“Go back up the stairs and wait for me,” Rodrigo said. Raquel and Carlito did as they were told. He didn’t want to separate from them, but if Leila was dead, they didn’t need to see it. Besides, the farther they were from that giant, the better. He hurried over to her. The demons around mostly ignored him. “Leila?”

She looked up at him slowly, her unblinking eyes puffy. “Oh, it’s you.”

Rodrigo exhaled deeply. He had forgotten how to breathe until she spoke. “Are you okay? What happened? Other than all this, I mean.”

“Bianca...my best friend. She was killed a few minutes ago.” Leila dropped her face into her hands as sobs wracked her body. Then in a hoarse voice, she muttered, “She was going to make it. I needed her to make it.”

“I’m sorry.” Rodrigo paused, not sure what else to say. He had been lucky enough to never have lost anyone he cared about. Not to death, anyway. “I know this is all insane, but can you really let yourself die here?”

“What?” Leila asked, glancing up at him again.

“Hannah. Are you just going to leave her alone?”

“You don’t understand, she—”

Rodrigo grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, drawing his sword as an imp approached. Due to the sword’s weight, his slash was slower than he expected and the laughing demon effortlessly dodged it, causing the blade to strike the wall. Between his rusty technique and the thickness of the wall, a top-tier man-made sword might have snapped in half. Rodrigo’s demonic blade cut into it like butter.

The imp raised both middle fingers at him with a sneer before flying off.

“Come on,” Rodrigo said, releasing Leila’s hand and hurrying up the staircase.

“Did we not have enough dead weight? I can grudgingly accept the brats, since they’re your kin, but this girl is irrelevant,” Resent said.

“So what? Just leave her here to die, even though I’m all she’s got right now? I won’t do that.”

“Leila!” Carlito yelled, sprinting over to hug her. Having been so young when she was in their lives, he barely knew her, but someone he was familiar with surviving this crisis was enough to bring him some small solace. She hugged him back gently, saying nothing.

Rodrigo was trying to determine whether using the nebulae to parachute out one of the second-floor windows with three people clinging to him was feasible, when Raquel’s legs abruptly gave out. For a split-second, he feared something had hit her, but then he followed her disbelieving gaze to the brutality taking place below.

The demons were seizing anyone too sluggish or stunned to move out of their way. Most of those slain were mercilessly torn apart while their killers laughed. It wasn’t all the blood or the screams of the innocent that truly sickened him, but that the demons could kill them all so easily if they chose to. Instead, they trapped the humans between themselves and the overwhelming mass of the unmoving ogre. Taking their time to relish every second of tormenting something weaker than themselves, simply because they could. The depravity of it all made rage rise like bile in Rodrigo’s throat, threatening to choke him.

A blond boy, around Raquel’s age, was trying to sneak past the ogre. He only came up to the demon’s knee, and it appeared distracted by the mayhem, so the boy probably figured his chances were good. A sly kid, shrinking smaller the closer he got. It looked like he was going to make it, until the ogre’s pitiless gray eyes locked onto the crouching boy. The demon smacked him with the hammer, catapulting his small body through the air and thudding into the wall.

“No!” Rodrigo shouted, propelling himself upward with the nebulae.

“Have you lost your damn mind?” Resent demanded.

Soaring toward the ogre, Rodrigo stuck his left hand out in midair, forming the sphere from the nebulae. He launched it forward and two spikes exploded from it, piercing the unready giant through the eyes in a spurt of blood. It let out a ferocious roar as it lost its balance and fell backward into the bed of glass shards, causing the ground to tremor. The panicked screaming of the humans, the disgusting laughter of the demons, and Resent’s protests, all ceased.

Rodrigo somehow managed to land on his feet at ground level, nearly fracturing his ankles. He pointed toward the exit. “Uh, clear out of here everybody.” Though he had intended to sound authoritative, his voice sounded young and afraid, even to his own ears.

There was reluctance at first, but then someone spoke up. “What are you all waiting for? The boy’s given us a chance! It’s now or never, people!” To Rodrigo’s surprise, it was the once smug receptionist. As he ushered people past the downed ogre and out of the building, he gave Rodrigo an appreciative nod.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The demons didn’t give chase, all twisted humor gone. Apparently, they were convinced taking their eyes off Rodrigo would be a fatal error. Having essentially sucker-punched the ogre, his show of strength was a total sham. But, since he had their undivided attention, he’d take advantage of it. “Leila, get them out of here!”

She moved down the steps, holding Raquel and Carlito’s hands, gaping at him in awe. Cautiously, she made her way past the fallen ogre and to the exit. With everyone out of harm’s way, Rodrigo’s focus turned toward the demons. There were ten imps and diavoliks in front of him. Even with Resent’s help, he didn’t like their odds against such a large group. And yet, turning his back now would lead to not only his death, but the deaths of everyone who just left.

“So, we doing this?” Rodrigo asked, swirling his nebulae around him for effect. There was a growing sense of unease among the demons. Miraculously, they started backing away. Then they retreated in a rush. He wasn’t sure where they were headed, but it wasn’t through the front. When they were out of sight, he sighed in relief. “That went better than expected.”

