Cold Cry took off after the Three-Headed Demon. He didn't have room left to worry about whether Noe could hold off the Jumping Demon.
Seven or eight hours still stood between them and the end of the selection. If the Three-Headed Demon got away now, it would come back once its body healed and for the handful of Contestants left, that would only make things worse.
He vanished into the trees a moment later.
With the giant gone, the pressure on the field lifted, and everyone felt it. Victory looked close enough to reach, and it put strength back in their arms; the shouting picked up as they threw themselves back into the fight.
At the edge of the clearing, Noe held the Jumping Demon off while Kimura and Akino kept the Spider Demon pinned. With those two no longer able to slip in and pick people off, the Contestants' confidence came back, and the tide started to turn.
The Jumping Demon moved like something built rather than born, everything about it running on some fixed set of instructions, except for its eyes.
It sprang off the ground, cleared ten meters in a blink, and dropped into a straight, high-speed kick aimed at Noe's head.
In its flat, empty eyes, she was already dead.
With Cold Cry gone, she finally let herself go all in.
She didn't dodge. Didn't step back. As the kick closed in, she raised her arms, muscles swelling grotesquely under the skin, and took the full weight of it head-on.
The impact drove her back a few meters before she planted her feet. Then she swung her arms and flung the demon off her.
It flipped twice to put distance between them, and something shifted behind those flat eyes.
She was the only prey it had faced tonight that had walked away from a direct hit, and that seemed to be sinking in.
Having taken two of its attacks already, she had a read on its strength now, and she pushed forward first, blade out.
The demon was too fast for her close-range cuts, dodging every one, answering with kicks from every angle. She met each one head-on, using the muscle density she could call up at will.
They traded blows like that for a while, until the Jumping Demon seemed to accept its legs weren't getting through to her. Its head swiveled, mechanical, toward the rest of the Contestants instead.
A moment later it had a target. It leapt, tracing a clean arc through the air, and came down on a male Contestant.
He never saw it coming, too busy fighting for his life to notice death closing in from above until the demon's feet were already diagonally overhead, a few meters out and closing fast.
His mind went blank. There wasn't even time to be afraid. But in that gap, a streak of pink cut through the crowd and planted itself in front of him. A voice rang out, clear as a bell in an empty valley.
"Love Breathing, Second Form: Love Pangs."
The blade whipped around the demon's calves like a snake finding its grip.
Noe wrenched the hilt back, flinging the demon aside as the spinning blade tore through both legs.
It crashed into the crowd and hit the ground, calves severed clean, blood spraying across the dirt.
The Contestants recognized it instantly: the thing that had already taken several of their own. Their first instinct was to scatter, get clear.
Then they saw the legs were gone, that it couldn't stand, couldn't run, and the fear that had gripped them all night turned straight into something closer to rage. They closed in on it together, blades falling in a steady rhythm.
Outside the circle, all that was left was a severed leg, still twitching. Watching it, something in Noe flickered with pity, of all things, for the monster. She stood at the edge of the fighting, unsettled, thinking that the people doing this no longer looked entirely human either.
The Spider Demon let out a string of low, guttural cries. As if on command, every remaining demon broke off and surged toward the crowd, clearly trying to pull the Jumping Demon out.
More Contestants went down. Under the weight of the counterattack, the group actually lost ground.
In the pool of blood at the center, what was left of the Jumping Demon barely looked like anything, nothing whole on it except the severed legs.
As the Contestants fell back, the ruined flesh started to move on its own, knitting together, muscle reforming into shape, tissue folding back into order. A wet pop, and the legs regrew.
Its eyes snapped open. Whole again, it sprang straight up off the ground.
Is it still alive?
Shock rippled through the crowd, and under it, fear. If this thing had clawed its way back once already, what would it come back with next?
Would it run, the way the giant had?
For a second, it looked that way.
It leapt clear of the fighting and landed on a rise nearby. Just as everyone assumed it was fleeing, it turned, slow, and jumped again without hesitation.
Everyone understood at once it wanted the extra height to add weight to whatever came next.
Who was it after this time?
While it held everyone's attention, the Spider Demon pushed the other demons harder, and the fight swung again.
In the middle of the chaos, Noe dropped into a low stance, right leg forward, hand on the hilt, ready to draw. She took one breath and let out a sharp cry.
"Love Breathing, Third Form: Cat's Drizzle."
Her legs swelled with muscle to match the demon's own, stamping two shallow pits into the mud beneath her.
She gathered herself and sprang, cat-quick, off a demon's skull, using the bounce to weave through the fight; every landing either flattened something or opened it up with her blade. In seconds nearly every demon nearby was down, and the Contestants around her closed in to finish them off.
Mid-air, she crossed paths with the Jumping Demon on its way down. She kicked its legs out from under it, sending it tumbling helplessly through the air, then spun a full circle and drove her heel into its back. Her calf swelled to six times its usual density on impact, and she drove it into the ground with a crash that shook the dirt.
It left a crater half a meter deep, and the crack of its spine breaking carried clean across the clearing.
She hopped lightly out of the pit, blade in hand, and turned her back to it, standing at the edge as if she'd just crossed a shallow stream. Looking at the clear ground ahead, something in her face finally eased.
Watching from the crowd, Eimi's jaw had actually dropped at the sight of it.
A run of stomping strikes had cleared nearly every demon in range and turned the fight around. Then that kick had knocked the Jumping Demon out of the air entirely, and she'd driven it straight into the ground after.
Everyone there had already seen what its legs could do. What came out of Noe's, apparently, hit even harder.
Just as the relief started to settle in, something rose out of the bottom of the pit. Two meters tall, standing dead straight, right behind her. Dirt sloughed off it under the moonlight, and somehow that made it even worse to look at.
A cold sweat broke out across the crowd on her behalf.
"Watch out!" Eimi screamed.
"Love Breathing, Fourth Form: Heart-Stopping Suffocation."
Noe flicked her wrist, and the blade bent and stretched in a way that shouldn't have been possible, coiling around the demon's throat.
She pulled the hilt back gently, like drawing in a line. A wet pop, and its head shot into the air, blood arcing out of the stump like fireworks.
The Jumping Demon was dead. It stood there, upright in the moonlight, for one last second, then crumbled into ash.