I stared at my approaching death with a detached sort of despair.

It didn’t feel quite real, to be honest. The distant dots of whatever fliers the jinn were preparing didn’t look too dangerous. And if they were… well, what exactly could we do about it?

Mia, on the other hand, did not share my morose resignation.

The cat girl placed herself in front of me, teeth bared and long claws glinting in the sunlight, ready to rip into anything that eventually descended upon us.

“Good work, you two.” Glaustro’s pained grunt as he melted out of his rock construct snapped me out of my daze.

Suddenly, I wanted to shout, or do something similarly inane. Approaching death, remember? But the calmness of my commander stopped that urge in its tracks.

Instead, I watched silently as he strolled up to the center of the golem’s chest, then stomped his foot down.

The golem’s body trembled, but that was it.

The demon grunted again, this time in annoyance, as he took a knee. His hands lit up, then literally parted the rock, digging deep into it.

Eventually, he tugged out a glowing orb the size of a watermelon, covered in densely packed runes. It was perfectly spherical, and it bled mana. The only blemish on it was a single crack, which I easily recognized as my sword’s handiwork.

I must have gotten lucky while indulging in my rune stab-fest. In my panic, I definitely hadn’t thought to aim for a core. Not that I would have known where to look for it, of course. Golem makers could stick the core into any part of their creation.

Still, this particular golem’s crafter was definitely a stickler for tradition. The core had been treated as a literal ‘heart’, and placed accordingly. I wanted to scoff, but that had worked out in our favor, so the mage-creator got a pass.

Even so…

“Sir?”

I wasn’t sure what to ask him, so I settled on that one word. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and ‘Is that really important when we’re about to die?’ seemed a tad disrespectful. After all, it was only his intervention that had made it possible for me to go all stabby-stab on the golem in the first place.

“Keep this, soldier. You deserve it.” Glaustro held the core out to me with a smile, and I hesitantly took it.

He turned away, took a deep breath, and then made his mana manifest around him again.

I stared at the core for a second before shrugging. If he wanted me to have a little more loot before the end, who was I to say no? Come to think of it, thanks to my soul-bound dimensional pouch, I would get to keep the core even after our imminent death.

This perked me up a little.

While I was struggling to force the core into my dimensional purse, Glaustro raised his arms dramatically.

Mana pulsed out of him, spreading much more easily now that the sandstorm wasn’t backed by the golem’s magic. All over our battlefield, rock constructs rose out of the ground, scooping up demons as they went.

Some of these demons protested, and some even managed to evade capture due to their relatively stable condition, but most looked like they had been put through a blender. Sadly, that description wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Let it happen,” Glaustro bellowed. After that, his conjured minions finished collecting demons in short order.

Our losses weren’t as bad as I had feared. The golem’s initial attacks took out a bunch of demons, but the subsequent waves merely caused serious injuries. As far as I could gauge, we lost about 200 soldiers.

A fifth of our forces. But when the alternative was a full wipe, it didn’t seem so horrible.

Face creased in concentration, Glaustro motioned with his hands. His gigantic construct, already half-melted over the golem, collapsed fully. Then it rose up again, forming into a massive snake. The rock-minions carrying demons walked straight into the snake, melting into it and taking their cargo with them.

I blinked, then slowly turned to look at my commander. He quirked an inquisitive brow at me.

“Well? Are you coming, or do you need an escort as well?”

Wisely, I decided to shut up and follow him.

The snake opened its jaws. Its rocky tongue unfurled, presenting a perfect ramp for Glaustro, Mia, and me. We strolled down this ramp to join the rest of our unit inside the snake’s belly.

The space would have been cramped if not for the many nooks carved into the walls, where the most heavily wounded demons had already been laid. Some were unconscious. Still, the majority of the survivors were on their feet, waiting for us.

I was relieved to spot Bronwynn towards the front of the group. Quickly looking over his injuries, I relaxed further. He had bloodstains on the front of his armor. His left leg was savaged, and it looked like he was barely able to stand. He had small cuts all over his exposed skin. But his eyes were bright and aware, and he was currently assessing me and Mia the same way I was assessing him.

The snake’s mouth closed behind us, plunging the space into darkness. The whole construct trembled as it began to move.

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A second later, light winked into existence above the crystalline demoness, her ice body twinkling softly under the illumination of her spell.

“Well, that was a right mess,” she said cheerfully, which earned her more than a few scowls.

Glaustro just looked amused. “I admit I did not expect them to be capable of weaponizing the local environment. Not to that extent. By all rights, it doesn’t make sense. If the blasted sand is mana resistant, then they shouldn’t be able to manipulate it so easily.”

Was my mighty commander whining? It sounded suspiciously like he was.

“And yet they are,” his aide jumped in with a sigh. The normally impeccable Tybalt looked haggard. His clipboard was nowhere to be seen. “We saw it when that jinn attacked the city, too. I should have prepared for something like this.”

“It was an unfortunate string of events, yes, but let’s not act like we earned nothing. Just knowing that such golems exist will be invaluable for high command. Be proud. We survived, and we will be rewarded for it,” Glaustro declared, visibly lifting the spirits of everyone inside the snake’s belly.

Tybalt, however, seemed determined to force reality on us. “Only if we get away, commander.”

I was not the only one who grimaced at that. Anxiety briefly thrummed through my chest, but the placid look on Glaustro’s face calmed me somewhat.