“Fortunately, they were intelligent enough to recognize what the nebulae signify.”

“Oh? And here I thought I did it all on—”

An enormous hand clenched Rodrigo’s leg, and he was scooped off the ground. The presumably dead ogre, that likely weighed at least a ton, had gotten onto its feet like a goddamn ninja. The demon raised Rodrigo, dangling him upside down in front of its face. It flashed a crooked smile at him as blood oozed from its ruined eye sockets, and for a terrifying second, he thought the ogre would rip his head off with its yellowed fangs. Then it released a deafening roar, spraying foul-smelling spittle onto Rodrigo’s face before hurling him into the demolished fountain.

Every bone Rodrigo possessed wailed in anguish, and he did with them. The sounds of them cracking throughout his body were like fireworks exploding in his eardrums. “H-how...um...” he began, the blow rendering him unable to string together a coherent thought.

“How is it alive? As I said, they’re quite durable. You did manage to blind it and ogres don’t have particularly sharp senses, so maybe you can finish it off.”

In his state, Rodrigo didn’t feel like he could defeat an ant, let alone a giant. Although he could feel his bones painfully popping back into place, the dizziness was lingering. Forced to crawl along the ground as his body repaired itself, Rodrigo hoped the demon’s remaining senses weren’t acute enough to spot him. The frustrated ogre was swinging its hammer along the area where it had thrown him, crushing everything it connected with into dusty rubble.

“Any ideas?” Rodrigo asked, taking cover behind the overturned front desk.

“A plethora. However, if you can’t defeat this lone demon on your own, you might as well not bother fighting at all.”

“Helpful as always.” Rodrigo struggled to his feet, wiped blood from his mouth, and tiptoed around the ogre. When he was behind it, he slammed the nebulae into the ground and drew his sword. He stabbed it through the nape of the ogre’s beefy neck. “Hey there,” Rodrigo said into one of its short, pointed ears, while latched onto the beast. The ogre turned its head and attempted to swat him with its hammer, but Rodrigo released his grip on the sword as soon as it swung. The demon brought the hammerhead down on itself, dropping its weapon and falling to its knees.

Rodrigo stood up, breathing heavily as he visualized the nebulae. He wouldn’t turn his back on the ogre again. Rodrigo stretched out both hands toward the demon and the nebulae extended, wrapping around its throat and waist like chains. The ogre started to rise, dragging Rodrigo forward with it. He pulled on the chains as hard as he could. There was no effect. Before he could be lifted off the ground, he made the nebulae dissipate.

Resent laughed. “What did you think you were going to do? Tear it apart with your puny physical strength?”

As the ogre roared and charged at him, Rodrigo dove aside, causing it to run headfirst into the wall. The wall crumbled from the impact, but the demon was dazed. It aimed its hammer in Rodrigo’s general direction, and he once again lengthened the nebulae in his hands. One wrapped around the ogre’s raised wrist and the other around its throat. If pulling on the chains was pointless, then he’d have to imagine the nebulae doing what he could not. They tightened as the ogre violently resisted, veins bulging under its skin from the strain. The demon roared in pain and anger while the nebulae continued to decrease in circumference, strangling its flesh.

For a moment, Rodrigo considered stopping. He had proven to Resent, himself, and even the ogre that he could win. Wasn’t that enough? But in that instant, he remembered the boy this demon had smacked away like a mosquito. And that was when the links of chains pressing against the ogre’s skin sprouted countless fangs, like baby teeth erupting through the gum line, and took the enraged monster apart. The ogre’s hand and head popped off its body in a shower of blood. Its remains collapsed, shaking the ground for the final time.

Part of Rodrigo was disgusted with himself. Watching through his own eyes as Resent used his body to kill and doing it himself were two different things. Until now, the biggest thing he’d ever killed was a mouse that had gotten stuck in a glue trap in his kitchen when he was twelve. Knowing his mother would either let it starve to death or drown it in a bucket, he’d disposed of it himself. Even though it was a mercy killing, the way the rodent had tried to fend off the chef’s knife in his hand with its teeth, desperate to survive, had left him guilt-ridden for days.

But now, in killing something so much stronger than himself, something that had genuinely deserved it, most of him felt...proud. It took an entire minute for his adrenaline to die down enough for him to think about anything beyond the kill.

“And here I thought you would have some drawn-out moral dilemma about slaying it. I suppose you’re fine with it because it was a demon,” Resent said.

“You’re in my head. What do you think?” Rodrigo walked over to the ogre’s headless corpse and yanked his sword out of its neck. He wiped the blood from the blade on the ogre’s loincloth before returning it to the scabbard.

On his way out, he noticed the red smudge high on the wall that trickled down in a thin streak, ending at the boy’s broken body on the floor. The kid’s eyes were still open and blood dripped down his face from his hairline. Had Rodrigo acted a few seconds sooner, this boy would be alive. He choked back tears, closing the boy’s eyelids with his hand. “I’m sorry.”