Avoiding even seeing, avoiding even thinking, he merely acted out a mind that didn't think but – reacted. He couldn't – please don't – count those left, didn't want to, didn't want to think of a moment in which there – no – weren't 18 literal demon fake-soul operated dirt-cunts he'd have to –

Slay!

he could see the lies in the eyes and the fakeness that was supposed to operate behind there – he could see that insanity that was the absence of reality and only the fake – something in the eyes that wasn't real that merely operated.

That thing merely replaced, merely operated; reduced and intentionally destroyed and intentionally ruined flesh-bodies

that the things inside them couldn't care for.

Because hating, they couldn't continue to maintain in anything like a healthy response to nature, existence, reality, anything else because only destruction – only hatred – only a religious hatred of what they were and what they were derived from fuelled them now.

The sacks of powders and biles that they sputtered – these had reduced such creatures to the automatons he fought. Repetition sacks, repeating the same moves. Repeating. Always repeating. Only ever. Repeating.

– Reacting now only to specific patterns of engagement; cues already memorised he – stepped forward for a taloned swing of the thing in his direction, and forward again; and a clean hack through separating its neck and shoulder column from the rest.

/step-back/forward – he leapt back; avoiding the spat pustules that combined with the blood elicited chemical/electrical explosions:

a swipe of talons, and a step forward, step back, out the range momentarily, axe in one massive power-swing, though the entire neck and shoulder column of the demon in front him.

Others; circled now; demons – the same patterns, awaiting in a sense, waiting now, to be ripped apart and destroyed; firing merely, those in back, the pustule balls that he recognised. Even this had a simple repetitive pattern: a three-way sequence he memorised.

Stepping out the way of the demon talons, out of that strange pattern, he dived forward again just as the talons retracted – the demon before him – and swung a massive power-swing through the entire neck and shoulder column of the dirty demon organ bag – this one, this current one before him.

There was now a pile of neck and shoulder and head columns piling up over the side by the grid-wall. Their flying further beyond that, after he struck them off, was prevented by that impediment.

Circling back and forward again taking into account the talons; the flurry of organ pustule balls released by the swarm behind in that moment, he stepped forward, tempted the talons, stepped back, and once retracted he was – forward and cleave:

through another neck and shoulder column: flying through the air in a streak of ruptured pustules; that combined with the powders seeping out of the other neck and shoulder columns by the edge of the grid over there.

This last incendiary elicited a great explosion of all the gathered powders and dried out demon flesh and separated neck and shoulder columns. Back and behind and avoiding the shot flurry, he tempted further talons, scratching the empty air he'd backed out of.

Forward again, into it he stepped; the second they retracted: swinging. – This current flying neck and shoulder column – he swung through – met the already liquefying acid pile of former neck and shoulder columns, burning and bubbling up and boiling over again over there, he thought, seeing it, in that chemical, electric fire, blazing on the dried out weird demon powders, and acid pustules.

Back in the rhythm with new talons, the King avoided them as they flew out in the same memorised patterns. He was the same thing as the quickly reducing swarm of demons, back even behind this; he was a fake-soul too. He was merely one of these creatures that operated in its own; same repetitive, rhythm.

The only difference he was singular, he was separated – and this was the core of his identity – whatever this was; the core of who he was now. He realised, in fact, that this was the one thing he didn't know, because the limited continuous history of his consciousness, was only an accumulation of this memorisation of the rhythms that his flesh operated under.

He fought the demons, stepping back, cleaving off neck and shoulder columns of a swarm that continued to grow in geometric progression; no longer 18, they'd been 36;