The demons were shooting me odd looks by the time the last of the critters was put down, which I found rather hypocritical.

Sure, I was cackling. Sure, I was covered in the golden blood (or was it ichor?) of the scorpions. And sure, I might have been indulging in the emotional high of getting to earn souls without guilt for once.

But who could blame me?

It wasn’t like they hadn’t enjoyed at least one decent cackle rampage in their lives. They were demons!

“You might want to get that smirk off your face, kiddo. Oh, and the blood. Definitely get the blood off your face,” Bronwynn grumbled.

“You’re all too sensitive.” I bounced on the balls of my feet, eyes flicking around the massive cavern in search of more scorpions. “Stab a couple critters, and suddenly everyone’s a critic.”

“Hayden, you had your arm fully embedded inside one of the things. I didn’t know they had soft bits until you ripped them out.” Bronwynn paused, looking me up and down. “You look like you took a bath in their blood. And if you’re wondering why people are eyeing you like that, it’s because you threatened to stab some of them when they tried to help you fight.”

“So it is blood!” I exclaimed happily, still bouncing.

I ignored the rest of what he said. I would never threaten to stab a demon. Demons were scary! They would stab me back, and then I’d be dead.

I was smart like that.

“Yes, Hayden, yes you did threaten them,” Bronwynn sighed, massaging his forehead.

My eyes widened. I never knew Bronwynn was a mind reader! Wait, were more demons mind readers? Were they reading my mind that very second?

Oh no, what if they find out I did actually want to stab some of them for getting in the way of my hard-earned stress relief?

The pink-skinned demon in front of me grit his teeth and looked skywards, which was silly, because we couldn’t see the sky inside the cave.

“Hayden, I’m not a mind reader. You’re still saying all of your thoughts out loud. You have been, for the last good while. I tried warning you about this already. Could you please calm down and get a grip? I’ve been following you this whole time so I can stop anyone from gutting you if you say something too offensive."

I froze as my mind struggled to process what he was saying. At first, it was difficult to tamp down my nervous energy and the feeling of excited bloodlust. But the more I understood how far I had let myself slip, the easier it became.

Probably because panic was rising up instead…

“How bad was I?” I finally managed to whisper, my eyes still as wide as saucers. “Wait, what about Mia? Where is she?”

Bronwynn gave a relieved sigh, followed shortly by a scoff. He pointed somewhere behind me.

I turned, then had to do a double take as I caught sight of a very self-satisfied cat carving apart dead mutant scorpions.

With obvious delight, Mia pried off a pincer, followed shortly by the outermost layer of the thing’s shell. It was the ‘dead’ part of the creature. Looking more closely, I guessed it was an accumulation of sand, coalesced into a uniform mass and transformed somehow into natural armor. Mia peeled all of it off, then proceeded to stuff the lot into a familiar-looking bag.

“Is that my dimensional pouch?” I asked no one in particular.

Bronwynn nodded. “Yes. You gave it to her a while back when she stopped trying to claw the things apart faster than you could kill them. She gave up and started harvesting your kills.”

The demon sounded both proud and exasperated all at once, which sent my mind into another confused swirl. I didn’t know how I should feel about any of this, either.

I had apparently gone off the rails in an obsessive bug hunt. Now Mia was knee-deep in gore, lost in a looting haze.

And we were surrounded by demons.

“We… didn’t piss off anyone too badly, right?” I asked carefully, not daring to look around and check the faces of our fellow soldiers myself.

Bronwynn’s amusement won out, and he laughed before clapping me on the back. “Don’t worry about it, kid. If anything, you helped smooth over some of the resentment from the whole sand-resistance thing. Not with everyone, obviously. There are still some demons you should watch out for. But it helped.”

“It did? But… I went on a kill-stealing rampage…”

Now he looked at me like I was an idiot. “Hayden, do you remember what happened when those things attacked? Some of the others actually got hurt. We would have won with or without you, but you definitely made the process much easier. Now, that’s mostly down to that sword of yours, but no one can take it from you, so it doesn’t matter. You contributed. Glaustro even got a few apologies from people who objected to your recruitment.”

I blinked owlishly. “He did?”

“He did.” Bronwynn grinned. “Would I lie to you about something like this? Kid, it’s been several hours. You’ve hunted down over seven hundred of the things by yourself. Sure, the rest of us killed more than twice that number, but that’s all of us. Together.” The demon shook his head, clearly amused.

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I genuinely didn’t know how to react. The slaughter was just a blur in my memory, a wash of sensations and satisfaction and rampant emotions. Sure, the purse on my hip felt heavier with souls, but their weight was barely noticeable thanks to the enchantments placed on the item.

I would have to check and see if the souls were all ‘lesser’, of course. They did come from beasts. Regardless, it was still a nice little windfall.

Though that begged the question: “And everyone was really fine with me getting all those souls?”

“For how much they’d have needed to work for them? Yes.” Bronwynn shook his head. “I swear, we all heard about the locals’ mana resistance, and how much of a pain they are to fight, but this was an eye-opener. Frankly, it’s a good thing we got attacked here. It was a nice little preview of what we can expect to face in the city.”

I furrowed my brows at that, but it didn’t take me long to make the connection. With their mineral-type skin, the locals were remarkably similar to the scorpions. If they were protected in the same way the creatures were, then yes, they would be a nuisance for regular demons.

Then again…

“The jinn who attacked the city didn’t have resistance to magic, right?” I asked.

“No, we haven’t heard anything about jinn developing the resistance.” Bronwynn frowned suspiciously. “Why?”

I waved him off, trying to think without revealing any trace of emotion.

