Michael looked back at the beautiful silhouette standing before his camp. Her ragged clothes clung to her frame, exposing her skin beneath a layer of fresh mud. Her pale face glistened as she stared at him with tear-filled eyes.
"You have a nice base... can I have a meal, please?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
Knowing better than to trust anyone in the Wasteland, Michael simply nodded. She walked over and sat on the log opposite him. Without a word, he slid a tin of hot chicken soup he had simmered over the firewood toward her.
As she took the tin, her eyes locked onto his, her inner thoughts spinning behind a fragile facade. This human hasn't looked at me with lust for even a second. Is he not interested in this form I took? ...Whatever, it doesn't matter.
She looked up, flashing a fragile, desperate smile. "Thank you for your kindness."
Leaning forward, she reached out and gently caressed Michael's cheek. "Thank you for the meal. Is there... anything I can do to repay you?" she murmured, slowly opening her legs in an alluring, submissive manner.
Michael didn't even flinch. He didn't blink.
"Humans, monsters, life—it's all disgusting. What do you take me for? One of the lustful men you see every day?" Michael's voice was deadpan, cold, and razor-sharp. "First, the mud on you is still wet, meaning you deliberately smeared it on yourself to look defenseless. Second, even a desperate person wouldn't make a move this fast. Third, those clothes are smaller than your actual frame, which means you definitely stole them from a corpse or a victim. Fourth, anyone who isn't from our academy year should have been out here much longer than a couple of days, which means..."
His eyes narrowed. "You are either not human, or you want to kill me. Unfortunately, I don't have time for your games."
Without a second thought, Michael pulled a heavy dagger from his belt and lashed out in a blinding arc.
CLANG.
Instead of the wet tear of flesh, the blade shattered instantly into a dozen iron shards. At the same moment, a searing, white-hot agony tore through Michael's back.
The frail, muddy girl standing before him shifted. Her skin turned a deep, unnatural blue. A single, jagged horn sprouted from her forehead, and her eyes flared a brilliant, terrifying aurora-purple. She smiled down at him, her expression shifting from helpless to predatory.
"Smart you are," she purred, her voice echoing with a dual-toned resonance. "But weak, too. For the poison that flows within me is potent enough to dissolve a thousand ordinary humans together."
Before Michael could react, a barbed, serpentine tail whipped backward from her spine, sliding out of his back where it had just impaled him. She casually stepped over the fallen debris.
Michael coughed, blood spattering the dirt, but his expression didn't show panic—only sheer, unadulterated contempt.
"Yeah... one thousand sane humans, you fucking monster," Michael spat, wiping blood from his lip as he glared up at her. "Look at me. Do I look normal to you? For years, I deliberately ingested and drank every type of poison I could lay my hands on to develop absolute biological immunity to foreign toxins. You scum... I had no powers. I didn't rely on some borrowed, hand-me-down ability.
He staggered to his feet, his chest wound bubbling with dark ichor. "I AM MICHAEL OZOR. A BOY WHO BELIEVES HUMANITY'S EXTINCTION IS TRUE PEACE."
The demon girl froze. At the sound of his full name, her pupils dilated. Sudden, violent flashbacks flashed behind her eyes—a vision of a man, an absolute butcher, who slaughtered everyone in his path, reducing everything before him to smoking ash and flattened earth.
Veins bulged violently from her head down to her toes as she stared at Michael with sudden, murderous recognition.
"YOU'RE HIS BLOOD, AREN'T YOU?!"
She didn't speak another word. She vanished.
An instant later, a devastating roundhouse kick hurtled toward Michael's head. Michael dropped down in a split-second reflex, slamming his back flat against the ground while shooting his legs upward to block.
CRACK.
When his boots collided with her shin, it felt less like hitting a body and more like kicking solid granite. Realizing he couldn't match her raw durability, Michael didn't hesitate—he whipped his legs back, twisted his spine like a striking snake, and vaulted backward into a clumsy, desperate retreat.
"You can't run!" she shrieked, her body beginning to envelop in a dense, swirling aura of purple, reality-warping energy.
Her speed multiplied exponentially. The distance between them closed in a single frame of light. Michael couldn't track her visually; she was moving too fast for the human eye. Forced to rely entirely on predictive calculation—analyzing hundreds of high-level combat patterns and visualizing the single best defensive vector a human could take—he jerked his head to the left a microsecond before her fist hammered through the empty air where his neck had just been.
Her fist blurred in every direction, punching shockwaves through the forest.
"Prediction is disgusting," she hissed.
As she threw a final, straight punch, she suddenly halted it mid-air right in front of his face.
Michael's eyes snapped open in sheer, cold shock.
"I call this one... Gunshot."
Her fist compressed the air, shattering the sound barrier into a concussive shockwave. The invisible wall of pressure struck Michael square in the jaw. The sickening crack echoed across the clearing as his head snapped violently backward.
The force lifted his 6-foot-7 frame entirely off the ground, sending him hurtling backward through the air like a discarded ragdoll. He smashed straight through a massive iron-wood tree, splintering the trunk in half, before crashing hard into the carcass of a giant Wasteland beast.
His jaw hung at a grotesque, unnatural angle, dangling loosely by shredded muscle and skin.
For the first time since entering the Wasteland, Michael hit a wall where sheer tactical brilliance, poison immunity, and human physical limits weren't enough. The thing he was fighting belonged to an entirely different tier of existence.
To survive this, he couldn't hold back. He had to cross the line—even if it meant letting the entity take the wheel, knowing full well he could only control it for a few agonizing minutes before his mind was completely devoured.
As his vision blurred and darkness crept into the edges of his sight, the demon girl materialized directly above him, raising a glowing, purple-drenched hand to drive straight through his heart.
"You must die now."
With his head resting limply in the dirt, blood pooling beneath his broken jaw, Michael's lips parted just enough to whisper one final, fatal word into the dirt:
"Release."