Everything was black for a few seconds, and then seconds turned to minutes and minutes into hours.

"Where am I?" The man asked himself. As far as he knew, he was in a dark space, with nothing around him. He could not feel anything in the pitch blackness of it all, and could not even feel the things he used to feel with.

"I should have just been..." The man thought, but he was unable to form the thoughts clearly in his mind. It was like a dream, something that should have been clear as day being swept over with muddy water, unrecognizable.

A few days later, everything was still pitch black as before, but he at least could remember things about his past.

"I was killed..." The man thought to himself. In his last moments, he heard someone shout;

"I just need more power!"

and that was the end for him. The man thought for several days about how he felt some unnatural force inside of him being ripped out, through an even more unnatural method.

"Is this what I have been doing?" The man thought to himself. The man had a general idea of what happened, but it was not something he wanted to think about. He had done it many times before, but never on a living being.

"Can summoning magic really do this?" The man questioned himself. There was nobody in the darkness around him, and as he sat or laid, he did not really know which. The man thought about what was around him, and it was scary.

The man did not want to want to think about it, but his soul was used for a powerful summoning spell. The man and his four friends, brothers in arms, conditioned combatants, and humanity's heroes,  were just getting into the final stretch of killing the demon king.

"Kirito the swordsman was fighting back minions as they hatched from the demon king's eggs, Feng was fighting the demon king with his martial god fist, Akira was using a wide range of spells to keep the demon king in range of Feng, but Asura was..." The man thought about the situation, but he could not come to a conclusion. In his heart though, he knew what happened.

The days turned into weeks and the weeks into eternity. The man could not tell time in the pitch blackness, and all the man could do was sleep and reflect on his past life. From when he left his mountain village at the age of 15, the man had traveled across the human kingdom fighting monsters and learning skills for the future. The man learned the basics in his village, but outside of it he became a master at swords skills and using his magic.

At only 18 years old, the man found a monk on the top of a mountain who taught him to use martial techniques. The man trained with the monk  non-stop until he was able to learn the legendary martial technique Wolf Fang Fist. It could strike dozens of times in a single second, or penetrate steel with a single blow. Before the man left the monk on the mountain, he was told "I lift things up and put them down, find the truth to this phrase you will be more powerful than even I have become." 

At only 21 years old, the man found ancient tombs that contained detailed scriptures of how to perform ancient and forbidden magic. To make a foe fall asleep with the wave of a hand and the uttering of a single word, that was the power of the ancient magic. There were dozens of spells like this that only needed a single word to be spoken to achieve the desired effect. The forbidden magic was something else though. It used latent energy from souls in the atmosphere to summon evil beast from another dimension to fight for the caster, thought this was not said in the scriptures. It was the forbidden summoning magic, and it was the very magic that the man refused to believe took his life.

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At the age of 23, the demonic kingdom invaded the human empire, killing 70% of the population, and the man was summoned by the king to participate in the counterattack. Four other heroes joined forces with the man as they followed the Legion of Holy Swords, lead by Saint Ajoras, into the demon controlled human kingdom lands and eventually even into the demonic kingdom.

It took 6 years to get from the last bastion of humanity back to the borders of the original kingdom, and by that time the man was 29 years old. The Legion of Holy Swords moved up and down the constantly shifting border to annihilate the demonic forces.

Seeing that it would take an estimated 10 more years at least to get to the demon king's palace at the current speed, the man and the four other heroes entered the demonic kingdom ahead of the Legion of Holy Swords.  They moved across the demonic kingdom at breathtaking speeds.

Akira used the spell [Fly] to soar through the air along with the man who used [Fly] himself. On the ground, Feng was using a martial technique to move like lightning. Asura and Kirito were riding magical beast that Asura summoned from another realm that could travel dozens of yards in a single step.

It only took a few more weeks and they were already at the gates to the demon king's palace. The demon king was not able to mobilize the army on his palace, and thus only the regularly stationed guards were there. Kirito and Feng made a path towards the center of the palace as the man and Akira cleared the demon soldiers on their flanks. Asura commanded magical beast to surround the palace and prevent soldiers from gathering.

Once inside the palace, the heroes made it to the center of the palace with little resistance, they could see the demon king was sitting in his throne while behind him there were eggs being taken out of the room by his concubines.

The demon king said something in the demonic language, but none of the heroes knew it, so they started attacking. Kirito and Feng were in the front and Akira and the man were in the back providing support with spells. Asura was controlling magical beast still around the palace.

As the demon king was losing to Kirito and Feng, he ordered the concubines to start breaking the eggs. The concubines did as they were told and made cracks in the huge eggs. Slowly, and 3 to 5 at a time, demons came from the eggs and attacked Kirito and Feng.

Kirito split off from the demon king to fight the demons from the eggs. The fight was starting to turn the other way as the demon king wore down Feng, and hundreds of demon spawns were steadily injuring Kirito.

"We need your help here Asura!" Yelled Akira who was controlling a lightning spell as it moved wildly in the path between Akira and the upper portion of the demon king.  

"There aren't enough souls in the room!" Asura yelled back, looking around at the other heroes fighting. "I just..." He said in a lower tone that only the man and Akira could hear.

"I just need more power!"