The idea of falling off a cliff didn’t even faze me. I’d jumped down with complete confidence, and that certainty was not unfounded. I hit the slope and skidded down with ease, using my hand to stabilise my movement. My skin should have been ripped off from the friction, but all I felt was a light scraping sensation. I weaved myself around jutting rocks and cliffside shrubs, knowing with each approaching obstacle how I needed to shift my weight to pass by unhindered.

When the land flattened out, I set off at an effortless gallop. Volce trailed up behind me, flying head first with Mallus dragging behind him. He no longer showed the panic he did earlier—besides, he was never really afraid to begin with, just trying to leave the other demons to their demise.

The land sloped gently downwards and from my elevation I could make out the action in detail. The estray had slithered into the middle of Markus’ ring of fire. The haures wasn’t fighting it; he was too busy patching up holes in his fire wall. Digressers were piling up in small mountains and leaping over the top of the flames wherever they were too low. Markus sizzled them as he worked tirelessly to push the flame wall higher and higher, mouthing a string of endless curses.

Where the digressers did make it through, Enzi was slicing them apart with grace. Each swing of Gale carved through a digresser with not a single movement wasted. When one glitched around too far from her, with a flick of her wrist her shuriken flashed out.

Onryō, Class 6. A homing star shuriken with a particular thirst for demon heads. The second half of it was a ring which, when gestured the right way, would call the shuriken back, allowing Enzi to chain her throws one after another.

The shuriken pierced right through a digresser a moment before Markus’ flames sizzled it. Now that the digressers had been cleared out, she twirled on the balls of her feet and released a slash that blasted the estray in the back.

In response, the digresser’s head flipped back and it forced open a maw. The sounds of combat faded out like the world was on a volume slider and the estray had dropped it low, turning all sounds into a distant muffle. Before it did whatever it intended to, however, Toll’s spear appeared on its back, below the head. The wielder materialised like mist turning into life. In a smooth motion, Toll dug a clawed foot into the digresser’s snake body and levered the spear out. The digresser’s head swivelled all the way around so that its non-existent face was still upside down. With its maw still opened it blasted a void-dark beam at Toll.

Everything went silent, save for a monotonal ringing in my ear. Then that tone gave way to something… strange. Like an irregular heartbeat. It was everywhere, coming from all sides at once, from a million different sources. I sought out the closest source, and oddly enough there was a digresser there, slithering towards me from ahead of my path down the incline. I kept it in sight.

The estray’s beam landed on solid ground, leaving a round hole no wider than my torso. However, the balaam, its target, was nowhere to be seen. The estray’s head snapped back together and its “snout” now faced to the side. A moment later, Briary appeared in its tail and Toll emerged into reality once more. This time I saw the knife in their hand.

Myst, Class 3-S. A knife which camouflages the wielder with the sky itself, but only so long as they make no hostile actions.

The estray swiped at Toll with its three arms, one after another. The balaam’s form was already fading, beginning from Myst and spreading along their arm. Each of the estray’s strikes missed, leaving rends in the earth without any of the rumble and tear that usually accompanied excavation. When things were getting dicey for Toll, a jet of flame roared towards the estray and struck it with force, knocking the thing back and making the world go quiet for a moment as it screamed out its fury.

They were in perfect coordination, fulfilling their roles exactly as I had ordered them to over the last couple of days. Despite all their whining and attempts to poke at me, the demons knew this was the best way to fight, and so they acted without question.

The ground levelled out and I lost sight of the demons behind the wall of flame. Only the monstrous estray was visible above it, its head contorting and twisting at unnatural angles and its arms flailing like it were a ragdoll.

The digresser I’d been tracking finally reached me. It leapt out of a groove in the ground and aimed for my head. Without pausing, I calmly raised my knife. The top of its maw went straight through the blade and the squiggly disintegrated before it even had a chance to wriggle its form around to lash me. Their weakness was inside the mouth, after all. It was obvious now that I took a close look at them. That got me thinking about the estray: if the spawn were destroyed easily when you stabbed their mouths, despite the lack of sigil, perhaps that was a property inherited from their maker. However, I wasn’t interested in guessing.

Another digresser leapt out, this one aiming for Volce. The deuce pirouetted in the air arcing the hammer wide. The rabdos’ face struck the digresser and splattered it, launching trails of smoke through the sky.

“I hope your ashed up ass is fire retardant,” Volce cried, his voice unnaturally muffled by the estray’s presence. “Because you’re going to get a little sunburnt going through that fire.”

I fell back to Volce and gestured. “After you.”

The deuce shrugged and steamed ahead. Ahead of us the flame wall was approaching. There was a small gap before me where digressers weren’t forming a mountain, where I planned to get into the ring. Of course, I had no doubt that Markus wasn’t going to let me in if I called. I needed another way.

