When Logi decided to leave his house on a Wednesday night it was initially to try and scope out a next target while also doing some basic errands. Even arsonists have to buy groceries after all. He had just picked up some charcoal for a later plan, not that he needed it. He leaned on the wall of an alley as he felt the burning core within himself, he could completely flood the ally he was in and a decent chunk of the surrounding block if he wanted, he could feel it.

The fire wanted to eat and grow, he could feel the temperature within him slowly grow larger as it consumed… what was it consuming? The fire, his reserves of fire were ever slowly growing, but what were they feeding off of? Logi pushed the thought out of his mind, he had already been standing by a wall with his eyes closed for too long.

He walked further into the alley quickly maneuvering himself into a variable tunnel system of alleys. The city was located directly on top of one of the most active faultlines on the planet and was rocked with frequent large earthquakes leaving the city in a continuous state of destruction and repair, this is what allowed the massive mazes of alleys. Coincidently it also made the city one of the least car-accessible cities in the country as large buildings were frequently abandoned and the city council had ruled that as long as you fixed the building up to city codes you could claim the building allowing many small businesses to pop up.

Unfortunately, the same factors that made it hard for cars to get into the alley-works made the police presence nearly nonexistent allowing crime to run rampant, this was why when Logi heard a yelp to his right he was unsurprised. He turned towards the noise and began walking with his bag of charcoal and groceries both held over his shoulder casually with one hand.

He turned the corner and saw a duo, a man and a woman harassing what appeared to be a high school-age kid with a knife. Honestly, Logi didn’t know what they wanted with a kid this young, wasn’t likely he had more than lunch money on him anyway.

The woman was getting real enthusiastic with her gesturing with the knife. Quite as a feather on water, he walked behind the duo, only the kid seeing him. It was easy to forget seeing as Logi was as lean as he was but Logi was a big man, he was a solid foot taller than the woman he was standing behind, and so when the woman finally took a swing at the boy he didn’t need any of his formidable superhuman strength to grab her by the elbow and stop the slash.

“Boy, I highly suggest you leave the vicinity before you get caught up in something you don’t want to.” There was a sharpness in Logis's voice like razors in velvet. As the boy quickly slipped from the duo and ran out of the alley the woman he had a grasp on Logi let her wrench her elbow out of his grasp. She glared up at his orange eyes and rubbed her arm where he had held it.

“What the fuck man? Stop butting into other people's business that useless dickwad owed us! You wanna pay for him or something?” The man seemed content to stand behind the blustering woman so he turned his attention back to her.

“And if I say I don’t want to pay for him?”

“Then we do the same to you as we were going to do to him!” The woman lunged her knife cutting through the air towards his abdomen. Logi didn’t dodge. It would have been easy, the woman was practically moving in slow motion.

As the knife stopped dead against his skin not even drawing a drop of blood he began to speak. “You see I didn’t tell that boy to run because I wanted to pay for him, or even to save him from you two. No, we can infer that that boy has a family, and that family will look for him, and they would probably find him too! The thing is you two amateur gangsters probably don’t have families, or at least no one who would go looking for you when you're gone, which means it will take longer for you to be discovered-” Logi’s eyes had been brightening throughout his little lecture until they were as bright as fireworks. “-your bodies that is.”

“W- what?” the woman's eyes were still fixated on the hole in his t-shirt, and the unmarred flesh underneath it.

“You see I recently made something of a self-discovery, and I know how it works on objects but sometimes things affect living things differently y’know? The fact that there are two of you is perfect by the way, thank you for that.” A familiar grin had crept its way onto Logi’s face as he stared down at the unnerved pair.

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

The man spoke for the first time “What the fuck you mean by that you freak?” the man had a distinct southern drawl at certainly fit the stereotype of a redneck.

