My laughing irked him more than I expected.
I could see it in his eye—that one good, burning eye—the way the muscles in his jaw twitched, the veins popped across his forehead. The bastard was losing it.
And I loved it.
I laughed harder.
Choked on blood.
Spat out pieces of myself and kept laughing.
So he acted.
He threw the chunk of my skull he had ripped out like it was trash.
And then he squeezed my head even harder.
Hard enough that I heard the bones groaning under the strain.
Hard enough that my vision flickered at the edges, black creeping inward like ink spilled on parchment.
He squeezed like he wanted to pop me like a grape.
And maybe he could have.
Maybe he should have.
If it weren’t for the blood.
The blood inside me.
The sentient, writhing, cursed blood that didn’t know how to give up.
The blood that wasn’t just mine anymore.
It molded itself, piece by piece, rebuilding what he destroyed.
It crafted new bone where my skull was missing.
It knitted torn brain tissue like a mad tailor working on a suit made of rage.
It sealed wounds before death could slip in.
The demon felt it.
Saw it.
And he grew angrier.
Infuriated.
He ripped at my skull again.
Tore the newly healed bone apart like wet paper.
And again, he ripped out a piece of my brain with it.
I felt it.
The strange, hollow sensation of losing parts of yourself.
But the blood... it worked faster.
It clawed at life like a starving beast.
Sewed me back together with furious desperation.
I could almost hear it inside me—hissing, snarling, refusing to let go.
And he?
He ripped again.
And again.
And again.
Each time he tore me apart, the blood rebuilt me.
Each time he mutilated me, the blood spat in his face with my resurrection.
The bastard roared.
Not a laugh this time.
Not a giggle.
A roar.
A sound of pure, impotent rage.
He slammed my body down onto the deck—hard enough to rattle the whole goddamn ship.
The boards cracked beneath me. I felt them splinter into my back.
I felt everything.
My ribs shattered.
The bones meant to shield my heart became knives stabbing into it.
I felt a rib puncture my lung.
Felt the air whistle out of me in a wet, rattling gurgle.
I felt my intestines rupture, spill onto the ground in a steaming, tangled heap.
I felt my legs twist into shapes no human limb should ever make—bones snapping, skin tearing, muscles coiling wrong.
It hurt.
God, it hurt.
But the blood kept working.
It stitched together the ruins of my ribs.
It pulled my punctured lung back into a semblance of function.
It mended the heart even as it spasmed uselessly for a few panicked seconds.
It drank the spilled entrails back into my body, like water sucked into dry sand.
It reformed shattered bones, rewove shredded flesh, reknit snapped sinew.
The blood healed it all.
No hesitation.
No pause.
No mercy.
But I could feel it.
With every rip, every tear, every desperate repair—
The blood was thinning.
It was draining.
Like a river that’s been dammed too long, forced to feed a land too dry to live.
I could feel it getting slower.
Weaker.
Less vicious.
Each heal took a little longer.
Each breath it saved came a little harder.
I was surviving, yes.
But I was burning through the one thing keeping me upright.
The blood wasn’t infinite.
And it was spending itself to keep me alive.
Piece by piece, cell by cell, it was throwing itself into the fire to keep the heart beating.
And eventually, there would be nothing left to throw.
I knew it.
The demon didn’t.
He thought he could break me.
Crush me.
Bleed me out.
But he didn’t realize:
I was already dead.
I was already ash and rage and spite held together by threads thinner than hair.
He wasn’t fighting a man anymore.
He was fighting will.
He was fighting a corpse too stubborn to fall down.
He was fighting something that didn’t know how to lose.
And if he wanted to kill me, he was going to have to bury me with his own broken hands.
I pushed up from the ruined deck.
Half-collapsed.
Half-crawling.
Blood poured down my face, thick and hot, blinding me in one eye.
My jaw hung loose, cracked at the hinge.
My fingers shook as they gripped the edge of a broken board.
The demon loomed above me, snarling, seething, dripping his own blood now too.
His breathing was ragged.
His muscles trembled.
Not from exhaustion—but from fury.
From the helpless, maddening realization that he couldn’t just kill me the way he killed the others.
I laughed again.
Even now.
Even broken and hollowed out.
I fucking laughed.
Because he wasn’t just fighting me anymore.
He was fighting the thing he made.
The thing he pulled from the abyss with his own filthy hands.
The demon wanted a massacre?
Good.
I wanted that too.
And it would start with ripping the last laugh from his throat.