First came shock, followed by horror, and then it rapidly transitioned to rage.

  Seeing everything I ever knew gone hit me like a ton of bricks. At that moment, I coped in the only way I knew how: violence.

  IT KILLED MY PARENTS! IT HAD TO DIE!

  I threw myself at the monster, channelling every ounce of power into my legs and unching myself at the abomination.

  The power was on a scale I was always afraid to use before this moment, but right now, the pain felt nothing to me. And it showed.

  The ground beneath me detonated from the force applied, and so did my legs, which exploded in a shower of gore coating the crater I left in my wake.

  I also heard a surprised scream behind me, but it did not register at the time. Like an arrow fired by a Titan, I flew across the sky with enough speed to leave behind a sonic bst.

  My target was its one massive eyeball.

  This monstrosity killed my parents! I needed to die!

  The monster noticed and quickly used one of its eight wings to cover and deflect me. The action was nearly instant and faster than me hurtling through the air.

  What the fucker did not know: I COULD MAKE MY OWN LEVERAGE!

  So, I did and accelerated pumping as much power as that ability would allow me.

  I could feel the air rip into my flesh as it seemed to turn from decelerating sludge that tried to halt my body. I hit some sort of diminishing return, and the fact did not make me slow down.

  The hit was massive but not as hard as I expected. I hoped to tear through the wings and puncture its eyeball. Instead, it felt like I hit a wall of solid Mythril. Since I impacted head-first, there was a visible crunch, and my vision bcked out for a second. However, it returned less than a second ter, and in just enough time to notice he was moving the wing forward.

  I accelerated in the opposite direction, but to little to no avail, as it felt like I was trying to stop a mountain. It flicked me away like a gnat, and I was once more unched away. By now, my legs were already back in fighting shape, and I used them to accelerate myself upwards and hover there for a second.

  This thing killed my parents, and it had to die.

  I looked directly at its massive bck eye with a solid purple glowing iris. Its body-spanning mouth, shaped like a cruel grin, stared directly at me. Some form of magical force paralysed my whole body, and I plummeted down my mind, suddenly lost in a screaming cacophony that seemed to echo from everywhere.

  My mouth still worked, and I shouted to the titanic creature.

  “I have something for that too, you fucker!”

  Training with an adept magical fighter like my dad(the thought sent another surge of boiling rage through me).

  It was initially designed to counter my dad. Still, it worked well enough here as with the onset of the new power activating and empowering, the effect of the gaze weakened considerably.

  Now, the cries were reduced to whispers, and though my body felt sluggish, I could move perfectly fine. The monster also noticed, and dark tendrils shot out from its maw. The tendrils were as thick as my waist, but compared to its massive size, they looked like a sea of tiny threads coming out of its mouth.

  I stepped in the air to push myself away but was not fast enough. Several tendrils wrapped around my body. The contact made my flesh sizzle; the pain was orders of magnitude higher than what I thought.

  I had my skin peeled off before, and while the experience was not fun, it did little to put me down.

  Right now, it was as if someone magnified the pain and made me acutely aware of the skin slowly peeling off and muscle tissue began to show, but even as it happened, new skin regrew. I was trapped in a vicious cycle of restoration and being cooked alive.

  ‘Death… Kill… Eat… Strong… Revenge…”

  Thoughts that were not my own began to flood my head despite my suppression staying in full effect. Only rage kept my consciousness intact, impotent as it was.

  The tentacles began to drag me into it’s maw filled to the brim with teeth that resembled bone fingers clicking and ccking. With a great heave I tried enhancing and accelerating but instead of movement all it managed to do was melt away my limbs.

  My eyes met the monster, and there was a gleam of triumph in it’s eyes.

  This thing would not win! I would murder it even if it was the st thing I did!

  It killed my parents! I could not exist!

  A fsh of light cut through me and the tendrils at the same time.

  I was sliced into ribbons but the funny thing was, so was the monster. I did not have enough flesh left in my body to move so pushed as much magical energy as I could to regenerate as I fell down with bits and pieces of disfusting monster flesh all around me.

  “Simon! Are you alright?!?”

  A feminine voice came from behind me, her tone full of worry.

  My mind was not registering her at moment as I returned to my useless rage.

  Since my body was whole once more, I tried unching myself at it’s eye once again.

  “That thing is a demon! Only powerful magic works on it!”

  If it had been any other time, I would have realized what that meant. Despite all the power I could put behind my fists, they were still objects of pure force and flesh. I could not channel magic, so my ability to fight this thing was impossible by default.

  However, at the moment, reason escaped me, and so I futilely threw my body at the problem, as was my habit.

  This thing killed—

  “Simo— argghh!!!!” Came a strangled scream, and a shred of reason returned.

  I turned down to see a single detached tendril wrap around the leg of… Charlotte!

  “No!!!”

  I unched myself in her direction despite my body still moving in the opposite; doing this broke quite a few bones, but my frayed mind blissfully could not compute pain for a while now.

  Before I could even reach her, she emitted a burst of bluish prismatic light that shredded the tendrils, leaving a horribly wounded leg.

  I crashed next to her, reducing my speed just enough at the st second not to make much of an impact.

  Finding her unconscious, I grabbed her and started accelerating as fast as I could in the other direction.

  A cry of displeasure rang behind me, but it did not stop my moving legs.

  What did, however, was the magic radiating off Charlotte. Out of nowhere, another burst of magic exploded out of her and unched me away from her.

  For the first time in a long time, despair hit me, and my mind finally snapped. My vision went blurry as the stress of everything that happened triggered all at once, causing my consciousness to buckle under that load.

  With one st gasp, but all managed to fall down. My st sight was the grassy dirt rapidly approaching my face.