Looking at my hand as I tried to estimate how old this body was now. It didn't have any wrinkles anymore, I was nearing forty but my skin was clear and smooth. I doubted my body was much older than twenty. I also noted the fact I had no body hair, I had eyebrows and hair on my head, thank god, but nothing else. My arms felt cold and my chest felt weird against the wrinkles in the clothing I had on my top half.
I really needed to get new clothes, I knew where to get clothes luckily but... I didn't like where it came from.
I looked over at all my fallen comrades, there was a lot of clothes there. I'm sure I could piece together a set of clothes which is undamaged. I just hated the idea of taking the very clothes off of my dear comrades bodies. I knew it was a necessity to salvage what you could, even from the dead. I had done so in the past but it still left me sick to my stomach.
I stood over their corpses, they had been lazily thrown here. The demons had no care for them, far as they were concerned they would just let the earth itself reclaim the bodies. all they needed to do was make sure it was gone from their camps.
For a moment I wondered how close I was to their camp still. Quite far I guessed, demons tend to have an incredible smell. All our engagements with demons had to be from down wind, otherwise they would smell us instantly and already be alert to our presence.
They wouldn't want to smell rotting corpses so they dumped us far enough away that they had no chance of smelling it, several kilometres at least. That worked in my favour, they wouldn't be able to smell that I was still alive and I would much more easily be able to escape. Escape where I wondered for a moment.
I'm getting side tracked.
I searched all the bodies for anything I could need, some still had some food in their pockets, the greedy bastards. Many had heirlooms but there were still some things I could use. It seemed like they hadn't even looted the bodies. The stuff we had was likely useless to them, the metal we used for our weapons were nothing but weak rocks to them. The materials they used being far better.
---
I woke up with the sound of water beside me, I was still naked but that is just because last night I had cleaned the clothes I planned on using and was letting them dry overnight.
With a heavy heart I took the clothes of the branch I was hanging them on and put them on. The names of who these belonged to flashed through my mind, Derrick's shirt and cloves, Kwame's vest and mask, Laura's trousers and Seoho's boots.
It was interesting to me that my legs had slimmed down enough to fit in a woman's trousers. I wasn't embarrassed about being in a woman's clothes, in the face of the current situation something like that is trivial. No, I was more curious about the fact I could fit in them at all, I was a big and bulky man but now I was slender. My body felt just... wrong.
I was weaker too, but not by too much. My core and weave were completely gone, not just the fact there was no mana in my core or circulating in my weave, there was just nothing.
All that was left was the ambient mana within my body, which was just inherent to the fact I had mass. One's body was naturally made of one fifths mana by weight, disregarding the core and weave.
Creating a new core wasn't going to be a huge problem, it would take years to slowly condense and assimilate mana enough to force it into a core sure but I was an immortal now. I had many years ahead of me. The weave was similar, it would take a few years once I've got my core and both would take decades more until I would reclaim the full magical prowess I once had.
The main problem with it was the fact I would likely never get to that point, a slightly irregular but magicless human stands simply no chance
I had put on my set of clothes by now, though that only made one question apparent.
"What now?" I said to no one
I wouldn't stop here. I couldn't stop here. Not until I have made every single one of these demons pay for what they had done. It made the current goal pretty obvious. Get stronger, strong enough to stand above all of demon kind and wipe them out by myself.
"By myself" I echoed, I was now well and truly the last human left.
I shrugged off the thought, though it refused to leave the depths of my heart. I knew I had to get strong sure but that didn't solve my immediate next steps so once again I asked myself the question. What now?
First I should list what I know. Currently I'm in what used to be Canada, we attempted an assassination on the demon lord which had invaded here. He seemed to be here to guard or otherwise manage the giant rift machine thing a few kilometres north of here, it was how they arrived on earth so if destroyed would make them unable to go back.
We tried breaking it of course but the demon king had cast some kind of magic on it. In return for being so powerful made him vulnerable, they had to stay within our dimension and were restricted in power. In the end though, we were still too weak to face even this restricted demon lord.
I felt weak and powerless, I had for a long time but never to the extent I was feeling now.
I finally made a decision on what to do first, I would scout around me. There was a hill beside me which would allow me to get a view of my surroundings. I hoped that I would figure out what my next steps are by the time I was up there.
---
The hill was quite large, it took me nearly an hour to both get to its base and walk all the way to the top. The scenery was beautiful as always, the trees were just as green and full of life as they had always been. Birds still chirped, I even saw a squirrel.
The demons never cared about the animals of earth, they occasionally killed some for food or if they were being attacked but unlike their treatment of the humans they didn't seem to mind the other animals.
Walking to the top of the hill had been incredibly easy, despite the fact I had been walking uphill for so long I wasn't tired at all. It seemed like my new immortal body had recovered, even my stamina.
As I looked around, far in the distance I saw it. I saw the rift which bridged our world to the demon realm, well that's what we called where the demons came from but we didn't know what they called it nor did we know what it was like. No one had been able to enter the demon realm, or maybe they didn't survive to tell the tale, either way we had nearly no information about it.
As I looked at the rift I noticed something strange. We had looked at this exact rift many times but now it looked... different, I could see what looked like cracks surrounding it. Not only that but the cracks seemed to be growing larger and larger.
No wonder I could see the rift from here, it was expanding. Unlike before where it was a very large but perfect circle, now it began to stretch larger and larger. I guessed that whatever the demons were doing here had now reached its final stage.
As I watched the cracks spread further and further, engulfing nearly the whole sky now I noted just how fast it was now happening, a moment later I felt something. It was like a massive wave of mana washed over me, I couldn't describe how but the mana didn't quite 'feel' like any mana I had felt from Earth.
It almost felt like the demon's mana.