Chapter 163: Demon Wave

The first enemy rose before Malik had time to think too hard about it, a hand bursting up from the ocean’s surface a dozen feet away, its fingers curling into a fist and snapping open again as it grasped at the air as though trying to catch something invisible.

Its skin was pale and waterlogged and swollen in places where skin had no business swelling, and it was wrong in a way that made his instincts cry out before his mind had caught up to what he was seeing.

Then another rose, and another, and within seconds a dozen had broken the surface at uneven distances, all of them moving with the same groping hunger.

Further out, among the masks, a figure split.

Vaguely humanoid and vaguely demonic, it tore itself apart down the middle.

It simply separated into two halves that stayed joined at the torso by a thin bridge of flesh, and each half began to move on its own, like conjoined twins who had never learned to coordinate.

Malik watched the first one take a staggering, experimental step.

Its left half went one way, and its right half went the other, and the connecting flesh stretched and strained but held.

There were more of them, five and then ten, and he stopped counting once the masks along the ocean’s edge began splitting open and more twin-demons crawled free from inside them.

He exhaled slowly.

"Of course."

It could never have been only one or two things to deal with.

This realm, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure, was crawling with enemies he had no context for, no experience fighting, and no idea how to kill.

He raised Spine Splitter anyway.

The hands lunged first.

Malik ducked beneath the nearest one and carved a clean line through its wrist, a cut that should have taken the limb off entirely.

The hand did not bleed or slow, and it dragged itself across the surface on its remaining fingers, twitching with the same hungry rhythm.

’Another one that will not stay cut.’

There was no time to test theories here as he had with the snake-man in Hell.

The Split-Demons were closing fast, their halves moving in opposite directions to flank him from both sides, and their jerky, unsynchronized movements made them nearly impossible to predict.

One half would lurch forward while the other hung back, and then the pattern would reverse without warning.

Golden fire bloomed around Malik’s fist.

"Ember’s Touch."

He drove his burning hand into the nearest half, and it shrieked, and both halves shrieked together in perfect unison even though only one had been struck.

That told him how deeply the two bodies were bound, however far they stretched apart.

More hands rose around him, and more masks split open, and more Twin-Demons crawled out and stretched their new limbs.

The purple lanterns above pulsed brighter and faster, their violet light flickering in time with the chaos beneath them, as though they were drawing strength from the fight and from the fear and from whatever Malik’s presence was stirring up.

He liked that no better than the rest.

Malik spun with Spine Splitter trailing golden fire and cut through three hands in a single sweeping arc, and all three kept moving, their severed fingers twitching against the dark water.

’They do not die from cutting nor fire. I need something else.’

He could not see what, and he had no time to look.

A Split-Demon lunged from the left while its other half came in low from the right, and Malik leapt back and landed with a splash in the shadow-water as both sets of claws swept through the place where he had stood.

Humble as he was, Malik was good, and he knew it.

He had survived things that should have killed him a dozen times over on the way down, and he had fought through places worse than the Abyss and Hell on stubbornness alone.

But this was not a fight he was built to win, not yet anyway.

The hands breached the surface faster than he could track, dozens of them now, and the Split-Demons had doubled as well, tearing themselves apart with every passing second as though the realm were making enemies faster than he could measure the threat.

Step. Cut. Step. Cut.

Step. Cut.

He knew the feeling of being overwhelmed well enough to recognize it at once, that cold certainty settling in his gut that no amount of skill or Will would carry him out of this one cleanly.

A hand closed around his ankle, and he kicked it loose with fire scorching its grip, but three more took its place immediately, crawling up his legs and his waist, cold and wet and far stronger than anything without visible muscle should have been.

A Split-Demon’s claws raked across his back, and Malik grunted and twisted away, his blade cutting a wide arc that bought him perhaps two seconds before the gap closed again.

’Dammit, I might need to...’

He did not finish the thought.

Thump!

The world opened beneath him.

A black hole tore itself into being under his feet with no warning, only a sudden absence where solid footing had been.

Malik had time to register the sensation of falling before gravity took hold and pulled him down into the dark, and the hands, the Demons, the masks, and the endless ocean all fell away above him.

The ocean vanished.

Malik tumbled through nothing for what felt like no time at all and far too long at once.

Then there was light.

It was a harsh light, carrying the smell of blood and something burning nearby.

Malik was falling, this time through clouds, thick and gray and soaking wet, the kind that clung to his skin and left droplets running down his face as he tumbled through them.

He let himself go, blinking up at a sky that was, at last, only an ordinary sky.

There was no red and no throne, and no giant gazing out over an impossible ocean, only gray clouds and thick, acrid smoke rising somewhere close.

But, of course, it wasn’t peaceful.

He heard screaming in the very far distance.

It was no longer the synchronized shriek of the Split-Demons or the grasping sounds of the waterlogged hands.

This was human screaming, panicked, desperate, and painfully familiar.

The cause of that was quite familiar as well.

While he didn’t see them, he was sure.

A Demon wave was upon him.