Ashen weaved through the Narkal beasts with Alice clinging to his back.
Their state was undoubtedly haggard. Ashen was bloody all over with dried crimson layered over fresh red. His uniform was more scab than fabric.
Alice, hands looped around his shoulders and thighs wrapped around his waist, had four of her nine tails hanging limp and lifeless.
Instead of the normal golden color or the highly mana-concentrated azure, they were ash white: completely drained of the stored mana within.
Where the mana went was clear: siphoned by the ravenous human she was currently clinging to.
Ashen utilized every ounce of it to fully display his skills to their current limit and survive amid the forever-unending Narkals, all while protecting the damsel on his back. Though, considering she was the battery to his engine, calling her such wouldn't do her justice.
Ashen knew he couldn't just aimlessly kill the Narkals around him and hope for the best. So the best plan he could come up with on the fly was to move toward the human territories' direction as he killed, hoping reinforcements would arrive and drive the Narkals away.
It had been two days since he'd taken that decision, and four of Alice's tails had been completely depleted from constant mana siphoning.
As he steadily advanced, Vital Drift kept eating more and more mana to substitute for food and water, and Somatic Autonomy optimized everything to keep his body in top shape.
Alice had to starve, however. Thankfully, her demi-human biology and noble bloodline allowed her to go for days without sustenance.
But while Ashen did his absolute best not to let a single blow land on her, she still looked pale all the same.
As they progressed—slowly, but surely—toward the human side, Ashen suddenly heard a whooshing sound.
His body moved before he could even form a thought. When he came to, Alice was suddenly hugged to his chest. He knew he was the one who'd pulled her, but he didn't know why until he felt searing pain on his back.
A poisoned arrow had struck him.
The Great Beast snipers were back.
But if there was anything he'd learned since the start of his trek to the human territory, it was that when Somatic Autonomy was coupled with copious amounts of mana, it was simply unstoppable.
He flooded the skill with more mana, and it responded to his next thoughts: mend and resist.
His flesh mended, and the arrow was pushed out. Next, SA started tweaking his body's immune system to resist the poison. The trial-and-error lasted—and Ashen suffered for it.
His body got heavier, his temperature shot through the roof, and moving felt twice as hard. If it wasn't for the Daydream state, even his thoughts would have numbed.
But that didn't last long. Eventually, SA cracked the poison, and his body's immune system purged it. In the meantime, he was shot three more times, but his instincts seemed to prioritize Alice, so she escaped unscathed.
And as if to prove his claim of SA being unstoppable with enough mana, he guided it to enhance his sixth sense.
The improvement wasn't permanent; that would take an amount of mana he wasn't willing to fork out right now, but it served his purpose.
Now, he could feel the arrows before he could hear them traveling through the air.
His body let involuntary goosebumps moments before being shot, like he was seeing the arrow right before his eyes, though he saw nothing. His body still felt.
Taking the human's natural sixth sense to such a height not only allowed him to dodge those deadly arrows—it allowed him to dodge more effectively and conserve more energy. Something he'd thought impossible to improve after entering the Daydream state coupled with Trance.
Eventually, the arrows stopped as he kept constantly dodging at the last moments. The Demon, watching from the sidelines, must have recognized the futility and ordered them to halt.
And with every titan Great Beast already felled by Morikawa and Rowan, the only available option for the Demon to kill the cancerous human that still lived despite thousands of Narkals attempting to kill him was to flood him with even more Narkals.
The majority of the Narkals were still feeding on corpses, even after two days. No matter how numerous the Narkals were, those were millions of corpses, after all.
Maybe it was also Rowan's unspoken plan to stall for more time by having them all die in the same place and be feasted upon. He knew the Narkals' behavior best from warring against them for so long, so it wouldn't have been far-fetched to think so.
But after two days, some of the Narkals that had had their fill noticed the anomaly that was Ashen.
And like the destructive species that they were, they promptly attacked, not needing the Demon's instructions.
So the pressure on Ashen kept increasing, even after he'd passed the snipers' threat.
Despite that, though, he didn't seem to be stopping. Instead, he seemed to be getting faster and faster in his slaughter.
⛧
⛧
⛧
Three more days passed.
Thrust. Withdraw. Step. Thrust. Withdraw. Step.
The rhythm became monotonous, almost hypnotic. Despite the constant danger, Ashen's mind wandered between real and unreal, consciousness drifting through the dreamscape while his body continued its mechanical dance of death.
In that liminal space, he heard whispers.
They came from within, from his own Sin, wanting to lull him into its embrace.
If you have to do something, then you might as well do it as fast as possible... so that you can go back to doing nothing.
But Ashen only acknowledged the first half.
If I have to do something, then I might as well do it as fast as possible.
The thought took root, growing stronger with each repetition.
If I have to do something, then I might as well do it as fast as possible!
His spear thrust faster. Not through conscious effort, but as if the weapon itself had heard him and agreed.
If I have to do something, then I might as well do it as fast as possible!!
