Slay the Hierarchy

Hope

A/N: Longest chapter yet. 3000+ words! Enjoy!

Vega would have described it as similar to the time the princess went missing on her mission to infiltrate the palace.

Though the only thing that replaced his absurd workouts and digging were unending assaults on demons as the Slayer traversed the ruins, traveling between towers, dungeons, and then towers again within only a span of a single Earth day.

'Earth day', considering a 'Taras Nabad day' was the equivalent of three days on Earth. It was a totally alien cycle Vega took note of, and as night came upon them, the AI naturally began counting the unnatural minutes and hours it spanned for. Vega calculated lots of things, in fact. Time, temperature, energy readings, and - most importantly - distance.

'Approaching a three hundred metre radius from the princess's location,'

Came the announcement between a shotgun blast and spray of blood; the Slayer stepping over a mountain of demonic corpses that one by one, vanished in flames.

'Three hundred and fifty metres.'

His relentless assault continued on. The Hellwalker left no corner unturned and no room he entered stayed pristine for long. The demons all screamed in rage and confusion as they fought back only to be met with a swift and surprisingly clean end, for the Slayer's mind seemed elsewhere. Amiss. As if there was something else on it other than the total and brutal annihilation of demonkind...

And they weren't wrong, really. I mean, he still got the job done. But there was a lot to be said about the clean headshots he landed on almost every hellspawn. Be it with the Precision Bolt, the shotgun, the Ballista--heck, he even managed it with the Rocket Launcher, somehow!

It really shouldn't have bothered him, but the more distance he put between them, the more the Slayer realised he may have put Daisy in more danger than he did a place to cool her head. But who could blame him? The woman was out of control. He of all people knew rage when he saw it.

Daisy's, however, was dangerous for all the wrong reasons; it was a ticking time bomb ready to take her down with it.

'Four hundred metres.'

The sound of demons and Vega's announcements were the only things that kept his senses sharp for a moment until he returned to mindlessly retracing the halls of a once-bustling capital city, searching for anything with a significant amount of Hell energy to it. The Slayer hardly expected it to come from a Titan. But lo and behold, he stood before one again, albeit a dormant one.

Argent D'Nur was one thing. The Titan, something else entirely.

He still remembered the war as clearly as he did his time on Mars. It may have been centuries ago, but it took a lot more than cryostasis to forget how he subdued the thing--the memory sparking something in him. Something Vega noticed as he clambered the huge, languishing beast; ages of dirt and rubble forming part of its skin, consuming its body like a barren morass would.

'Four hundred and fifty metres.'

The AI said as he clambered the massive demon, standing in a place he hardly expected to again--that is, the beast's fleshy atrial cavity. Even after all these years it remained a spitting image of how he left it; every remnant of the intense battle seemingly frozen in time... one of them being his Crucible; the brilliant red of the blade plunged deep into the titan's bloated heart, as it had been for centuries now. Compared to the bed of flesh it was in, the sword appeared to be nothing but a glowing and foreign speck.