Chapter sixty eight(a wee bit of mature content)

      Two days later I followed Brenda to the Serafino estate but this time I didn't leave, I waited a few hours for all the lights in the house to go out and then used my old friend the bolt cutter to cut through a portion of the electrified fence surrounding the place , after that I was nimble enough to climb over the brick wall.

     I walked quietly towards the mansion in the darkness past the overgrown shrubbery and paths with tiles missing. I tried to open the front door but it was locked, that didn't deter me though since the lock looked like a simple cylinder tumbler system and thanks to my misspent youth I could pick locks like this with nothing but some hair pins. With a slight application of my power I was able to get the door open in less than five minutes. Once inside I saw a flashing security system demanding a security code, a quick consult on my phone on the make and model and I was able to find the way to disarm it on the internet before the five minute countdown had finished, in the end it ended up being something very silly like having the administrator reset code posted on the internet, I actually found it on yahoo answers, an idiot had asked how to reset his alarm if he forgot his password and a bigger idiot had answered his question. As I entered the long string of numbers I wondered how anybody would be dumb enough to post such important information on a public forum.

      After the security system had been disarmed I looked allover the large mansion looking for Mr Serafino but I was unable to find him or Brenda anywhere in the dusty old house but there was one place I hadn't checked, the basement.

       I finally found a door behind what looked like the famous Beyeux tapestry which depicted the death of King Harold, the king of England by the Normans in the battle of hastings except that in this one instead of an arrow in his eye he was engulfed in flames instead, there was a creaky door behind the tapestry that led to the basement. As I kept going down into the darkness I was wondering how deep this basement was when I heard muffled screaming coming from ahead of me. I rushed down the stairs, taking two stairs at a time. When I got to the bottom I saw a scene that was straight out of the worst gore films (a.n. I'm not making that up , it is a real subgenre of horror movies.)

      The room was illuminated by torchlight and I could clearly see that there was a chalk circle with different symbols that was glowing faintly and inside of this circle was Brenda , she was hanging from the ceiling naked and gagged. Not only were there shackles coming from the ceiling but also from the ground, holding her taught in a spread eagled position. There were knives sticking all over her body making her look like some grizzly parody of a pincushion and the pattern suggested that the person who did it knew what they were doing because the knives were placed systematically into her soft tissue without hitting anything vital.

     The perpetrator of the scene before me was in the process of placing yet another knife into Brenda as I watched, in my soul sight I could clearly see that the old man in a red robe had a very weak soul and that all the power that he produced was going into maintaining a small flame found in the center of his soul but I could also see how the ritual he was performing was stripping the power from Brenda's glowing core and putting it in various jewelry that the old man was wearing. All his jewelry were glowing brightly in my soul sight , and they were only glowing brighter as he continued his gruesome task.

       I immediately raised my gun and tried to shoot him but I had made a miscalculation, my bullet was deflected by an invisible wall created by the chalk circle and now the old man was aware of my presence. He stopped twisting the knife he had just inserted into Brenda and turned his attention towards me. He didn't say anything , he just raised his hands and started making gestures. Using soul sight I could see energy flow from one of his pendants into the small flame in his core and the energy was converted into flame as it was gathered into a sphere then flung in my direction, once it left his soul the ball of flame like energy turned into physical flames as it hurtled towards me or rather where I used to be since I had already dodged.

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      As I was dodging his attack , I holstered my gun and took out my fans instead. Using the fans I was able to create winds to deflect his fireballs and got close enough to enter the circle of chalk but as I reached the border I was repulsed by the same invisible wall that kept my bullets out.

     I was running out of ideas, he was able to attack me from inside the circle while I couldn't do anything to him from outside of it. As I was thinking about how I was going to get to him the old man stopped his attacks and the gestures he was making changed , instead of a constant stream of energy being drawn from all his jewelry  his pinkie ring was completely drained and a storm of fire came my way. The gust of wind I created was not enough to ward it off and I was suddenly engulfed by red hot flames.

     I felt excruciating pain as all my clothes were burnt off and my skin started to bubble and boil but my power had increased recently thanks to my recent stint in the Oslo hospital and I was able to heal myself as quickly as I was burning up, that did not mean that I wasn't in excruciating agony. In my desperate scramble to make the pain stop my mind came up with a plan. 

     I jumped up into the air used a wall to get even higher and then plummeted straight down. Instead of rolling to mitigate the impact like sensei taught me, I stomped down as hard as I could on the concrete floor. I used the butterfly effect to magnify the resulting impact as it traveled towards the circle. 

     There were a few things working against me but the most important one was that there was less random motion in solids than there were in gasses making it harder to use the butterfly effect in the concrete. The second problem was that concrete has resistive force of four thousand pounds per square inch which was well beyond my powers at this time but instead of directing the force traveling through the concrete in one direction I made the concrete vibrate just right so that when it reached the chalk boundary it split into two forces that pulled in opposite directions. Although concrete might have four thousand pounds resistive force when under compression this number drops dramatically to something around four hundred under tension and thanks to the heat caused by the bastard who was trying to roast me alive this number dropped even further.

    A combination of all these factors caused the concrete under the chalk circle to crack and the glow of the circle disappeared, immediately afterwards I threw one of my fans at the old man, decapitating the old bastard. I walked towards his decapitated head and started stomping on it until his skull caved in. I told myself that it was to make sure a necromancer couldn't get anything from him but I knew in my heart that it was just a futile attempt to hurt the person who had caused me so much pain.

     I turned around to free Brenda who was looking at me with round eyes. I imagined what I looked like to her, a naked bald chick( the fire had burned all my hair off and I didn't bother to regrow it) covered in nothing but soot stomping on the head of a man she had just decapitated, she must have thought I was a monster.

    When I reached out to free her from her restraints she actually pissed herself and passed out.