The situation was looking rather grim. Danny’s mind was reeling as the demon began to dig into his back. From his position, he could see Smith continuing to dispatch the cultists, whose number was finally starting to dwindle. There had to have been almost 100 people who had ambushed them. If he had been in anything close to a stable state of mind he would have remarked that it felt like way too large a group to have been able to go under the radar.

Instead, Danny’s brain was doing its best to disassociate from the pain he was experiencing. He was staring at Smith, thinking that the grizzly man looked rather cool at the moment. It looked like something out of a horror-action flick. There were piles of bodies everywhere, but the man stood firm, still shooting, but occasionally mixing in a spell if people grouped up enough to be a good target for an explosion of magical fire.

In his current state, Danny offered no resistance as the demon threw him off. His body rolled across the lawn, leaving a long trail of blood. Am I going to die? Danny felt weak. He knew he had lost a lot of blood. Oh yeah, I was blown up as well. Danny could faintly feel the burning sensation coming from his chest. Thinking about it had been a mistake, now he felt it intensely. His chest was a burnt and bloody mess. His back, which he couldn’t see, was the same or probably worse. The adrenaline that had got him up after the fireball had hit him had run its course, leaving him exhausted.

Danny watched the demon stomp toward him. He struggled to focus, his eyes dimming a little. Wait. I’m going to die. Danny tried to muster something, anything, from within him to try and get up. The demon got closer. A spear of fire came crashing in, knocking the demon back. Danny could hear a muffled shout that sounded like his name, but his hearing was finally giving out. He was struggling to hold down a thought and all he could do was watch as the demon picked itself back up and continued toward him.

A faint feeling began to bubble up inside him. A warm current that spread throughout his body. Slowly at first, but rapidly speeding up, until it started to resemble a crashing wave inside him. It was his mana, his mana was finally free of the curse. A little late. The demon was right before him now, but Danny couldn’t move. He had nothing left. The mana was coursing around a system that had come to an end.

He felt his mana doing something to his body, attempting to stabilise it, sadly there wasn’t anything to stabilise. His breathing had stopped at some point without him realising. His vision blackened and his mind drifted off.

Suddenly, there was a thundering course of energy sent through his body. His lungs roared to life, pulling oxygen back into his system. His flesh tingled and feeling returned to him. His mind came back online, his senses assaulting him with information. A blinding torrent of pain surged through him, waking him right up.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” A guttural roar tore itself free from his lips as he shot up. His body was fire, igniting every cell of his. He writhed, completely unaware of anything around him. All he could feel was pain. Pain and distant presences. The presences cried out with him, acknowledging his pain as if it were their own. Danny immediately felt a level of connection with these other beings he hadn’t before, as if a part of him had become part of them, and vice versa.

Danny’s vision cleared as the pain left his system as suddenly as it had come. He was standing in a small crater. The lawn that had once existed around him was gone. Before him stood the demon, with what could only be understood as an expression that resembled bewilderment. Its two arms were stretched out before it, toward Danny. Or, they had been. All that was left of them were singed stumps.

The demon snarled a distorted sound that hurt Danny’s ears. He frowned. With a thought, he summoned a spear of sand, at least two metres long, and sent it hurtling into the abomination. The demon couldn’t defend itself and the spear tore through its fleshy body, leaving a gaping hole. Danny summoned another, then another, and finally a third. All three spears ripped into the demon, tearing it to shreds.

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All that was left was a deafening silence. The cries of the zealots were no more. The demon was dead, just like that. The chaos of the last 10 minutes was over. Danny looked down at his body, confusion filling him. There were no wounds on his chest, not even blood. Just as confusingly, he was as naked as the day he had been born.

“Skala? What was that?” Danny turned, finding Smith looking at him apprehensively. The man had a few wounds and was drenched in blood, most of it likely not his own.

“I, uh. I don’t know.” Danny truly didn’t. I’m pretty sure I was dying.

“We can work it out later. For now, let’s make sure we got all the cultists. And find you some clothes.” The two of them began clearing the street's buildings, finding that most of them were empty. Now that the violence had died down people started to poke their heads out of their homes. After seeing Smith covered in blood and brandishing a gun, they all disappeared back into their homes. Danny was sure that a 6’5”, naked, man, standing next to the blooded gunner, didn’t help either.

The houses the cultists had emerged from were all empty of life but filled with horrors. Rooms covered in blood and carved symbols, bodies of animals and people littering the floors. Danny still managed to find a pair of trackies and a hoodie that fit him. It reeked of blood, but it was better than being naked.

When the two of them made it outside of the last house, they found a tall woman waiting by Smith’s car. She had long, flowing brown hair and pale skin. As she turned to them, her sharp blue eyes locked onto Danny for a second, before moving to Smith.

“Tamm, you’re late,” Smith spat.

“You seem to have had it handled.” The woman said briskly. “The other sites have been cleared. Nothing major came through. What happened here?” The woman’s eyes fell on the body of the demon.

“We got the demon. Only an imp though, I’m not sure what else they exchanged for. Did we get everyone?” Smith walked over to the corpse of the demon and inspected it for a while. “Danny, come burn this thing.”

Danny walked over and began the slow process of using his mana to burn the body of the demon. As he channelled his mana, Danny noticed that something had changed. If before using his mana had been easy, now it felt like second nature. He barely needed a thought to command it how he saw fit. It felt as though his mana had become a natural extension of his body.

Tamm and Smith had walked a distance away from Danny to speak. He was sure they were talking about him but tried not to think about it. A series of vans pulled into the street and teams of people streamed out. They began sealing off the road and cleaning up the scene. They all left Danny alone as he took care of the demon’s body. It gave him some time to think as well.

As he reflected on what had happened he was assaulted by a wave of nausea. He was doing his best to distance himself from the physical sensation of what he had done to the cultists, but it still struck him. He had spent thousands of hours in the ring, striking other humans, but this was different. He had never been one to pull his punches, but he had never felt bone break under his strikes so viscerally. He had never wielded such sheer physical might.

He had the distinct feeling of fragility of the cultists he had beaten etched into his hands. It was an utterly disgusting feeling. He acknowledged that he felt no emotion toward the people he had likely killed. The crazed look in their eyes worked to dehumanise them in his mind. They hadn’t acted like humans, they had been utterly controlled by whatever the demon had done to them. At least, that was what he was going to be telling himself for the foreseeable future.

Then there was what had happened to him while he had been fighting the demon. In hindsight, it had been pretty ridiculous to try and fight the monster with claws and sharp teeth in unarmed combat. At the time it felt like a compulsion though, Danny had felt like he had no choice but to fight the demon with whatever means he had. Was I under some sort of spell? Like a taunt or something? Danny made a mental note to check that with Smith.

Then there was another serious matter. Danny was pretty sure he had been dying after the demon had bitten into him. He had stopped breathing, his vision had darkened, and his consciousness had begun to fade away.

“I think I might have died…” Danny muttered to himself.