After the man and I had dramatically rushed at each other, I swung at his neck and he punched at my stomach. When sword Steve hit his neck, nothing happened. I mean, there was a slight indent in the skin where the sword was pressing against his neck, but no damage occurred.

Then there was me. I coughed up warm liquid into my mouth. It tasted coppery. It was blood. I looked down to see his fist had punched through my stomach.

I felt something extremely painful. It felt like my spine was being crushed. It took me a few seconds to realize that was exactly what was happening. He had grabbed hold of my spine through my stomach and was crushing it in his fist. When he finished crushing it, my legs went out. I was paralyzed from the waist down.

I pulled my head up and started crawling along the ground towards Sarah. I knew I was going to die, but that didn't matter to me anymore. He stomped on my leg, breaking it, and then kept his foot on it. I couldn't feel the break. I just heard it. It didn't sound very good, but that was the least of my worries right now.

Sarah was screaming through the gag he had put on her mouth. I couldn't move any closer to Sarah with his dumb foot on my leg. She finally loosened the gag on her mouth enough to talk around it.

"Ele'or!" she yelled at me. "Ele'or, Ay!"

She kept screaming the same thing over and over "Ele'or" and "Ay," whatever each of those words were supposed to mean. Then the dude standing on me started a monologue.

"God has kept me on this Earth long enough! It's finally my time! Who are you to stand in my way?" he said.

I didn't answer him. I was focusing on figuring out what "Ele'or" and "Ay" meant. They seemed important. They were important enough for Sarah to struggle to remove her gag and then continuously scream her lungs out at me with just those two words.

While in severe pain that I was slowly dying from thanks to my apparent super toughness that wasn't actually invincibility, I tried to think. What letters do gags prevent you from saying? I quickly ran through the alphabet sounding out the letters. "Ah," "Buh," "Cuh," "Duh—"

"Are you having a stroke?" the man asked. I don't like to see jokes get reused in media. It really bothers me. But I'm just reporting the facts. That's what he said!

"No! I'm trying to think," I said.

"Well, think quietly! I'm trying to use you as a sounding board for my feelings about God," he said. "So God," blah blah blah. I stopped listening again. He was like Lucifer before therapy, except worse. At least Lucifer kept it to a couple paragraphs at most. This guy had written a speech.

Ok, back to thinking. I realized most of the vowels could still be used, except 'U' when you tried to use the 'you' sound. But you couldn't use most consonants. So the missing letters had to be consonants. That didn't help me much. The alphabet was mostly consonants.

After going down the list again, when I hit 'D' I realized that "Ay" was "Dave." Ok. If "Ay" was "Dave," then she must be telling me to do something. The "Ele'or" was a verb, an action. What was she telling me to do that she thought I could do in this moment?

I went down the list again until I hit "T." I was just replacing all the consonant sounds with a single letter. So "Beleborb," "Deledord," and several others came out before I hit "Teletort." And then it finally clicked. How could I be so dumb? How could it have taken this many paragraphs of thought for me to figure out what she was saying? She was telling me to "teleport."

I had forgot that I could not only teleport long distances, but I could teleport short distances too. I didn't need my legs!

So that's what I did. I teleported behind Sarah and cut the ropes, keeping her from moving. She got up and said, "Thanks, Dave." The ropes fell off her body, revealing her fully nude form.

"You're welcome, but what are you going to do now? You're naked," I said.

"Run out the door, of course!" she said.

"Naked?" I asked.

"A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to survive sometimes, Dave. You should try it sometime," she said.

"I'll get right on that," I said, bleeding onto the floor slightly from the massive hole in my stomach.

"No matter! You still can't escape the circle! It allows people in, but not out! You're both trapped!" the man yelled.

I looked down. I was lying on part of the glowing red circle. "This circle?" I asked, as I wiped my hand through the concentric lines and demonic symbols.

"No!" he yelled.

The circle went dark. It stopped glowing. I looked at Sarah, who was still standing there. "Run!" I yelled. "I'll stall him!"

I teleported over the man's head and swung my sword at his face. It bounced off his thick skull, but it messed with his vision. The light blinded him. That gave me an idea. I teleported over him, but behind him this time. I held the sword against his face while using my limp body as leverage.

He twisted around blindly, trying to grab me. "Ah! Get off!" he yelled.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"No!" I said. "Steve, can we get some extra light please?"

"Yes, sir!" the sword said, brightening by over three times.

"I can't see! Stop!" the man said.

"That's the point!" I said.

"Argh!"

I couldn't see either, but I heard the front door unlock, open, and then slam shut. And then I remembered once more what an idiot I was. I could have just teleported Sarah away with me this whole time. Well, at least after I destroyed the circle.

I teleported outside the house and yelled, "Sarah! Grab me! We'll teleport away!" As I heard the door open again.

"No!" the man yelled.

I felt someone grab my arm, and I instantly teleported both of us back to the hospital, right into the emergency room. They were just starting to move Margaret's bed out of the room when a severely wounded me, and a buck naked Sarah appeared in the air and plopped on the ground.

I blinked my eyes. I could see again. I looked up and saw Margaret with a furious look on her face, staring daggers at me. "What?" I asked.

"Why is Sarah naked? What were you doing?" she fumed.

"Nothing, I swear! The weird killer guy stripped her for some reason! Don't ask me why!" I said, and then things started to go dark. I had lost too much blood. I was about to pass out.