“Well, why don’t I just show you?” Logi pushed past the woman sender her staggering before walking up to the man, he was almost as tall as Logi and significantly heftier. Logi’s hand snaked out in a deceptively fast grab, wrapping itself around the heavier man's neck and lifting him up a solid 6 inches off the ground. The man was easily 300 pounds and in Logi’s grasp, it made as well have been 3.

The redneck scrabbled at his agressers hands and yet the digits wrapped around his throat were like steel slowly crushing his windpipe in a vice grip. The man's female compatriot took the chance to run but Logi didn’t let her. He chucked the man at the woman in a solid arc that sent them both prone.

“I feel that was an adequate demonstration don’t you?” Logi calmly stated over the coughs of the man. He stalked over and crouched down in front of the tangled pair. Frowning he picked than man back up by the back of his shirt looking him dead in the eyes, he wound up and threw the man into the nearby wall, Logi actually reached the wall before his victim did, watching the wall dent as the man slammed into it roughly. He heard the redneck's ribs break from the pressure of suddenly moving as fast as he was and slamming to a sudden stop.

Grabbing the man by the face logi slammed him to the ground before sitting on the hefty man.

“See I don’t particularly like being called names, much less being called a freak. Hence why I’m being so rough, but inevitably we probably would have ended up like this cause I’m testing things right? The first part of what I wanted to test was how a human stood up to the forces I can exert. You are doing a very good job of being a test dummy.” The test dummy beneath him groaned in pain as Logi shifted his broken ribs.

A flair of light made the redneck open his eyes, seeing the orange-eyed man's hand directed at the entrance to the alley palm out. Said entrance was aflame, burning with seemingly no fuel and forming a wall of fire.

“But you…” Logi looked towards the woman who had yelped and jumped away from the flames “Didn’t I tell you not to move? Well, I guess the throw kinda implied that right?” He abandoned the test dummy in favor of the Thing that was disobeying him.

Logi backhanded the terrified woman into a wall, the ground around him was starting to waver from heat mirage. Fire began to lap at his knuckles as he paced towards to quivering thing. The fire on his fingers turned to a full glove as he grabbed the woman's wrist. She screamed as the fire burned away at flesh. Logi grinned in perverse pleasure as the skin in his grasp began to blacken. He maniace let the woman go before walking back a couple of steps.

She watched in horror as the flames around his fist parted leaving normal skin in its wake. The fire fled from Logi’s hand forming a column of fire over his right shoulder, he looked at it before focusing for a moment. The pillar changed shape to a circular pyramid and began slowly rotating. As Logi turned back to the woman she gasped, Logi was unaware of it, as he was with his eyes turning orange, but the corners of his eye were beginning to leak fire. Uncaring the pyromaniac made a dismissive gesture and the flaming spike launched into the woman's head, killing her instantly.

He turned back to the test dummy. “I’ve got one more test for you…” he picked the man up by the face once more and lightly tossed him up. The crash dummy went about a foot up before Logi’s fist buried itself in his sternum, literally. The man's eyes went wide as an after-shock of fire blasted out of Logi’s knuckles exploding out of his back in a gory rain. Several vertebrae clattered to the ground.

The flames blinked out of Logi’s eyes as the orange dimmed back to black.

“Well this is going to be a pain to clean up.” luckily for him the only blood that had gotten on him was on his hands. He blinked at the realization that he had just killed two people and his only reaction had been how annoying it would be to clean up. He shrugged it off and began the process of incinerating the bodies, turning his fire to as hot as it would go. He soon realized he could do this much quicker if he just did a connect-take.

The bodies instantly crumbled to unrecognizable ash as he felt a rush of energy blast him. This wasn’t the same level as the gain from the house fire but it was surprisingly close given there was much less mass in the bodies. He would have to figure out how that was determined later. He was going to be doing a lot of thinking and testing later.

Logi picked his charcoal and groceries back up as he walked out of the alley the wind already dispersing the ashes. He mused to himself about how confounding the sudden perfectly round slagged hole in the wall was going to be someday as the newly minted murderer vanished into the alleys.