The first pair of Dark-Walkers stood before me, acting as guards and sentries to prevent anyone from approaching their hideout—anyone except their own kind, that is.
Sadly for them, they met me instead.
During my extensive training with Codex, where he taught me everything about being a mage and a swordsman, I had mostly relied on large, long-term formations. But now I needed to test what skills and techniques I could draw from within myself—abilities instilled through the gruesome regimen that constituted my training as a swordsman. Considering I had lived the life of a sword primordial through my variants' memories—not just experiencing their journey from mortal to their current levels, but their peak existence—I deserved a pat on the back for enduring that mental torment.
For this encounter, I decided against stealth. Instead, I did the simplest thing possible: I walked directly toward them while materializing my precious blade from its dimensional storage. Upon drawing it from its scabbard...
SHHHRRIIIIILLL
The blade itself practically screamed aloud, joyous at being released from storage and its confining scabbard, yet simultaneously annoyed at its master for neglecting it for so long
Naturally, these were mere impressions I picked up from it, emotional resonances rather than actual thoughts. In response, I mentally addressed my weapon: 'Sorry, buddy. There wasn't anyone to draw blood from until now, so we'll be hunting today...' I thought with a chuckle as the blade sent back waves of acknowledgment and calm, though underscored by unmistakable excitement. Clearly, I had forged quite the bloodthirsty companion.
The Dark-Walkers before me sprung into action immediately upon recognizing the intruder—a human, no less. I could practically feel the condescension radiating from them. Unfortunately for these demons, they were in for a rude awakening.
Despite their obvious disdain for what they perceived as a mere human (a sentiment I understood simply by following their mana usage patterns and interpreting their internal communications), they still alerted those inside the cave. According to my soul sense, the other eighteen demons, including the demigod, all mobilized and lay in wait, clearly intending to ambush me after I engaged these two sentries.
I could only shake my head in disappointment as I called out to them in their own language, much to their evident shock.
"Hey theeerreee... Can you not try to be that idiotic? A strange human suddenly and silently appears before you, Dark-Walkers of such strength with even a demigod among you, and you want to underestimate me? Really? Oh well, it's like you want to die that badly..." I spoke while assuming a particular stance, holding my sword horizontally before me and initiating a sequence of deceptively simple yet graceful movements.
With my left foot forward and my right behind, coiled like a spring, I took a deep breath and then... I moved, targeting their most vital points—most obviously, their compound eyes.
The first Dark-Walker barely registered my movement. One moment I stood several meters away, the next I had traversed the distance in a blur of motion too fast for even its enhanced senses to track. My blade, gleaming with a subtle blue-white aura, passed through its neck with no more resistance than if I were cutting through mist.
For a fraction of a second, the creature stood motionless, its body not yet comprehending its fate. Then, as I completed my turn toward its companion, the first Dark-Walker's head slowly slid from its shoulders, detaching with a sickeningly wet sound. The cut wasn't clean—the sword technique I employed, Sword Flash, wasn't designed for mercy. Instead of a single clean line, the blade had vibrated at frequencies beyond perception as it passed through flesh and bone, essentially atomizing everything in its path.
The result was grotesque but efficient: the Dark-Walker's head didn't simply separate from its body; it disintegrated into a fine mist of particles, the compound eyes popping like overripe fruit before they could even register pain. The headless body remained standing for two more heartbeats before collapsing, dark ichor spraying from the ruined neck in a fountain that seemed to defy normal fluid dynamics, splashing the ground in patterns that resembled eldritch runes.
The second sentry, only now beginning to process what had happened to its companion, raised its clawed appendages in a defensive posture. Its body shifted, attempting to access its spatial mana for teleportation—an ability rendered useless by my earlier formation. Shock and something resembling fear rippled through its energy patterns as it realized its escape route had been severed.
Too little, too late.
