The buzzing got louder, though, and instead of being a strange new attack, it turned out to be alien reinforcements. The shadowy realm beneath the stygian canopy came alive with waves of slithering creatures and crawling insects. At first, the Ebon Blade had trouble figuring out where they came from, but it soon became clear. The little corner of hell that they were locked inside was distorting and changing.

-117 Life Force.

What had been trees a moment ago were now warping into twisted termite mounds and giant wasp nests. The trunks still had the same shape, but had become something else entirely. That was true for the ground as well. After a few more seconds, it wasn’t Earth at all. There was no soil to be seen, only things that normally crawled within it. The entire jungle floor had become an endless, writhing surface made up of a million million bugs.

The blade didn’t feel disgust at such things, but even so, a wave of revulsion went through it as it sliced through the first couple to get within arm's reach. As foul as demons were, there was something here, at the dark heart of the Bug Queen’s lair, that was hopelessly polluted.

They were a distraction, though, and no matter how many strange allies she sought to use against it to even the odds, the blade did not let her escape, and continued to charge her as before. This time, though, it did so amidst an onslaught of strange allies.

Spiders lunged at it, worms stretched out from the ground to snare it, and all around, flying, buzzing clouds assaulted it. These were both the most common and the worst of all the pests, and no matter how many it turned to momentary fireflies or ash with a blast of Hellfire or the wake of a Bolt attack, there were always thousands more.

-438 Life Force.

+984 Least Demon Souls.

Even the giant, fist-sized mosquitoes with dagger-like proboscises couldn’t breach its armor, of course, but the smaller flies could work their way inside the armor, gumming up the delicate works that allowed it to move with such grace. Worse, they obscured its sight to a dangerous degree.

In this dismal void, the only things the blade could see were the threads that made up the world, and the way his enemy disturbed them. Now that she’d turned the place from a shadowed clearing into the inside of a wretched hive, though, that job became a thousand times more difficult. Everything was moving, everything was alive, and as a result, she vanished from view almost entirely amidst the squirming, writing background noise.

Its wielder’s movements were slower now, and blind as the blade was, it shifted tactics. Rather than chasing the spidery demon queen through her failing web, it retreated, flaring with fire at irregular intervals to buy it space and time, but each of those bursts was short-lived, and within the space of a minute it had been struck twice more by its foe.

-791 Life Force.

Both of these attacks might have been deadly for a mortal foe, but they were much more cautious than before. Rather than strike in wicked scything blows that it might have the chance to intercept, the Bug Queen lashed out with piercing thrusts at the limit of her long range. These blows were always from behind, and as soon as she struck, she’d already vanished again.

-481 Life Force.

That frustrated the blade, but it couldn’t be everywhere at once. It lashed out randomly. Striking and moving in ways that were utterly unguessable. That reduced the frequency with which her attacks were successful, but it did nothing about the endless writhing masses of insects that clouded their three-dimensional battlefield.

In desperation, the blade fled further up the trees, seeking to rise above the worst of the clouds, and into a place where the light might keep them at bay. It never made it that far, because part way up the tree it was using disintegrated into nothing but ants and soil, and in the ensuing chaos, as it tumbled and looked for a clear views, the Bug Queen struck again, severing both of the Warbringer’s legs at the thigh, and sending all three of the pieces of its wielder falling in different directions.

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-875 Life Force.

It’s lucky that she attacked its legs; the blade decided as it fell. Anywhere else would have been worse, and my last arm would have been lethal.

All this time, she’d been striking at vital areas where organs would be, as if someone wore the armor. While they hurt, reducing its wielder’s range of motion and lowering the automaton’s speed as it leaked oil, they were hardly vital. All she needed to do was separate its body from its wrists, and it would be entirely helpless.

She didn’t understand that, though. The blade wasn’t sure that she understood anything but killing. Other than her screech of pain and the howl that had summoned her unending torrent of bugs, she hadn’t said a single word. There was no sign of higher intelligence, but then, in the face of animalistic intelligence, she didn’t seem to need it.

After all, while it had severed more of her limbs, it was the one with no legs and only one arm who was falling to earth. It should have been able to bolt away to a higher point, but she’d figured out its trick there, and if it couldn’t see where it wanted to go, then it couldn’t teleport further away, and right now it couldn’t see anything at all. Its blade and its wielder’s body were infested with an inches-thick crust of insects, and no matter how many it burned away, more appeared.

She wasn’t content just to let it fall, either. She savaged its wielder all the way down, striking half a hundred times on the way down.

-1,894 Life Force.

She couldn’t escape its thirsty edge forever, though, not even in this shitstorm of madness, and even as she cut into its wielder, it struck back. Still, her blows were more numerous, more frequent, and often deeper as a result of the strange magics that let her strike at the very core of people and things.

-1,492 Life Force.

+352 Life Force.

It hit the ground hard. So hard that it almost bounced out of its wielder’s hand despite the death grip that the metal man held it with. It tried to rise then, but it couldn’t. It was buried in filth, and then the Bug Queen was on it, shrieking for blood.

Its body was made out of forged iron, soul steel, and other stranger metals, and she carved out a piece at a time, and in that flurry of blows, the blade let her. As she blinked around it, all it did was seek to avoid the worst of the damage, preserving its remaining arm and the fiery clockwork heart that made the Warbringer move.

-2,671 Life Force.

Given how much she was bleeding, that wasn’t hard. She wasn’t in significantly better shape than it was, and all of her grace and deadly skill had been replaced with savagery as she punctured its armor again and again. Then, right on the verge of victory, it hit her with its trump card: Eye for an Eye.

The Ebon Blade had not planned to use that power, nor had it set up this moment for it. It found the thing distasteful, and yet in a moment like this, what other choice did it have?

In the moment of her victory, she lost completely, as most of the damage she inflicted on it rebounded on her. She froze, in shock. Then, she came apart into the same bloody pieces she’d tried to carve the blade's metal wielder into. It was a messy ending made worse by the fact that her pests and pets immediately began to feast on her bloody carcass before it had even stopped moving.

+1 Demon Princess Soul.

Not a queen after all, huh? The weapon thought, wondering at the strange hierarchy of hell. While the prime evil would probably have a different sort of soul, it seemed increasingly likely that none of her minions did.

As the Bug Queen’s corpse twitched its last, a few stray sunbeams penetrated the canopy. The Ebon blade was in such a poor state that it took it several seconds to notice them. It was only when the insect swarms retreated in mass into the dark that it noticed, but by that point, the sunbeams were ubiquitous, and the cause was obvious. A rain of leaves was falling all around it now that it had ripped out the heart of this cursed, petulant jungle.

Even then, though, the blade’s wielder did not move. It was exhausted. No, it was beyond exhausted. The enemies of hell were growing more powerful, and while the last one had probably been closer to ending it than this one, the dead spider woman that lay in half-devoured pieces on the ground had been the first one to fight as well, or nearly as well as it had in a long, long time, and its wounds showed that.

-1,136 Life Force.

For once, it hadn’t been the demon’s powers that had done the heavy lifting. She existed as a predator. She was smart and had molded the battlefield to her advantage, cleaving its wielder’s body into pieces as a result.