Krogar ran, leaving everyone far behind in no time. Perplexed by his own speed, he was in too much of a hurry to notice the scenery around him. He just knew the road was paved with stone and there were houses and people around.

Sensing danger, he jumped sideways and saw a few shards of ice passing by, probably a spells his pursuers threw at him.

Why won't they give me at least a minute? I need to get a lot of things sorted out in my head, but like this. . .

Another volley passed by Krogar;s head and following it, one more flew at him, this time right through his head. ..

* * * *

Akir stopped while passing through the first floor of the tower and cut his wrist.

"What are you doing? You said .. " His colleagues were all shocked by his sudden action.

"Eternal Death Ritual, now." His answer had created even more questions in their heads. "He is marked, it will work."

They obeyed immediately, like the elites they were and soon, they held all the tools and ingredients needed in their hands. Akir felt that he should explain himself to lower their stress level, it could impact the ritual in a negative way.

"You have not noticed? It is almost unnoticeable, but the situations around the demon feels strange, he always chooses the only one option that allows him to escape, as if . . "

". . as if he could foresee the possibilities?" One of the men finished the sentence.

"Exactly, not mentioning he knew the name that he should not be able to find out. I do not know what it is, but we will use the Eternal Death Ritual to make sure he dies and stays that way. I have already got my hands on a drop of his blood. I originaly wanted to observe him more, but it is not safe.It will be for the best to use this insurance instead of hesitating." Akir looked ito the eyes of his companions and saw their resolution, that was what he wanted to see.

"Let's start!"

* * * *

Krogar felt another surge of intense pain and rolled his eyes, like praying to some god he had never believed in.

"Again? I do not want to see that face again, I am fed up with it."

A few seconds later. . .

"Face, face,, lovely face! Let me see it just one more time, please!!!" Krogar wanted to shriek out, but there was no sound, or was there?

If felt like his senses had transformed fundamentaly, but in spite of his confusion, he was shortly able to see again.

Although everything seemed to smell, look and sound differently compared to before.

"Ah, the face!" He could see it again, what a nice face it was! Yet, something was off, he looked around and immadiately saw the difference in how they looked at him.

"They did not stare at me like this before, impossible! How can their reaction change before I even do anything?"

Accidentaly, Krogar looked at his hand and froze in place, it was gray now and when he moved, there was some kind of an afterimage, like a second ghostly body followed his movement.

"How on Earth is this possib . ." His surprised words triggered a flood of memories he was not quite ready for. "Wait Earth! I can remember now!"

"What is this transformation? What spell is he using?" To her great displeasure, her questions were interrupted by Akir's command.

"All of you reinforce the barrier, the objective has changed, isolate him, no extermination."

"B-But, I can still complete my .. "

"No you can't, the thing in front of us is not a demon, but an unidentified creature, so act with accordance with the procedure for such a situation!" Akir said sharply to hide his restlessness. Frankly, he had no idea what were they dealing with anymore and he would not think that the one in question was even more clueless than him. From his perspective, it looked like the demon transformed in an instant without any previous indications.

Krogar just watched with his wide eyes the sequence of completely new events unfold in front of him, he himself ending up enclosed in a barrier thicker than the one from before.

"What are you? Why have you masked yourself as Krogar?" Akir took the initiative, ignoring the defiant posture of Five.

"I.. "

To say "I do not know who or what I am." will not fly, that is certain.

"I . . am a Bubon." Krogar said with a sigh and his shoulders sank, trying to look like someone who has been found out.

"A Bubon? I have never heard of any species of that name, you look more like an undead to me."

"Bubons are an artificially bred race." Krogar looked for his reflection somewhere and soon, he found a platinum desk that could be used as a mirror. "It is a hybrid race of a zombie, crocolisk . .and a cheetah. It is still humanoid, because the zombie portion is the greatest of the three. So it is just a cheetah-crocolisk zombie hybrid that has been created to .. to hunt ordinary zombies."

Crap, he is so not buying it.

Krogar could see he might have messed up his introduction a bit, but he decided to walk the path of infinite shamelessness.

"We are actually peaceful creatures, cleansing places infested with undead, particularly zombies and our . . "

"Save your breath,do you think we are stupid?" Akir stared at him seriously, anger in his face.

"Yeah."

The anger intensified.

"I mean, yeah, I knew it is hard to believe. J-just let me consolidate my thoughts, you are too rash, I will answer everything in a minute." Krogar turned his back to him, not knowing how to continue the conversation.

