The Ebon Blade was certain that the battle would pass it by, even though it hoped that wouldn’t be the case. Buried in mud and shit no one would ever find it. It should have been pleased by that, at least as far as demons were concerned. Still, it was conflicted; it didn’t want to be wielded by a demon, or to taste their vile flesh again, but even as repulsive as that would be, it would still be joyous compared to its current banal fate.
There was another complication, though. While its Life Force reserves were already full, its soul reserves had plenty of room still, and the longer that the demons fought around it, the more of those souls the blade was gathering, whether it wanted to or not; likewise, the energy that flowed into it from its Red Haze ability wasn’t any cleaner. Foul creatures were bleeding out all around it now, forcing the blade to drink a polluted tide.
+8 Lesser Demon Souls.
Even hidden away, it still reached out invisibly in all directions, scooping up every soul that was released from its body. No matter how quickly the other demons tried to devour it, the blade’s touch was faster. It didn’t want to be, though. It would have been happy to let each of them slip through the cracks, but it couldn’t.
After a few minutes of that, the blade gingerly examined one of the demon souls it had just received. It didn’t want to devour it, but it had other ways it could use a soul. It didn’t have to get just information or power from them. Reluctantly, it tried to examine the grudges of the thing. Unfortunately, they were nearly as inscrutable as the rest of the information it had tried to study in other demon souls. It was just too unlike the human souls that powered it.
While it couldn’t understand who it hated, or why, it could see the threads of those connections stretching out the army outside of its foul cocoon. Some of them stretched further than that, all the way over the horizon. I wonder if any of these stretch all the way back to creation, the blade wondered. I wonder if there’s some way I can use that to break free of hell?
It didn’t try that right now, though. Instead of doing something too crazy, it settled for something simpler and picked one of the closest threads. Free me! It commanded the demon that apparently hated the one it had picked.
The dark soul in its core burned away as the Ebon Blade activated the power. That was expected. What was less expected was the messages that followed.
+1 Unholy Soul Devoured.
-1/100 Divine Souls devoured.
Negative one? It asked itself in confusion. Negative? What does that even mean?
Before it could reach any kind of conclusion, the imp’s hive was hit with a giant skull-topped warhammer, shattering it into a spray of ichor and dust. Most of the imps were purged in a single strike, bombarding the weapon with lesser souls even as the air filled with dust and shadows.
+26 Lesser Demon Souls.
As much as the blade did not wish to have those souls, it barely noticed them as it focused on the battle that was taking place all around it. For months, or perhaps even years, the weapon had been blinded to the wider world. Now, it was blinded for a moment by the bright light that it was no longer used to, but even that hazy brilliance could not entirely obscure the largest figures, some of which towered two or three stories above the fray.
War, the blade whispered to itself as it took in the sight. The place might be hell, and the figures were anything but human, but this part, it understood, and even as the hamfisted pig man reached for its hilt, it longed to join the fighting.
Unfortunately, the fighting didn’t wait for it. No sooner did the demon's black soul touch its own as its thick fingers closed around the hilt than its potential wielder was attacked by a snake man. It had barely pulled it an inch out of the stone where it had lain since its arrival before the pig demon’s slithering, legless opponent bit deep into his arm, dissolving a stretch up to the elbow with smoking acid.
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The pig demon roared and headbutted the thing, temporarily distracted from the Ebon Blade. The arm he left behind wasn’t, though. Even as the lightning-fast snake dodged the clumsy blows of the pig’s one-handed warhammer strikes, his arm continued to grow, leaching power from the sword as hand and forearm grew an elbow, an upper arm, and started growing a shoulder.
Over the course of several minutes of fighting, the mutant arm evolved like a cancerous tumor, draining thousands of Life Force from the Ebon Blade. While part of it was outraged that so much power was being wasted to heal something that shouldn’t even exist. The rest of it was grateful. It was being leached of the poison that its soul was drowning in.
