“Shay!” Mason called after his friend only to hear Terk squeak again. The little birdman looked closely at the staff, with its bright green gem at the top, and the elegant black body carved with mana-infused runes from top to bottom. Even without mana sight, the black almost glowed, somehow both avoiding attention, and commanding it.

“D-d… “ Terk began, only to silence immediately when Mason shot him a glare.

“Stay there, Terk,” Mason said impatiently, walking briskly out of the room to head after Shay and explain.

“Stay back. No, get your hands off me! Mason, flee!” Mason heard, only to hear the scuffling and footsteps of what could only be more than a handful of men, armored much better than the ruffians they had first encountered. It made sense then- the first group had been witch-hunting vigilantes, patrolling to try and find the guilty party before the guards got kill-happy again.

Then the men grabbing Shay now must be the actual guards. “Fucking hell…” Mason muttered. He stepped back into the room and looked at Terk, “Play dead, or get killed. Your call,” then ripping the sternum he carried from his bag and hastily activating Mana Vampirism, he pulled a large amount of mana to both his personal self and his staff, leaning heavily on the improvements he had received to Mana Resistance.

The spell triggered, and he followed it with Shadow Stalk, vanishing while he moved swiftly toward obvious danger.

The mana burned heavily as he felt the weight of nearly forty full points raging through his body, but he knew he had no choice if he were going to maintain a brand new spell for any reasonable length of time. At the least, he felt the combination of the mana and his hasty activations improving each of the skills he activated by one. He saw Shay being dragged across the large hall that led to the oddly familiar ornate doors, and contemplated how he would take out six armed, armored, and likely mana-infused warriors at once to rescue his friend.

They had hurt Shay badly already, that much was obvious. His body sagged as three of the guards worked together to pull him along, and a faint trail of blood trickled back, making it easy for Mason to follow at a distance.

They had gone halfway down another hallway when Mason stumbled, pushed aside by a doorway opening right where he had crouched in stealth. Noticing his weight, the door opener glanced down and looked at him directly, and he felt the guise of shadowstalk lifting instantly. Reptilian-bird eyes flew wide open as they noticed him, and the woman looked about to shout, so Mason immediately leapt to his feet and tackled her, utilizing every drop of his newfound agility stat.

She went down and together they rolled back into the room, Mason trying to bear the brunt of the fall to prevent more noise. He exhaled heavily even as he clamped his hand tighter to the woman’s mouth, but as he tried to lift himself and urge her to silence, he looked up to see three angry birdmen standing over them both.

They weren’t in armor, but they wielded heavy looking, if unconventional, clubs possibly made from expensive table legs, and Mason swore and pulled the woman up against him as a living shield. “Attack me and I swear I will drain her of her mana and her life until she’s nothing but a shrivelled husk,” Mason gasped out quickly.

“Aye, you harm a feather on her head and you’ll be nothing but a squished pumple you fur-ridden lout!” the center man shouted, much louder than Mason could appreciate in this tense moment.

He used the hand that wasn’t clamped to the woman’s mouth to grab his dagger out and hold it, hilt first, toward the man. “Take my weapon, just stay quiet,” Mason urged. “Please, god, please.”

The man looked suspiciously at the hilt of the blade, but his compatriot, a smaller, bluish birdman took it and looked at it. “Merek, I think we should be pointing questions, not clubs. May be this is the witch, or the demon, everyone’s in a hubbub about, but if he really were, why’d he hand over his weapon? Didn’t he kill the king with just a thought?”

The larger man, Merek, bumped the lower end of his club against the smaller birdman and exclaimed, quietly, “Shit-for-brains if he can kill the king with a thought then of course he’d give up a measly little dagger. The real question is why he hasn’t killed us at all. I mean, it’s not as if holding a woman and thinking were mutually exclusive tasks…”

“Well I would have to beg to differ, seeing as my brain do turn quite to shit when I catch a whiff of the feather-crown of a lady as fair as Bazy’s,” said the third, wielding what looked like a sharpened shovel.

Mason looked between the three, exasperated, “If I let go of Bazy and promise not to melt you all with a thought, can you spare me a minute to explain what’s happening?”

“So you are the demon? Boy the guards will sure be happy if we hand you over to them, sure will,” chimed in shit-for-brains.

“I swear to Phoenix if you don’t pipe down I’m going to smash you in the head with this club until your brains start to work, Lany. There’s no way the demon is gonna turn himself in.”

Mason gave up on waiting for them to be reasonable and simply let go of Bazy and addressed them all, “Merek, Lany, Bazy, and Shovelknight over there, I will not be turning myself in, but I will also not be killing you today if you don’t make me.

“My friend and I were hunting for mana and stumbled upon these ruins, which I guess is still a fairly functional city for you all. My friend got captured by your guards, and now I need to get him free and out of here. Can you at least do me the decency of staying quiet and letting me free him if you won’t help in any way?”

“Ah, well it does make a lot of sense that they’d mistake your buddy for the demon. If he looks like you, he’d look a whole lot like the demon. Or more’n he don’t look like us, and my best guess is nobody could kill the king if he were one of us. King was a big ‘ol tough guy, fancy staff and lots of power that he took from the stuff he killed protecting us all,” Lany added, earning again the name shit-for-brains.

“You planning to kill your way to your friend, or think you can sneak him out with some fancy smoothe-skin magic?” asked Merek, ignoring Lany’s rambling.

