“I am the Demon Prince of Pride, and I’ve come to kill you, usurper.”

Michael grinned, “I don’t really plan on dying.”

“They never do, but you will. Simply curse the world that you weren’t born as me.”

Well he’s living up to his title, prideful bastard.

Suddenly the demon was gone, and piercing pain ran along Michael’s shoulder as it flashed past him.

Michael quickly spotted the demon several yards away, holding onto his severed arm.

It took Michael only a second to numb the pain in his body.

“You know what. I can do that better.”

The demon tossed Michael back his arm.

“Put that back on and stand around where you were, I want to try that again.”

This guy's insane.

Michael reattached his arm and ordered most of his soldiers to rush towards the demon.

It grinned, “Oh don’t be a sour sport, I’m trying to do something here.”

Once the soldiers had neared the demon, their bodies shifted, as they almost instantly warped into thousands of fleshy spikes that moved to impale the demon.

The demon dodged them all, but that was expected, as every explosive Michael had on his person had been given to the soldiers, and went off feet from the monster.

The resulting explosion was enormous, and kicked a large cloud of ash.

Michael waved the ash out of his face, “Come on out, I doubt that killed you.”

Suddenly Michael heard a voice behind him, “You’re not wrong.”

Michael turned around, and swung with his mace in one fluid motion.

His attack missed and it felt like a brick had just smashed into his mind. As all the soldiers he’d brought with him were killed in that instant.

The demon smiled, “Now now, we can’t have others intruding in on our duel, have a little bit more pride will ya.”

Michael repeatedly swung his mace towards the demon, and missed with every strike.

Every couple of attacks, Michael would lose a limb, and the demon would toss it back to Michael, simply saying he would cut it off better next time.

It wasn’t painful exactly, he’d numbed his sense of pain at the start of the fight, but it was extremely frustrating.

Michael’s blood stained the floor of the room as the hours passed, until Michael finally lay upon the floor in a pool of blood. His arms and legs severed into pieces at his sides.

The demon crouched down beside Michael and sighed, “You usurper, being of order, why do you let me down so? I understand why you lost to me, it was the inevitable outcome. But to think that you were this weak.”

The demon gripped Michael by his hair, and lifted him.

“I usually let you apostles live out your pride through your dreams, before you eventually shift back to whatever rock you crawled out of. But you resisted the dream, I thought you would be one of the interesting ones, one of the strong. Yet you sadden me.”

He tossed Michael back to the ground.

“You stay there, I’m going to do this finishing move perfectly on the first try. Just you watch.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The demon began to walk to the other side of the room.

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Consciousness was fleeting for Michael. The demon was unreasonably strong. How could something be that powerful?

Was it a difference in species? No, that’s not it. He’d simply been holding himself back. The flesh that hates wasn’t something that specialized on improving its own body. He could’ve been coming to these worlds with armies, but he didn’t, and he won’t. All because of the morality of it all.

The flesh that hates was supposed to make armies out of people's suffering, behemoths from mountains of corpses. Michael wasn’t going to do that to people, he wouldn’t make the corpses himself, but he wouldn’t exactly turn down the materials themselves. Especially when they practically begged him to be used.

Michael’s blood coated the room, and had sunk deep into the ash laden floor. It wasn’t exactly ash, it would be more accurate to say it was the crumbled remains of bodies. It had once been flesh, it all had. What really was the difference now?

Not much, at least to the flesh that hates was concerned, and Michael’s blood had moved amongst a large portion of the ash. He was infectious.

The demon of pride readied himself to finish Michael, as the floor began to shift.

Large columns of ash shot towards the sky, and circled around the demon. They had no souls within, they’d been devoured ages ago. So Michael needed to control them himself.

He instantly sunk himself into the field of ash, and seconds later the demon’s glaive pierced where he’d been seated.

The ash moved upon the demon, the room itself attempting to swallow the creature of pride, but he was an elusive beast.

Michael’s heart beat heavily in his chest, he needed to kill the demon quickly. Controlling this much ‘flesh’ was exhausting when he had to do it all himself.

The demon sliced through the pillars as soon as they were made.

It was a losing battle. The second Michael left the demon unacausted, he knew he would die. It didn’t matter how deeply he buried himself in the ash, he would die.

So he tried a new plan, he shifted the ash into something easier to control. The pillars had just been him panicking. He needed something that felt more natural.

So Michael let his body mold the ash, the flesh, into something he felt natural controlling.

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The Demon Prince of Pride, that’s what they called him.

That was all he was, and he took pride in that. There's beauty in simplicity, and the creature he fought now was the opposite of beauty.

Column after column of ash moved to pierce or crush the demon, as he expertly moved throughout the room to avoid and slash through the pillars.

The demon broke through a rather large pillar, and readied to slash another, but they had stopped.

Perhaps he’d given the apostle too much credit.

He raised his glaive and prepared to throw it through the ash, it didn’t matter how deep the apostle hid, it would hit and kill him.

The demon grinned, this would be a finishing move he could take pride in.

Suddenly an ashen hand sprouted from the ground and gripped onto the demon.

He chuckled, that little annoyance wouldn’t stop him. The demon ignored it and moved to throw the glaive, but he couldn’t.

Thousands of hands gripped his arm, as a behemoth of ash began to rise from the ground.

The demon broke free from the hands and avoided the onslaught of ash. There were far too many. They were uncountable.

It was rather strange for the apostles' control over the ash to increase that dramatically.

Nevertheless, he would be the victor, he had confidence in that.

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Michael’s heart was beating faster and faster. He didn’t know why this form was so much easier to control, but it still probably wouldn’t be enough. The material he used was simply too lacking in quality.

But although the ash was empty of souls, that didn’t mean there was nothing there.

There was a large, large amount of resentment within the ash.

Michael’s heart beat harder.

The resentment was the result of countless unjustified deaths. These are the ashes of the foolish and desperate. They made deals with the devil, and this was the result. Pure raw resentment, and it was currently being pumped through his heart.

The heart roused from its slumber for but a moment, muttering “delicious” before falling back asleep.

It continued to pump through the heart, refining into something tangible.

Michael pushed himself deeper and deeper into the ash. He knew what was about to happen, and he needed to be far away from it.

He used up the remainder of his strength, making countless hands to hold down the demon, as it struggled to escape his grasp. Michael knew the demon would, eventually, and that was something he couldn’t allow.

More hands fell upon the demon, as pure distilled resentment began to fill the behemoth.

Michael continued to burrow, and instinctively knew what power the heart had given him, as the ash began to grow red hot. The distilled resentment of countless corpses became volatile, and the world turned to a mixture of fire and sound as the behemoth violently combusted.