This pain had been who he was too, and it was this pain, he recognised, that had rid him of anything else; all of it; the thing – whatever it was, that wasn't this separation. That connection.

This was the only difference between him and the demons he even now – was –slaying, in repetition, back and forward, avoiding talons sideways glanced off the flurry of pustules containing the weird biles of – the – demon things.

Forward again as the talons retracted, he cleaved through the already flying neck and shoulder column, head obviously on top – off to the side flung thud-scattered into the insane bubbling/acid pile already burning in infinite effulgence.

Separating himself only technically from demons – was the thing he operated in this repetition.

– The King in Grids.

This was the demon mentality, this was the demon world, over and over and over again, repetition in isolation; this was the difference between him and them – no difference between him and them.

– No difference.

They did not act in concert; they were not coordinated at all – and this was in fact how he could despatch 147, 456, no longer 18 they'd been 294, 912, no longer 18 they'd been 589,824, reality rewriting itself again in the backward future – because it was at one and the same time – this – in separated cells of semi-artificial-consciousness.

Back and forward, a flurry of pustules fell to the earth like demonic rain, sideways avoided; he stepped forward producing the flick of the talons, back/forward the second retracted and – cleaved through the already flying neck and shoulder column – in repetition – because he was a demon too.

Just the other side of the wall; just the other side of the fence, just the other side of that arbitrary conscious barrier – that – maybe once had meant something – but now systemically had been reduced to nothing more than perspective – this was what he fought, this thing that –

He didn't know beside that identity was fighting to be reborn – and he didn't; he didn't think anyway – that he even wanted; he could even suffer that because –

– that was the pain; the pain that here was his strength but there, in that realm in which he knew, was his ruin: Was the thing that took him to a place worse than non-existence – and this was the one concept brought with him, something rather obvious in the no-history world he saw/was before him.

the King in Grids and Mind –

The Fake Soul that Operated Flesh in Repetition; stood in the final pile of guts and organs of the army of demons he'd slain. Breathing now. Breathing through his mouth exhausted. A momentary flash of exterior perspective:

A small talon cut on his face, bled, a couple bruises too on his only flesh; exposed. Helm; red beard, sanguine red, in blood. He was massive, and built for this – a giant image of a King. He breathed.

The grids of the plane that had fallen upon reality, these pulsed with a biological rhythm; flashes of light/of colour, played across them in unidentifiable snatches merely to indicate their presence, merely to indicate that they were there. The floor – that sand, that was only dried blood – it was only the powder form to which it had been reduced, of these demons.

Where he was.

You could call it a corridor.