Magi-Plagues are equal parts horrifying and disgusting, with one spell you can reduce an entire nation, entire world, to nothing more than a bloated heap of corpses. Where you would once find shining halls of artistry and culture, you find nothing but monsters and rotting corpses.

It is our responsibility, nay our RIGHT, as purifiers to not only cleanse worlds of these disgusting magics, the mages who create them, and the monstrosities they create, but to also protect the universe at large from the travesties they are capable of.

When you find a Plague Witch, or a Sickened Spawn, you do not have the luxury, the means of mercy or regret. You must, and you WILL destroy them, all of them, no matter what!

We are the Purifiers, and we will cleanse all!

Atohm, The First Purifier - Time of Speech Unknown.

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He’s beginning to annoy me.

To say that Lilliha was ever a ‘tolerant’ person would be a lie, even she knew she had little patience for the incompetence of others. Especially those who thought themselves better than her, when they were anything but.

Her newest student however had begun to test her patience ever since she had taken over his studies. Constant escape attempts, childish complaints almost daily, and the constant nagging over using magic.

Most children wouldn’t even begin to learn to cast magic until they’d completed their studying and could prove themselves sufficiently capable, whether that meant in common sense or innate talent.

The boy lacked both.

She had caught him attempting to cast Igniti, a fire spell. When she’d asked him the obvious question of why in the hells are you trying to cast a combat spell in your very flammable residence, his response had been ‘but fireball?'. Either the boy hadn’t realized the destructive capabilities of the spell, himself, or his newfound gifts. She didn’t know which, but she did know he was a massive fool.

Trying to cast a combat spell indoors, let alone the loss of life within the building itself, the fool would have blown his own limbs off.

Her constant irritation aside, she had spent the last few months going over the contents of the city's libraries. From fiction to nonfiction, the works she had gone through had greatly increased her knowledge of the world's advancements and culture.

Most importantly however, it had highlighted its propensity for violence.

Half the works she had gathered had the topic of war or extreme amounts of violence involved with them, even a majority of the ones directed towards their children were packed to the brim with watered down perceptions of the two. While stories of valiant knights rescuing princesses from some kind of evil were home in practically every world she’d been to, the amount she’d found that went leagues beyond the typical ‘hero saves princess’ trope was alarming.

She’d found stories about violent wars, gruesome murder investigations, and a plethora of stories about survival in a hostile environment. She didn’t fully understand this ‘isekai’ genre, but almost all of them involved a vast amount of violence.

To be sent to a new world, and almost immediately choose violence might have only been recorded in their literature, but art is a mirror of life, and these people had the tendency to get remarkably violent quickly.

While the idea of using children’s stories as fact would be reprehensible to her, the fact of the matter was their own history and the city itself was more than enough proof for her to confirm her little theory. People in history, the ‘media’ and even on the streets in the city were very quick to anger. With death battles occurring in the streets over petty things like ‘looking at someone wrong’ or simply wearing the wrong colored clothing on the wrong street. A young woman she’d passed by had almost been violently assaulted for wearing the wrong clothes before she herself had disarmed and dispatched the fool attempting to establish his ‘gangs’ dominance.

She had taken no joy in ending the cur’s life, but she would be lying if she said she regretted doing it.

The stupidity of some mortals will never change, no matter how far they advance, it seems.

She knew there would be a long road ahead, she had cleared at least a century with her advisors before leaving after all, but she hadn’t anticipated the amount of problems she’d run into. A disobedient, and rather dim charge, a world infested by new technologies and magics, and to top it off half the planet she stood on had been claimed by death.

The simple fact that ‘cut ties and run’ hadn’t been the first option the people of the world had chosen when they’d ‘won’ their little war was astounding. And while it was a testament to their perseverance as a species it didn’t bode well for the inevitable fight for dominance.

Why can’t all worlds be filled with pacifists, would make my life so much simpler.

Her master may live for war, and while she loved her unconditionally, she found the stress and irritations of war rather poor for her emotional state. Nothing like spending a century or two stacked to the brim with sieges, combat, broken bodies and shattered hearts to make one weary of life, let alone war.

She much preferred learning, and admiring works produced by her followers over war.

When will I be able to admire Mikra’s Sculpture of Divinity again? Would the Lady notice if I left for a week or so for a quick break?

Her longing for home however was interrupted by the sound of knocking on her quarters door.

Damn it, not again.

It felt like every other hour the boy returned to pester her with questions, or did something else that annoyed her beyond belief.

