Amber yelled out, “John! What the heck! They were just trying to talk!”

Hearing that caused anger to flare in John’s heart. Did the demons allow humans to talk and parley in Quebec City or Montreal? In any of the great and many cities they destroyed in Asia and Africa? Did they allow peace and parlay when they tortured and killed those peasants right in front of me at the witches’ house? How many peaceful humans have the demons slaughtered? How many women and children?

Maybe Amber has forgotten those that have fallen to these invaders, but I won’t. Their souls cry out for vengeance, and I will not close my ears or heart to those pleas. They will face what is beyond this life avenged, their soul’s content and at peace.

Today, either I fall, or Earth will be free of invasions. I will not let mundane humans steal this battle from me, nor will I allow them to make a deal with these demons. There is no middle ground. And after these demons here are slaughtered, the scales still won’t be balanced. Not even close. They’ve killed hundreds of millions of humans.

After dismissing what he thought of as the low desires of Amber’s fearful mind, a mind that sought only comfort and peace for herself, John tightened up his focus and entered into his battle-mind. He had a horde to slaughter and untold millions of people to avenge. He needed battle. This battle. If no one else was up to the task, he’d do the deed on his own.

For most of John’s life, even when he wasn’t a king in truth, he had the means and wealth to live in comfort and luxury like one. For the most part, he chose not to, as time passed faster and more easily when one’s mind and body were kept busy.

From John’s perspective, life should be filled with hardship, struggle, and conflict, as those three things made the bellows burn hot enough to separate the slag from the steel, those three things made the most fertile soil from which the best of men grew.

It was John’s belief most of what life threw at a person came in threes. The best things in life seemed to need three main ingredients, be it something as simple as stew or something as complex as smithing.

The first steel John had worked with came to be known as crucible steel. It required iron, pig iron, and a flux such as sand, ash, or glass. The word crucible also came to be known as a trial of constant searching, testing, and adversity.

Marriage needed devotion, a strong sense of duty, and mutual respect. The husband provided food, shelter, and safety. The wife provided caring, children, and upkeep. And so on and so forth.

Three main ingredients. The rule of threes repeated too often to be coincidence.

For all John’s blessings and advantages, he hadn’t had an easy life. He had endured horrors that would’ve broken all others. He endured all those horrors many times. Even so, the heartbreak of betrayal he now felt weighed down his soul too much. His heart hurt tremendously. It hurt enough to make him feel completely lost.

There were thousands and thousands of demons arrayed against John, standing before him. And his heart went from weighing a thousand pounds to being light as a feather as his lifelong dream of having fire billow forth from his hand, setting many, many enemies aflame all at once, became fulfilled.

John laughed merrily as demons lit up in a glorious and fiery blaze. His soul sang with joy as they ran about screaming in agony, their skin crisping, sizzling fat dripping off them. He slipped through the shadows further down the line, stopping to bathe new foes in the fires of [Least Glyph of Darkflame Jet]. And he slipped again, wishing the demon horde was much larger.

Fire billowing forth from John’s hand, plus many, many enemies, plus those enemies screaming in terror as they burned to death, equaled medicine for his aching heart. Just three main ingredients. Still.

Stretch popped up in the middle of a group of demons and had to retreat away from the darkflame. Amber, in bear form, could reach no demon with her blink spell, as all within her reach burned. Hubaba didn’t enjoy killing what he considered the children and young of his kind, so was told to focus on unbinding manifestations and to only fight the Silvers and Golds. Still, John saw purple scythes appear much deeper into the horde, attacking something.

And as his companions struggled to reach an enemy to fight, John reveled in joyful euphoria as the best medicine he had ever taken soothed his soul in a way no healing potion, elixir, draught, or other remedy ever could have.

Why exactly burning so many enemies at once with fire magic and hearing their screams of tortured agony filled John with such elation was not clear. He only knew all his worries and hurt shed away as they did, and his soul sang harmoniously along with their screams. His heart was light and unburdened and, for a time, didn’t hurt.

Over the years, John had noticed that the most notable of horrors also came in threes. Ages were said to last 2,150 years. If so, he was living through his third age.

Three races invaded Earth. The demons and g’athu each had three portals. Three dark walkers were brought.

Stolen story; please report.

For Lilly, there was her infidelity, her bloodthirst, and how she manipulated memories with the mind power.

Of all the times John had been captured and tortured, three of those times stood out prominently in his mind, and they were the three times he was burned very badly.

The first time he was captured and held for a very long period was due to fire. Ahn asked John to watch over Ur while he left to wander. Ahn had said he’d be gone for no more than ten years. He was gone for well over a century.

Eridug failed to tribute all they should have for the third year in less than a decade. And as John had done twice before, he went to the city, waited outside until night, and went to scale the wall.

John learned a terrible lesson that third time. As terrible as it was simple. It was a bad idea to scale the same part of the same wall three times in a row. He should’ve picked a new spot. The base of that whole section of wall was replaced by a pit trap filled with tar.

