A bird, Kurt thought, the demon looks like a bird.

  Standing 20 feet tall, the thing had the rough morphology of a vulture: Its form was covered in light brown feathers, with some type of writhing, oily darkness pulsating beneath them. Its … main head, connected to the body through a long and skinny neck, was equally covered in those pale feathers, with only its eyes, round and covered in yellowish cataracts, and its beak, an obsidian-black and jagged thing that seemed to stab its way out the thing’s head, which it surpassed in length, uncovered.

  Its wings were wide and half-extended, with dark hook-like protusions of bone jutting out of their ‘elbow’ joints. Its legs were completely devoid of feathers, their surface a blood red sea of blistered and bloated flesh, and ended in four dark, long claws.

  And yet, for all the horror that was the rest of its form, Kurt’s eyes remained fixated on the creature’s back, or rather, what was extending from it: A second head, this one bald and fleshy as the creature’s talons, hung limply from its back, showing no signs of cognition or even life.

  Demon of Disease and Madness

  Melalo

  LV:42

  "So?" Asked the main head with that disgusting voice. "Do you perhaps come to greet me, now that my release is so close to ocurring? Oh my! Humans sure have gotten more polite since I was sealed." His eyes looked upon its ‘visitor’s’ sword. "Ah, I see. I guess a little hero has come to slay the evil demon." The creature emitted a sound from its throat that was too inhuman to properly read into, but Kurt assumed was conptemt. "You humans are as boring as ever, always playing by the same old narratives."

  "That may be so, Melalo." Kurt shot back, putting an emphasis on the creature's name, causing the demon's yellow eyes to widen ever so slightly. "But these narratives of us have been driving your kind back since the dawn of mankind, so I think I'm gonna get a bit stereotypical today and play the part of a hero."

  "Very well then." said the demon. "Then I guess I should play my part."

  And with that, the creature darted forward. Those flayed legs carried its massive frame with quickness capable of taking even the Od-boosted warrior by surprise, if at least for how unexpected that level of speed was. In an instant the demon stood besides the warrior, one massive foot raised above the boy’s form for a moment before dropping. Three-one of them extended from the back of the foot- sharp talons downed on Kurt like guillotines, poised to cleave through flesh and bone in one move.

  It was then that he moved.

  In a burst of speed, faster than anything he had ever mustered before thanks to his recent level-ups, the boy darted away from the attack, Silver Demon held to his side, and towards the beast’s second leg, which stood firmly planted on the earth. With superhuman speed and strenght, Kurt slashed at the appendage, his sword cleaving right through it with a sound like lighting a match. Without losing his pace, the young warrior kept his stride away from the creature until he stood at the center of the dome.

  "Wow, that sure hurt!" said Melalo with a cheery voice. "You are way stronger than I thought."

  The beast was now knelt, the sudden difference of length between its legs giving it no other choice. Its back was now exposed at the warrior, and its second head hung limply with its beak almost touching the floor. It wouldn’t last. Both halves of the cleft leg were already being pushed together by those shadows that made the beast’s insides. Kurt’s eyes, guided by his recently developed aetheric sense, laid their gaze on a spot between the beast’s neck and where the second head emerged from.

  Kurt jumped, the Od-flares on his legs burning bright, at the beast’s neck, his sword poised forward in a silvery lunge aimed for the spot between both heads. If succesful, it would terminate the beast immediatly. He didn’t get that lucky.

  The second head burst upwards, poised for Kurt’s arm. No, not his arm. His sword, so close to the demon’s core, was caught in a beak the size of its wielder’s whole body and forced up in the air alongside the boy.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "Now, now." Chastited the demon in a parody of a fatherly tone. "What’s the rush? Let’s just take our time trying to kill each other. It won’t be fun if we end it so soon."

  Kurt was left suspended up in the air, unwilling to let go of his sword. He seemed to struggle while trying to keep his hold on his weapon, to the beast’s great amusement. The dead head had frozen again, this time stiffened in rigor mortis. A foamy white liquid oozed out its eye.

  Then, when the beast seemed sure on its victory, Kurt made his move. Taking Galton’s staff from his inventory with his free hand and pressing it against the eye of the beast, he cast a Fireball. The projectile went into the bald head and through the other side, voiding it in a shower of charred flesh and dissolving shadow.

  The force of the blast pushed Kurt back and away from the demon, who started howling in pain.

  "Fuck!" yelled the creature, its second head hanging limply once again. "Where did you get that from?!"

  "Why don’t you come so I can tell you?" said the boy, raising both staff and sword towards the demon.

  The demon closed the distance in three huge strides, taking its wing downwards the staff, trying to snap it. Kurt pushed the staff back into his inventory with a twirl of his wrist, causing the beast’s attack to hit nothing.

  Using this window of opportunity, the young warrior reached forward with his now free hand and grabed the hook-shaped claw on the wing, and stabbed into the wing with his sword.