My second strike came even faster than the first, the blade now glowing with a more intense radiance as it responded to the taste of demon blood. This time, I didn't aim for a quick decapitation. Instead, the sword described a complex pattern in the air—five strikes delivered in the span of time it would take most beings to blink once.
The first cut severed the Dark-Walker's right arm at the shoulder. The second removed its left arm mid-forearm. The third and fourth cuts crossed in an X-pattern across its torso, the blade passing through chitin and internal organs with equal ease. The final strike was a precise thrust that entered beneath what passed for the creature's jaw, angling upward to pierce directly through its primary brain cluster.
As I withdrew my blade, the second Dark-Walker remained standing, its body seemingly intact despite the fatal damage. Then, as if in slow motion, it began to come apart—segments of its body sliding away from each other along the perfect cutting planes my sword had created. Its head split vertically, the top portion sliding off to reveal the ruined neural matter within before both pieces dissolved into the same fine mist as its companion's head.
The swift, one-sided executions happened so quickly that, in the moment I was in the process of dissecting the head of the second sentry, the demigod Dark-Walker hiding deeper in the complex finally realized the threat and burst into action—too late to save its subordinates, but determined to eliminate the unexpected danger.
This prompted the remaining eighteen demons to converge on my position, having collectively decided that the human before them posed a genuine threat requiring immediate elimination, if not containment. Any being capable of dispatching their kind—creatures known for their extraordinary reflexes due to their secondary innate alignment to spatial mana—so effortlessly was clearly more dangerous than initial assessments suggested.
Capturing me would be ideal, but only if they were capable of doing so—a tall order considering the speed with which I had dispatched their comrades using nothing more than a simple sword technique.
As I watched the others approach, fresh blood dripping from my blade and spattering the ground at my feet, I smiled and spoke again in their tongue:
"Two down... many more ants to crush..." The words emerged as a silky promise rather than a threat, and I moved forward with a grin spreading across my face, genuinely excited to put my hard-earned cheat skills to the test.
---
[Shion's POV]
From the moment I awoke after experiencing pain beyond my imagination, I've been fascinated with a particular being—ironically, the same one who caused my suffering and brought me to death's door, yet also became my savior and the protector of my people.
To be honest, I don't fully understand why this fascination has persisted since regaining consciousness and comprehending the gravity of my situation. But my instincts—the primal, beastly intuition that my kind possesses, what one might call a seventh sense—have been screaming one particular message, clearly and repeatedly:
'He is strong, learn from him. He is strong, follow him.' Over and over again. I even asked my parents if such thoughts from my subconscious were normal, but even they were taken aback by this situation, despite their lofty strength as demigods.
I completely regretted asking them, since afterward, my mother created a complete misunderstanding, assuming I was interested in the human as a potential mate. I mean, to be honest, even by human standards and our species' humanoid forms, Ryan wasn't bad-looking, and I won't deny being fascinated for entirely different reasons.
However, returning to the present—my confusion about why this particular instinct had been acting up since I awoke has now been completely resolved. How? Simple: by witnessing the events unfolding before me.
Humans, on any normal level—whether classed as demigods or even the weakest E-ranks—were always considered inferior to other species who specialized in their natural strengths, as determined by bloodline or innate talents. From what my parents taught me, humans tended to be jacks of all trades and masters of none, thus limiting their potential, with rare exceptions.
And right before me was one such exception.
Ryan—the being whom even our goddess Yddra respected and revered (itself a sign of his anomalous nature, considering that a deity more powerful than normal demigods would show such deference)—was currently and systematically slaughtering the Dark-Walkers, creatures that even the elders of our species would struggle against unless attacking in overwhelming numbers.
After dispatching the two sentries with a display of swordsmanship that defied comprehension, Ryan faced the oncoming horde of demons with casual confidence. From my concealed position at the forest's edge, I watched with a mixture of awe and horror as he engaged beings that had haunted our people's nightmares for generations.
