“You know, this wasn’t funny the first time you did this and it is not funny now.” Nur uttered, his lungs crushed under the blade of the sword. The sword was coated with magic, so even with the power of witch’s contract; he still was going to die.

“What you speak of, you demon fiend! Where is the witch? I know you are the one who took her!” The knight in ordinary looking armor bellowed. He thrust his sword harder, making Nur grimace from pain.

“I thought I would get used to this, this happened over twenty times by now, but I still had to get caught by you guys, I am pathetic, right?”

“Answer me now!” the sword now up to the hilt in Nur’s chest.

“Why such anger? You are not the one being skewered here, so might as well have a civil conversation…”

“You will tell me everything I want to know, or else I will…”

“Thrust you dagger in your left pocket into my eye and then slash my throat? We have been there before, but you wouldn’t remember, considering the circumstances…”

“Did you read my mind? Perhaps I can cut off your head and have it converted into magic device.”

“What a barbaric practice. I thought knights were supposed to be better than that.”

“We are better than your kind.”

“My kind?” Nur calmly muttered with his last breath.

“Demons should know that their place is to be buried underneath the ground.” He proceeded to stab Nur through the throat, now Nur’s body stopped moving. Life has left his body, but the his expression was still hauntingly solemn, as if he did not fear death that was cast upon him so suddenly.

* * *

“Well, this is not as fun as I was hoping it would be” Nur muttered. He was tied up by the ropes, hanging upside down, tied by his legs to a rope connected to a thick branch a tree. In a sense, he was a human punching bag.

“Fun? The blood will go down your brain and then you will start bleeding out of ya mouth, still think it’s fun?” the knight said in mocking way.

“It beats being eaten any day of the week” Nur said with a smile.

Nur ended up being caught by a group of twenty knights, who now wanted to torture him. They found out he was a demon by throwing a spear at him. Seeing how the effect of contract turned his body to dust the moment the spear touched him, they quickly realized he was a demon.

Now each one raised his sword and proceeded to stab Nur countless times.

“Stop! Stop It! Stop!” Nur screamed in pain, but the knights kept going, and when Nur’s sight started to fade away, a merciful knight proceeded to behead him in a swift fashion.

***

“Speak, you half-wit!” Now Nur was tied by his legs and hands to two horses, unable to move, the horses were about to move in separate directions.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know!” Nur desperately pleaded the knights.

“Where is he? Where is your leader, the Demon King?”

“How the hell should I know?!”

The horses started to move, his hands and legs now tore off, dematerializing into dust before rematerializing as his limbs, he fell down on the ground.

“The fact that you are a demon is enough of a proof that you are an ally of Demon King, now tell the truth, where is your master? Answer me!” He proceeded to slice Nur’s right arm off, Nur screamed in pain. “You still have two legs and an arm, unless you want to lose those as well, tell me what I want to know now!”

“I never even met the Demon King!”

“Wrong Answer.” Another slice, now reduced to just one arm and leg, Nur plummeted down on the ground.

“I really don’t know! Honest! I am not even sure why I am here, I was kidnapped by Chronos! Please, you have to believe me! It is not my fault, it is not my fault!” Now Nur was reduced to sobbing.

“Enough of you. If you are of no use to me, there is only one thing to do.” The knight turned towards the others. “Off With His Head!”

Just like that Nur lost his head, in more ways than one.

***

Nur Finnerman regretted letting Sariu remove her contract from his body when she left him. Aida ended up being killed by the Knight of Night, the same man who killed them in the previous loop. Now he was face to face with the Knight of Night himself.

“Why? Why do you keep standing in my way? What have I ever done to deserve a reaper like you to hunt me down?” Nur shouted.

“This is the fate of Demon Kind, to be cut down and put out of its misery. I only do this for my duty of protecting humanity, nothing more. Do not think I enjoy inflicting pain upon my victims, that is the job of a torturer.”

“Do you think I will just give up here just because you are here? I will fight you as many times as it takes, even if it takes me a thousand tries, just beating you once will be worth it!” Nur lunged at him with a sword he stole from burnt corpse, left there after Aida’s battle with Knight of Night.

Knight of Night just stepped forward and punched Nur in the gut with such impact that Nur’s mouth ended up spitting blood.

“Don’t presume yourself to be capable of a feat your body is unable to accomplish. There is a thin line between confidence and suicide, and you might be on your way to cross it.”

