Chapter 161: Countless Obstacles

"DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

The man-snake lunged, and Malik did not wait for him to close the distance.

Devil’s Footsteps ignited beneath his boots and he moved so quickly that he seemed to vanish, golden fire blooming in his wake and leaving two burning hoofprints scorched into the ground where he had stood a heartbeat before.

Then he was behind the creature, Spine Splitter already swinging.

The blade bit into the thing’s back, and it should have cut clean through, the way it always did.

Instead, the flesh split wide and black blood sprayed across the frozen fire beneath them, and then the wound closed, skin knitting itself shut within seconds until the gash might never have been there at all.

Malik’s eyes narrowed.

’Regeneration.’

Nothing in this place ever came easily, and he accepted that without surprise.

The man-snake spun, far faster than a torso of that size had any right to move, and one of his arms split apart at the elbow, a second limb tearing itself loose from the first in a wet unraveling of muscle and bone.

Two arms became four, four hands with four sets of claws, all reaching for Malik at once.

He ducked under the first swipe.

Leaned back from the second.

The third caught his shoulder and tore through fabric and skin, and Malik hissed, though it troubled him far less than it irritated him.

"Ember’s Touch."

Golden fire raced down his arm to his palm, and he drove his burning fist into the creature’s chest.

The flesh sizzled, smoke curled up in thick black ribbons, and the creature screeched and stumbled back, but even that wound had begun to close before Malik’s hand had fully pulled away.

’This is going to take a while.’

He found he did not mind, he had nowhere else to be until he worked out how to leave this Gate, and there was some use in burning off his frustration on something that could survive it.

The creature’s lower half shifted. Its human legs melted into something longer and thicker, the scaled tail of a serpent taking their place, and it rose up on the new form until it towered over Malik by a full head and shoulders.

"Goliath’s Fall."

His body swelled to match it, muscle stacking on muscle as his frame stretched until he stood eye to eye with the creature, his fists grown to the size of boulders, and the ground groaned beneath the sudden weight of him.

The serpent-man struck first this time, his tail whipping around in a wide arc aimed at Malik’s ribs, and Malik caught it.

Both hands wrapped around the thick, scaled muscle and held it there, straining, while it thrashed against his grip like a living thing trying to escape a trap, which was exactly what it was, and exactly the difficulty.

He squeezed.

CRRRRRACK.

Bone split beneath the scales and the tail went limp in his hands for three seconds before it detached at the base, the creature screaming as black ichor sprayed from the stump and a new tail began forming in its place.

’Seriously?’

Malik hurled the severed tail aside, and it struck the frozen fire and dissolved into smoke, as though the Corruption that made it could not survive long outside its host.

That seemed worth remembering for later, though it was of no use to him now.

The creature came at him again, faster than before, panic bleeding into its movements.

It clearly disliked losing pieces of itself even when it could grow them back, which made sense, since pain was pain no matter how quickly a wound closed.

Six more arms split out of its back in a spray of gore, each ending in claws longer than Malik’s forearm, and all of them lashed out at once.

There were too many to dodge and too many to block, so Malik let three of them connect.

Claws raked across his chest, his side, and his thigh, lines of fire opening across his skin as blood ran hot and fast, and he gritted his teeth through it and used the opening to drive Spine Splitter into the creature’s open mouth.

The blade sank deep, and the thing gurgled and thrashed while Malik twisted the sword and carved a wide arc through whatever passed for its throat.

It should have died there, and it did not.

The wound sealed around the blade itself, flesh growing over steel like a plant closing around its prey, and Malik felt the pull and felt the sword begin to lock in place.

He yanked it free before it could seal.

The creature reeled back, and for the first time Malik saw something close to fear cross its half-human face.

He took some satisfaction in that, since fear made a fighter sloppy and a sloppy fighter was easy to kill, but this creature was not dying, at least not in the way that others did.

’Alright. I need a different approach.’

He stepped back and shrank out of Goliath’s Fall, his body returning to its usual frame, because there was no sense spending Rukh on that form while he worked the problem out.

Malik watched the creature mend itself and studied the pattern of it. The regeneration was never instant, and it took a second, perhaps two, for a cut to seal or a severed limb to begin growing back, and a second was enough to work with.

If he could land enough wounds inside that single window, faster than the body could close them all, then the healing would have to fall behind.

Devil’s Footsteps.

Malik moved.

Golden fire traced behind him in overlapping arcs, hoofprints burning into the frozen ground as he circled the creature at a speed that blurred his own outline.

Step. Strike. Step. Strike.

A dozen times in the span of two breaths Spine Splitter opened gash after gash across the creature’s body, and he never lingered long enough in one place for it to answer.

The serpent-man spun in confusion and lashed out at afterimages, striking nothing but smoke and fire, and the wounds piled up faster than they could close.

Black blood sprayed in every direction and pooled across Zamharir’s frozen flame, and the creature’s screeching turned ragged and desperate as its voice cracked under the strain of keeping itself whole.

Malik slowed for a moment, only long enough to judge the damage.

The creature was still standing and still regenerating, though more slowly now, its chest heaving with effort and patches of exposed muscle showing where the skin had failed to knit back together.

’Almost.’

He needed something that did more than cut, something that consumed.

Scorpion’s Sting.

The golden flame along Spine Splitter’s edge shifted and darkened, curling into something black and hungry, a fire that did more than burn flesh and devoured it down to nothing, leaving no scrap behind for the regeneration to work with.

Malik lunged.

The creature tried to dodge and threw another set of arms up in defense, but Devil’s Footsteps carried him faster than its panicked reflexes could track.

The black blade punched clean through its chest, and this time, when he pulled it back out, there was no wound left to close.

There was only a hole, smoking and black-edged and empty.

The creature staggered, its remaining arms flailing weakly as they searched for something to hold, and then its serpent legs gave out and the massive body collapsed sideways onto the frozen fire with a wet, final thud.

Malik stood over it, breathing hard, blood running freely from the claw marks across his chest and side.

The creature’s human half stared up at him, and for the first time since the fight began it looked less like a monster and more like a man, dying and afraid.

"Your son... he died the same way."

The thing’s mouth opened, but no words came, only a rattling breath.

"Did he suffer like you?"

Malik asked.

"Or did I make it quick?"

There was no answer, and he knew that it hardly mattered, because he already knew what he would have heard either way.

He raised Spine Splitter one last time, black fire still curling along its edge, and brought it down.

The creature stopped moving.

Slowly its body began to dissolve, the way the severed tail had dissolved earlier, black smoke rising off its skin until nothing remained but a damp stain on the frozen flame and a faint, lingering stench of sulfur.

Malik exhaled.

His wounds were already closing, his own healing finally catching up now that the fight was over, flesh knitting itself back together far more slowly than under Safira’s magic but steadily all the same.

He looked down at his hands and found them still shaking, just slightly, from adrenaline or exhaustion or some mixture of the two that he could no longer tell apart.

’That was closer than it should have been.’

A Fallen human with a Crowned Demon’s blood in him had been turned into something that could outlast nearly anything Malik threw at it. If he had not worked out the timing of the regeneration, and if he had not held Scorpion’s Sting in reserve for the most opportune moment...

He did not like finishing that thought, so he let it go unfinished.

Malik sheathed Spine Splitter and wiped the black blood from his face with the back of his hand, then turned to look at the branch stretching endlessly above him.

One obstacle was behind him, and countless more were waiting.