Jacob didn’t think he’d ever be standing back to back with Starman, but there they were, holding off a tide of demons together with Fenris’s supine body between them. He was surprisingly glad to have the silver nuisance backing him up. If anything about him was reliable, it was his monstrous power.

They moved in perfect sync. Starman blocked an attack, and Jacob went in to punish the attacker with a follow-up. He slashed the back of a knee, and Starman came in to finish off the wretch with a brutal slam. Two of them came at once, and Starman took one while Jacob took the other, then switched places to increase the enemy’s confusion and each deliver their finishing blows.

One of Starman’s talents must have been Danger Sense, because he was reacting to attacks that he shouldn’t have been able to perceive. In tandem with Jacob’s sight beyond sight, it allowed them to move fluidly as water, each strike flowing perfectly into the next, the two of them moving about each other so deftly it almost felt like a choreographed performance. The hatred was there, but also a reluctant admiration.

“You know…” Starman grunted as he stomped the face of a weeping demon and knocked all its teeth down its gullet. “...I’m revisiting the idea of making you my sidekick, ‘cause this is too much fun. How about it?”

“We can be friends if you want,” Jacob replied, jabbing the fingers of his open palm into the gut of another enemy, his hand sinking all the way to the wrist with a squelching of putrid blood. “I’ll be real friendly when I visit you in hell after I kill you.”

“Ouch! You sure know how to make a girl feel stood up.”

“Just shut up and fight!”

“A ‘please’ would go a long way.”

Jacob did not deign to reply.

The battle flowed on with frenetic urgency, and he stayed in constant motion, jumping and ducking and using the enemies as convenient footholds. But breathing was a struggle with his severed nose pooling blood down his throat, leaving him constantly winded and gasping for breath, and the death sense was starting to wear on him. Apparently, being resurrected didn’t reset the strain it placed on his mind, at least not effectively. He wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer.

System, give me a count.

[CALCULATING…]

…

…

…

[ERROR: INSUFFICIENT VISIBILITY]

You’re really on a roll today, aren’t you?

A particularly overgrown specimen invaded their little slice of demon-less ground with a rumbling bellow that produced a spray of spit, toting a sledgehammer with a head of bloody, rough-edged rock.

“Boost?” Starman asked.

Jacob nodded and ran at him. Starman raised his shield so it was horizontal, and Jacob leapt on top of it. Starman threw his arms up, casting Jacob into the air. He flipped over the demon’s head and caught the top half of his face on the way down its back, his fingers finding good purchase inside the eye sockets. He pulled the demon’s head back, heedless of its screaming protests. A shudder went through it as Starman knocked out one of the legs. It fell, dropping its formidable weapon without ever getting to swing it once, and Jacob flipped away.

In a show of unusual consideration, Starman had disabled the right leg so that the demon fell away from Fenris rather than straight onto him. Starman dented another demon’s head in with a straight punch and threw Jacob a bloody thumbs-up, who nodded in return.

The enemy guns inside the fortress fired off another volley. Jacob tracked their trajectory idly while fending off two more threats, weaving between them so they ended up striking at each other and did half the work for him.

Most of the cannon shots went wide of the glowing sphere that was Paragon, but one struck her dead-center and knocked her back, light flickering before returning to full strength. The distraction caused several of Akor-Goram’s coiling snakes to find their mark, exploding inside her radiant perimeter and disturbing her equilibrium all over again. Prismatic intercepted the next wave of attacks until she could recover.

That doesn’t look too good.

“Starman,” Jacob said and pointed towards the fortress. “Silence those guns. I’ve got things covered here.” He didn’t know if that was a true statement, but those guns needed to go. Paragon couldn’t spare the added nuisance.

Starman gave a lazy salute. “I’ll do it, but not because you told me to. Oh, who am I kidding? I couldn’t say no to you, bestie.”

And with that, he was off, plowing through demons like chaff and letting them bounce harmlessly off his greatshield. Jacob let him pass out of his field of attention and turned his focus only on the enemies that immediately surrounded him.

There were a lot—twenty-three of them, in fact—and they looked a little upset with how he had been slaughtering their friends.