  The demon screamed, the constant touch of mithril feeling like acid to it. It snapped its wing back on instinct. But it was useless. The warrior keept his hold on the beast’s limb, and his sword embedded on its shadow-flesh, which blistered and spewed forth smoke as the blade purified it. Now matter how much the beast thrashed around, the warrior just stayed there all the same. So the beast changed its strategy.

  The demon stopped still without any warning, directing its energy somewhere else. Soon, its feathers began vibrating and shinning a sulphuric yellow. Detecting the danger, Kurt lets go of the creature’s wing and kicks himself away from the beast, ripping out his sword in a spew of oily shadow, and near the edge of the seal.

  The beast… stood there, its feathers shinning but without any sign of doing something else. Was it a bluff? To get Kurt and his sword away from its flesh?

  This notion was refuted quite quickly. From the demon’s hide exploded a cloud of sulfuric yellow magic that covered its form like a suit of armor. Where this gas touched, the stone greyed and withered away into dust, drained by the corruption of the entropic energy. The demon, once again, stomped towards Kurt, who now had nowhere to retreat.

  Realizing that he had to met the creature’s charge, the boy once again takes the staff out of his inventory, and soon shots a Fireball of great size at the beast. The yellow energy coating the creature’s body darted towards the mass of power, and soon began eating at it. Tendrils of corruptive energy stabbed at the sphere and began disolving the flows of power that kept the spell together.

  The Fireball dissolved into nothingness. The demon laughed and continued its charge.

  Projectiles are useless against that thing, Kurt realized. He needed something more constant. Something he would be pouring energy into uninterrupted so that those tendrils couldn’t unmake it.

  He formed another Fireball, this sphere the same size as the last one. He didn’t shoot this one. Instead, he willed it to condense into a volume the size of his fist. Concentrated beyond his ability to keep it together, gouts of energy began shooting outwards. Just as expected. Instead of trying to keep these bursts of energy contained, the young sorcerer guided their release, sending them along whatever path he so desired and, by doing so, bringing the whole construct back into stability.

  Fire Sorcery: Blowtorch (Rank E spell)

  A sphere of super condensed heat that spews forth a constant stream of destructive energy, whose flow the caster may control at will.

  Power increases with MND stat, Aetheric Attunement skill rank, Evocation skill rank and AP consumption.

  With this new spell prepared and slowly burning through his AP bar, Kurt stabbed at the cloud with the staff, projecting the heat towards the gas. Tendrils of energy tried to eat away at the spell, but the constant stream of AP kept its structure refreshed and solid. For a moment both forces seemed to reach an equilibrium, the red hot energy and the sickly yellow one lashing at each other without achieving anything.

  And then the cloud reached its limit. Its own nature as a force of putrefaction made it, despite what the previous showings implied, quite vulnerable to extreme heat. At least, that is, if one manages to take it to the point where the heat is great enough that the system collapses.

  That point had been reached.

  The cloud exploded.

  A giant explosion enveloped Melalo’s body, pushing Kurt back against the edge of the seal with what should have been bone-shattering strength, hadn’t he been burning his Od at the time, while sending the demon’s body skittering through the floor until it hit the opposite side of the dome.

  Neither moved for a while, both of them still recovering from the blast. But while Kurt had simply received some minor contusions on his back and limbs. Melalo was another story altogether.

  Its once light brown plumage had, where the feathers hadn’t burned off entirely, turned into a forest of charred, black barbs. One of its wings-the one Kurt had stabbed into- had been wholly amputated from the main body, lying in a burnt pile of dissolving shadows at the center of the dome. The creature’s second head had been burnt so badly before the explosion that the further damage blasted it away, not even being cut off, but reduced to ashes.

  The demon’s form began moving, trying to stand up. Its head rose from the ground and turned towards Kurt. Only one of its eyes had survived the blast. The other one, and in fact half the creature’s face had been reduced to a mass of writhing shadows.

  But that one remaining eye looked at the boy with enough rage and hatred to make up for its solitude.

  They stared at each other for a moment. Kurt began approaching the creature, sword and staff gripped tightly, ready to end this.

  The demon… didn’t move-pherhaps it couldn’t-, it just kept staring with that baleful and glassy eye, which began bulging and shining a bright yellow hue. Kurt stopped and raised his staff, prepared for anything the demon tried to throw.

  He waited, still looking at Melalo’s singular eye, for an attack that didn’t seem to come.

  Suddenly, the demon’s body vanished from sight. And so did the seal’s walls, leaving Kurt to stand up in a seemingly infinte plane of stone.

  Before Kurt could wrap his heand around what had just happened, or where he was, he heard a sound coming from his back. An awfully familiar sound.

  He turned around, and witnessed the origin of the sound.

  And hell appeared before him.