“We are currently underground. I am empowering my construct to burrow at top speeds. It’s not faster than flight, but they will have a much harder time tracking us. Otherwise, well… if we die, we die. If it comes to that, I will detonate my construct so they can’t inflict a worse death on us.”

My expression soured. I really didn’t want to know that my commander’s calm mood stemmed entirely from his confidence in an easy death.

To my surprise, the reassurance actually did the trick for the rest of my comrades. Smiles slowly peeked through on the demons’ faces, and some even began to chatter excitedly. I could do little but stare at them in shock before the mystery resolved itself in my mind.

They were used to it.

They were used to fighting all-out, to the very best of their ability, then laying down their arms and accepting death. As I scanned through the crowd, I realized that not a single demon looked tense or uncomfortable.

How many times had they all died and then returned to life? How many times did someone have to go through that process before they became entirely indifferent to it?

I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I would like the answer.

I definitely didn’t view the prospect with any degree of indifference. Judging by her stiff posture and the way her eyes were darting around, neither did Mia.

“You okay?” I whispered, trying not to bring attention to her emotional state, even if the effort was meaningless in a room full of abyssal empaths.

“I don’t like being underground. Or in tight spaces. Or in tight underground spaces,” Mia hissed.

I had to fight to keep my face blank. Mia was not, in fact, worried about our potential deaths. No, she was dealing with a phobia.

Well, that makes me feel silly.

I decided to drop it. It felt kind of nice to give up on the worrying anyway. Instead, I dragged Mia down to lean against the construct’s wall.

“Come on,” I said, extracting my grimoire. “We need to work more on your spell optimization. With your natural advantages, you should be much faster than me when we’re both running the same technique, but you’re barely staying ahead.”

The cat girl bristled at the ‘insult’, but it did the trick. She held half the book while I held the other, and we bent our heads over the diagrams and detailed drawings of the human body.

She grumbled fiercely about the drawings, saying the technique did not account for her ears and her tail, and that whole muscle groups were entirely different. Nonetheless, we studied diligently for a long time.

It was a wonderful distraction, not to mention practical, but it didn’t entirely drown out all the worrisome activity around us.

I was keenly aware of Glaustro’s rigid posture and pale, sweating face. I couldn’t ignore the fact that his aide kept surreptitiously slipping mana crystals into the commander’s hands. They were far shinier and larger than any mana crystals I had seen, but the exhausted sergeant still worked through each one in a matter of minutes.

It was also hard to miss when, several hours into our retreat, the tremors of the construct’s motion grew far more turbulent.

At one point, an explosion rocked the snake’s entire form, making chips of stone rain down from the ceiling. The demons all tensed at the sound, but their faces remained blank, maintaining the façade that nothing notable was happening.

I found it much harder to be so casual.

Even knowing that I would come back, even having gone through the process once already, I felt like a vise was squeezing my chest. My pulse hammered away, so loudly that I was pretty sure Mia hear it. Regardless, she definitely sensed my anxiety.

She made no comment, bless her heart, and even doubled down on her questions about the spell, but that only helped a little.

“Prepare to engage.”

Glaustro’s words were as sudden as they were disquieting. The next moment, everyone was on their feet with weapons ready, myself included. My eyes darted all over the snake, though there was no way I could spot an approaching throat through its walls.

I didn’t have to wait for long.

With a low whine, something broke through the ‘ceiling’ and crashed down to the floor. I had just enough time to assess the intruder before the demons were on top of it.

The creature, if it could be called that, was a short, stubby thing. The trunk of its body was a tube, adorned with runes and glowing with power. Its face was a collection of drill-like instruments, with an opening that accepted the incoming sand and dirt. It had four legs and a long, sinuous tail with a star-like shape at the end. Dirt was currently streaming out through that tip like water through a hose, but without new material coming in, the stream quickly petered out.

It was obviously a construct, but I couldn’t tell whether its original purpose was pursuit, or if the jinn were just using whatever they could get their hands on.

Then I had no time to puzzle over such details, because dozens of the drilling constructs began breaking into the snake.

I spun immediately towards the closest intruder, slashing my sword confidently at its spinning drills. Unfortunately, the impact rattled my arm and sent me skidding backwards.

The incensed thing decided to pursue. I leveraged my strengthening technique, combining it with the movement technique Mia taught me. Flashing past the creature, I raked my sword along its side this time.

Once again, my attack proved to be of little use. The only result was a shower of sparks.

Then Mia descended on the construct like the wrath of some unholy god, her enchanted sword wreathed in flames. The thing faltered. The next instant, Mia stuck her implement of death in the creature’s artificial jaws and poured all her mana into it.

Flames blazed white, then blue. The thing finally stopped moving as its enchantments failed and its insides melted.

“Your sword defective?” Mia asked with a smirk, looking immensely proud to have scored the kill.

I felt my lips twitch into a smile despite my annoyance. “No. These things just aren’t alive.”

My voice was bitter. I had finally encountered it, my one weakness: fully artificial life forms. The golem skirted the rule, having been granted true life by its creator. But if anything lacked a soul, I could not cut through it with ease.

Maybe if my sword was several upgrades closer to its final form, I could accomplish something. At the moment, though, I was stuck.

Thankfully, the creatures went down quickly after that.

The demons seemed to be taking all their frustrations out on the constructs. And unlike the scorpion beasts, these were not durable enough to shrug off unnaturally strong blows. Shortly after the final construct fell, the tremors of our ride evened out, returning to their pre-attack levels.

I didn’t quite dare believe it yet, but there was a strong chance that we were finally safe.