บท 18: Shift
Lokus heaved a breath, wiping blood off of his cheek with the palm of his axe-wielding hand.
Almost an hour had passed since their battle began. If it weren't for Lokus' Endurance, he might have collapsed from exhaustion long ago, his corpse a banquet for this most dangerous of foes. But because of his current capabilities, he was only now beginning to feel fatigued.
His claws, however, had long since melted. His paltry Majesty stat, still stuck at the start of Prince, had given out on him over half an hour ago, leaving him with nothing but his fists and the makeshift axe he had managed to retrieve.
The demon, on the other hand, was as fresh as someone who had just woken from a good night's sleep. Since it could turn intangible whenever it wanted, it hardly gave any thought to defending itself from Lokus' attacks via conventional means. Why would it block or dodge something that couldn't even touch its hairless hide?
Instead, it focused on whittling the human down to the point of exhaustion, bleeding his vitality out of him one drop at a time as wound after wound accumulated on him.
It didn't always lose its physical form in time, and that had allowed Lokus to score some relatively minor strikes on it, but it was still in much better condition than Lokus currently was.
However…
His yellow eyes seemed to pierce through the gloom surrounding them, fixated on that perfect mask on the demon's face. This was all an illusion, of course; even now, Lokus could see no better than a blind man in this darkness.
'That mask,' he thought. He turned to the side and spit out the blood that had pooled in his mouth during the lull in the battle, but his eyes never left that mask. 'There's something about it.'
It was more than just its paradoxical appearance that blended both perfection and flaws in an impossible balance that Lokus was on about.
Over the course of their battle, Lokus' Domain had been wrapped around the demon, partly to see it and partly to scour the demon for anything that might be exploited for an advantage. What he discovered had to do with this mask.
Since it had first appeared within his Domain, parts of the demon's form had seemed to flicker and vanish at random, like it was a fever dream with uncertain features one couldn't recall with perfect clarity.
This happened even when the demon was tangible, giving it an ever-shifting and volatile feel within Lokus' touch-based Domain that made pinning down its movements difficult at times.
But that mask never flickered.
Lokus' eyes narrowed further as the demon vanished. The mask vanished as well, but that was something Lokus had come to expect. It wasn't this that had snagged his attention.
His eyes drooped closed, and he mentally shut out his senses of smell and hearing, focusing only on his Domain.
'There.'
Lokus hadn't spent all this time turning himself into the human equivalent of peeling wallpaper for nothing. After watching the demon appear and disappear over and over again like a one-trick magician, he had noticed a tell.
Spinning on his heel, Lokus struck out with his axe just as a particular demon showed itself.
His axe's bone shard point buried itself into the demon's left shoulder, stopping its own attack and causing it to howl in rage using its many mouths.
Lokus winced at the sound, but didn't tarry, his other hand moving.
He grabbed the demon on the opposite shoulder and, before it could turn intangible and escape, violently ripped his axe out of its shoulder.
Its howls shifted into pained screams as its arm was nearly torn from its socket, the appendage dangling limply from its shoulder by a thin sliver of tendon and muscle.
Lokus struck out again with his axe, and it vanished from his sight.
He huffed a breath as he monitored the surroundings with his Domain.
Once Lokus had noticed that the mask didn't change at random like the rest of the demon, he had put more of his focus toward it in between their clashes.
When he had first seen the demon, he had thought that the mask was a mundane item it wore as a trophy or to be more like humans. Now, however, he knew better.
Whenever it turned intangible, which Lokus had taken to calling "shifting," his axe, his hands, rocks, and everything else couldn't touch the demon. If the mask was mundane as he had first assumed, it should have been impossible for the demon to keep it on when shifting.
And after further scrutiny, and no small number of scratches and gouges for his trouble, Lokus had begun to suspect that it held some sort of importance to the demon's abilities. It was always the first to leave his Domain when the demon shifted, and more importantly…
Lokus struck out with his axe again, aiming at a spot in the air that was empty save for a singular, human-like mask.
The rest of the demon manifested a split second later and attempted to catch the axe and disarm Lokus, but he had wisely attacked from the demon's left, and its limp arm refused to respond in time.
His axe's point hooked underneath the demon's mask and flung across the cavern floor, and as if he had just hit a home run, Lokus tossed aside his axe and sprinted madly toward the mask.
The demon roared in anger and disappeared, but Lokus knew it would chase after him. He dove forward, his hands closing around the edges of the mask just as another furious roar reached his ears.
Lokus sighed wearily as he stood, "looking" down at the mask in his hands as he examined it with his Domain.
'Looks like I was right.'
Somehow, this mask was what gave the demon its physical form, almost like a switch to flick off and on. With it removed, it had no "on" button, and was forever stuck as an apparition.
A sense of curiosity welled up within him, and after a moment of hesitation, Lokus put on the mask.
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