Just stop this rolling train already, I need to think!!

He sat and stayed that way, surrounded by the barrier.

He could finally access his memories and the memories of someone else. Digging through everything, he began to understand his situation, because of his identity as Krogar. Sadly, even Krogar did not know what was with him now and even why it had all happened.

"The first thing I need to do is set a goal, I surely want to survive, but I need some long term strategy, because a good tactic without strategy is just a prolonged unorderly defeat in the end. Honestly, I do not care about returning to my old life, because it was not that great anyway and I might be able to turn this accident into an opportunity. My first goal will be to know more about this place and my situation, only then I can set my sights on something specific. There is no decision-making without intel, thus it will be my first objective. Aside from not dying of course."

He was too unnerved to sit, thus he began to walk back and forth, accidentally hitting the barrier, or more like not hitting it at all, as he passed right through it with no resistance.

Apparently, his new state had its perks.

His walk soon turned into a mad sprint and even though everyone tried to stop him, he was unstoppable and soon vanished in the long streets of an unknown city.

And yes, the fall could not kill him, even without the dirty horse.

He had no idea why were his opponents gentle this time, but it all meant they kept being focused on restricting his movement, not on harming him, which proved to be useless.

In the end, he managed to escape, running into the unknown, as Krogar's memories of this place proved to be pitiful at best.

* * * *

He passed the city, the details of which had been left in a hazy fog by his brain, because he was focused on getting away with his fastest speed. The only significant detail he noticed was the road of a good quality and the fact that it might not even be a city. The important part was, he left the road, because he did not want to be seen and ran in the direction that looked without human inhabitants.

Not expecting to get rid of his pursuers easily, he kept running at a break-neck speed, passing the few fields on which some blue berries grew, heading more into the wilderness. He could tell his speed would not lose to the speed of a horse and even after a long run, he did not feel hunger or fatigue.

After the fields, there was a forest, the trees of which had a tint of red and even further was a swamp, a truly fitting place for an existence like him.

This should be enough, I ran well past midnight with an absurd speed, this place has to be deserted enough to take a break and test a few things.-

"The first test is my physical strength." Krogar grabbed a piece of rock and pressed it hard in between his two fingers.

"UAAAAGH"

Nothing happened, except he had nearly broken his fingers.

"Alright, I was too optimistic." He grabbed a branch with thickness comparable to his wrist and crushed it in his fist.

"Still, my strength is certainly abnormal, the problem is I do not know what is normal here." Remembering some scenes from the city he had passed through, it should be abnormal.

"That was the easy part, the complicated part will be magic." He tried to use Krogar's memories to help him, but realized that the demon had been wandering different worlds and knew close to nothing about this particular one. Still he tried to get the most general understanding of magic based on his memories.

He understood it like this, if you grab a handle with your fingers to open a door, there is only a few efficient ways to grab it. The same way, if you want something to happen not using your body, only some ways are feasible and those ways are the systems of spells. The hand in this case is mana, which has to be present to do magic. Of course the origin of both is will. Different kinds of "grips" or spell systems are more fit to do certain things. What surpised Krogar was, that even "hands" can be different, one can use different kinds of mana for different effects. The true mess begins when different kinds of "hands" are more fit for different kinds of "grips". That means some spell systems are more suitable for perticular kinds of mana.

"So, mana or whatever is the juice I need and spell systems are the methods of serving the juice. We cannot serve red wine in a tankard right?"

Mana was in the environment its sources were called wells and its counterparts holes, but according to original Krogar, at least some levels of mana should be everywhere. What surprised the present Krogar was . ..

"The origin is already a part of the spell system . .. what?" Krogar did not expect this. "You mean like you want to say dog, but you have already said d, therefore you can only say og, ance, ense, but when saying enlarge, you will end up with den large?" His foot got stuck in the swamp, but his lagging brain was more at fault than the swamp.

"What he ment by the origin anyway? It seems to be body plus soul or. .? I guess it is something like one's identity or his view of himself considering body and mind. Ordinary people would probably call it talent, but it feels somewhat different."

Krogar skimmed through his extra memories and found a simple aptitude teast, that should roughly identify ones origin.

"Hey, the old demon fool called it origin, I can adopt the term. The first test tells me to cast a spell every magician knows, it is called Light."

"Great." Krogar scratched his head, he had even found how to do it, there was something called Elder Tongue, if one tried to compress mana into specific shapes with his will, it produced spells. Those shapes were the words of the Elder Tongue. Therefore, it was enough to just compress mana into the letter for "light" in elder tongue and that was all.

