Perry knew the final confrontation was just around the corner, and he needed every ounce of power he could scrape together to survive it.

So he killed demons.

The Pernicious Prison swept across the battlefield, tearing apart war demons and draining their vital essences to keep Perry going without food, sleep, or comfort. Every moment of the slaughter felt like the first ten minutes, but for his gradually disintegrating clothes.

They were replaced with leather.

Perry finally understood what they had here: It was a perfect flow state of War. The scenery changed, and the situation was always variable, but the goal was always the same. Kill, consume, scatter their corpses across Norgosh and penetrate even further into the Alkush’s territory.

The infinite war within the Demon lord of War’s territory was a state of mind. Slak’vreth seemed impressed that Perry could keep up despite being mortal, and that he was lucky enough to not get struck by the artillery and bombardments that Alkush seemed to favor.

Perry didn’t avoid them, they just didn’t hurt much. They were pretty much exactly what his HP was designed to soak up.

The only times Perry seemed to surface from the ocean of war to catch his breath was when he snuck off into the distance to ‘maintain his gear’.

Which was when he fed Gna’kis the screaming chunks of lesser demons to fuel her metamorphosis into a full-fledged Demon Lord while Eugene acted as a lookout.

Speaking of Eugene.

There were a lot of Eugene now, but while they were friendly with each other, seemed to prefer establishing their own hunting range within Norgosh, only occasionally bumping into each other, so Perry never saw more than two at a time.

Much like tigers, albeit less murder-y towards rivals.

They were busily spreading out, emptying the land of it’s native inhabitants and spreading beyond anyone’s means to control. The very definition of an invasive species.

Shouldn’t’ve hung up on me.

The trolls were having a great time. There were barely a dozen left, but they were in hog heaven, like goldfish who ate themselves to death when given all the food they wanted. Only Karth seemed to have any plans of going back home, and those plans seemed to involve moving his clan here.

Perry tried to explain that the attrition rate made it unviable as a place to raise a family, but Karth waved it off.

The XP Perry got for each demon killed was miniscule…but he made up for it with sheer quantity. First hundreds, then with a few upgrades, thousands, and finally tens of thousands as he decoded their simplistic fighting styles, industrializing their murder and swept across the battlefield like a combine, mowing them down like so much wheat processed into pure XP.

He liked to think that the absorbed potential he was pulling out of circulation was making the world a better place, as less war demons meant less mortals being influenced by them, but who really knew? If the realm truly was infinite, then nothing he did mattered.

As long as he slayed Alkush, though, everything was cherry.

Congratulations! You have reached level 17!

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 17

HP: 12

Body: 74

Stability: 74

Nerve: 75

Attunement: 74

Free Points: 68

XP to next level: 44408

Perry caught his breath, glancing up at the castle in the distance as a thought occurred to him. Was it the same castle they’d always been running towards? No, they definitely sacked it and pushed further into Alkush’s territory. But all the castles looked, smelled, felt the same, always another one just over the horizon.

Were they all just stamped out of cardboard? Was he running on a treadmill with no end in sight? There was a good chance this was the case, as size and distance were relative in Norgosh. Why were they marching towards a goal when distance had no meaning?

Weren’t they by definition always beside each other? Within each other, even? Did they have to get closer symbolically? Or did Perry have to bridge the gap somehow.

One must always be suspicious of spirit realms.

Perry frowned at the niggling thought in the back of his head.

He refocused on his stats and spread them out evenly, using giving Stability one of Nerve’s points to ensure it remained higher than his Attunement.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

As much as he’d like to specialize, it made more sense to keep his mind and body balanced so he could be a normal person when he wasn’t fighting, and leave the mind-warping insanity for Sliding Stats.

Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)

Class: Potent Thaumaturge

Level 17

HP: 12

Body: 91

Stability: 92

Nerve: 91

Attunement: 91

Free Points: 0

XP to next level: 44408

Perfect.

1.05^72 = 33.5

1.05^91= 84.76

He’d more than doubled his power in every respect between level sixteen and seventeen.

Choo-choo! All aboard!

“What was THAT!?” Slak’vreth asked, peering at him with an uncharacteristic expression of alarm.

Perry glanced over at Slak’vreth standing next to him, perched atop her Earth elemental like a tank commander in WWII.

Perry narrowed his eyes.

Stability 92 -> 77

Attunement 91 -> 106

Perry doubled his Attunement again by adding fifteen points, ending at a total one hundred and seventy-six times his base.

“What…are you?” Slak’vreth asked, her question falling on deaf ears as all of Perry’s concentration was fixed on unraveling the mystery of the ‘infinite’ planes of War. They weren’t infinite, they were just…set up in such a way that no one could ever win, because they were chasing each other’s tails in a never-ending game of ring-around-the-Rosie.

Well, enough of that.

The world wobbled under his scrutiny.

Perry fixed Slak’vreth in his gaze, pinning her and all of her troops in place in his mind, and then turned, the world itself creaking and shifting like a rusty door hinge as he turned his head.

