The blade let loose with a wide slash at the first instant of betrayal. It had hoped to learn more from the demon prince, and maybe even reach an accord. While it enjoyed killing everyone in its path, it did not have to if there were other benefits to be had. The machine-knight that it wielded moved just as fast as it had before, and even though it didn't see how little tentacles of cloth could hurt it, it severed each of them before they reached it. Well, it severed almost all of them. The last two managed to land on its boot. It cut one more of them before its motion ground to a halt. Then, it was fighting for control of the knight with the prince. Up until now, that conflict had been fairly one-sided, because it was the one that touched it directly. Now, though, they both did, and the strange machine’s infernal master had a very strong grip over it. You should have given my magnum opus back to me when you had the chance, the man gloated silently. We could have been allies. We could have waged war on the seventh circle together. Now you will be nothing but a very small cog in my very large machine. I will use the vast energy you have to— For the moment that Prince Voltrim had touched the knight, the Ebon Blade was losing control of it. Still, the prince had no control over the blade itself, only the arm that held it. So, the blade resolved the problem by bursting into flame. It used Hellfire to send a gout of fire across the platform, making both the cloth limbs as well as the desk full of papers erupt in a curtain of green fire. Only the demon prince himself was fast enough to leap free. “My blueprints!” he yelled. “You’ll pay for that!” The rıghtful source is 𝕟𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕝·𝘧𝙞𝙧𝙚·𝔫𝔢𝔱 However, even as he cried out, the blade charged him. The demon might be smart enough to build some very clever contraptions, but he was stupid enough to pick some terrible fights. He had no chance against the Ebon Blade, not even on his best day. At least, that’s what the weapon thought. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite able to catch him. Even as it crouched and leaped through the air, the demon swung from strut to bracket, swinging just below the ceiling at a remarkable pace. Not just that, but the platforms seemed to move slightly to meet him. They were turning away from the blade, too. The factory was a vast place, and each time it jumped or charged, little things shifted in ways that slowed it down as its query got further and further ahead. “You think you can challenge me? In the heart of my own domain?” the prince called back, his shrill voice echoing through the place. “Allow me to show you the error of your ways!” The blade looked for the source less from the sound, which echoed deceivingly, than it did from the threads of mana that the demon exerted. The problem was that those were everywhere. Every time he adjusted some small feature of his factory, glowing lines flickered to life before fading. The wiser move might have been to retreat in such a strange situation, but the Ebon Blade was not fond of retreating. “If I can’t kill you, then I will tear this place down,” the blade threatened in its cold, booming voice. There was no response, not until the workers came crawling out of the woodwork to strike. They came as a tide, and more carried tools than weapons, but even if they’d all been armed with swords, they wouldn’t have been the distraction that Prince Voltrim thought they would be. The blade slew them by the score and feasted on their dirty souls. While it still didn’t care for the taste of demonic flesh or Life Force, beggars could not be choosers, and it was no longer the poison it had once been. +86 Lesser Demon Souls. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Those morsels proved only to be the main course, though. After them came large industrial golems twice the size of its current body. Though larger and even potentially stronger, they were slow, clumsy things that were not built with combat in mind, and the Ebon Blade sliced them into pieces until they were nothing more than smouldering chunks of iron in ugly piles. The defense was not particularly efficient or effective. That tends to happen when you pour all your efforts into the walls and someone breaches them, the blade though wearily. In the demon’s defense, he had built a fine defender; he just hadn’t planned on having it used against him, which was his real error. Always assume that someone will betray you, the blade reminded itself as it stalked its prey through the darkness of his factory citadel amidst its dwindling defenders. That advice didn’t help it at all, with three more of the large automatons attacking it at once. This time, they weren’t trying to fight it, but crush it, and trap the blade and its knight beneath their bulk. For a moment, they succeeded too, and a moment was all it took. One minute it was fighting an avalanche of scrap steel, and the next it was burying beneath the heavy bodies. That wasn’t much of a problem. The blade was more than strong enough to push free. It was the wave of molten iron that suddenly overwhelmed it that was the issue. One of the giant nearby cauldrons had tipped, emptying hundreds of gallons of liquid metal across it in a tidal wave of pain and death that washed across both it and its body completely. He didn’t have anyone next to them to tip the cauldrons, either. Somehow, that was this demon’s magic. It controlled the blanket that it had found the man bundled up in and the factory that it ran almost as easily as the knight it usually wielded, and at least for the moment, the blade was trapped. “You might be thinking, ‘he wouldn’t do anything to hard his creation, he wants it back!’ Unfortunately, there you are mistaken,” the Demon Prince’s voice called from somewhere in the rafters. The blade might have admitted it had that thought, but it didn’t think it was relying on it, as the molten iron pooled around it, splashing across its body, though it seemed that it had. The heat didn’t hurt it, though it did damage the construct holding it significantly. The outer armor burned away like melting ice, revealing the delicate mechanisms beneath even as the blade healed it as fast as it could. Despite the molten metal that clung to it like sludge, the blade pushed off the last debris and trudged forward. It used Bolt to shoot forward out of the worst of the pool, but it didn’t get far. The molten iron that coated it cooled, and it steadily ground to a halt as its armored body was coated in a second, and utterly unwelcome metal skin. As it ignored the degradation that Warbringer was suffering, it was confident that given time, it could break free, but Prince Voltrim didn’t give it a minute. Instead, now that it was pinned, he renewed his mental assault on the weapon. Now that it couldn’t move, and even its best powers were contained by searing metal, it couldn’t escape, and worse, the demon’s attack was succeeding. It was all the blade could do to hang on at first. The demon gloated at that, but the Ebon Blade ignored him. Not only did it not care, but it needed to focus every aspect of its attention on the fight. The demon’s embrace of its psyche was insistent and crushing, but the man had made one terrible mistake, and the blade discovered it only slowly. The more damage that the vat of molten iron did to the knight, the more the Ebon Blade’s stores of Life force were used to replace the soul steel that burned away, and soul by soul, the demon prince’s home field advantage waned. He said tens of thousands of souls didn’t he? The blade considered, trying to remember? It didn’t remember exactly. It didn’t have tens of thousands, but it had hundreds, and it had the condensed Life Force of thousands more, and though the cost was terrible, the blade paid it, and as the iron cooled, it regained control. It didn’t let on that it had, of course. If it did, the demonic laborers that were working tirelessly to free it would have ceased their labors and left it in place. Instead of tipping its hand or even responding to the demon prince, the blade retreated to the ruby soul stone in its pomel and devoured dozens of lesser and regular demon souls to keep its strength up as it waited. The metal cooled long before its power waned. After that, the damage that was chewing at the metal body it clung to stopped, and it could probably have used its titanic strength to rip free, but it did not. It wasn’t going to move until the Demon Prince was within striking range, and it could finish this properly.