Volce was twirling Mallus like a hurricane, swatting down digressers in showers of smoke. Meanwhile, I ran my blade into another three digressers’ mouths with pinpoint accuracy, using as little energy as possible with each strike.

As we approached the gap between the digresser piles, Volce turned to me and asked, “So what’s your genius plan to—oh, no no no no NO!” He’d finally realised how I planned to get over the wall.

My highest recorded jump is one hundred and twenty centimetres. Volce was floating at my head height, at one hundred and eighty-two centimetres. With little effort, I leapt up and planted a foot on his back. From there, I kicked off, causing Volce to grunt as he shot to the ground.

I soared over the top of the flame wall so, so slowly, or perhaps that was just a sensation caused by adrenaline. The heat seared my legs, flashed my skin, dried out my eyes. Digressers leapt at me in a mindless attempt to send me to the void, but all of them soared behind my back and were sizzled by the flames. I passed over the apex with no issue then slammed hard onto the barren and charred earth.

My legs weren’t hurting from the fall, but my ankle felt uncomfortably hot. Looking down, I saw a flame catching on the leg of my pants. I slapped it down with a hand—it was cool compared to the heat radiating off the fire wall. It was probably the hottest flame Markus had produced so far. No wonder the digressers were being ordered to stay back.

A moment later, I heard a scream. I turned just in time to see Volce cannonballing over the fire wall, howling in a fit of rage. I stepped sideways and the deuce splatted onto the ground, hammer in hand. Mallus, by this point had grown so that the head was as large as Volce’s body.

The deuce pried himself off the floor and bared his serrated teeth at me. “You ungrateful fuck! After everything I’ve done for you, you go and step on me!”

I slipped a foot under him and thrust him back up. “Kill the spawns, defend the others,” I ordered.

Without waiting for a response, I charged into the fray.

After another stab into its body, the estray brought up its tail and swung it around in a whirlwind. Dirt splashed up beside me, far from the estray’s strike. The source was Toll, who appeared from nowhere and rolled a few metres across the earth. They scrambled up in an instant before fading into mist, the soil on their tattered robes taking a little longer than the rest to disappear. I had no way of telling how badly they were wounded.

Then the estray screamed, cutting off all sound again. Its three arms began clawing at its own flesh, tearing it off in stringy, gooey chunks and hurling it all about. When each of those chunks hit the ground, they writhed and glitched, then started moving on their own. New digressers. With just a few seconds there were ten of them, and they kept multiplying and multiplying, far more quickly than I’d anticipated.

I didn’t hesitate. I lunged for the closest one and stabbed at it, destroying it before it had a chance to move. It was shockingly easy. I didn’t even need to put any strength into it, thanks in part to the ash.

We needed to keep up the pressure or else the estray’s armies would slowly overrun us; the wall rendered us prisoners just as well it protected us. I let a thought bubble to the surface, saying we needed to get closer to the estray. Having read my mind, Volce nodded in understanding. One at a time we destroyed the digressers, but we couldn’t get much closer.

The estray was still tearing them off; a veritable horde of glitching black was growing inside the ring of flame. And when the estray realised it was working, another arm sprung out from its “back”, then another from its “front”—with its head writhing and snapping around as it did, I had no idea which side was which anymore. These new grey arms were long, spindly, jointed in all the wrong places, with fat mitts for hands tipped with long claws: custom built scoops for ripping its own corporeal form to shreds. But despite its self-mutilation, the estray wasn’t losing volume. Each time its form was torn off, it reformed a few seconds later in a patch that was slightly off shade from the rest of its grey self.

We were all being pushed back. Mallus had stopped growing at about twice Volce’s size—digressers could only provide so much food for it. The whirlwind known as Volce couldn’t get any closer and was relegated to smashing one digresser at a time. The piles of digressers outside the ring of flames were growing higher and higher still, forcing Markus to divert all his attention to whittling them down. Enzi’s hands were full—Onryō was flying out non-stop and Gale’s blade was gradually becoming solid. It would only be a matter of time before she had to feed it more ash. In anticipation of that, I started moving towards her to cover her back. Toll hardly appeared in a whole minute, and when they did, it was to grab my shirt and scream a muted, “Get down,” before tossing Briary.

The spear soared high into the air, giving us plenty of time to back up. Now freed of its balaam foe, the estray’s head hinged back at the neck to reveal a maw. Inside there was nothing, and as darkness gathered around it the world went silent once more.

Briary struck the earth in front of the estray and exploded into a ball of thorns. The sharp branches climbed up the giant snake’s body to reach its head, sticking out of the estray in every direction like it was a contorted sea urchin.