Standing on a WWII tank right beside their Earth Elemental was Alkush, seemingly fighting alongside them the entire time. And he had been, separated from them by a thin fold in reality as they pointlessly chased each other.

A design of the Demon Lord of War, perhaps?

The castle walls ahead of them erupted into chaos as the defenders found themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their enemies, turning small arms and swords and bows against each other.

Alkush glanced over at them and seemed to jump in place. For a brief moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the two opposing war demons locked yellowed eyes, failing to breath.

Alkush began fumbling for the pistol tucked into a holster of demon-skin, while Slak’vreth surged forward, Echo raised high.

The pistol had an interesting gilded engraving on the side, and judging by the magical pulse it emitted, shoving Slak’vreth’s attack backwards and shattering a good fraction of her pauldron, it must’ve been quite potent in its own right.

It wasn’t quite enough.

The two-hander’s strike was shoved back by the cone of force, but one of the echoes came in at the exact right angle to avoid the blast, lopping off Alkush’s hand at the wrist and sending the ornate pistol tumbling off the tank and disappearing into the barren soil

With a wordless gasp of pain, Alkush tried to retreat back into the tank while Slak’vreth recovered, but Perry was having none of it.

Dragor’sKinesis.exe

Perry wrenched the hatch out of Alkush’s grip and then disassembled the tank piece by piece, popping the heavy welded seams and stripping the bolts that were designed to never come apart again. In moments the tank was floating in individual pieces in a cloud of scrap metal around of them.

Alkush’s wounded hand grew back while his other one launched a ball of concentrated Essence at Perry’s chest.

Perry caught it in his palm, where it immediately began to disintegrate his body, sending a devastating curse up his arm, the veins blackening in a fraction of a second.

Sampler.

Perry took a sample of the spell and confined it within an empty internal battery set aside for just such an occasion. He leaned down and took a little taste of the lethal spell, gaining an instant understanding of its composition as his mouth began to degrade, tongue sloughing away as the black corruption aimed to pass through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.

It’s a nasty piece of work that seems to be a combat-curse supercharged to cause gangrene in a fraction of a second. It has a robust method for circumventing counters and healing spells. Matter of fact, the spell itself is an aggressive glutton that will eat aforementioned defenses to increase it’s own power. But…the complexity of adding what is essentially a digestive system to a spell creates vulnerabilities.

Before the top of his mouth dropped out, Perry used the sample and his understanding to design a tweak to the spell’s design, inserting an extra essence ensconced inside the sample he’d stolen to prevent it from being recognized as foreign. This extra essence added a set of commands that caused the spell to cannibalize itself inside him.

Perry flushed the modified spell through his body, where it mixed with the original, burning itself out before it could achieve critical damage.

In an imperceivable instant after Perry caught the spell, it had been neutralized.

Perry crushed the last of the spell in his hand and shook the tingles out as the skin grew back.

Alkush’s eyes widened, jaw wide. He looked like he was about to say something when Slak’vreth fell upon him, swinging her new blade with a vicious snarl.

Perry shot the bits and pieces of tank in every direction while he waited for the battle to cool down.

Even with her new sword, cutting a greater demon down to nothing in his own domain was an arduous task. The echoes could only do superficial damage, and Alkush seemed to heal as fast as he was damaged while peppering Slak’vreth with truly nasty magics, showing that even while he was disarmed, he was still dangerous.

After what felt like an age, Alkush began to slow, and finally collapse, kneeling in the barren soil in front of Slak’vreth.

“May I have a moment?” Perry said before Slak’vreth ended the demon for good.

Slak’vreth’s eyes narrowed. “He’s mine.”

“And you can have him, I just want to ask him something.”

Perry squatted down in front of the greater war demon, meeting the panting demon’s gaze.

“Where’s the contract with Tyrannus?” Perry asked, idly searching the demon’s pockets. He didn’t really think it’d be there, but stranger things have happened.

Alkush let out a low chuckle.

“I sold it, obviously.”

“You did what?” Perry asked, deadpan.

“The dragon’s contract is transferrable. Once I learned you were coming after it, I immediately sold the toxic asset to our Lord in exchange for the power to win our battle.”

“It isn’t a goddamn mortgage, you can’t just…” Alkush’s bloody chuckling indicated that he indeed could. With a growl, Pery stood and turned away in frustration, ready to leave Slak’vreth to her work. A moment later the oddness of Alkush’s phrasing caught his attention.

“Toxic asset,” Perry murmured, turning back to the demon. “Whose words are you repeating?”

“The moment he learned of your location, Tyrannus advised me of your goal, and bade me pass these words unto you: I don’t owe you a climactic battle with me.”

“FUCK!” Perry shouted as his mind caught up with new information.

Tyrannus had been watching the entire island escapade.

How did he do that? A bug on Charles.

If he could bug Charles’s person, it would be far, far easier to design the counterspelling devices he sold Perry’s uncle to forward all the data from their experiments trying to steal Abun’zaul to his personal labs.

Where they had no doubt had perfected a machine designed to extract the legendary mimic.

Which was no doubt pointed at him at this very moment, because Tyrannus wouldn’t give him a warning if he had any chance of-