There was no time to think, and no time to let his fatigue slow him down. He entrusted himself to the flow of battle and forced his body to its limits. Once he started moving, he didn’t stop, bouncing from one enemy to the next one and the one after that. He dizzied himself, and the cloying taste of sewer discharge mingled with the coppery blood in his mouth. He kept moving.

One Dash too many buckled his knee, even with Shock Absorption, and threw him out of alignment when he kicked off. He crashed straight into the spiked hauberk of one demon, cutting up his side. He managed to claw that one to death with an undignified flailing of limbs, but as soon as he fell to the ground, he had three rusted weapons falling towards him. He rolled back out of the way, coughed at the blood filling his airways, and struggled for breath while stumbling about, desperately trying to keep up with the fickle current outlined by his death sense.

Three of them were on top of Fenris now; defiling him with their filthy hooves. He growled and Dashed at them, heedless to his straining legs. They died in quick succession, and he ensured that their bodies fell clear of the wolf.

More of them were closing in. He still couldn’t see any end to them.

[CONGRATULATIONS, PRIME CANDIDATE USER! YOU HAVE—]

“Shut the fuck up!”

Jacob sensed only a vague impression of Starman in the distance, and was unable to ascertain his condition without focusing on him directly. But the guns hadn’t fired in a while, which he took as confirmation that Starman was doing his job.

While he piled up bodies in great heaps around him, he felt the deaths of three more heroes. Two he didn’t recognize, and one large dispersal of deathly energy that he surmised could only belong to either Titaness or White Wolf. Whoever it was, they had lost their first S-Rank.

A dull boom echoed across the field, and everything was suddenly washed in golden light. Jacob halted for a moment, turning his attention skyward. Even the demons had fallen still, and a hesitant silence fell over the battlefield.

Way up there, a brilliant nova grew out from a central point and boiled away the black clouds around it, letting a circle of blue sky and daylight shine through. The nova continued to expand, and its light became so overwhelming that the demons were forced to look away and cover their faces in pain.

Jacob, for his part, already had his eyes firmly shut, but he still felt a strong white light burn through his eyelids. He could still perceive the proverbial second sun hanging over them through his death sense, but he couldn’t tell what it meant. Was it a finishing move, a desperate last-ditch maneuver, the final deathrattle of a demi-god?

It didn’t really matter; he’d learn sooner or later anyway. For now, the nova had opened up an excellent opening against the demons, and he would be a fool not to exploit it. He broke into a run, fell as his legs buckled, rolled back to his feet and kept going. He reached his first target and tore the entrails from his exposed belly in mid-step. He wrapped them around the neck of his neighbor, then pulled tight until strangulation. More followed. He reaped a good harvest while they were distracted.

As the nova slowly faded and the light projected onto the ground dimmed, Jacob felt a single death-ping go off up there. Not the filthy, cystic blowout of a demon, but human. That meant one of two things. He didn’t want to think about the worse option.

A fiery meteor broke free of the nova’s failing remnants and rocketed straight towards the ground. Jacob did not have time to do more than duck before it impacted the ground maybe a hundred meters off. A luminous conflagration burst outward, throwing nearby demons like ragdolls and flash-frying the ones lucky enough to stick to the ground.

The impact left a shallow smoldering crater of about twenty meters with nothing living left inside of it. The figure at its center lay prone; motionless, a shell of red-hot gold falling away from her in pieces.

But Jacob did not smell much death essence on her.

Still alive.

Jacob spared a nudge of awareness towards his wolf, who had yet to stir and was only barely breathing.

Sorry, dog. I’m gonna need to go on ahead.

Jacob weaved his way through burning demons to get to Paragon. He didn’t bother sparing energy towards offense—these ones were soon-to-be dead anyway, so it would only be a waste of time. He stumbled onto the patch of clear earth after a few seconds, and others converged on her location at nearly the same time. Bulwark, with his skin like stone, and the Concordian with his two slender Blessed swords. Four of Drakemyth’s drones settled in a defensive orbit above Paragon. The machines looked a little worse for wear and were unsteady in flight, but they soldiered on just like the rest of them.

