The Ebon Blade had promised itself that it would burn down every tree between the shore and the volcano, and that was exactly what it did. Fire was not its favorite weapon, but from that moment, as the forest closed in and sought to confuse it and twist its plodding wielder's path, it became the blade's only weapon.

Hellfire flared a dozen feet in a sickening halo of death. Then, as it marched forward, it hung there. It wasn't a cheap exercise of its power. It burned away dozens of Life Force every minute, but it was effective. The world was filled with green-tinged flames, and they pushed back not just the mist and the shadows, but the entire foul jungle.

-20 Life Force.

The smaller plants puffed into ashes almost immediately; the larger ones had thicker, waxy leaves that took several seconds to ignite.

They burned with a black, oily smoke that looked quite toxic, but the blade's current wielder needed to breathe any more than it needed eyes to see, and it gazed right through the dark clouds that it shrouded itself in. The trees ignited too, but the trunks had scarcely begun to burn by the time it had passed them and moved on.

In its wake, the blade left a path of ashes in a perfectly straight line that traced its path from the beach. That line was flanked on either side by rows of trees that were burned like candles. The fire's spread outside of its immediate radius, though, was limited. The lands were too moist and too foul for even magical fire to penetrate them very quickly. Still, they smoldered in its wake, and as it moved forward, the damage of its wake spread slowly outward.

The blade didn't need to burn the entire place down. While it would have happily done so, it was far more interested in getting past it than obliterating it, so it pressed on at a slow, methodical pace that burned a line deep into the dark soil of that hellish place.

The insects faired almost as poorly as the miasma, and evaporated as soon as the plants had entirely burned away. Most fled its approach, but a few of the larger ones transformed into embers as they flew away, spreading its flames that much further. Spiders as large as a man, which were by far the largest creatures it saw in this place, shrieked in protest at the advancing flames. Those cries became even louder when their webs went up like pitch.

-180 Life Force.

Those brief but complicated flame structures glowed for only a single moment, like some sort of hellish rune before vanishing forever. Those became more common as it pressed further inland, and since it had only glimpsed a couple of the giant beasts on its previous journey, the blade immediately decided that their presence was progress.

This is deeper than I got last time, it told itself, noting the way that the canopy continued to rise above it, and the shadows thickened as it watched the huge arachnids.

Most of the giant beasts fled quickly enough to avoid even catching fire, but a few of them charged it in anger, throwing their lives away for one last attack. The blade could respect that; it would have done the same thing in their circumstance.

It tried to honor those with an equally quick death, slicing the boar and even cow-sized monstrosities into pieces with one or two slices. That wasn't so hard, but the way their poison blood sizzled as it did so, and the way it sizzled when it splashed across its metal wielder, gave it pause. While it wasn't painful exactly, the rusting necrotic rot that embraced it for a moment before it was burned away made the weapon wary.

-878 Life Force.

+194 Life Force.

+4 Demon Souls.

The demonic trees and the souls that were twisted through the foliage lasted only a little longer than these things. The blade made no move to end their suffering rapidly. Instead, it left them to burn. The demon trees wailed in agony at this, and the human souls expired with looks of silent gratitude.

+18 Damned Souls.

All that carnage and more was left in its wake as the weapon marched further into the smoky, shadowy darkness. It could no longer see the volcano now. Even if it leaped as high into the air as it was capable of and came down like a flaming meteor, the height of the trees blocked its view. The jungle was all-encompassing now, save for the single blackened scar that it left in its wake.

-340 Life Force.

That perfectly straight line functioned as the inverse compass needle, pointing the way that it had been, which pointed the way that it needed to go, even if that path was now obscured. The Ebon Blade was not lost, and it would not be diverted again.

However, given how much power it was using to burn down one small portion of the world, it did start to devour the infested human souls it found along the way. If the souls it had tasted on the seventh circle's hanging tree were like overripe fruits, and the ones it had devoured on the walking palace of the sixth circle still tasted of creation in their tainted way, then the souls in this place tasted entirely of rot.

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+33 Damned Souls.

Somehow, that was worse than the brine-filled wretches of the sea the blade had just emerged from, but it endured. Eventually, there would be danger in this place, and it would not do to find that danger half-depleted.

So it pressed on, further and further into the darkness, until even the inferno that it surrounded itself with was all but consumed by the cavernous nature of the jungle. The upper layers of leaves stole almost all the light from smaller plants, making its flames somewhat less effective. It was no longer carving a burning path through a field, but burning a tunnel through a mountain of poisoned vegetation and shadowy creatures.