Leaving the small desk she had acquired from one of the office buildings she’d previously visited she blinked over to the door, before opening it to deal with another batch of irritating questions.

‘Oh Lilliha how does fire magic work? Where does the water magic go after it’s canceled? Why do summons attack their masters without adequate preparation?’ If you kept reading maybe you wouldn’t be so confused?

Her irritation was replaced by a small kernel of worry however, when she saw his expression.

She was used to annoyance by now, and had seen a few flashes of anger or panic.

She hadn’t seen desperation yet.

Goodness, now what have you done?

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

She would find out in short order however, when he asked if she was capable of curing magi-plagues.

She would find out a lot of things about her newest charge over the coming days.

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“I am capable of curing practically all magi-plagues below the fifth tier, so I would assume I can cure whatever disease you caught in this dump.”

It took him a few moments to regain his ability to think.

It took him a few more moments after that just to formulate a response, the question that had been burning within him since he’d discovered the book on magi-plagues. The very thing he’d been working towards, putting his health and at times his life on the line to achieve ever since his mother was infected with the Ambrosia plague.

“Can you cure my mother?”

It came out as a whisper, his throat closing off at the question.

He wanted this, more than anything, but he was also terrified she would say no, or they’d get there and the disease was somehow incurable, no matter how improbable it was.

His desperation must have been clearly written across his face, because hers softened slightly. He hated himself for feeling so desperate, being so desperate, but this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, for both of them.

When he wondered whether or not the silence would consume him, she gave an answer.

“I can.”

All this time-

“But I won’t.”

His hearts stopped for just a moment, then began again far harder than before. He could feel the anger he’d felt so many times in his youth amplifying itself a thousand times further than ever before. Anger so potent that if he was capable of clear thought he would have recognized it as unnatural. If he’d been in the right state of mind he would have felt the vibrations from his arm spreading across his body, feel as it sent layers of cold energy towards his mind and heart in an attempt to calm him, like a scared dog tugging its master’s leg in an attempt to get it to run away.

If he wasn’t so far gone, he would have listened.

If.

He didn’t realize he’d thrown a punch before he’d done it, against his long-forgotten judgment, and against the will of the entity within the arm he’d used in an attempt to smash her skull in.

There would be a time, years from now, where he’d look back upon this moment and feel shame from the entire situation, his immediate and rash decision to resort to violence, his anger, his lack of thought to simply ask ‘why not’, the failure to immediately realize that something wasn’t right.

But most of all, how ignorant and foolish he’d been to attempt a direct assault on the Overseer.

Mark didn’t see what hit him, he didn’t even know if something had hit him. All he knew was for one instant he was throwing a punch that would have cleaved anyone below the C-Tier in half, to being thrown through a dozen walls with his body frozen in shock.

No, not shock.

Physical trauma.

He couldn’t move because whatever had hit him made him feel like his nervous system had been removed.

He couldn’t even feel the walls he crashed through, not even the brick he crushed twice, once while exiting the building and a second time when he was sent through the apartment building across from it.

All he could feel was a red hot anger that refused to recede, and someone he could use it on.

Get… Get up! Get up! Get…up!

He strained, and screamed mentally in an ocean of wrath he could barely see through. Every slight, every flash of irritation he’d ever felt over the last two months were amplified to the highest extremes possible.

When he’d finally made progress in regaining control of his body, she appeared above him. Gone was the small form of a woman so closely resembling a human, standing there was a monster, and she was not pleased.

With black scales covering a vast majority of her body, a large tail resembling that of a dragons, and the eyes of something so far removed from his reality that looking into them paralyzed him completely.

A Demon.

Fear overcame sense, the fear brought upon him by his body's most basic survival instincts had easily overpowered everything else.

The Devil Herself.

“You will learn your lesson for that, boy.”

Raising her scaled fist over his head, he’d barely had time to react before he was sent into the dark depths of sleep.

“Later… of course.”

-----------------------------------------------

“Is he dead?”

Pipa turned her head towards the speaker, their contract holder for the job ahead, and the man she was growing to dislike heavily over the last few weeks.

Watching from a vantage point a few buildings away, they had front row tickets as their target was literally smashed through an entire building and into another. While this wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence amongst the higher tier Altereds, it was concerning that the ‘baseline freak’ had been with someone so powerful, coupled with the fact that she could still feel his mind, she knew that their job hadn’t ended just yet.

Let alone the fact we have already fallen behind by two weeks because of that woman, the bastard might not even be dying.