Jacob dragged himself over to the others, tripping up more than once along the way. Fatigue was starting to recoil back onto him, whether he tried to ignore it or not. His body was screaming at him to stop abusing it, or else.

Fuck that. I’ll stop when I’m done.

The Concordian spared Jacob a tired nod, panting. Jacob returned the gesture. They exchanged no words, but formed a tight triangle around Paragon’s supine form. She looked so fragile, all banged up and half-eaten by rot. It was a wonder that she was still hanging on.

The soldier demons, realizing their opportunity for eternal glory among the urgek hells for killing the greatest of all humans, snapped out of their momentary lapse in purpose and charged the crater from all sides. They shoved and slashed at each other to get there first. Even ones engulfed in flames staggered forward, screaming in agony and warlike lust at once.

There were too many of them. He wasn’t even sure if all his efforts had put a dent in their ranks.

Drakemyth’s drones began firing out of guns protruding from their undersides. Each shot found a demon’s head. One of them was cut in half by a flying axe, and the pieces fell away with the stuttering buzz of failing motors. The others kept shooting, adjusting their orbit to compensate for the loss of a unit.

Jacob was too exhausted to sense the current anymore. The demons that came at him stuttered in reality, suddenly right on top of him when he should have had several seconds to prepare a defense.

His body moved as though in slow-motion, weighed down by an accumulated detritus of petty fatigue.

The first blade bit into his shoulder, sank all the way through his trapezius muscle and cracked something that he assumed was his clavicle. He gave a bloody snort through his open gape of a nose and managed a sweeping kick that knocked the attacker sideways. The next one would have split his head in two, but one of the drones domed it just in time, and Jacob was barely able to sidestep and avoid the falling corpse.

He yanked the blade out of his shoulder, the arm on that side rendered limp and useless. He hurled the weapon at the nearest demon, but reality stuttered and he missed by a wide margin.

Jacob was a few moves away from death. Even without the battle current’s guidance, he knew that as an absolute certainty. His resistance was symbolic at this point, stemming from a mostly mechanical reflex rather than any desire to fight or hope in victory. If he died now, although it would alleviate at least his physical stresses, he could not afford the few seconds it would take him to return. That was enough time for the demons to trample him and get to Paragon.

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When Starman broke into the crater—shining and fleet-footed as ever—Jacob felt, despite himself, a great wash of relief. His armor had suffered some serious damage at this point, and the lower third of his shield had cracked off, but if that troubled him he showed no sign of it.

Starman booted away the demon closest to Jacob and sidled up next to him, taking his place in what was now a four-cornered defense around Paragon.

“Miss meeee?” he asked, a sing-song lilt in his voice.

Jacob grunted in reply and broke into a bloody coughing fit.

Starman carried most of the weight against the next wave of attackers. It was all Jacob could do to get the occasional lucky hit in. With Starman there to pick up the slack, maybe the best thing would be to kill himself for a quick resurrection that would get him back into the fight.

I think I have to.

I’ll ask Starman to snap my neck, as much as it’ll hurt to say those words.

But he didn’t get the opportunity to enact that plan. There came a pulsing, cold terror from above, and Jacob couldn’t help but fix the entirety of his attention on it. Everyone else felt it, too, and the distraction caused another lull in the battle as their gazes turned skyward.

Akor-Goram, victorious conqueror and merciless genocider, floated down from the sky with a deliberate slowness that spoke his confidence without words. He had dismantled Paragon twice, and now they were next.

He carried the limp body of Prismatic by his head, holding the S-Rank out for all other heroes to see and despair at. Akor-Goram, a pale devil barely larger than a human with a form that was lithe and thin unlike the hulking muscle-bound frames of his cohorts, had not suffered a single scratch or injury in his fight against Paragon.

His victory was flawless.

What could Jacob do against evil like that? What could any of them do, except beg for their lives?

“Testing a hypothesis,” Drakemyth’s distorted voice came over the drones’ battered speakers. “Observe.”

A single shot rang out from a high-powered rifle somewhere in the distance. The demon thane wavered in mid-flight, discomposed.

And his spell shattered like glass.