The first wave approached him in a semi-circle formation—five Dark-Walkers moving with predatory grace, their claws extended and bodies already beginning to phase between normal space and the shadow realm that granted them their name. Under normal circumstances, this tactic would make them nearly impossible to track, their forms becoming semi-transparent and capable of attacking from multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Ryan, however, seemed entirely untroubled. As the first demon lunged at him from his left flank, partially phased into shadow state, he didn't even turn to look at it. Instead, he performed what appeared to be a casual sidestep that somehow put him directly behind the attacker. His blade flashed once—a horizontal cut that passed through the creature's midsection at waist level.
The Dark-Walker's momentum carried its upper half forward several meters before it realized it had been bisected. Black ichor erupted from both halves as they came crashing down, the legs continuing to run for several steps before collapsing in a twitching heap. The upper portion clawed desperately at the ground, trying to drag itself away before a fountain of corrupted energy spewed from its mouth and it went still.
Without pausing, Ryan spun into a low crouch as two more demons attacked simultaneously from opposite sides. His sword moved in a circular pattern that seemed to defy the laws of physics, the blade somehow appearing to be in multiple places at once. Both attackers froze mid-lunge, then slowly toppled backward, each one split from groin to crown in perfectly symmetrical halves. The precision was horrifying—internal organs sliced with such exactitude that they remained in place for several seconds before spilling out onto the forest floor.
The fourth Dark-Walker, witnessing the fate of its companions, attempted a different approach. It fully phased into shadow state, becoming little more than a dark smudge against the ground, racing toward Ryan's position at incredible speed. This was a technique I'd seen once before, when a hunting party from our settlement was ambushed—the demon becoming essentially intangible until the moment of attack, making it impossible to defend against.
Ryan merely smiled. As the shadow reached his feet, he casually planted his sword into the ground, point-first. The blade sank effortlessly into the earth, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then, a terrible shriek emerged from the shadow as it began to contort and bubble like boiling pitch. The Dark-Walker was forced back into its physical form, its body emerging from the shadow state inside-out—skin peeled back to expose musculature, organs, and chitinous internal structures, all now on the outside of its writhing form. It thrashed in unspeakable agony for several seconds before Ryan ended its suffering with a swift downward strike that split its exposed heart in two.
The fifth demon, clearly more intelligent than its fellows, turned to flee. It made it exactly three steps before Ryan flicked his wrist in a casual gesture. The sword in his hand seemed to extend impossibly, its blade elongating to more than twice its normal length in an eyeblink. The extended tip pierced the fleeing Dark-Walker at the base of its skull, emerging from between its compound eyes. The creature's momentum carried it forward, essentially impaling itself further along the impossibly long blade until Ryan reversed the technique, the sword returning to normal length and yanking the demon's corpse backward to land in a crumpled heap at his feet.
Five demons dispatched in less than ten seconds, each with a different technique, each death more horrifying than the last.
The remaining Dark-Walkers hesitated, their earlier confidence evaporating as they witnessed the casual slaughter of their companions. Even from my distant position, I could sense their fear—a chemical signature in the air that tickled my sensitive nostrils and confirmed what my eyes were telling me: these creatures, the terror of the forest for centuries, were afraid.
Their demigod leader, however, was made of sterner stuff. It emerged from the cave entrance, its form significantly larger and more developed than its subordinates. Standing nearly twelve feet tall, with a crown of bone-like protrusions circling its head and six compound eyes arranged in a ring that allowed 360-degree vision, it radiated power that made the air around it waver like heat above summer stones.
"Interesting," I heard Ryan say, his voice carrying clearly despite the distance. "You might actually provide a slightly more interesting challenge."
The demigod Dark-Walker responded not with words but with action, raising both arms and sending a wave of corrupted dark energy hurtling toward Ryan—a spell powerful enough to level a small village. The attack moved like a living thing, tendrils of negative energy reaching out hungrily as it rushed forward...