The thorns came for us all, gobbling up at least a hundred digressers in the meanwhile. Volce, still spinning his hammer, stretched out and launched to the far side of the ring, letting the hammer’s momentum carry him. Enzi’s legs extended and she thrust herself back as though on springs. She called back Onryō with a flick of her fingers and it sliced a digresser on its way through. Markus directed his left hand towards the oncoming thorns and turned them to cinders before they could get close.

Meanwhile, I was running because that was all I could do. That, and sliding my knife through anything that got in my way. Toll was beside me. Their hand gripped my arm and they dragged me forward. Even after taking ash, I couldn’t match their speed and stumbled my way behind. The brambles approached my heels, then stopped suddenly when I was almost near the edge of the ring. However, I didn’t get away clean. At the last moment, Toll had yanked me forward and I tripped over my feet and dragged the balaam down with me.

After a short slide across the earth, I got back onto my knees. I felt a dull pain but not much else. However, when I looked at my hand, I noticed a trickle of blood running down it. A graze, but more importantly, a sign that the ash was already beginning to wear off.

The scene was so surreal without noise, like I was watching a film with the volume off. So much destruction, yet it felt distant without the sound, as though without volume everything was less real. All of it was made stranger still by a persistent monotonal ring in my ears—a sound that the mind produced when there was no sound; the perfect track for a fight with the embodiment of nothing itself.

Toll collected themselves beside me. Myst lay next to them so their form was visible. It was thanks to that that I saw their feathers stood on end when they looked up at the estray.

Despite the silence, I could hear it: the distinct ssk, ssk, ssk of something being cut. The noise seemed to be so far away, yet if I reached my hand out I was certain I could grasp it. Though it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, I somehow knew that it was the sound of a clash, of two things fighting to erase each other’s existence.

I leaned in closer to hear it better and uttered, What?

The words were swallowed whole by the silence. Everything had been clear to me before: I just had to hold off for a while, search for the estray’s sigil, then stab it when the chance arose. But seeing this now, I wondered, what was a sigil? Sure, I knew the standard answer and all the norms surrounding it, but seeing a creature that defied everything, using the enhanced senses the ash provided me that showed me the strange and complex details to everything, I began to wonder if a sigil was something more than just a rules and memories. That maybe sigils were a gateway to evermore.

Shaking my head, I dropped the issue. It was a fight. I needed to remain focused.

The wooden needles running along the estray didn’t return to Briary so much as they were simply gone. In their place was a Celtic knotwork of gaping holes in the estray’s body, all of which appeared to have missed its sigil. What remained of Briary’s severed thorns returned to it. Once it was back to its neutral form, the spear trembled in its upright position for a moment before collapsing onto the earth.

The estray hadn’t fired the beam yet, assuming that was its intent. Plus, it was injured. I guessed it would try to repair itself first and figured, now was my chance. I stuck my hand into my inventory. When my hand closed around Everwant, I could have sworn I heard singing.

However, the ball of darkness haunting the estray’s snapped-open maw split. Two spaces stood beside each other where the light seemed to be swallowed whole. The head followed suit, and now there were two snouts turned to the side, with mouths sliced through them at a disgusting angle. The cobra-like hood surrounding its head peeled down in halves such that the thing fanned out in two like a blooming flower. Then the whole length, from blooming neck to split snouts, divided once more. Then the newest additions divided again until there were six spots of darkness aiming in every direction.

Toll’s beak moved; I heard nothing, but I didn’t need to. One of those six gaping heads stared at me, and the darkness in its maw became something intense. A ring formed around it—the thing was swallowing light so quickly that it was forming six event horizons. When that thing fired, nothing would escape its draw.

With inhuman strength I rolled aside. A beam of nothing carved right through the earth and shot outwards. It snaked along the land as they estray brought its heads up, down, and around, spiralling and swerving.

Another beam raced towards me and I sprang away, now losing my grip on Everwant which was halfway out my inventory. In my peripheral vision I caught a third sneaking up on me while I was mid air. I stabbed my knife into the ground with a crunch and using only my grip I twirled myself out of the way. As I came back down, I realised I was falling into one of the divots the estray’s beam had just carved. There was no bottom to it, only darkness.

Panicking, I released the knife and flung both arms out to catch the edge. My forearm slapped against packed earth and I reflexively clawed my fingers to scrap myself to a halt. Before I could move, another beam cracked through the earth right beside me. I swung the other way and flung myself over the edge.

Back out of the chasm, I rolled onto a knee and faced the estray, trembling and breathing heavy from panic more than exertion. However, to my relief, the attack was over. The estray’s mouths had all snapped closed.

At least, that attack was over. The land was rent. Chasms to Hell itself scarred the battlefield. But that wasn’t the worst of it. When I turned around, I thought for a moment that, maybe, this might be futile.

The walls of flame had been parted in dozens of places, and through the gaps poured an army of digressers.