"Captain!" One of the guards raised his voice, pointing at the blood on the ground.
The woman imdiately lost her humor as she turned on the slaves.
"What happened? Who did this?" she demanded, he face locked into a scowl.
Seeing this, the beastkin woman started to laugh. It quickly rose to a cackle, and one of the other guards smacked the cage, telling her to shut up.
That left two guards looking toward where Kir was hidden.
"Tell or I will scour every patch of your mangy fur from your flesh," the maven shouted, punching the air and producing a burst of blue fla that made the slaves shrink back.
The woman started to reign in her laugh as she rose from her own crouch, but an odd, almost hiccuping set of chuckles remained before she spoke. "It was a blue-hearted demon," she snarled. "Gods willing, he will end you tonight."
The guards had noticed Kir’s hiding spot, and one of them approached slowly. The mont the beastkin woman finished speaking, Kir emptied his storage of the four bodies at the sa ti, crushing the lead guard beneath them and sending two heads rolling toward the cages.
The guard went down, crying out and screaming at the horror, and the guard behind him drew his sword and slashed into the darkness-
-striking nothing.
"Get them off !" the first guard shouted up to his companion.
All of them were so distracted by the corpses that none had noticed Kir’s leap upward, or that he was presently hanging from one of the rafters.
The guards nearest the cages started looking around, and that was when the beastkin woman struck. She grabbed the guard whose back was closest to the cages, clawed hands cutting into his face before she stuck her muzzle through and bit him hard on the neck.
Seeing this, Kir let go, shifting into his war form as he dropped heavily toward the guard trying to dig his friend out of the pile of corpses. Both n were crushed as Kir landed.
Now wielding Kangetsu in one hand, Kir took two steps and slashed for the maven and the guard behind her.
Instead of trying to leap out of the way as he expected, she ducked and rolled, and Kir’s slash took the guard in the hauberk, cutting through thick cloth and leather until he slid into two halves, bisected just below his heart.
A mont later, a searing pain shot through Kir’s leg as the maven woman attacked. Even though he was fire resistant, it hurt quite a lot thanks to his increased sensitivities, and he lashed out toward her with Kangetsu, only succeeding in driving her back as his vision started to tinge red at the edges.
"Fuck fuck fuck!" the maven said. She was holding two jets of blue fla in her hands like daggers. The way she stared at him, wide-eyed and fearful, told him she hadn’t expected him to be able to withstand her flas.
In other words, he was a bad matchup for her.
Fire sparked beneath her feet. Kir realized she was about to take off right as she blasted fire at him, obscuring his sight for a crucial second as she flew toward the back entrance. It took her only one punch to smash through the door as Kir started sprinting toward her, pouring mana into his speed.
Halfway to the door, however, she shot up straight into the air shouting "Demon attack! Demon at the docks!"
Realizing he was now on the clock, Kir let out a frustrated snarl and ran back to the cages. One by one he ripped the doors off of each, but the slaves remained inside. Except for one.
The hyena beastkin woman stepped out, a bloody smile on her face. "First I thought you were a ghost, mister demon... are we really free?"
Kir nodded. "I am no demon. Just half of one," he confessed, before looking around the warehouse. "What will you do?"
The beastkin woman turned to look at those who had been caged with her. "What are you waiting for?! Grab what you can and go!" she shouted, then turned to Kir. "I’m Selene."
"I... can’t share my na," Kir said as the prisoners started rushing out, many of them grabbing the first valuables they could.
"I’m sure they’ll figure out sothing for you," she stared at his chest, which glowed under the now too-short cape he’d stolen.
"Are there more slaves on the ship?" Kir asked.
"Nah," the woman said. "Just cargo and slavers. Michelle, the woman with the fire, insisted slaves go on last, so most of us have been here for weeks." She turned to the side and spat. "Cowardly bitch."
"I’m going to take care of the ship and then run. You should go too," Kir said as the beastkin woman crouched and pulled the sword from one of the dead guard’s belts.
"You’re killing slavers, I want in."
Kir deployed his wings. "I’m in a hurry. And I won’t be in any condition to fight soon, so get sowhere safe."
Launching into the air, he flew toward the front of the warehouse.
"It’ll be slightly to the left..." he muttered to himself, squinting between the two-centeter wide crack of the large doors until he saw the ship bobbing gently on the water re ters away.