Their small group was composed of six people, a scout, three fighters, a mentalist and their contractor, Mr. Rebek.

While they had been more than happy to accept a very profitable contract from the man, the fact of the matter was that they hadn’t truly understood what they were getting into. They had come here expecting some small baseline punk who wasn’t a threat beyond the information he knew.

What that information was, she didn’t know, and she knew better than to ask.

What they had found, however, was an unidentified woman who had been strong enough to kill one of them in less time than it had taken them to react. They had planned an ambush to capture the woman alive, and use her as bait for the boy but hadn’t realized just how strong she had been. Let alone the fact that the man she’d killed had been one of their strongest C-listers in the Guild, just a few steps below the B rank, even Pipa who had been the bait had barely any time to react to the woman’s actions, and had barely felt her mind when she’d approached, or left.

They had planned to drag the boy out by taking one of his friends, the woman who had been living with him as of late, and having him meet them in the warehouse district.

They’d instead lost their heavy hitter, and for absolutely nothing.

After spending an entire week arguing with the contractor over the simple fact that they couldn’t even scratch the bitch, he had simply demanded she ‘figure it out, or else’.

Breaking a contract with the Guild was certain death, everyone in the organization knew this, hell people outside of the organization knew it. After spending an entire week stalking the boy and his apparent roommate, they’d come to the conclusion of a Psychic Strike, timed whenever they could find an opening.

Which sounds easy, until you spend a week observing the rat and the only two things you can feel off of him is impatience and fear, especially whenever the woman makes contact with him. Either she's his slave master or he’s just a coward.

She had begun timing her sleep schedule to his, as hectic as it was, and had spent the entirety of every day practically cataloging his emotional state. What made him angry, what made him sad, what made him excited, she had even begun peaking into his dreams in an attempt to try something there, but all she got was shadows… and nightmares,

While she had no idea what sort of trauma he’d been involved in, any time she attempted to dive into his dreams from the apartment across the street all she had gotten was the stuff of nightmares. Claws, teeth, scales, and screaming. So much screaming.

I found my opening though, whatever he felt near the end there was enough… let us hope it was enough.

Suppressing a shudder she watched as the woman appeared above the boy, this time sparing no effort in hiding what she really was, wrapped in black scales and looking closer to the devil her mother warned her of as a child than the woman they had watched before.

All it had taken was amplifying his anger, for just a split second, his anger had overtaken his caution and fear of the woman, and he’d struck.

She figured with how scared he was of her, that such an attack would result in an immediate execution. People didn’t feel that type of fear unless the person they were with was a direct, honest threat to their lives.

But she hadn’t expected this. Whatever the woman was - she wasn’t human, no human would have such a heavy mutation, especially not a mage class Altered.

Is she… is she an invader? Did we just stumble onto some end times shit?

They watched from the small apartment they had occupied, they all did. Among the five of them she had been in the work the longest, and had become increasingly more comfortable with stronger Altereds and their excessive mutations, the same could be said of their contractor who had hardly moved since they, or more accurately she, had struck.

Among them was Svet, an old scout that had been a part of the original scouting teams issued by the Guild shortly after the war. Old, angry, and slightly senile the bastard had only survived as long as he had due to a rare mutation that had slowed the aging process by around half. Even with that mutation however the old man was practically one foot in the grave, but still highly valued to her team and the guild itself. As a remnant of the old guard the old man had been through practically anything someone of the Guild could go through.

Which is what made her so surprised when he began to pray.

None of them were saints, they’d all killed before, robbed, stolen, blackmailed, and while she had no proof the rather sick way the fighter twins she had employed looked at the women they passed in the street didn’t bode well for anything they got their hands on.

To see someone who had gone through more than all of them, from the beginning to the end, praying to a god she didn’t know he had was worrying, to say the least.

What the hell are you doing you old bastard, ain’t no one gonna answer you cept’ the barrel of someone’s gun if you keep-

Her mind froze.

She froze.

She had been distracted for just a moment, long enough for her connection to the boy to break, and long enough for something to grab the other end with a clawed fist.

She felt as something scoured her mind, and in an instant it knew who she was, it knew why she was here, and it knew where she was.

She knows.

“SHE KNOWS!”

She screamed, she howled in pain as her mind was assaulted so severely she could hardly even remember to fight back. She died screaming, arms at her side as tears of blood rained down her face. They had barely enough time to look at her in horror before the walls around them crumbled to dust, and the Devil descended upon them all.

“I Know.”