The problem with the Elder Tongue was, that it was universal and did not differentiate, meaning for the same letter one would get different effects based on his origin. The more complicated the letter the greater the difference until the point it was useless when trying to cast complicated spells, for serious magic, a specific dialect was needed.

"Not that it matters for me, Light seems to be the simplest thing there is." Krogar laughed and imagined the everpresent mana around him compress into the letter "light", that the demon Krogar conveniently knew.

It was simple, he just imagined the word in front of him and gray shades began gathering to assume the desired form until there was a short word Krogar wanted to create. The moment it had been completed, there was an explosion of eerie grayish aura, extinguishing most of the daylight around him.

"What a ghostly spectacle, now what doeas it mean?" He looked deeper into Krogar;s memories.

"Bright, yellow ligh, nope. Bright, white light, nope. Green light, not at all. Orange light, no. . . . .Conjured shadows or darkness, no chill, signs of dead vegetation, that is it! "

"Great, but there is chill and dead vegetation, what now?" Krogar was puzzled, there was also one with chill, but that described a case with frozen vegetation. Additionally, the vegetation seemed to be kind of pulverized into mush, which did not match any of the two descriptions.

"Well, but the two are the closest, one is death magic and the other is ice magic. I will try out a death magic spell, because there are no memories of ice magic."

Unfortunately his predecessor used fire magic spell system and knew just one basic death magic spell, which he had learned only accidentally. it was called Ruin and its effect was quick decomposition of an object, but it should not work on inanimate objects.

The word was simple and Krogar managed to construct it after a few minutes. He targetted a tree in front of him and

"RUIN" He shouted like an adolescent boy trying to imitate his favorite character.

"Fine, I should not have done that." Krogar looked around quickly to ensure no one had heard him, but a second later, the scene in front of him fully captivated his attention. Not only the tree he had targetted was rotten to the core, even his top half had crumbled to the ground and when he stepped on the sones around it, they cracked and fell apart, leaving only fine powder behind.

"Strange, it should not have worked against inanimated objects. That is the proof my true origin is not exactly death magic. Let us hope I will not blast myself into oblivion when trying out more complicated stuff in the future." He observed the place more closely while thinking about what had occured, it was apparent he should not be trying out more advanced magic carelessly given the additional unpredictable effect.

With the means to attack, he continued through the march, it was the perfect opportunity to cover his tracks, Looking like a zombie demon glued to its ghost, he was not even surprised that he felt no hunger or thirst, he looked two hundred percent dead after all.

* * * *

"Lord Archon, is that it?" A demon towering above the lines of others whispered to another of his kind, an even bigger one. Looking into the demon;s eyes, he could see him looking through him, to unfathomable distance through a small hole made of dazzling green light in front of them. Observing the wisdom in his eyes, he did not dare to disturb the demon any further, awaiting his response.

Another demon, who was of a similar height to Archon looked into Archon's eyes too, and saw the true meaning of the glamour hidden behind its green pupils.

What The Fuck?!

"Ehm, Archon, is this supposed to be the portal?" He whispered and nodded in the direction of the small hole. "I can at most fart through it, how am I supposed to lead an army through that thing?"

"Send a scouting mission. I have an urgent bussiness to attend to." Archon barked, throwing a poisonous look at the demon next to him, who in turn scratched his head and yelled at his subordinates.

"The smallest demons will march forth and go through the portal."

"B-But .. lord" Several demons rushed to the portal, but could only helplessly measure its dimension with their eyes.

"Do not call me a butt lord." The leading demon looked behind his back, checking Archon's position. After affirming that their leader was out of hearing range he just smirked at his lean subordinates. "Squeeze a few hellhounds through there."

He eyed the portal for the second time.

"Pick the lean ones." He said nad walked away while chuckling with laughter.

Archon closed the door to his chamber gently and smashed a big stone table to bits, roaring with anger.

"Why?!! Why is it screwed up? What happened to the spell?" Fuming with rage, he walked around, smashing everything that came under his hand. The perfect unity spell he had so painstakingly designed was ruined. "The portals have opened, but like this? I have to find out what happened. "

The problem was, he was unable to try it again like nothing changed, the only safe way to continue was to close the broken portals first and only then start again with the same spell.

"I have to fix this somehow, let;s hope that meanwhile we won't go kaboom with our whole world." He did not admit being afraid, he felt just a bit . . unpleasant.