What floated there was not a perfect victor, but a tattered thing, barely holding himself aloft. He was missing fingers, most of one leg, and a fist-sized hole had been punched right through his stomach. The disturbance of the bullet he just took through the shoulder caused him to drop Prismatic’s corpse, which tumbled end over end before landing unceremoniously with a thud.

I see. Clever bastard.

Steelfeather’s streamlined form shot in a high arc from somewhere in the distance and bore into the demon thane’s back. Akor-Goram faltered and fell, and Steelfeather kept his hold on him as they plummeted together.

With a scream, Akor-Goram sent out a shockwave that ripped the hero away from him and caused a ripple on the ground strong enough that it knocked Jacob to his knees. He steadied himself with a hand against the ground before rocking back onto his feet.

“‘Scuse me,” Starman said, backing up. “Just popping out for a second, dear.”

With a sprinting run-up, he launched himself dizzyingly fast dozens of meters up, meeting Akor-Goram halfway on the way down. He caught the demon thane on the chin with the rim of his shield, snapping it out of alignment. Akor-Goram caught hold of him with one hand, and where he gripped his wristthe Force of Will armor began to falter and peel away, a web of cracks spreading across the whole suit. Starman kicked against the demon and separated the two of them, their trajectories going wide from each other.

Before Akor-Goram could recover, Steelfeather and Excelerate hit him both at once from different directions, putting his body in a wild spin. Below him, Titaness waded into position past throngs of lesser demons. Akor-Goram tried to catch himself and halt his fall, but Steelfeather came in for a third time, driving both feet into the enemy’s back and spiking him straight into the ground.

The heroes piled onto him. Titaness and Steelfeather pummeled him into the earth while Excelerate hit him with waves of roiling lightning that streamed from the sole of his raised boot.

Reality warped, jumping around, but nothing changed. However he configured himself, Akor-Goram was at the bottom of a very riled-up pack of S-Ranks. When his underlings moved in to protect him, Excelerate whipped around in a whirlwind blur, tearing through bodies and shocking others into cowardice with his stinging electricity.

Jacob couldn’t do anything but watch impotently. Even if he wasn’t needed to cover Paragon, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to muster the strength to get over to the other heroes.

It was a minuscule eddy of perception that alerted him to a new presence. If not for his death sense, he never would have noticed it; even with that, his distraction had almost led him to miss it.

Some intangible creature began to hoist itself out of the ground just next to Paragon, behind the backs of the two other oblivious heroes standing there to protect her. It was a foul creature with a hanging belly and drooping breasts and spindly, too-long limbs. Her body took on tangible shape as she fully emerged, and she hoisted a wickedly curved dagger high, ready to be plunged into Paragon’s breast.

Jacob willed up some vestige of power he didn’t know he had left in him. Grasping the odious crone by her bristly white hair, he flung her to the ground. She raised her dagger between them with a fearful cry, but he smacked it out of her hand. She put her hands together to beg for his mercy, but he had none. He fell upon her and wrenched his hand down on her skull. He squeezed her lumpy cranium in the vice of his enhanced grip strength until it cracked and collapsed in on itself, spilling the slimy inside out over his fingers. Not quite a brain, but more like a tightly interconnected colony of squirming leeches.

He stood and kicked her corpse aside.

Eris-Kord, I take it. Good riddance to you.

After his feat of brutality, the lesser demons shrank away from his sight, shaken out of their bloodlust. A good thing, too, because he would not have been able to fight them off.

Over in the distance, the S-Ranks continued to decimate a weakened Akor-Goram, putting him through a thorough pounding. Once he was fully subdued, Steelfeather and Titaness hoisted him up between them, Steelfeather holding the legs and Titaness the arms.

With a violent pull, they ripped him in half.

Jacob felt Akor-Goram’s death essence reverberate across the battlefield. The demons seemed to sense it too, because they hissed and raged about, some tearing at their own flesh while others prostrated themselves in apparent prayer.

By all rights, that should have been the end of Akor-Goram, but something didn’t feel quite right. His death had rung too dully, like a cymbal with a mute on it. Some hateful piece of him lingered, refusing to suffer defeat.

