The soldier was still unsatisfied.

Several craters were located around the previously untouched countryside, each of which was smoking. During the hilariously unbalanced fight with the bandits, the soldier had discovered that really just meant that anything he used to attack would light on fire. He was pretty sure that it meant a lot more than that, but wasn't around to explain it, so he could hardly confirm that theory.

At any rate, the bandits were toast of several different flavors. Most of them were in different places, with their various body parts either dispersed unevenly or disintegrated entirely. Eld and Isabelle were both eating the same victim, an expression of bliss on their fluffy faces.

Aliss was examining the head of the bandits' former leader, a strange expression in her eyes. Noticing him, she flushed slightly and explained, "Sorry. It's just - a month ago, I would have been freaking out at the first sign of blood. Now I'm holding someone's decapitated head. Actually, this guy seems familiar - I think we should keep it, just in case there's a bounty out for him."

The soldier ignored her, stomping over to one of the only bodies with all their limbs still attached and kicking it into the far distance. He watched it vanish over the horizon, struck by a strange feeling.

In the Hell he knew, he had been strong and tough. Ridiculously so, in fact, but now he could probably tear a mountain to its roots if he had enough time. It was satisfying on a huge level, and he couldn't see an end to his limits approaching any time soon.

But Satan... that devil had stopped him like a child on a tantrum. He wanted to grab the biggest guns he could manage, go back down to Hell, and shove a barrel down his smug throat until he was out of ammunition.

A faint boom interrupted his thoughts, and he summoned a heavy shotgun and aimed it in a fraction of a second, startled. Aliss looked up curiously, making an odd gesture with her hands and causing the head to disappear into some sort of rip in the air. "What is it?"

The soldier squinted into the distance. There was a black dot, quickly increasing in size, hurtling towards them from over the horizon. He wasn't sure what it was, but there was one way to tell.

Dismissing the shotgun, he summoned the sniper rifle and raised it to his shoulder. Behind him, Aliss said, "Oooh, that's nice right there. What are you aiming at?" Once again, he ignored her in favor of looking down the sights at the approaching object.

He... wasn't sure what he was looking at, honestly. A giant red bird with flames searing through its wings without injuring it, flying straight at them with clear intent. With a mild shrug, he solidified his grip on the sniper and centered the crosshairs on the bird's head. Without a second's hesitation, he pulled the trigger.

The sniper kicked, and Aliss jumped to her feet. "Whoa, Doom, what is it!?" Staring off at the area he was aiming at, she put a hand over her eyes, and then her jaw dropped. "Oh. Oh, crap, oh bullcrap with supercrap mixed in and ultracrap drizzled lightly over the top, we are in so much trouble."

The soldier glanced at her. What was the problem? It'd just been a bird. A large one, albeit, but a bird nonetheless.

Mere moments later, the bird in question slammed into the ground, digging a trench as it slid to a stop about sixty feet away from them. The soldier blinked. Instead of a gunshot through its head, its eyes were simply covered by two large black Xs.

A second after it paused, a person's head rose from its plumage. The young man wore tough-looking leather armor, and his short, straight black hair draped over his perpetually squinty eyes. Lightly jumping off of the bird's back, he examined it carefully. "Yare yare, it's going to take a while to recover from this. I take it you guys are the source of all this havoc? It's a bit violent, don't you think?"

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Looking around, the soldier nearly jumped out of his armor. Instead of the satisfying carnage he'd wreaked, there were larges blotches of fuzzy space covering the innards of the bandits, leaving only the bloodstains and panicked expressions of their previously alive bodies easily visible. It was almost as if something was censoring the damage.

Swiveling back to the odd person, the soldier raised a shotgun from nowhere and promptly blasted him in the chest. With an 'oof' of displaced air, the young man was literally hurled over the bird he'd been riding.

Aliss's jaw was hanging open again. "Doom! You just - that was a Hero! And not just any Hero, that was-"

"Hinobi Yamada, thanks for asking!"

