SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts Chapter 626

This was not the instant lethality of a strike or a spell. The demon was dying, but dying at the pace that a toxin died things rather than the pace that force died things. Minutes rather than seconds. A gradual reduction of the essence that sustained everything the demon was, the thing that made it Grade Four becoming less and less available as the Null Blood worked through its system.

The demon’s eyes were on him throughout.

Not with fury. Something different, the quality of an intelligent creature that had understood, sometime in the last several minutes, what was happening to it and was not able to do anything about that understanding.

He did not feel particularly bad about this.

The demon was a Null demon. Its blood killed things by doing exactly what was being done to it now. The irony of the situation was the most interesting aspect of it from a certain perspective.

He watched the essence level drop.

It took time.

The demon at its peak had been a full Grade Four, and Grade Four reserves did not empty quickly even under the sustained drain of a Null Blood infection without countermeasure. He sat beside it and waited, the forest going about its business around him, Luton holding its light grip, Fenrir waiting, Cerbe warm to his left.

The level dropped past the Grade Five threshold.

Then past Grade Six.

Then into the range below that, the range where the essence sustaining the demon’s physical function was insufficient for the demands of that function, where the gap between what was available and what was needed began expressing itself in the demon’s body as degradation rather than just reduced capability.

The tremors increased in that range.

Not because the Null Blood was doing more. Because the demon’s system was doing less, the compensation effort having consumed itself, the remaining essence no longer sufficient to maintain the active fight against the intrusion and the basic functions simultaneously.

The demon chose the basic functions.

Or rather, the basic functions took priority by default as the active fight became unsustainable.

The Null Blood worked without opposition.

The level continued dropping.

Damien tracked it all the way down.

When it reached zero, there was not a dramatic moment. The demon simply stopped having the quality that living things had. The physical form was intact, nothing had been destroyed or removed, but the essence that had animated it was gone and the form without that essence was the same form without the relevant characteristic that made it what it had been.

He sat with it for a moment.

Running through what he had observed and checking it against what he had expected.

The Null Blood worked on demons. That was confirmed, clearly, without ambiguity. The mechanism was the same as he had understood it to be from Arielle’s explanation, the Null property attacking essence rather than attacking the body, the body failing when the essence was gone rather than from direct damage.

The quantity required was the significant data point.

He had used thirteen drops across the engagement, distributed across multiple entry points, and the process had taken the length of time he had observed. Against a human target, his understanding was that the quantity required for the same result would be considerably smaller, the Null Blood’s interaction with pure essence being more efficient than its interaction with demonic essence.

Demons were made of demonic essence. The Null Blood’s property worked against pure essence. Demonic essence was not pure essence, it was the corrupted inverse of it, and the relationship between Null Blood and demonic essence was therefore less efficient than Null Blood against its primary target.

It still worked.

It just required more.

He filed the ratio. Thirteen drops over multiple entry points for a Grade Four demon, result confirmed. The Grade of the demon would affect the quantity required, the higher the grade the more essence to deplete, but the mechanism was the same.

He looked at the demon.

At the jar in his hand.

At the full jar.

A considerable amount remaining.

He allowed himself the grin again, quieter than the one that had made the demon shudder, the grin of someone sitting with information they found genuinely useful and not yet having decided all the ways in which it would be useful.

He had ideas.

Not specific targets. Not plans that required naming. Just the shape of what having this information and having this supply of Null Blood made possible that had not been possible before.

The shape was interesting.

He looked at Luton.

The slime had been maintaining its hold through the entire experiment without requiring direction, the light grip having been sufficient since the limb-breaking made significant movement impossible. He felt Luton’s attention on him in the way he felt all his summons’ attention, the particular quality of presence that communicated awareness without requiring confirmation.

“Done,” he said.

Luton understood.

The grip changed. Not released, transformed, the light hold becoming the full engulfing motion that was Luton’s consumption process. The demon disappeared into the slime with the quiet efficiency that Luton brought to consuming things, the form that had been on the forest floor a moment ago simply no longer being on the forest floor.

Damien sealed the jar.

He stood.

Directed Luton to receive it back into the Universal Space. The slime took the jar and the jar was gone, stored alongside the other jars in the organized interior that Luton maintained with more deliberateness than a creature of its apparent simplicity should have been capable of.

He mounted Fenrir.

Luton returned to his head.

He looked northeast, the direction of the seventh altar, the direction of the forest’s edge and whatever came after the forest’s edge.

“Move,” he said.

Fenrir moved.

The forest continued around them, the afternoon light filtered through the canopy in the patterns he had learned to read as the day’s progress, the ambient essence of the Forest of Twin Disasters carrying its own information in the way it always did.

They encountered the next demons an hour later.

A pair of them, Grade Four, moving through a section of terrain that put them directly in Fenrir’s path. Not Null demons, the essence signature reading clean and ordinary by the standard that his time in this forest had established.

He assessed them.

No particular threat. No particular interest. No experimental value. Nothing he needed from them except for the conclusion of their existence in his immediate vicinity.

He looked at Luton.

“Hungry?”

The slime on his head pulsed in the particular quality that he had come to associate with an affirmative regarding food specifically.

He signaled Luton forward.

The slime dropped from his head and moved, and the two demons had the specific experience of encountering something that looked completely unimpressive and discovering that impressiveness had nothing to do with it. The first one went quickly. The second one had more time than the first but not significantly more, Luton’s efficiency with paired targets having been well established across the weeks they had spent in this forest together.

Both demons gone.

Luton returned, slightly larger.

But it spat out the cores.

The two dense spheres of demonic essence landed on the forest floor in front of Fenrir’s feet, and Cerbe’s nearest head oriented toward them with the focused attention of something identifying items relevant to its interest.

Damien looked at Cerbe.

At the cores.

At Cerbe.

The hellhound looked back at him with three sets of eyes that all carried the same expectant quality.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Cerbe did not need further encouragement.

The cores were consumed with the particular Cerbe enthusiasm that was the hellhound’s defining quality in situations where enthusiasm was appropriate, all three heads involved despite the cores being more than manageable by one.

The additional essence settled into Cerbe’s presence as a faint increase in the ambient heat around it.

They moved on.

More demons later, the forest delivering them in the scattered, unpredictable way it had been delivering things all day. Each pair or group that appeared, Luton handled. Each core Luton spat out, Cerbe consumed.

The rhythm established itself without requiring management, the three of them cycling through a process that was simultaneously the most mundane and most productive use of a journey through a forest full of enemies that Damien had found.

He rode without particular attention to any individual encounter.

The seventh altar was ahead.

The day was moving toward evening.

He was content.

The two dense spheres of demonic essence landed on the forest floor in front of Fenrir’s feet, and Cerbe’s nearest head oriented toward them with the focused attention of something identifying items relevant to its interest.

Damien looked at Cerbe.

At the cores.

At Cerbe.

The two dense spheres of demonic essence landed on the forest floor in front of Fenrir’s feet, and Cerbe’s nearest head oriented toward them with the focused attention of something identifying items relevant to its interest.

Damien looked at Cerbe.

At the cores.

At Cerbe.