As large as the spiders had been from almost the beginning, here their webs were gigantic. It burned away more webs than foliage in the place, and some of those were the size of castles, or event cathedrals. Large as they were, though, they were flimsy structures, and it took only a single spark to make them blaze like stained glass windows, then they were gone forever.

-280 Life Force.

The webs would burn for a moment whenever it reached a new wall of them, but only the closest trunks would be left smouldering in the wake of those racing, chaotic flames. For a time, the blade sliced through some of these, just to make sure there was enough devastation in its wake to keep the forests hold at bay, but eventually, even that would do nothing. It could slice a whole section from the man, or even cottage think trees, and it would just hang there, presumably held in place by the tangled branches that linked to all the other nearby trees.

This entire place is a web of sorts, the Ebon Blade whispered to itself, wondering if the ruler of this realm was a bug at all. Are spiders bugs, or are they something else? It didn't know, and the question was hardly worth wasting one of its few remaining archmage souls on.

For a time, the blade burned like a lantern in the darkness, to no effect at all. Trees came, and trees went, but it was hard to say it was making progress. Only the tiny gaps of light far above that acted like stars were enough to show that it even moved forward at all.

Then the storm broke. The blade didn't see it approach because of the thick canopy, or even hear the first few drops. That would have made too much sense. Instead, a peel of thunder announced its arrival, and a few seconds later, a wall of water fell in a great deluge, attempting to hammer the whole world into submission.

-80 Life Force.

Neither the Ebon Blade nor its wielder were bowed by and continued to march forward, carving their slow path of destruction. The fact that it had appeared so suddenly was strange, though, and so was the fact that it made some plants wither and brown while others perked up noticeably. However, odder still was the effect that it was having on the weapon's Hellfire.

For more than half a day, the blade had roared like a bonfire. The metal that made up its wielder glowed red at its fingertips, and sometimes even its helmet.

Now that the rain fell in great endless sheets, it was no surprise that the metal hissed in protest as it was cooled. What was a surprise, though, was that it fell strongly enough to put out its magical flames. That didn't happen right away. It occurred over the course of twenty minutes of storming, but step by step, the power of the hellish halo faded, until the yellow-green nimbus of fire it had carried all this way was extinguished entirely.

Even then, it tried to flare its power, but it did little good and only intensified the cloud of steam around it. The blade had expected something like this. No one in this cursed realm, it seemed, could simply let it continue on its way.

-40 Life Force.

The lack of fire meant it could not go forward without getting lost and waylaid once more, and standing in place to be drenched by the poisonous rain took a different toll on it, as the blade was forced to use more and more power to regenerate the delicate clockwork pieces that were being corroded by the storm.

Its fury abated almost as soon as its fire did, though, for which the blade was grateful. Whoever is using this power has no way of knowing it's affecting me, the blade reminded itself. Why would they waste power on something pointless now that the fires were gone?

Without the fire, it had been plunged into a cavernous darkness. While there was a clear path of devastation behind it, the trees ahead of it and around it on all sides were taller than any mage tower. There were half a dozen undercanopies to the foliage fighting for light, and none of it made it to the nearly barren jungle floor.

That didn't affect the blade at all, though. It studied the weave of the world looking for its enemy, and for a time, it found nothing at all. Eventually, though, it noticed footprints. They were strange, disconnected things that might have come from an animal or a person. It would have been sure they'd been there for days if the seething rain hadn't obliterated the traces of everything else.

It studied the jungle void that surrounded it, and then, a shape moved out of the darkness. It wasn't much, but it was something, even if the threads that made up the world seemed to cut and tear rather than show the blade what it was seeing.

In fact, no matter how hard it looked, it was impossible to say what the motion was, exactly, because it was little more than a shifting shape and darkness. It existed only by dint of the poison raindrops that trickled down from the foliage from high above and the ever-changing footsteps it left on the ground. Even the weave of the world did little to reveal the identity of the distortion, but the blade still knew who it was.

There would be only one person who could hide in plain sight, the lord of the circle. "Are you the Bug Queen?" the blade's wielder asked in its hollow, booming voice.

The only answer was the sound of skittering, as she side-stepped here and there throughout the clearing. A single pace might take her five feet or twenty-five feet, as she leapt effortlessly from ground to tree branch to ground again with all the grace of a jungle cat.

The blade didn't pivot to study her as she moved around it. It watched from the same phantom perspective that it always did while its wielder stood there waiting for the first strike to land.

She's obviously trying to bait me into showing her what I'm capable of, the weapon whispered to itself. She would not be successful, though.

While she'd had all the time in the world to study it up until this point, the blade wasn't going to give her any more hints. Instead, it waited perfectly still, like a steel statue, as the toxic rain sizzled and sputtered, and it waited for her inevitable attack.

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