My shot on the sword-demon wasn’t as well placed as the previous ones. I hadn’t put nearly as much time or ULE into refining my aim and it showed. I could tell from the first moment that it would go high. While that would impact how effective it was, I could still get some minor value out of it.

The demon clearly saw it was a bigger threat than I would have, as it stopped and raised its sword appendage instead of trying to blast me with a more powerful heat beam now that it probably knew my exact location. A few fractions of a second before the shot would have cleared a foot over its head, we both acted.

The demon moved to the side much faster than anyone I had ever seen- counting MGs- and started to chop at my projectile. In a lucky coincidence, just before I registered what it had done, I burst the shell. The resulting spray mostly ended up on the sword-arm, with a few lucky drops hitting other places where they started to boil.

However, despite being hit with the majority of the chlorine trifluoride, the sword looked unaffected. I quickly realized it was even worse than that as the demon pulled the appendage out of a floating, frozen, sword-shaped sheath it had just frozen like the bodies behind it. When I tried to reignite the extremely sensitive chemical, I found I couldn’t form a connection to push my ULE through.

By this time, I had made it to the roof access door with the air rifle in hand. Quickly deciding I wanted the fire extinguisher part of it, I weakened the glue keeping things together and smashed the pipe-end against the ground with a nice clank. That done, I ducked through the doorway and vaulted over the stair’s railing to skip a floor of stairs

Priority one was getting away. While I didn’t think the demon could bring down the building I was in, I wasn’t in the mood to be proven wrong. It also had the clear advantage in the corridors and small rooms of this building and from my surveillance, was running here at an alarming speed.

The stairwell I was in fed right to an emergency exit, so I continued hopping railings and converting the impact into ULE to save my knees from the repeated impacts. By the time I had descended all five floors, I was feeling bloated with energy so I dumped a portion of my reserves into heating up the fire sprinkler near the door the demon was about to crash through- distance and trying to create heat making it more difficult than I would have liked.

It didn’t really do anything except confuse the demon for a few seconds as I sprinted next door. The entrance I had picked on account of it being closest was locked, eliciting a curse from me. That continued when I realized that however the demon saw the world, it was close enough to be able to tell where I was and was preferring to make its own doors through the interior of the building I had just left over using the perfectly functional ones that were already built.

Using some ULE to boost my effective strength, I threw the fire extinguisher through one of the second floor windows and followed it up with a nearly overexerting jump that only just let me get a solid grip on the frame. The protective magic of the costume protected me from getting the cuts I deserved as I hauled myself over the remaining glass and into the building, narrowly avoiding a hastily aimed beam of heat from the demon as it emerged into the alley below me.

As I once again took off, I kept my mind and hands busy. A quick survey of the demon showed me that it hadn’t had an easy time doing renovations, and it now sported a number of small scratches along its body- including what looked like catastrophic damage to three of the soft eyes lining its head. At the same time, I had been filling the banged up fire extinguisher with silane since I didn’t have faith I could keep ClF3 from exploding under the stress and magical soreness I was feeling.

The damage to the demon’s eyes told me it probably didn’t have eyelids, an oversight I was piecing together a plan to exploit.

With a thought, I adjusted my prosthetic's feedback to give me my normal level of detail across the entirety of the building for a fraction of a second. Doing so immediately caused me to stumble as a splitting headache cut off all my thoughts until my brain caught up to the information that had been dumped into it. The pain was worth it as I was able to find an apartment of someone who probably had a baking hobby a floor above and a few hallways away.

The flash of information also let me get a very clear picture of the demon as it climbed the exterior of the building by stabbing its hand and sword through the concrete to create holds before it faded back to a red wireframe of dangers outside the area of my two perception amoebas. Even when climbing a building it was terrifyingly fast; it had probably taken more time to think about what to do than climb a story.

Only a few seconds after I had jumped up, the demon had joined me in a dash through the hallways. In order to stay out of the demon’s line of fire, I had to further tire my metaphorical magic-muscles by continuously burning ULE to add energy into my skipping and aggressive cornering actions. And by that I mean I was jumping into and off of walls in such a way that I could keep some speed while painfully bouncing around corners. Again, the force dispersion effect of my costume saved me from getting a concussion or broken shoulder.

Despite its higher top speed, the demon’s lower gymnastic ability lost it a precious fraction of second in each corner as it elected to slow down and actually turn. This time came in handy when we made it to the stairwell closest to my target apartment. Instead of being able to line up a clean shot on me in the open space, it had to settle for melting the paint and a concerning amount of metal off the silane filled fire extinguisher I held.

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As soon as it started to swell from the gas heating up and freeing itself from my control, I dropped the now-bomb into the stairwell and helped it along. It probably would have been a good idea to set it off there anyway as the rough confinement of the explosion focused most of the energy into the structure and demon. Sadly, neither were too badly affected, but my pursuer having to dodge back down to the second floor gave another few seconds to my lead.