As soon as John fell into the trap, soldiers threw torches down, and John was burned up very badly and was easy to capture. He was held and tortured for a very long time. So long, he was forgotten about and left to waste away.

The next capture that stuck out in John’s mind came much later. He had left Sparta for three decades, as he often did, assuming enough time had passed that he could return safely. He returned as either a helot or a perioikoi, though it mattered little which if part of a war retinue of a Spartiate.

A lochagos that clearly remembered John from when they were eirēn together tricked John and managed to trap him in a dungeon. He was only imprisoned for about a decade before he made good his escape, but he was often tortured with fire. His captors somehow got it in their minds that if they ate enough of John’s flesh and drank enough of his blood, they would attain his power.

Things weren’t all that bad until his captors tired of his raw flesh and started roasting parts of his still attached limbs. They would often force John to eat his own flesh too. After a while, when their deeds gave them no benefit and it was clear it never would, they just became mean and malicious and continued to cook and eat of him. But they also became complacent and gave John a good opportunity to escape and drink of them.

The worst incident was also the most recent. Not that long after the Poles consolidated under one king and were made Christian. A king, Wrymouth, split the kingdom among his sons, and there was a great need for warriors and mercenaries in those regions after doing so. Those castles had a lot of traps, and John had been caught under the weight of too many rocks and rubble during the taking of one.

After the debris was cleared and John was found broken but alive, they assumed he was a warlock and tried to burn him at a stake. Since he continued to scream long past when a human would’ve died, the ruler had him cut down and chained in a dungeon.

The ruler wanted John’s power. Once John was healed enough to perform the ritual, the ruler became a hopper and John nearly escaped. As he was pounding his way out, pitch was poured into the dungeon and was set afire, burning him up all over again.

John was then chained tightly and tied to a table, a rope wrapped around every inch of his body but his head. He was tortured badly for a very long time. Eventually, no one came to torture him, and he wasted away.

Sliver by sliver, year by year, John pushed his wasting frame out of the ropes. He tugged on his chains for years before they broke. He fed on insects and worms until he was able to open a section of the dungeon with rats and the decent amounts of vital essence they provided, gaining the strength needed to dig his way out.

John’s mind had deteriorated a good amount during that imprisonment. He slaughtered many people in the castle and town once free, uncaring of their guilt or complicity, knowing that those he killed were probably all born after he was captured. His heart hungered for vengeance, and he fed his heart all it could want. He then returned to England and met Thomas not all that long later.

So, John hated fire, or being burned and set aflame. All three of his most prominent memories of capture involved fire. Why he hated to be burned but loved burning his enemies so much was a mystery to him, but he put little thought into it. There was an act he could engage in that filled him with joy, and he would never tire of it.

Having set all the enemies ablaze he could reach, John felt into the demons behind them with his blood power. He focused on their heads, or the blood in them. He was inside as many enemies as he could feel into while preventing a few unbind attempts. He built up and gathered control over some blood in each demon’s skull, enough to do what he wanted. When he had enough, he yanked it all forward and hardened it.

Nearly five hundred demons had what looked like bloody icicles shoot out of their eyes. The blind demons stood dazedly for a moment, then all began to slump down dead.

John felt into a new area filled with demons but Stretch and Amber were fighting those, and he cursed. The human troops were rushing forward to join in the battle too, their new pistols sending essence into the backs of fleeing demons. He slipped through the shadows, and slipped again, pursuing the fleeing demon horde. He began to feel less Silvers on the battlefield. One Gold in his senses winked out of existence as it entered the portal, then another, then the last.

After slipping into the tail end of fleeing and cowardly demons, John let loose with [Least Glyph of Darkflame Jet] at all the demons he could reach with the spell, all the demons making a mad rush to the portal, in full rout.

Then, not even one Silver remained on the battlefield. They were all dead or had gone through the portal. All the remaining demons crowded the portal too, rushing through it.

John should’ve asked where the portal anchor was if the three Gold demons had gone back to the Nether.

Stretch burst through the ground about halfway between John and the portal, bowling over demons, outside the range of John’s fire glyph.

As Stretch jumped off the ground, the wooden-man was trapped in an olive-colored bubble and suspended in the air. A massive and sudden pressure brought John collapsing to his knees. His orb-eye saw most of the human soldiers crushed to death behind him. None of the demons were crushed, but many of them were on fire and soon would be dead regardless.

Silhouetted in front of the portal was a man, not a demon, missing one lower leg, standing in a strange pose, holding a staff, hundreds of cartoonish and large eyes swirling around him. A man that felt extremely powerful. The remaining demons, the ones that could, fled past the man and into the portal.

The man’s soul looked strange. Not in that it was dark with misdeeds – though it certainly was – but as if it was greatly damaged and healed in a strange way. It was large and bright, but misshapen and wrong, like it was patched up and jury rigged, somehow hobbled together incorrectly.

And the man had a familiar scent John couldn’t quite place.