I was standing, but I nearly fell. My body was broken beyond repair; it was a body that had been burned, sliced, and chewed on. Any blood that emerged from the depths of my broken bones dripped to the ground from hundreds of wounds around my body.

My insane Endurance was finally beginning to run out.

Above me, the horned demon looked down with fiery eyes, and I glimpsed disgust and enjoyment inside its gaze.

It hated me because I had no soul to burn, and yet it enjoyed the brutality of my actions.

I was about to die, and yet I raised my right hand anyway.

"Come on," My voice came out as a croak. Half my throat had been torn open at some point. I did not remember when. "Come on. I’ve got one more."

A demon hissed and lunged at me, and I caught it by the throat, and I squeezed.

The demon thrashed, its legs tore at my stomach, and its maws closed on my ribs. I heard my ribs creak and felt one of them crack, but I did not let go.

I squeezed until my hand closed, and then I squeezed more, and the demon’s head separated from its body in a spray of dark fluid that coated me from scalp to navel.

"I tire of this farce."

The voice of the horned demon was the only warning I had before a claw the size of my torso came out of the darkness without any sound, and it closed around my waist, and then I was lifted off the ground.

I looked down to see that a claw of shadow, the size of a wagon, connected to the horned demon above.

The shadow claw brought me to the face of the horned demon, and it grinned, its mouth opened to speak, and I punched it in the face.

My broken fist connected with its lower jaw, but the demon did not flinch; its smile vanished, and its teeth came down on my neck like a lover.

There was a moment of incredible pressure, and then a sound I had never heard before and will never hear again, and then the world tilted sideways.

I was on the ground. No, I was near the ground looking at the ground from an angle that did not make sense.

The charred grass was very close to my eyes. Why was the grass so close?

Oh. My head was on the ground. My body was somewhere else.

The horned demon had bitten my head off.

For all its intelligence, it was still nothing but a savage demon beneath.

I understood that my neck had been severed at the third vertebra and my brain had approximately four seconds of oxygen left, maybe less.

This was it, I was dead.

My headless body was still held by the demon’s shadow, but my corpse did something that should have been impossible... it moved.

My body did not need to breathe or see or think. It only needed to finish the fight.

One arm was useless, but the other arm was still raised in a fist, and it punched the demon in the face a second time.

The demon’s head snapped back, more from surprise than pain, and my body punched its face again and again.

Cursing in anger, the demon bent to bite my body’s arm off, and its teeth closed on the shoulder and tore, but my body did not stop.

There was nothing left in it except the last command that the lightning had encoded into every fiber before my head was torn off.

"Fight!"

My body kept throwing punches, even as the demon savaged it with its teeth.

Mortal Shell ensured that as long as I had any connective tissue inside my body, I was still moving. My arms had already been reduced to bones and mangled flesh, causing one punch I threw to tear a gash below one of the demon’s eyes.

It threw its head back in shock, a shriek of surprise and pain emerging from its mouth, but that left its throat exposed, and my broken fist connected with its throat, and the demon gagged in surprise and pain.

My body drew back its hand, but Mortal Shell, my Endurance, and the last dregs of Lightning Resonance’s structural reinforcement ran out at the same moment, and my body stopped.

The demon watched for a long second, breathing hard, one of its lower eyes leaking black blood. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

My body was motionless, with its arm still raised, broken fist clenched together, and headless.

The demon’s shadow finally released my body, and it fell to the ground and no longer moved.

The horned demon floated down and approached my body and prodded it, and received no response, before it turned away.

But I was still conscious. My head was on its side, and I could not move my jaw or even blink. I could see the demon walking back toward the ridge before it took off into the red sky.

I could see my body lying in a heap of torn flesh and broken chitin, one arm still raised in a fist that would never close again.

The warmth was gone. The pain was gone. Everything was gone except the sight of demon corpses scattered around my body like offerings.

"So, you are more fragile than I thought."

The darkness came.

It was not cold, and I did not feel pain. It was just the absence of everything that had been before, had just been snatched from me: the lightning, the pyramid, the staff, the warmth of demons, the fear that I was not enough, and the hope that soon I would be.

I should be dead, but my mind was too clear to easily fade away, and I knew that the darkness I sank into was not empty.

A soul would fear this darkness, but I did not.

The darkness was waiting, and somewhere in the distance, I heard the sound of the loop beginning again.

I will be back... I will always be back.