The immortals stood in long lines, stuffing their mutilated bodies into the black mist until the demons' soul-forms could no longer endure it and exploded, their fragments scattering away. Then fresh demons surged forward, forced to devour them, forced past their limit, and exploded again.
The demons on the ground had already been replaced several times over. New ones emerged from the rifts, while the old ones were bloated to bursting, over and over again, like a machine that never stopped running.
The queue of immortal humans was even larger, even denser.
There was no longer any way to count how many lines there were. They spread from the center of the town to its outskirts, from the outskirts into the wilderness, and from the wilderness to the open ground beneath the rift.
Some stood, some sat, some squatted, some lay on the ground, and some were carried by others.
But there were nowhere near enough opportunities.
Batch after batch of number tags was issued from the registration desk, from one to ten thousand, from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, from a hundred thousand to a million.
The numbers were handed out faster and faster, the numbers written on them growing larger and larger, yet the lines only grew longer.
The demons could not be fed to bursting as fast as the queues grew. The odds of winning the lottery were diluted again and again. The patience of those seeking death was stretched thinner and thinner, until it became numbness, then despair, then silent madness.
Someone would suddenly drop to their knees while waiting in line and smash their head against the ground until the flesh on their forehead peeled back, exposing bone beneath. Then the people beside them would pull them up, and they would continue waiting.
Someone