Reality twisted like a towel being wrung. Gravity shifted, and Jacob found himself staggering about, first drawn one way and then another, then lifted into the air before being slammed back into the ground.

Shapes formed from liquid shadow appeared and disappeared haphazardly. With grasping hands and raspy screams, they attacked anyone nearby, friend or foe, bringing them down with flurries of long-clawed swipes. Manifestations of Akor-Goram’s dark mind.

Jacob got up on his knees and managed to stay that way despite the violent swaying of the world.

The ritual of banishing. Crux and the support worker mystics are dead, so there’s no one around to complete it.

But I might have something.

Jacob went into his pocket to find the button that the Deady Bear had minimized itself into. But he didn’t have any pockets. Looking down, Jacob found that his pants were completely gone. He was naked from the waist down.

Shit. That’s right, I got cut in half at some point. The legs I left behind must still be wearing them.

Drakemyth was calling for the heroes to take Paragon and evacuate. Two of his drones collided with each other and the third flew straight into the ground, his voice cutting out along with the last speaker.

Jacob ignored the request. Expanding his overworked death sense as far as possible, he searched for lingering traces of his own essence. There were several. Lurching away from a lunging wraith, Jacob made his way towards the nearest hotspot. He moved with painful slowness, not only fighting his own failing body but also the reeling, storm-tossed ship that was reality itself.

His breaths came as wet, raspy wheezes. Dragging himself over piles of corpses and past reeling demons, he made it to one of the hotspots. There was nothing there, probably just a few smaller bits of him buried under all the guts and gore. He moved on towards the next one, cursing to himself with every other step.

A wraith grabbed his ankle and pulled his leg out from under him. He hit his chin off a conveniently protruding rock and bit into his tongue, flooding even more blood into his already overworked respiratory channel. He worked his way free of the shadowy silhouette and pressed on.

I hate everything. Just give me the fucking thing, please.

Jacob tripped with the warping curvature of the Earth, and a pair of bodies fell away to reveal a set of suspiciously familiar legs. He crawled doggedly over to them, flipped them over, and dug through a pocket. Nothing there, of course not. He checked the other one and came away with a red plastic button.

He rolled over on his side, hacking and coughing, and thumped at the button with his fist.

“Go,” he hissed. “Absorb. Capture. Do the thing.”

Nothing.

“Put the fucking demon in the fucking teddy, please!”

The button inflated into the purple bear, hanging limp in Jacob’s hands. Its black eyes glinted as if in quiet understanding.

A storm of whirling black poison was sucked out of the air, waves of it drawn in with an invisible pull, and was funneled into the bear. There was a horrible squealing whistle like a boiling tea kettle, and the bear shook in his grip, violently tugged around so that he was only barely able to hang onto it.

Then the sound suddenly stopped, and the blackness was all stuffed inside, and the bear went still. There was a final hissing sigh of demonic malevolence, then nothing. The world relaxed, seeming to exhale, and gravity gradually smoothed out, allowing everything that had shifted or floated up to come back down and settle normally.

Jacob let out a long, rattling sigh.

Demon thane, captured.

He had accomplished everything that could possibly have been expected of him, and now all he wanted was to sleep. But that was still a privilege painfully out of his reach. With Akor-Goram’s dying tantrum ended, there were now the remaining lesser demons to contend with.

Luckily they seemed content to ignore him where he lay among the corpses. There was a general state of confusion and fear among their ranks. Some of them were still pushing forwards while others had started eyeing around for a way out.

But there was no way out. Not when Paragon came to life and drifted lazily into the air above the battlefield, clutched by a sputtering shroud of light, with her fiery crown spinning above her head.

One barrage of sweeping beams that cut through swathes of demons was all it took to finally convince them to flee. A few of them turned at first, which inspired others, which inspired yet others, and suddenly the whole horde was scattering in different directions, running for their lives.

Jacob dragged a corpse over himself to avoid being trampled. He felt the weight double whenever one of them stepped over him. There was a thunder of racing hooves that gradually lessened until, finally, Jacob only heard the occasional brute stomp past.

Once he was reasonably confident that he was in the clear, he went to push the demon corpse off him. He quickly found that it was too heavy to shift in his diminished state. He pushed with all the strength left in his one working arm, struggling to suck each disgusting breath down into his filthy lungs.