I wasn’t sure if it was my paranoia acting up or a genuine concern, but… if all the locals eventually developed mana resistance due to their environment, what was stopping the jinn from doing the same?

Now, I didn’t know how jinn procreated, or how long such mutation would take. But I did know that they had been occupying the world for over nine hundred years. That was a lot of time. Maybe not according to immortal races, but still.

Was there really a guarantee that not a single jinn would mutate in that time? And if they did, then their threat level would skyrocket far beyond a regular member of their species.

The last jinn we encountered had only died so quickly because Glaustro and Rosaveta managed to snipe it down with magic. Without their demonic spells, the jinn would have been able to wreak significantly more havoc. Hells, maybe he could have seriously hurt one of the demon commanders. I hadn’t witnessed the full extent of the jinn’s abilities, but even his manipulation of the mana-resistant sand was impressively dangerous.

“Hayden? Don’t do this again, now. The commander is here.”

Bronwynn’s voice snapped me out of another spiral. As I blinked back into awareness, I found myself staring at the smiling visage of Glaustro.

I wonder if it will ever not be strange to see him smiling.

Still, as always, I couldn’t deny that the sergeant looked very nice when he wasn’t scowling.

“Excellent work, soldier!” the demon boomed. His hand came down on my shoulder with some force. “I knew recruiting you was the right choice. Besides, judging from your appearance, you are making excellent strides towards securing an ideal ascension. When you achieve that, you will become even more of an asset for our unit.”

Unlike his normal, measured tone of voice, Glaustro was almost shouting. This confused me at first. Then I glanced around to find the attention of the surrounding demons firmly focused on us.

“Thank you for the praise, commander. I’ll do my best to live up to your expectations,” I assured him.

He gave me a satisfied smile, then strode off towards the demon with two scorpion tails I had noticed when I first arrived at the unit’s compound.

“Thelrod! Don’t you fucking dare—” Glaustro cut off his warning and burst into curses when the demon jabbed one of the scorpions’ stingers straight into his own stomach.

A small argument broke out. Thelrod was turning rapidly pale, but he kept defending his decision.

I tuned it out. I was far more interested in how the unit’s perception of me was shifting in real time. I didn’t know how much my critter-slaughter was contributing, but Glaustro’s proclamation of my chosen ascension method was definitely working wonders.

Since we joined the unit, none of the demons had been openly hostile towards me and Mia, but plenty of them had looked right past us. It was an ingrained response to ignore mortals in their midst. Until we finally ascended, we were lesser beings, unworthy of demonic attention.

Now? Now they were all eying me, as though I was finally a true rival.

After all, one of the reasons why mortals didn’t deserve notice was our inability to compete for souls during major conflicts. With my ability on full display, and the promise of more in the future, my demonic comrades couldn’t afford to ignore me.

This was especially true if my suspicions were right and most of the demons in Glaustro’s unit were ascendant. The rule that ascendant demons were weaker was often taken as fact. With me angling to become an exception, I wondered uneasily if I had made myself a target.

But it wasn’t true hostility I saw in their faces. If anything, their eyes contained shreds of respect.

I didn’t know how to deal with that, so I chose not to. For now.

Instead, I focused on what Mia was up to. When I saw the best answer for that was ‘up to her elbow in scorpion guts’, I ventured closer with a sigh.

I briefly considered keeping a distance from the splash zone. She was chopping bits off with gleeful abandon, making the remains rain down all around her. But, since I was already in a similar messy state, I just kept walking until I was right next to her.

“Hey, Mia. What are you doing with all the scorpion thingies?” I asked eloquently as she expertly stripped fleshy bits from yet another section of hardened, ‘dead’ armor.

“Hayden! Look at this.” The cat girl shoved a piece of dripping carapace into my arms. I complied with a grimace, even if I would have preferred to keep it at arm’s length. “Isn’t it amazing?”

“Um, yes, amazing, but why are you collecting it?”

Mia shot me a dazzling smile, then turned back to prying off the tails. “For Yules. She loves unique materials, remember? I’m not sure whether she can enchant these, since they don’t like mana. But even if she can’t, the armor alone would be incredible. Maybe weapons, too. I want something that’s good for stabbing.”

The cat girl paused, then looked down forlornly at her gold-covered claws, like they had betrayed her.

“My claws didn’t cut all that great, and I didn’t want to keep whacking the things with my sword,” she whined. “It would have gotten damaged.”

“That’s… a lot of good points,” I muttered quietly, taken aback.

The idea of materials hadn’t even occurred to me. Somehow, since joining the legion, my notion of currency and value in general had gotten skewed. I was starting to see souls as the only thing of real value.

That wasn’t true though, was it?

Without the mana crystals, I would be much slower getting through magecraft layers. Even the materials I stole from Berlis had been a wonderful gift for Yules, which she was ecstatic to receive and experiment with. Hell, some of those materials were in my armor.

Mia’s mention of an additional weapon further piqued my interest. My dual wielding style technically worked through a sword paired with a long dagger, yet I had all but dropped the dagger part due to the quality of my sword and the relative weakness of my off-hand. But if I had an impressive enough dagger…

I couldn’t focus exclusively on acquiring souls. f I started to ignore everything else in favor of murder, my progress would stall out. At the very least, I would be closing off opportunities that could be highly beneficial.

So, rather than try and talk the cat girl back to normal levels of excitement, I rolled up my sleeves to help her.

Well, I tried to roll up my sleeves. They were so soaked in mutant scorpion blood that they clung to my skin. Giving up, I dug my hands into another critter carcass.

I couldn’t wait to finish harvesting so we could clean up.