“Why did you kill her?! She did nothing to deserve this!” the severed head of a dragon lay there, the humongous body was lying ten meters behind it.

“Anything that can threaten humanity must be eliminated. The witch and the Dragon had to be exterminated. You are a human yourself, you must understand what it means to protect what you cherish, do you not? Don’t tell me you don’t understand?”

“Like hell I don’t understand” Nur lunged at him with a jab, but the Knight of Night simply stepped back and with a swift movement punched Nur on the back.

“Even if you want to defeat me, you are too weak. Even with the strongest ambition, if your body is weak, then you are powerless.”

“Then if you are the strongest, why the hell do you care about anything? Why couldn’t you just leave them alone, why did you have to kill them?”

“It is my duty and my obligation. You are mistaken to assume I am the strongest. The one who holds that title is the Knight of Light, not me.” Now his tone seemed somewhat sad.

“They were nice guys, they cared, they loved, they cherished. They were no less human than the ones you are protecting!”

“But regardless, they were not human. That is the unchangeable fact. I am the sword that strikes any that threatens humanity. Do you even think of the possibilities of what could happen if witch and dragon were to cause uproar within a city? Countless will die, innocents, young, children. All of the ones who had some kind of future will be killed. Now, do you think those two had a bigger fate than the entire population of this city? I certainly believe not. I kill two in order to save thousands.”

“What a hypocrite you are, Knight of Night, Killing someone in order to prevent someone’s death? In the end, you do kill someone, you are just as vile and evil as the demons you claim to despise.”

“I will not deny that. But as humans, we have to be united against them, not fight among ourselves. Abandon your flawed ways and join me, humankind needs all the help it can get to survive against the demons and monsters.”

“Then let me tell you this, I am not a human. I am a demon! To hell with your joining you offer, I refuse, I refuse, hear me? Just go to hell!”

“I see. In that case. Goodbye.” With a flash of darkness, Nur’s body now was cut vertically into two. Two halves now split right open before falling apart, resembling a peeled fruit with a bloody pulped inside.

***

“Why the hell those knights are so obsessed with hunting us down?” Nur said as soon as he woke up. This was the twenty second time he was waking up here, inside the forest, on top of a tree; his two companions, the witch and the dragon were there as well.

“UAAGH! Good morning!” Aida said with a beaming smile.

“Morning” Sariu said meekly.

After having a breakfast (Nur and Sariu hunted down some rabbits while Aida cooked them over fire), Nur discussed his plans with them.

“Like I said yesterday, we must get jobs in order to cover our current expenses, it has to be enough for us to get out of the highly populated region of this kingdom, far enough that there wouldn’t be any garrisons of knights there.”

“Nur, why do you wish to travel there? Is there anything specific you have in mind?”

“I do. I have two goals, accomplishing either one requires us to move from here.”

“What are your goals?”

“Finding where my master is or finding a deity named Chronos, either way I will get what I want.”

“Did you say Chronos? As in the Goddess of Time Chronos, the one worshipped by followers of Yakit Cult?” Sariu fearfully asked.

“Exactly.”

“Then, count me out. I do not wish to be involved with the gods that would kill me on the spot.”

“If you leave us, will the contract still be valid?”

“If I am sufficiently far away from you, the effect of contract will disappear.”

“Then, in that case, tell me, where do you hope to go if you leave us?”

Nur knew that in the previous loops, after being told of his goal of finding Chronos, Sariu has left his group, but she was ambushed and killed just two days afterwards, which caused Nur to die as well due to the effect of the contract. He also knew that a sufficient distance in order to nullify a contract is about half way across the city, not a distance a single witch could cover in two days. In the last few loops her leaving them jeopardized his goals, so in the subsequent eight loops he had her remove the contract which made it easy for knights to kill him. In the last twenty loops, he kept the contract, but he had asked Aida to accompany Sariu in order to ensure her safety, he forgot the key point- his own safety. No matter what he did by himself, he would get caught by the knights and either tortured for information or killed on the spot. The contract was only good for non-mana damage, and many knights other than the newbies knew how to coat their swords with mana. He tried many things, disguises, trickery, hiding, confrontation, and in the last loop he even managed to track down the knights and successfully avoided them, only for the last knight to find him and kill him, resulting in him being here. Of course he was not going to tell them this, the one thing he knew that had to be done differently in this loop- he had to have those two with him, for by himself he had an insured death waiting for him.