When I made it to the door of the apartment I was interested in I didn’t take the time to do any fancy tricks, just body slamming through it with the help of some more ULE. Doing so rewarded me with a very unpleasant compacting sensation all over my body, and a broken door. That I learned was unlocked in the first place.

Not having time to consider how embarrassing that was, I skidded my way over to their small kitchen and ripped open the cabinet housing a five pound bag of flour.

The previous explosion in the stairs hadn’t done much to the demon, but it was also relatively avoidable, dark, and couldn’t have been capitalized on to launch a meaningful attack . My hope was that setting off a dust explosion in the same room as the demon would damage or overload its eyes enough for me to get an easy hosing of ClF3 all over it. Or maybe if I was lucky it would just die from the explosion.

I didn’t have enough time to set up here with the demon rapidly closing in, so I set off the kitchen sprinkler and cranked gas stove knobs all the way on before letting a few second spray of pressurized and very excited chlorine trifluoride. It wasn’t the best for quickly creating a long lasting inferno, preferring to quickly oxidize anything it touched, but it worked well enough with the constant addition of water and made plenty of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid to stall.

Not wanting to go in the direction of the small chemical storm and demon, jumping out the window was my only method of escape. It also helped that I was starting to run low on ULE anyway and a three story drop creates a lot of energy. Once I landed I was off again, burning as much ULE as I could control through the phantom pain using it was starting to cause with every skip.

As I moved, I whipped my tail around in bladed form, cutting a cross shaped set of nice gashes across the bag of flour. Some spilled as I loosened my perception to scout for a suitable location, but getting clipped by a beam of heat was a much larger concern.

In my moment of consideration, the demon had somehow navigated the mess I left behind and lined up a shot on me while hanging off the building's wall with its sword arm. Only my childish method of travel and temporary loss of balance from moving my tail turned a center-mass shot into one that barely caught the outside of my left thigh. Some of the energy had been spread over my body, but being so close meant that even a glancing hit contained enough energy to be too dangerous to completely disperse.

With no other option, I continued to push through the pain and weaved my way between as many objects as I could while furiously skipping away.

The demon took a few more pot-shots at me, but quickly realized I would get away before it would land another hit. The red wireframe of its position launched off the wall and was followed by a screech of crumpling metal from whatever it hit upon landing. Said landing must have been messy since it took a second to shake free and get moving again.

That was all I needed to smash through the window of a small shop front. I nervously waited for a few seconds for the demon to get closer before slamming the bag of flour onto the ground as hard as I could and ducking around the corner to the back of the shop. To my relief, the demon didn’t try to get another shot off on me and ignored the cloud of gently floating powder. With no better option, I crouched down and let off a toroidal burst of silane to act as a primer. I let it travel for a few feet, mixing with the powder in the air before I tore every remaining scrap of ULE out of my body and shoved it into detonating the room.

There was the barest moment of hesitation as probability was overturned and molecules lined up in the most efficient places to react before every particle of dust ignited at the perfect time to add to the propagating shockwave. The remaining windows of the shop and those of the buildings around it shattered in concert with the deafening roar. Despite converting a large chunk of the force into ULE reserves and another portion being spread to my clothes, my ears burst and my chest felt like I had just been hit by a car.

Fighting through a sudden loss of balance and another form of pain, I hobbled out to where the demon was somehow still standing. Upon closer inspection, it actually looked like it had locked its sword in space and was limply hanging off of it. Its remaining eyes had been liquefied and the side of its body with the normal arm looked like the carapace had been cracked, but only slowly oozed dark ichor .

Fully relying on a cracked wall to stay upright as I aimed, I shakily coated as much of the demon as I could with ClF3, using my excruciatingly overfilled ULE to let the chemical burn and tear to its heart’s content.

Before it could succumb to my attack, I lost connection with the chemical like before and could only watch on in horror as the demon righted itself and turned my way, stepping out of a mold made from frozen chlorine trifluoride.

Plans of action flashed through my mind at a thousand miles a second, but none came formed enough to stop the demon as it struck at me with its sword. Acting purely on instinct, I dropped and raised my left arm to try and block the attack from disemboweling me.

I didn’t even feel it as the blade cut through my forearm, shoulder, and the wall behind me where it got caught on something before it could also cut through my leg. The magic of the demon prevented me from bleeding as the wound froze solid, the cold creeping up my neck and into my chest as my ULE was ripped away from me.

I didn’t even think, simply reaching out to anything I could and found purchase within the apparent lungs of the demon. There was a brief stutter as understanding of how to do what I wanted flooded into my mind just long enough to let me twist on a much deeper more fundamental level than before.

In a flash of indescribable color the demon just collapsed on top of me.

In the few, endless minutes before the other MGs arrived, I was assaulted by fits of hollowing cold, skin-searing heat, somehow worse than before nausea, and an endless stream of blood from every hole it could find to leak out of.