most of my left arm to the teeth of a Titan and got it back and lost it again, and the third time it grew back wrong, with the bones in the forearm crossed, and I set them straight against my own ribs and kept going. I was used to injuries like that, and I knew it would fix itself properly given enough time.

It was nowhere near the worst of what I took. One Titan got its claws under my jaw and took half my face off, and I would have lost my head if my jaw had not flown out of my face. I killed it with the Death Stone pressed into the roof of its mouth and a bolt of Lightning Edict written directly onto my own palm, and its head emptied out through the ears.

My legs were taken out from under me by a blast of demon magic, and two Titans stamped on my chest until my ribs were gravel. For a moment the pain was so great that I was almost tempted to die. It would have been so easy, and I knew that choosing that path was accepting Death, and it would be harder to refuse her touch if I let myself go.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, with the two of them pounding me into the earth, I wrote Break into the ground beneath all three of us and dropped us into the dark, and only one of us climbed out.

[ Stored Essence: 1,955,480 → 2,388,944 ]