Dropping into his warform had been a gamble to obscure his identity, and now he needed to get back to normal so he could execute his escape.
Kir lifted a hand, visualizing where he’d seen the ship relative to the warehouse.
Kir pushed as much mana as he could to the very tip of his claw, pointing toward the door like his finger was a gun.
The idea for this had co to him during his spars with Amarena in the basent. If he was able to accumulate mana into parts of his body for strength and speed and endurance, why couldn’t he do so for spells?
Doing so was likely harmful, and certainly not the best practice given how leery his mothers had been over any form of bodily magic outside of basic enhancent, but it would shorten the ti his seal had to detect the spell...
...and hopefully that ant he wouldn’t be punished into unconsciousness.
"All matter is frozen light..." he whispered as he focused on that point of accumulated magic. The amount of energy in a single atom was small, but millions upon millions of them went into the making of a single fingernail.
Kir readied his mind for what was to co, the unspooling of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. He didn’t know the distribution of other elents, but he knew that these three were everywhere in the body, and so the focus of his spell and how he visualized it was to dismantle one spherical centiter of his claw, centered at the thickest part.
Using mana, he began imparting each proton, neutron, and electron with vectors aid at the ship.
The protons and neutrons, he forced into beta decay, stepping them down until all he had was a mass of electrons still inside his body. Thus far, the seal didn’t seem to recognize what he was doing. The sheer energy he was forcing his internal mana to contain as he visualized what was to co.
Kir’s face split into a grin.
Then, in a split second, he flipped every electron at the sa ti, pushing them down in orbits to near zero. Enough to annihilate every single one into a massive amount of light concentrated into a beam one centiter in diater and released through the door toward its real target.
To the Syndicate crew on board the vessel, a thin beam of light without even a hint of magic painted their vessel for just a few seconds. None of them were in a position to see where the light drilled into their vessel, cutting a precise line diagonally from the bottom of the vessel to the top before the light passed through the city barrier, carving a thin line like an eyeslit into the shield.
Slowly at first, and then all at once, the broken integrity of the ship resolved as the halves began to tear apart from their own weight. Water poured into it, the sinking so fast and so thorough that only the guards atop the vessel failed to react until they were already being sucked under by the vessel, their armor weighing them down.
The whole sinking took a re thirty seconds.
Upon release, the seal recognized the spell. Kir’s punishnt was painful, and one of his eyes was bleeding, but thankfully he’d accomplished his goal enough to slip out of his warform.
But even that didn’t stop the seal’s punishnt, wielding his own magic against him with excruciating pain.
It should have been less, not more. Not... Oh. Kir had been so consud with trying to fool the seal until the last possible second, that he’d forgotten...
His body, mind, and soul were now far more sensitive than they had been.
It had made even the lesser punishnt of a single seal stand out just as badly as when he’d had all four... No, perhaps it was even worse. He didn’t know if a soul could be damaged, but it had felt painful enough to.
Still, he was conscious. His trick had slightly worked.
Now he just had to get...
He took a step and fell sideways.
"Ah shit..." He coughed.
He was still conscious, but his body was refusing to et his demands. It felt like it took ages just for him to push onto one hand-
"Shingir’s balls... what did you do to that ship?" Serene said as she pulled Kir onto her shoulder.
"Just a little atomic magic," Kir chuckled deliriously. "I need to get out of here."
"How do you want to go? I don’t think the guards are going to like what you did," Serene said, bringing him to lean against the wall.
"I just need a little ti... You get going." He knew there was a manhole at the back entrance. Forcing himself to stand fully, he began to stagger in that direction. His skin felt like it had been deep-fried...
"This fucking kid..."
Kir tensed. It was the voice from the poem... Looking around, he could find a source. Was he hallucinating because of the seal?
A mont later, Selene stepped in front of Kir and shouldered him in the gut as she draped him over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
"What are you doing?" Kir wheezed.
"You saved my life, now I’m saving yours." She started loping toward the back of the warehouse. "Mr. Demon, Glowy Heart Guy, sir."
"Call sothing else," Kir complained weakly as she ran past the manhole, painfully aware that soone attentive enough would see his heart beating thanks to his internal glow. "You thought I was a ghost or sothing..."
"Alright, fine," she quipped, smiling. "How about..."
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