"Why the long face, human?" laughed the aesh.
Fate and Samantha twisted their swords in the aesh's hip with a growl.
The Adept Guard simply frowned at the aesh's utter lack of concern for his punctured heart and lethal wounds.
He didn't seem bothered at Cait's tugging at his horns, his thick neck not allowing any movement he didn't approve of. He wasn't moved as the continuous rain of arrows fell from above, some puncturing flesh and others bouncing off.
Even when Pospo latched onto a forbidden area and started sinking her claws into it, the aesh seemed unbothered.
Instead, he just laughed.
"Ahahaha! You look like you've seen a ghost! Why so pale? It's not like humans can die from blood loss. Oh, wait!"
His laughter intensified, this situation immensely amusing to him.
Eventually, he shook his head with a wry smirk, dislodging Cait with ease, who landed on her feet and immediately tried to jump back on.
The aesh smacked her away with a palm, the sound of bones breaking resounding as blood spurted into the air.
"A kitsubus challenging an aesh?" the demon asked incredulously. "And one so grossly weak as well. You truly have forgotten all about us."
His grin widened, his yellow eyes boring into the fading light of the Master Guard's eyes. "That's fine. Half the fun of this war will be reminding you of our superiority with a sea of corpses.
"Here's what's going to happen, humans," the aesh said. "I'm going to die here tonight. My wounds are a death sentence. But first, I'm going to kill every last man, woman, and child holed up in this stone prison.
"Your human race will feel the pain our ancestors felt when they were driven from their homes and slaughtered wholesale by heartless monsters."
The aesh's arms flexed, a fog of steam leaving his lips as his smile abruptly turned to a look of utter disinterest.
"The tables have turned. This time, it's you who is weak, you who shall be enslaved and killed at our whims. And you know what? I won't feel a thing."
The aesh's arms twitched, and the heads of the two Masters separated from their shoulders.
The aesh watched the heads fall to the ground with an indifferent look, unfazed by the hateful glares on their faces in death.
The humans wouldn't show mercy to him, so why should he feel sorry for them?
"Now, then…" the aesh started, holding his sword up and examining the blood on it.
He gave it a lick, his yellow eyes darting to Fate to his side.
"…Die for me, will you?"
The aesh blurred, and suddenly Fate was on his back, looking up at the red sky above.
The battle between the Empress and the Tier V aesh was still ongoing, the sonic booms and flashes of light having punctuated the war since its inception.
He tilted his head, finding Samantha and the Adept, who had likewise been blasted back, standing to their feet.
Samantha froze her wounds over without a word as the Adept pulled out a bottle and poured it over the new hole in his armor.
An inky black liquid came out, covering his rent flesh with a thin film to stop the bleeding.
Venden and Cait were already frantically ducking and dodging around the aesh's sword, and Pospo was scurrying along his body to avoid his hunting free hand.
Kravoss and Gevum did what they could to hamper the demon, but what could two Tier Is do against a Tier III? Even the Masters didn't last.
Kravoss' Breath left lasting wounds, but the aesh was far too observant to allow the water to hit anything vital.
Fate placed a palm on the ground, pushing up to a sitting position.
He looked down.
With mild alarm, he noticed a hole shaped like a hand that indented his chest, and as he saw that, his nerves flared with the pain of the bloody hole.
Already, his Inverted Loop Skill was making itself apparent.
It dulled the pain enough for him to keep a level head, kept his organs safe from the palm imprint that otherwise would've decimated his insides, and made the blood gushing from the hole nonlethal.
Too bad he didn't have a way to patch himself up.
The aesh's sword was unenchanted, so his intangibility would've worked on it along with the palm, but the aesh had moved so fast Fate couldn't even register what was happening.
Reflexive Zero was a useful Spell on paper, but getting the timing down for it was far too hard for the current him, who had only seen a total of five battles since obtaining his Skill.
The first was the imps, the second was his duel with Venden, the third was his fight with the Black Dragon assassin, the fourth was his fight with Helga, and the fifth was this same one.
The problem, then, was obvious. In the first two fights, he hadn't even come up with Reflexive Zero yet, and in the last three, he was so outclassed it wouldn't have helped anyway.
Add that to the fact he's had his Facet for only a month, and it was a recipe for the state he was in now.
He swore to himself that after this, he'd throw himself into combat training until he could take an aesh down single-handedly.
As for dying?
He'd already died once today. He didn't intend to do it again.
He winced as he pushed himself to an upright position, not liking the feeling of the cold wind tickling the insides of his flesh.
He lifted his sword, which he hadn't let go of even when sent flying, and squinted at the aesh forty feet away.
They were just four Journeymen, two Familiars, and an Adept. What could they do against a Tier III that treated Masters like punching bags?
The only thing they could do: hold off until reinforcements arrived.
But the beast could bleed, and that meant it could die.
Who knows? Maybe they could kill it before the Arch-Mages arrived to ruin their fun.
He staggered to his feet, hefting his sword as he trudged toward the aesh with a determined expression.
His wobbly steps became firmer with each one until he was sprinting toward the aesh at full tilt.
As the saying went, "aim high and dream big."
And right now, nothing looked higher than this demon's head on a pike.