It was only my super toughness keeping me from passing out as soon as he punched through my stomach and broke my spine, but the blood loss was beginning to become too much for even my super toughness to handle.

"He's wounded! Get him on a table!" a nurse yelled.

Then, once again, it was lights out.

I woke up the ICU hooked up to a big machine. A bunch of tubes were going into my stomach and circulating material through the machine and then through other tubes into my body. I think the machine was acting like my digestive system. I had never seen such technology on Earth, but if they had external gestation chambers, why wouldn't they have whatever this was?

A nurse walked through the sliding door and came up to me. She checked my vitals and said, "Your replacement organs and the crushed portion of your spinal column will be ready in a couple hours."

"I hate saying 'what' like an idiot, but what? Replacement organs? How can you make them that fast? Are they organic or machines?" I asked.

"It's fine. You're still new to our medical system. We haven't seen you in here before, so I'm assuming you've been using Lucifer's primordial ooze pit to revive?" she said.

"Yeah. Couldn't I just use that?" I said.

"You showed up here alive. It was our duty to save you. And we did. We're not allowed to kill people, but in order to use the primordial pit, you'd have to die. Also, it takes too long to regenerate your entire body. We can regenerate parts and replace them much faster. And you seemed to be fighting someone. Wouldn't you rather recover faster so you can get out there and fight them again sooner?" she said.

"Ok. Can I see my girlfriend?" I said.

She sighed. "We can't move you from this machine and she's not really supposed to leave her medical room. She's supposed to be eating and drinking or in the bathroom constantly for the next 24 hours or so. She doesn't really have time to come visit you. Besides, she's still upset with you for leaving and almost getting killed."

"Did she say that?" I asked.

"No, but she didn't have to. We women can sense these things," she said.

"Right. Ok, so I just hang out here for a couple more hours and then go into surgery?" I said.

"Basically. There's just one little hiccup we have to discuss. We know how to synthesize demon parts, but not human parts. Not yet, at least. We never had to treat a living human before," she said.

"What, so I'll be part demon?" I asked.

"Only temporarily, until we can find a way to synthesize human parts. Speaking of, we are going to need harvest some of your blood when you're feeling up to it," she said.

"Can I talk to my girlfriend first? I don't know how she'd feel about this? Maybe just a phone call?" I asked.

"A phone call should be fine," she said. She went to leave. "I'll let you make your phone call. You have two hours to make your decision. If the organs finish before you're ready, they'll go to someone else," she said.

"Why? I don't like to do this, but don't I have priority because of who I am? I mean, the fate of the world could be on the line," I said.

"You could order us to hold on to them for you, but that is not our way, and that is not the old Devil's way. You may face public backlash for it," she warned.

"What is the demon way, then?" I asked.

"Socialist medicine. From each according to their health, to each according to their wounds," she said.

"Huh. Ok, I'll make my decision within the two hour time limit," I said.

"Very well," she said and left the room.

I felt the sensation of my ears popping as Lucifer teleported right next to my bed. I rubbed my ears. "Ow! Do you have to do that so close?" I said.

"Sorry. I'm still trying to figure out how to teleport to you without practically teleporting inside you," he said.

"Please don't do that. I'd rather not have you inside me, thank you," I said.

"Of course. It shall not come to pass," he said, grinning. "Now, I heard you were injured and this giant machine confirms it. What happened? Why didn't your invincibility work?"

"Because it's not invincibility. It's super toughness," I said, wincing from the machine.

"What's the difference?" he asked.

"One makes you immune to harm, and the other makes you resistant to harm. Really powerful things can still get through the second one," I said, adjusting myself in my bed so I could look at him better. "Can you move slightly farther away towards the foot of my bed? It'll be easier on my neck."

"Yeah, sure," he said, moving down to the foot of my bed. "Better?"

"Much," I said.

"Ok, so if something or someone got through your super toughness, and did this to you, they must be super strong. Like stronger than Steve strong," Lucifer said.

"He was," I said.

"Do you know who he is?" he asked.

"No, but he had an identify mark," I said.

"Like what? And where?" Lucifer said, narrowing his eyes. He was thinking about something, but he wasn't saying what.

"On his neck. It looked like a brand of some sort. A lot of wavy and looping lines," I said.

"Did it look like this?" Lucifer said, holding and looping his fingers together in a sort of gang sign. He had too many fingers all of a sudden and they were longer, too. But it did look like the same symbol.

"Yeah, that's it. Can you change your hands back to normal? That visual is hurting my eyes and my brain," I said, rubbing my eyes.

"Sure," he said, as his hands changed back. "So the good news is I know who it is. The bad news is I know who it is."

"Ok, give me the good news first," I said, messing with him.

"They're both the same news, you moron!" he said.

"I know. I'm just being an asshole. My spine was crushed in that guy's hand," I said. "I'm allowed."

"Fine. Be that way," he said. "His name is Cain."

"Like Cain and Abel, Cain?" I asked. I'd heard of him, but I didn't know his whole story. I knew he murdered his brother Abel, but that's it. I didn't know anything about him being immortal or super tough. "How is he still alive?"

"The Mark of Cain. He was the first human to murder another human. So my father put a mark on him that turned him into a true immortal, cursed to walk the Earth for eternity. He doesn't age, and he can't be hurt or poisoned or get sick. He is truly invincible," Lucifer said.

"Oh shit," I said. How was I going to stop this guy if he couldn't be hurt at all? And he had a super strength medallion? Drown him in concrete?