Then the weight was lifted away, and Jacob drew in a relieved gasp of marginally cleaner air.

A three-legged wolf stood over him, corpse hanging from his mouth. He tossed it aside and lowered his head to gently nudge Jacob with his nose.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jacob groaned. “I’m not dead. And neither are you. Aren’t we lucky.”

Jacob grabbed a handful of the wolf’s coarse fur and used it as a support to drag himself back to his feet. His death sense finally gave out, and he was forced to open his dry, blurry eyes.

“Can’t sleep yet. Got one more thing to do.”

The battle was over. The remaining demons were running for the hills, and Paragon had evidently given up on picking them all off. They were left in a field of bullish corpses, their flesh already beginning to rot and stink.

System, count total eliminated targets.

[CALCULATING…]

…

…

…

[NO. OF NEUTRALIZED TARGETS, ESTIMATED:]

[25 449]

Just a bit of light demon hunting.

Only a handful of heroes were still standing, grouped in a small cluster. Jacob and Fenris began hobbling in that direction.

He glanced up at the wolf. “What a day, eh?”

Fenris looked back at him and groaned.

After a painfully long-winded journey, Jacob made it over to the heroes. Paragon had fallen back to the ground and was in the middle of a seizure, limbs spasming and eyelids flickering. Drakemyth had climbed out of his beat-up mech suit and was by her side, injecting her with one syringe after the other.

At first whatever he’d put into her had no effect, and he worried she was going to seize to death. Then eventually the episode slowed, stopped, and Paragon’s body fell limp. Drakemyth checked for vitals.

“Alive,” he muttered. “Who knows if she’ll stay that way.”

There wasn’t much they could do—all the healers were dead. The vehicles were all ruined, so they would need to wait for backup from the Resort before evacuating.

Those still alive were Drakemyth, Steelfeather, Excelerate, Titaness, Bulwark, Jacob himself, Fenris, hopefully Paragon. The Concordian had died at some point defending Paragon. Everyone was wounded and exhausted; even Drakemyth, the old man bruised and battered after getting tossed around inside his suit.

But there was one hero who was unaccounted for.

“Anyone see Starman?” Jacob asked.

“Somewhere over there,” Excelerate said, pointing. “I was about to go check on him.”

“Don’t. I’ve got it covered.”

“Are you sure? You don’t look okay.”

“I’m okay.”

Without Fenris there to prop him up, Jacob would have collapsed straight down. But the wolf helped him in the direction Excelerate pointed to, and, sure enough, after a short trek through the dead, there lay a plain-looking man on his back, one arm covered in a pulsating rot. A turtle without his shell.

“How are we feeling?” Jacob asked.

“In danger,” Starman said with a tired chuckle. He glanced up at Jacob, but didn’t move his head. Maybe he wasn’t even able to. “I’d say we’ve… we’ve become quite close friends in the last little while, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“You wouldn’t kill a man who couldn’t fight back, would you?”

Jacob grinned a bloody grin. “You know I would, remember? You had that whole nice speech about ‘doing better’ and ‘killing being a last resort’. I guess it didn’t stick.”

“Come on, Jacob… I won’t come after you anymore. I swear I won’t. I… I’ll make a binding vow. Yeah, we’ll make a vow. Let’s find an arcanist, it shouldn’t be hard.”

“You realize we’re some of the last people on Earth, don’t you?”

Starman smiled sadly. “Fuck. You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Yup.”

Do I get… some last words or something?”

“Nope.” Jacob let go of the wolf and swayed, fighting to remain upright. “Fenris. Murder.”

The wolf tore Starman into little pieces and ate him up, clothes and all. No crumbs.

Bliss. When Jacob collapsed and his eyes fell shut, body all numb, he was truly content.

Everything I set out to do, finished.

The hard part’s all done. Now I just need to get back to her.

Nevermind fucking me blind, she’s going to fuck me dead when she finds out I saved the world. That’ll really tickle the hero fetish.

Jacob’s consciousness slipped away. Then, after a few moments, his overworked heart stopped beating.