The whispers persisted, trying to add their conclusion, but his own voice in his head was louder. And the more he chanted, the faster his strikes seemed to be. Faster steps. Faster dodges. Faster reactions.
Everything.
His spear thrust began choosing shorter paths with each strike. The blade seemed to know where it needed to be and simply... arrived there, cutting through space with increasing efficiency.
A Narkal lunged from the left. His spear was already there—not because he'd moved it, but because the shortest path between point of origin and target had compressed. The strike took less time, less motion, less everything.
Another beast charged from the right. His body shifted minutely, the spear describing an arc that seemed to bend physics, arriving at the throat before the creature could close half the distance.
[Spear Thrust^ (Masterful-)]
The notification came and went, unnoticed.
Ashen's awareness fractured further—deeper into the dreamscape, deeper into that state where thought and action blurred into a single continuous flow.
The air itself seemed to part for his strikes now. Resistance became a suggestion rather than a law. His spear moved through the world like a hot knife through butter, finding the path of absolute least resistance in each moment.
Instead of the quickest path or the most direct path, it was the shortest path… the one where distance itself contracted to accommodate his will.
If I have to do something, then I might as well do it as fast as possible… so that I can do it once again!!
His Sin's whispers ceased, giving way entirely to his own.
The concept took hold fully now, integrating with his movements until he couldn't tell where technique ended and understanding began. His talent, the one gained at the sixth step, had been quietly guiding him all along, telling him: efficiency is speed, and speed is survival.
But he'd never felt it like this. Never experienced it as a living truth woven into his very being.
Each thrust became a lesson. Each kill, an improvement.
The spear no longer seemed to travel—it just existed at the target. The motion between origin and destination was compressed into something approaching instantaneity through the elimination of wasted space instead of raw speed.
A Narkal's skull split. His spear was withdrawing before the body fell, already positioned for the next strike as if the intervening motion had been edited out of reality.
Another beast died. And another… and another…
The dreamscape and reality overlapped so completely now that Ashen moved through both simultaneously, his body following paths his sleeping mind had already traced, executing strikes his unconscious had already planned.
In the dream, he walked through a forest of frozen enemies, placing his spear tip against each one's vital point with eerily inhuman precision.
In reality, those same enemies fell in perfect sequence, carved down by a weapon that seemed to teleport between targets.
[Spear Thrust^ (Masterful)]
His breathing didn't change. His heart rate stayed steady. The Daydream state and Vital Drift worked in perfect tandem—body at rest even while in motion, healing occurring at triple efficiency, mana cycling through Alice's tails and into his system in an endless loop.
He was becoming a perpetual motion machine of death, powered by stolen mana and driven by a concept that did not acknowledge limitation.
Shortest path. Fastest execution. Immediate repetition.
The mantra was turning into a creed.
A cluster of five Narkals charged as one. His spear blurred—one motion, five deaths. The weapon hadn't stabbed five times; it had stabbed once, and that single strike had somehow split across five targets simultaneously, finding the shortest path to each vital point in the same instant.
The bodies fell in sequence, delayed by the time it took for their brains to register death.
Ashen kept moving, kept killing, his consciousness so deep in the Daydream that he barely registered Alice's grip tightening around him, her remaining two tails flaring briefly with renewed mana as her body instinctively responded to his escalating draw.
In the dreamscape, he saw the pattern of his own technique laid bare—geometric lines connecting source points to marks, each line representing the absolute minimum distance through three-dimensional space.
And then something shifted. The lines began curving.
The spear's trajectory through the dream-space took routes that shouldn't exist, and reality faithfully replicated them.
His thrusts began arriving from impossible angles. A Narkal charging from the front died with a wound that suggested the spear had come from behind. Another attack from his left fell with a throat strike that physics insisted should have missed by three feet.
The shortest path wasn't always the straightest one.
[Spear Thrust^ (Masterful+)]
Ashen's eyes had long since stopped tracking individual targets. He saw flows, patterns, optimal routes through crowds of enemies. His spear followed those routes with the inevitability of water flowing downhill.
If I have to do something, then I might as well do it as fast as possible, so that I can do it once again, and again, and again—
The chant became circular, infinite, feeding back into itself until it was less a thought and more a fundamental principle woven into his existence.
He was Sloth made manifest—so efficient at violence that it approached laziness, killing with such speed and economy of motion that he could return to stillness all the sooner.
Alice's eighth tail began turning ash white.
Ashen didn't notice. He was too deep in the enlightenment, too far gone into that space where understanding transcended knowledge and approached the realm of absolute truth.
The Narkals kept coming, as they always did, but they died so fast now that corpses piled up, creating obstacles that should have slowed him down. Only that, they did not.
His feet found the shortest paths over, around, through the mounds of dead. His body moved with such fluid economy that physics itself seemed to bend, offering him passage through spaces that shouldn't accommodate a human form.
And through it all, his spear thrust—faster than thought, more inevitable than death, following paths through space that minimized distance to the point of absurdity.
Once again.
And again.
And again.
And—
Then, cutting through the monotonous rhythm of death and the whispers of his Sin, he heard something new.
The thunder of horse hooves.