“For now, listen to what I have got to say. In two days, knights will find you and surely enough they will kill you, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, if you go away by yourself, your death is guaranteed.”

“How Can you be so sure of that?! You are no prophet, nor a person possessing Supremacy! How would you know! You are just a demon!”

“Then in that case, Aida, tell her if I am lying to her.” Nur now made eye contact with Aida, whose slitted eyes focused on him before turning to Sariu.

“He is not lying. Everything he has told you is complete truth. Somehow.”

“Thanks Aida.”

“But Nur, can you explain how do you know this?”

“Simple observation really. After we got Sariu out of the prison cell, they are surely searching for her within the entire city. I dare say the knights are skilled trackers, if they find none inside the city, they are likely to start searching within the forest, and going outside the city is not an option either. There are demons there.”

“Aren’t you a demon? Are they not your comrades? Wouldn’t they welcome you?”

“Nope. I don’t have comrades. Besides those demons will kill me the minute they see me, for all they know I am a human.” When both Sariu and Aida looked at Nur with confused expression, Nur muttered. “I was unlucky enough to be born a demon with no horns, so blame my bad fortune, ha ha ha.”

“That aside, how do you know exactly when they will arrive?”

“It is because we are being tailed, even at this moment. They are only a few miles behind us, if they get confused by the lack of tracts due to rain, it will take them at least two days to find us.”

“But it did not rain for all week.” Sariu countered.

“Look at the clouds above.” Nur Pointed at the sky. Both Aida and Sariu looked up. “The clouds are gathering together and in a few hours the rain will pour all over the place, erasing the tracts we left behind, confusing the knights following us. We need to act first, so that the knights will not stand a chance.” To be honest, Nur only knew it was going to rain because he experienced it first hand, he clearly remembered being beaten into a pulp in the mud while the rain was falling, in that loop he made a horrible mistake of crossing paths with a knight. The result was not pretty.

“I can just breath flames upon them and we will be done right there.” Said Aida.

“That would be nice, but as far as I know, they have two knights capable of killing even a dragon. I saw them only once, but there is a knight wearing armor of pure white and a knight of Night. Both of them are too strong.”

“But even for a dragon, I am strong!”

“Are you sword and spear proof? If I need to remind you, the sate I found you in suggests otherwise.”

“Hmm, Meanie.” Aida muttered.

“So what do you want us to do?”

“Well, we will find quick money within the city, but before that we need to make sure the knights following us are handled, so, anyone up for digging a trap?”

***

“Wow, I did not think that it would just take a single day for the catch to be like this. Nope, this is far beyond my expectation.”

“Get us out of here! There is water underneath here, we will drown if this keeps going on!”

“And what exactly your death would mean to me? In fact, what you being alive to me would even matter? I can just leave you to die there and nothing happens to me, that’s how I like it.”

“For the love of humanity…”

“I am not human.”

“What the hell are you?”

“A demon that wants to make a deal with you, so how about it? Give me your armor and swords and I shall spare your lives?”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise I shall be merciful.”

“Alright, men! Give him your armor and swords!” each knight now took off their armor and swords and held it up high from the deep hole they were in. There were a total of seven knights in a trap, courtesy of Aida who made the Trap unbelievably large, large enough to make it able to contain ten people. Plus, the rain was still pouring, meaning in time they would drown. The water was already up to their necks. They now had no choice but to obey Nur’s conditions.

The tallest one outstretched his arms holding the armor and swords in a pile and passed it to Nur, who lifted it all up with visible effort.

“Now free us!”

“Well, about that…”

“You promised!”

“I promised to be merciful, and this is my mercy.” Nur pushed a large rock to the mouth of the trap, now completely closing the trap. “Do not worry, you will suffocate within ten minutes. Thanks for the armor and swords, and have a good rest!” With such a merciless stroke, Nur Finnerman made his first victory against the knights who plagued him in the previous loops. The screams of knights echoed as the large rock completely crushed them underneath it while the water level rose to drown them. This way, this way, they would surely perish. After being killed by knights so many times, Nur felt an odd sense of satisfaction about his first kill.

“Can we come out now?” Sariu asked.

“Yeah, it’s safe now. Of course now we have a rather hefty endeavor ahead of us.”

“What would that be?”

“We need to get to a place that will buy used armor and swords.” Nur knew exactly where the place was. A place he saw while traveling around the city, the trading shop Apple Shack.