Mason looked between them uncertainly. Judging by their rough weapons and tattered clothing, they clearly weren’t looked upon favorably by the guards, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d be okay with seeing them dead.

Thankfully, Shovelknight chimed in, “If you’re gonna kill them all, I’ll help. My whole family got executed as friends of the witches. Seems I can’t find myself in worse shape by helping one now if I’m already guilty of it.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry for tackling you, miss. It was a bit of a tense situation with a whole group of guards just down the hall. Could you…”

“They’re taking him to the cellar, so you’ll need this to get him out,” Bazy passed him a key from under her frock. It was a thick, heavy thing, looking hand-forged. “There’s a set of stairs that spiral down at the very end of this hallway, and he’ll be down there. And next time you tackle me, make sure it’s onto something soft, would you?”

The three men looked at her, shocked by her forwardness, but she just shrugged. “There’s health potions in the cupboards two rooms down. There’ll be guards there, but if you can’t take care of them, well, you might as well not even try saving your friend. Feel free to drop my name if you need a distraction.”

She sat down on a chair by the table in the room, and Mason could see now that her frock wasn’t the raw sackcloth he thought it was. Once it may have even been beautiful, but now it was bloodied and dirtied from the civil war that had happened since the death of their king.

He nodded curtly, quickly snatching back his dagger, then ducked out of the room, deciding that their silence and approval were enough assistance for him to carry on.

He moved straight for the room that he was told would be stocked with potions and stopped at the door, contemplating. Then he knocked twice, and spoke in his best Lany impression, “Whoo boy, you’d never believe it! Bazy wants both of you to come visit her in her room! Said something about some secrets about the witches that you boys might want to rustle out under her skirts!”

It was hardly a believable ploy, but then, Mason didn’t need them to believe it. He activated Shadow Stalk, and as soon as the door opened lashed out quickly with his first dagger. Activating Focus as he stepped past the falling body, he lunged across the room with his dagger and every bit of ferocity he could summon.

Mana Blade activated on its own, fueled by his violent cross slash, and he watched the empowered slash cut right through the worn-out leather on the second guard in the room. He glanced around with Focus to see that those were the only two guards, and then turned to drag the body from the doorway into the room.

The guard at the door must have had much higher vitality than Mason assumed. As Mason turned, he barely had enough time to get his dagger up to deflect a heavy vertical slash the man aimed at his head. The dagger flew from his hands from the force of the blow, so he drew out the second one that Terk had found earlier.

The guard’s sword flashed and Mason found himself disarmed again, receiving a hilt to the face as further punishment from the combo. Mason was suddenly glad to be over-prepared as he drew the sword that Shay had leant to him. This time, he held tight when the guard began a flurry of blows, and did his best to deflect each hit, sustaining a small amount of damage with each blow.

His health falling even as his stamina plummeted, Mason knew he had to turn this around. He ducked under the next slash and came up to tackle the man under the shoulders, lifting him into the air long enough to pull away and get some space. Mason tapped directly into the mana reserves in his staff and unleashed another mana blade, and the guard, down when Mason used the first one, was wholly unprepared. It caught him around the neck and he fell in a spurt of blood.

Mason dropped the sword, exhausted from the expenditure of his health, stamina, and mana all at once. He shut the door to the room, enduring the presence of the two corpses, and sat heavily in the unoccupied chair.

“Holy fucking shit, what did I just do?” he asked the pool of blood on the ground, trying to steady himself with a breath.

A wave of fatigue that was as mental as it was physical came over him, and he sat heavily while activating Recovery, checking his notifications to see if there were anything he should be aware of before moving on. Mana Blade, Blade Specialization and Shadow Stalk all levelled up, predictably, but his challenge remained incomplete.

He looked down at the body beneath him and shrugged, “Really more reptilian than bird like, I guess. It was probably rude of me to keep calling you all birdmen,” He kicked it unceremoniously, too drained to really feel guilty for killing the man, whatever animal he most resembled.

Then Mason went over to the cabinets and took out three exquisite, bright red potions. He looked them over greedily, and then scanned the rest of the storage in the room. It was packed tight with food, and judging by how thin the four bird… or lizardmen… had been in the room before, this must have been the real reason Bazy sent him this way.

Nonplussed, he cast a quick Analyze on the potion to ensure it wasn’t just straight poison, and the console responded in a fairly assuring way.

??? Potion: 70% chance to have positive benefits for the drinker.

Despite the information deficit, he choked down the potion quickly, surprised by the very bitter, earthy flavor of something so brightly colored. It did the trick though, and he saw his health rise rapidly, and in a few seconds it was full again. Recovery was still working on his stamina, as the very last dredges of Mana Sickness still slowed that regeneration rate, but he knew he’d be ready to move on before the blood on the floor dried to his boots.

“Alright, friend, I guess this is goodbye,” He cooed, as he pulled the skull from his bag to replenish his mana. “I really hope you don’t curse me from the afterlife for using your body like this but the living have first dibs, after all.”

He placed the skull on the table where the two guards had been playing some sort of game involving tiles and dice, and drew his staff. As the last bone, and the skull, of the body that had left him his campsite, and helped him learn to use magic, he felt the weight of the decision almost more heavily than he did the weight of having just murdered two guards.

But he had no choice. He had decided to survive and grow strong in this world, and that meant pushing himself forward. He would not be trapped in the box of his weak human self, but would open the door into something greater.