As the soldier turned back around, the young man vaulted from behind his dead bird, wielding a cartoonishly large sword. A pair of translucent wings sprouted from his back, but oddest of all, the only damage the shotgun had done to his armor was to leave it smoking gently. "I don't know who you are, ruffian, but - wait, is that a shotgun!?"

The soldier hesitated briefly. This weird young man - Hinobi something? - was the first person he'd met so far who had recognized the weapons he was using. Did that mean he was from Earth too?

Aliss practically hurled herself between them, raising her hands in a panic. "Wait wait wait, I can explain! Yamada, this is Doom. Doom, this is Yamada. He's got a Perk called . It's what's causing the dead guys to look like that. Yamada, these guys were bandits. Doom was just taking care of them."

The wings vanished as Yamada made the sword disappear, walking towards Aliss with a goofy smile. "Aliss Avencourt? I've been looking all over Teracot for you! Your father is worried sick!"

Aliss winced visibly. "Yeah, I'm sure that's what he told you. Look, I'm partying up with Doom now, all right? He's a great fighter!"

Yamada's eyes narrowed as he turned back to the soldier. "Okay, but why him? Just look at what he did to these bandits! Why, they had to have been practically defenseless in comparison!"

The soldier was a bit tired of being left out of the conversation, and walked forward, raising a hand to grip Yamada's shoulder. Instead, he found his hand suddenly stuck in a handshake. "But of course, where are my manners? I am Hinobi Yamada. I used to be an ordinary Japanese high-schooler when I pushed my crush out of the way of a grocery truck and died in the process. When I woke up, I was here, and found that this world was in dire need of a Hero to defeat the Demon King!"

The soldier had stopped listening at 'manners', but his attention was instantly regained when the weird teenager said 'Demon King'. Seizing him by the shoulders, the soldier squeezed, and Yamada grinned widely. "Wow, you've got quite the grip! You must have been doing some serious power-leveling."

Turning back to Aliss, he said placatingly, "Look, let's just get you back to the castle and-" He stopped dead, a ridiculous expression of panic crossing his face while staring blankly at her shield. "Wait, is that the Osidir Bulwark? And the-" He practically choked, putting his hands over his mouth as he pointed at her armor. "The Razis Ward! We thought those artifacts were stolen when you were kidnapped! How did you retrieve them!?"

Aliss flushed noticeably. "Uhh, I may have... stolen them."

His eyes widened to the size of golf balls. "You stole them!? Those are worth several million gold at least! You've got to take those off right now so we can clean them!"

A complicated expression crossed Aliss's face. "About that. This armor is pretty much the only thing I'm wearing."

Yamada backtracked with remarkable speed. "Never mind, we can wait until we get you to the nearest inn. How have you survived? We heard reports that you were met by a famous demon-summoner."

Once again, the soldier's attention was seized by the term, and Aliss was suddenly in the unusual predicament of having two remarkably powerful individuals staring at her. "Okay, look, I wanted to get away, all right? I heard Hell didn't have any people or politics in it, so I-"

Yamada interrupted her, jumping away in shock. "Hell!? You've spent the past two weeks in Hell!?"

She shrugged awkwardly. "I mean, like a week of that was trying to get the summoner to send me to Hell, so it was more like a week and a half."

He waved it away frantically. "That's not the point! The point is-"

The soldier was finally done with this completely overblown teenager, and with all the strength he could muster, he backhanded Yamada in the face. It was extremely unfortunate for Yamada that he chose to take a step forward at that exact moment, and he did a full triple backflip before slamming into the ground, utterly knocked out.

Aliss stared at Yamada with an expression of shock, and looked up to the soldier, and then back to Yamada. "You just... he..." She groaned loudly, dragging a hand across her face. "We are in so much trouble."

The soldier didn't mind that, so long as Yamada was shut up.