Elizabeth looked up from her work, though her hands did not stop. Most soldiers around her just reacted like prey however, some even curling up on the spot and starting to murmur some things she ignored.
She had not known Aki had any shapeshifting ability, but from what she'd gathered it shouldn't be too far fetched for someone that held such a domain over flesh.
"How can you even stay strong like that in front of such an effect?" Ferris trembled, watching for any demons trying to approach.
There were none, they all crawled over each other to get to Aki, who was quite literally obliterating them as he shined a dark purple, small gouts of flame trying to form around him with no success.
"Aki broke something on my mind. I don't know what exactly, but after the wish to die stopped, things all became a lot simpler. Fear is a tool, not something to consume you." She scoffed. It was all very obvious to her now, to such a degree that she simply lost her anoyance at speaking with idiots.
If it's nescessary it must be done. Actually being human had just turned into a much lesser burden. While she'd not magically grown smarter, her focus and dedication had reached new boundaries she quite literally had been incapable of imagining.
While some things were a lot more disturbing, normal 'people' for example, she had never been squeamish.
"You mean you two..."
"Not an euphemism. He touched my head and broke a thing." That everything could still go back to the primal desires even for someone with such small restraints was amazing to her, but it was not like emotions stopped being a thing either. She'd been born broken of something she could not reconise and that was fine.
How else was she suppose to learn to create a dimensional anchor so easily?
Pushing down a small lever, a wave of stabilisation started expanding with the newly assembled machine as the epicenter. When it passed a demon, the roared in pain, and although her perception was still weak, she understood the concepts behind their horror well enough. If before they were amphibious animals learning to walk on earth, they were now newborn walking on razor sharp grass and suffocating on barely breathable air.
While Aki had been unable to explain it to anyone else due to laziness over the redundancie of the whole thing, she could now understand what the things breaching into their dimention were. While there aparently was a diagonal reality that could easily be described as 'hell' and was filled with 'demons', this was not it. Those were simply the equivalent of beasts of caos. Uncertainties, possibilities, thoughts, ideas, things that were simply not ment to exist in a form of matter, that could not exist in a system with such rigidity that they could not exert their nature.
She'd not looked, but was pretty sure that at the point where reality started bending there was a lot of dead creatures, killed by their own weight and form simply because their imediate existence did not translate well to this side.
"THE CREATURES ARE RUNNING AWAY!" A soldier shouted near her.
"You seem to have missunderstood something. That's not a good thing for you all." She spoke loud enough to be heard by the rest of the combat personel and support staff near her as her hands already worked towards assembling another anchor around a living 'demon'. "Someone need to carry it towards the tears in space after all, and while Aki is attracting a great deal of attention, a lot of creatures will run towards the machine when they realise there is no escape from the pain." The explanation took a lot of vigor out of the soldiers, their power simply not enough to properly take down anything trying to come to this side after all. Ferris would be the one taking care of such things, but it'd not help much with their intusiasm.
******
Aki could not feel any happier than he was at the moment. That was an oversimplification, he could think of several things that'd add to this situation, but none of them were even remotely available.
This was what he was ment to do however. This was so much of him! IT WAS RIGHT!
He had no fantasies that he'd survive trying to take down the whole invasion himself, nevermind that he could keep going for as long as he wished. Life was all about the pursuit of happiness however.
He'd enjoy the blood raining down on him, the feeling of crushing flesh and bone beneath his hands and feet, the rending of armor through his claws, the pain of his enemies as their very existence was dismantled, consumed and dispersed into his very own as existence itself, maintaining the stability of space despite the great amount of attacks where he himself cut apart it's fabric.
This was the best he could do against many enemies, the first time where he simply didn't need to give a shit about consequenses, apearances or punishments! If this was what Superman felt when fighting gods he needed not worry about slaying, than Aki would never be a real hero, and he couldn't be happier with that.
When his carnage brought him to the actual site of the space tears, he agreed that indeed, his expertise with the universal constant was very fucking lacking to be reconised by the system. Not only was the simple sight of the breach enough to cause him a headache, he couldn't make head or tails of the folds and how it interacted with what was clearly more than three dimensions.
He'd need to brush up on his Carl Sagan and the like if he wanted to force his perception further than what he could currently. His limiters weren't there anymore, so he'd not simply die from reaching enlightenment.
There was little he could do about that now however, so he just blocked the strike from the faceless mass of muscles that for some reason had long bone blades instead of arms and hands. It tilted it's head at him, then suddenly they had matching tooty grins. His own was clearly more handsome however.
Each jabbed with the limb not holding the enemy, Aki simply held his fingers together, his gray claws forming an imitation of a spear, the human going for the head and the invader going for the heart.
Neither moved much despite the shockwaves on the air. One pierced a heart and the other held a neck. The rarely asked question was not grinning anymore however, as it's muscles tensed, insides burning as they tried to flee him. It'd never felt such will to destroy and such agony from it's result.
Taking his enemy's arm in a lock with his own, Aki positioned himself horizontaly to the thing, then he turned and hit it's torso with his knee and yanked at it's spine with his hand, the slashed heart and lung of his stitching themselves back in place despites the great amount of blood that squirted out of his damaged chest, the broken bone blade being quickly eaten as his body fixed itself.
He didn't rejoice much on his kill, despite it being the first satisfying one of the day, instead breaking the other blade from the dead body and swiftly throwing it behind himself, his perception informing him of nothing important there.
*THUD*
There was no such thing in his mind when he battled.
When it died, the creature registered on his perception correctly, looking like a big fenile made entirely of muscle and bone, several colored spots appearing at random and not showing any diference from the composition around them. He'd like to study it for any clue on how to better his stealth since he had no perchant for specifics on the area besides some mind magic, but he didn't have the expertise to create his own pocket dimension even if temporary.
""""*WhaT'S YO...."
"That's copyrighted." He said, the compulsion too powerful to ignore even for him. The phisical body of whatever tried to comsume him, not so much. To punch it, however, took the consolidation of said phisical manifestation, which was basically the tear in space itself.
*WHAT is...* It tried to ask again, only to be interupted by an answer.
"Omae mo shindeiru."
*....* It stopped for a moment. That answer did not make sense.
The voice kept asking Aki for a name, an identity, but he did not give any, though a whole hour of answering a simple question with nonsensical words was hard to even his psyque. His enemy seemed to be young, for it did not have many voices to barage him with, nor was this it's domain, yet he stagered step after step of the slow going troop coming his way with the anchor.
From his observation, Aki was pretty sure the thing would only rank at a solid Mythical level (III), yet he could not hit it with his physical body because it didn't have a manifestation, he could not influence it's area of effect because he was quite literally inside of it, and his soul was simply too weak to actually do more than surviving and growing infinitesimaly from the struggle as his psyque was slowly diluted.
That and maybe his fury helped with getting a bit more out of the several beasties coming out of the gap in existence, but that was it. Only when space stopped it's constant natural flow did the thing scream in pain, suffering the equivalent of a human suddenly having blood coagulating in every vessel of their body.
"AND DON'T FUCKING COME BACK!" He screamed at the ten by five, floating blue/green tear in reality. His irritation was quite counter productive towards actually doing the boring and repetitive suturing needed for the stopgap needed here, but there wasn't anything that could simply swing his mood back towards 'calm' at the moment, so he'd just have to be hiper concious for now and beat the creatures on the future invasions even harder.
He needed the practice on spatial manipulation either way, his body was not going to simply develop further without proper nutrition after all.