Even with his eyeballs leaking out of their sockets, James kept intensifying the onslaught.

Lunaris had passed out so she couldn’t even heal him. But that wasn’t a problem for the madman. He could just use his incredible affinity for mana to sense everything he needed to see. And as for the gaping wounds, he didn’t even think about them. He couldn’t feel any pain, so he didn’t really care that his eyeballs were no more. The doppelgangers had more of a reaction to his imploding eyeballs than him.

But it didn’t end at his eyeballs. The doppelgangers were keeping up, so he had to up the ante. He sacrificed even more, this time making him bleed out of his ears. But since he only felt the warmth of the blood running down his face, he didn’t care. He was just happy to see his Javelins slowly overwhelming theirs.

The doppelgangers immediately matched the sacrifices, equalizing the number of Javelins in the sky. The dark and crimson Javelins were nullifying each other, exploding harmlessly without reaching either side.

Despite being the one on the offensive, James was quite impressed with these doppelgangers. Especially with the fact that they weren’t running out of mana at all.

James could naturally keep up since mana was the one thing he didn’t lack at all, he couldn’t even feel the bottom of his own mana pool anymore. But the doppelgangers had probably already wasted more mana on the Javelins than a thousand mages put together could muster. And yet, they weren’t phased by the mana consumption at all.

However, as impressive as their mana reserves were, they couldn’t keep up in every department. Even the cold and emotionless agents felt pain. And James knew that pain all too well. It wasn’t something that you could handle just like that.

Sure, if he could do it, a bunch of psychopaths born and bred for murder could do it as well. But he had to work his way up to this many sacrifices. He had to suffer for a long time before he could cast sacrifices over and over. And even then, only after receiving the trait that made him not feel pain he was finally able to go as crazy with it as he wanted.

But they hadn’t paid their dues like he did. They copied his powers, but they could never copy what he had been through to get them.

James cast 50 more sacrifices, immediately losing the feeling in his arms and legs. And yet he still didn’t care. He just kept spamming Javelins. Not even able to physically move his limbs to at least symbolically gesture, he was standing there motionless while several hundred crimson rods were firing automatically every second.

Finally, it looked like the tide was turning. The doppelgangers sacrificed again, but even with the five of them sharing the burden and thus needing to perform a lot less sacrifices than James, the pain had become too much.

It wasn’t just their minds that were faltering, they were used to many forms of pain. Pain tolerance was an essential part of training as an agent. But their bodies couldn’t handle it anymore either.

Forget coughing blood and twitching, they were now beginning to lose function of their limbs as well.

And unlike a certain madman for whom this was an almost daily occurrence, the agents were panicking at the sudden loss of their appendages. At first, they were able to resist it, but after having to keep up with even more sacrifices, and thus starting to leak blood from their ears and even feeling an overwhelming pressure on their bloodshot eyes, they realized that this was not a battle they could win.

Competing with the madman on sacrifices and pain was not something anyone could do, so the doppelgangers had already accomplished something extraordinary. But they still failed.

And James was not about to let them go. The Javelins kept pouring out of him, not stopping for a single second.

Seeing that they were beginning to lose, and since they weren’t willing to literally implode just to keep up with this insane guy, they decided to flee.

But James had no empathy for agents. To him, they were like fleas. Worse, they were like genocidal fleas who murdered and tortured millions without mercy.

“Oh, I used to tactically retreat as well! So you’re still just copying me!” James mocked them as he kept conjuring Javelins.

The doppelgangers were flinging themselves away, trying to get out of range as soon as possible. But James while James was more than willing to flee from danger from time to time, he wasn’t a coward. He didn’t need the barrier to keep himself safe from them. They needed a barrier to keep themselves safe from him.

He immediately abandoned his barrier, leaving his friends’ to nap it out under its unfaltering protection.

He stopped conjuring the Javelins. But that was only so he could focus entirely on keeping up with the little copycats.

As if mana was something he didn’t care about more than one cared about exhaust fumes, James began flying by pouring more mana out of him than he had ever dared before. After all, he had now absorbed the energy from so many Stygian cities that he lost count. He had plenty to spare.

However, that lead to something quite unexpected. He suddenly felt a sensation that was oddly similar to pain.

[Skill unlocked: Fleshrending flight.]

The name of the skill made him realize what he was feeling. He looked down at his legs, and he saw the skin literally melting from the sheer speed and heat generated by his flight. He couldn’t even move or feel his legs, and yet this sensation was so intense that it still reached his brain.

But it still wasn’t pain. It was an intense, stinging pressure, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.

And he didn’t even need to handle it for any longer, because he had already reached his target.

Within seconds, he found himself catching up to and even surpassing the doppelgangers.

“Ok, so I’ll give you a choice. Spill the beans on everything you know, and I won’t kill you with a snap of my fingers.” James proposed to the doppelgangers, even though he already knew what their reaction would be.