28 Art Of Brutality: The Sweats

An Abraxas whose perpetually coated in radiant flame propelled himself at an erratic manner, bouncing all around on many obstacles and grounds before massively accelerating at Lothair's direction within a close proximity.

Usually, it was possible for him to avoid such a trick due to his heightened information processing capacity, but the well-timed geometrical thorns from his behind that hadn't appeared for a while managed to catch him off guard.

He took the disastrous malice on the chest, popping off his limbs from the torso that was crushed in-between the body of the metal thorn and the unrelenting demon of flame.

Lothair knew this particular flaming demon. He was once a shitty tribe chieftain who usually harassed the neighboring merchant for their goods like a bandit. With the blessing of an ancient beast within his domain, he was able to coat his body with a strong and almost inextinguishable flame.

With the request of a local merchant guild, Lothair made the chieftain's gleaming flame even hotter and brighter. While it didn't damage the exterior nor the inner organs of the chieftain's body, the overly concentrated blessings made him suffer in perpetually occuring phantom scorching pain.

"Ragashk, you should've gone for my head."

Five of the identical smoke-armored Holy Witches were generated from the dismembered head and limbs. Four of them charged in four diagonal directions of the flaming demon and binded each of the former chieftain's limbs.

The demon was then injected by an Overheal directed to production of his 'cortisol'.

Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars in the bloodstream, enhances the brain's use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues. Many animals produce them, such as primates, carnivores and ungulates, and also many other living beasts.

It was also the hormone that induced the state of fight-or-flight.

The fight-or-flight response is a hard-wired, inherited response that the demon ancestors relied on to deal with the various threats to their survival.

This response is characterized by a release of adrenaline, as well as other stress hormones, which in turn raises the heart and respiratory rates, increasing the blood flow and tenses the muscles.

It gets the body ready to act, but this adrenaline rush also activates the apocrine glands — and with that comes sweat, mainly on the armpits and groin.

"Have you ever thought of drowning in your own blood?"

What also followed was the immense turmoil on the heart and other bodily functions…

The beating rhythm began to abnormally increase to the point of inflaming all the veins and heating up the body temperature.

In an autonomous response, the eccrine sweat glands that were found all over the body began to produce a lot of salty sweat to dismiss the heat.

Soon enough, his body began to leak blood instead of sweat.

The geometric metal thorn went through half of Lothair's body, splitting him into two. He didn't flinch in the slightest, probably because his messed organs had already given him enough pain as it is, so he just casually took a step sideways and continued with his own operation — he also healed the lost half of his body like nothing happened.

As this process escalated higher and higher, the flaming demon began to produce an enormous amount of red sweat to the point of weakening his own radiant flame, wringing him alive of every liquid in his body.

"There's a reason why the flame couldn't damage you yet the opposite can." With a snap of thunderous fingers, Lothair then electrically and chemically commanded four of his clones to search and destroy the other Abraxas as he gazed at the pool of blood in front of him. "The weakness of your blessing, is ironically your very own flesh and blood. Fascinating, isn't it?"

As soon as the new Abraxas replaced the job of the newly dead member, hundreds of sizable knives, each of them were attached to thick glass vials — began to rain down from the sky.

"The gastric acid of the western frog deities, huh." Lothair would be wryly sneering if he had any mouth right now. "They sure work their very best to find anything that can kill me."

Lothair pointed each end of his scarf-like exhausts to the raining knives above, before blasting the sky with a concentrated, fast moving, and expanding searing smoke projectile.

Instead of taking the anti-air measure like a mindless object, the knives immediately swerved to change its direction, accelerating faster than their initial speed at such an abnormal angle before realigning itself to face Lothair's position.

Just as quick with the arrival of new complications, Lothair combined his pair of exhausts and conjoined them into one big tube with protruding funnel like a trumpet.

He then did a quick step to the nearest location where the gravity is stronger and the time dilation is quicker than the other areas.

"Overheal Series."

An insurmountable amount of heavy smoke concentration began to spurt out of the trumpet-like organ, before flowing back towards the ground like a fountain of molten lava.

"Nevermind, I really don't know what to call this one."

The homing eccentric knives began to look out for Lothair's clones instead.

While Lothair could still detect any magus within the battlefield by stretching out the strings of his soul, the very same soul's tentacle used to gather and process Ayin — he couldn't really perceive or feel anything other than the extreme heat and scorching noise that enveloped his isolated space.

And then a loud crash — an arm as big as a whole adult boar had punctured the thick layers of concentrated smoke along with Lothair's face, pushing the Holy Witch out of his barrier onto a much more unstable soil.

Just as Lothair recovered his stance, he glimpsed a goliath bigger than ten mules combined — lunging himself onto the air with Lothair presumably being the landing platform.

Reflexively, Lothair leaped back to avoid the brunt.

But not even ten meters away from his former position, his evasion was obstructed by an impregnable, invisible wall.