While a second pig demon continued to grow from the hand still on its hilt, the blade watched as two then three serpentine warriors ganged up on the pig demon, constricting each of its limbs as it broke them one at a time. The tarnished bronze armor did almost nothing in their ever-tightening grip, and as soon as it was helpless, it became a feeding frenzy of blood and poison.
They didn’t even notice the lump that was becoming something more until it grew legs and drew the sword before charging them. The blade tried to influence the clumsy beast, and for those first few seconds, when it still had no head or right arm, it had great success. For the first time in far too long, it unleashed scything, brutal strikes, and it didn’t bother to hold back on bleeding Life Force to power any number of exotic strikes that weren’t strictly necessary. It amplified the strength of its headless oaf of a welder to slice two different snake beasts in half at once, then it used bolt to strike down the third as it hissed, all while using that flashing strike to lead to the next group of opponents.
And everyone was an opponent. While it was clear that this was a battle between two opposing armies, amidst the churning melee where they met, it wasn’t always clear who was on which side; it wasn’t as simple as snakes versus pigs. The place was a nightmare menagerie of horrors, and though most of them had weapons and arms to wield them, not even that was an iron-clad rule.
Even if it had been two clear sides, though, the blade would have fought against everyone. It was on no one's side, at least until the ugly pig demon’s head finished regrowing, then, moment by moment and strike by strike, the blade lost control of the body it had been commanding so effectively. One moment it had been a dirvish in the scrum, weaving between massed spearmen and packs of hellhounds as it made them all bleed, and the next, it lost that control, and it became just a weapon again, in the hands of someone who barely knew how to use it.
Once the blade lost control completely, the pig demon actually stopped attacking entirely as it looked down at its hand in an expression that might have been surprising. Is it wondering where its warhammer went? The blade asked itself. Really, even such a simple question might be giving the hideous creature's unblinking, beady eyes too much credit.
The thing stood there doing nothing for several seconds, which was a long time when life or death combat was happening all around you. for several seconds, so it didn’t surprise the blade at all when a hellhound the size of a pony latched onto its wielder’s leg and started gnawing through that newly created flesh with smoldering teeth. The thing didn’t make much progress, though. By the time it had succeeded in pulling the leg halfway off, the pig demon had been knocked to the ground, but it didn’t get much farther.
The maneuver was a clumsy one that pinned the attacker as much as the victim, and when the blade was thrust through the burning dog’s throat, and into its body from there. It tried to release the blade’s wielder then, but not even that small retreat would let it escape the blade’s hunger. Its ugly wielder had drained nearly 10,000 Life Force from it so far in this fight when it completely reconstructed its body, but because of the wounds that flowed all around it, its reserves were still nearly full. It was never enough, though, no matter how much the blade might hate the taste of demons, it would never be enough.
It was only when it noticed that its soul storage was close to overflowing. Even though it could fit 232 of them now, thanks to its latest upgrades, this battlefield was swarming with the dead and the dying, and they were pouring into it almost as fast as the black swirling currents of Life Force, and soon, it was overwhelmed by them.
This was not the first time that the blade had been overwhelmed by souls. It had happened in many fights before. When the souls reached their limit, they would burn down to Life Force. In the past, it had always spent that Life Force to keep it from overflowing, but this time, it focused hard and resisted the urge to upgrade, but that didn’t stop what was coming.
Once its soul storage was full, the blade burned the least of them, wasting the life force. That wasn’t the worst part, though; the worst part was the Divine Souls total, which kept going down.
With every minute and every strike, souls flowed into it, and as they did, it could feel the corruption as much as it could see it in the darkening threads of its magic. Second by second, minute by minute, the process continued, slowed only by the pig demon’s ineptness. The blade tried to block it out. It screamed silently in a voice that not even its wielder seemed to hear, and then finally, when the number reached -100, the world went dark. As those final glowing words faded, the Ebon Blade’s consciousness faded completely, as it lost itself in the darkness of its own soul.
+1 Unholy Soul Devoured.
-100/100 Divine Souls devoured. Corruption complete! Divine Path inverted to Infernal Path!