Eager not to waste another moment, Maels activated a powerful combustion spell that abruptly caused the young man’s legs to burst into a spray of blood, bone and shredded ligaments. The boy screamed for a moment and then his eyes rolled into the back of his head, his body falling limply to the ground as copious amounts of blood spurted out of the mangled stumps of his thighs.

“What are you doing!” screamed the male arcanite. “You must stop this at once!”

In the eyes of those around them, he was murdering the innocent boy that they had believed themselves to be helping.

Eyes on the immobile lad, Maels tracked the flow of energy as the Ket children continued to die, only six of them left at this point in the ritual. It took all of his mental fortitude to ignore their screams. Repeating in his mind that he was but acting in line with Lucian’s will, he averted his eyes from the tears of the girl from earlier as she watched her brother die at her side in a spasm of haunting screams, her gaze wide and unblinking. Focusing on the task at hand, Maels blew the boy’s arms from his body with another combustion spell of high magic, intending to repair the limbs now that he was clearly dead. It was at this point, however, that the ritual went astray.

As the boy’s arms burst into clouds of gore, Maels was taken aback when an unprecedented amount of magical energies exploded into the surroundings with such force that the nearby treetops began to sway, all of the arcanites and swordsmen falling to their knees as they fought to remain conscious. It was at this moment that he realized that the jewelry on the lad’s hands had not been magical supplements but magical limiters, but he didn’t have time to contemplate how a person with so much inner energy could exist, for the moment that the devastating aura was unleashed on the surroundings, the Inverted man at Gartur’s back suddenly began to scream at the top of his lungs as if he was in a tremendous amount of pain.

Grabbing hold of his head with strong, scaly hands, the Inverted man let out his loudest scream yet, which rendered Maels deaf for a second time as he lost control over the so-called demon, who was suddenly surrounded by a pillar of fire that reached hundreds of paces up into the sky. Maels instinctively shielded himself with his most powerful defensive spell, watching on in shock as all but two of the arcanites that he’d brought along burst into flames and began to writhe around in the dirt while screaming out in anguish, their smoldering bodies going limp moments later from just the heat given off by the unexpected burst of fire.

Frightened though they were, Maels’s surviving subordinates rushed to his side and formed a protective wall in front of him. The demon continued to scream as it thrashed around in anguish, crashing into a tree trunk and stumbling to the ground as jets of abnormally hot flames shot forth from his hands, eyes and mouth, one of these pillars charring half of the immediate vicinity and eradicating the dead children’s corpses like dust blown away by a sudden gust of wind, including the boy at the centre of the circle. Aside from a couple of Kets, nothing remained in that area of the clearing, even the metal cage having been evaporated into nothingness by the volatile magics.

Seeing that Gartur had been completely eradicated, Maels realized that the demon had lost its mind and so scurried backwards faster than he’d ever thought his long limbs would permit. “Retreat!” was all he thought to say, though he was suddenly engulfed by a jet of fire that set his robes aflame and covered his body in excruciating second-degree burns despite the fact that the barrier around him was powered by his exquisite-class magic crystal.

His subordinates weren’t so lucky. Before he knew it, everyone else had been killed except for him, most of their bodies erased from existence while some lay on the ground as charred piles of smouldering flesh. Just beyond the boundaries of the clearing, he could sense a few of the Ket children laying dead amongst piles of detritus, their blackened bodies smoking like tinder.

Still roaring with rage, a burst of raw energy exploded forth from the demon, which caused all of the trees behind it to burst into flames. Maels had never seen someone with such a pure and potent affinity for fire magics, with natural energy so aligned with flames that simply unleashing it out into the surroundings was enough to ignite anything around him.

Knowing that he had to do something or else he would die in the coming moments, Maels poured what was left of his crystal’s energy into the medallion in his left hand—the metal having cooked the flesh around it—and screamed out a desperate order.

“G—go north! Don’t stop until you reach the city! Once there, destroy the collegia!”

The demon suddenly went limp, falling to the ground where he lay for several moments before his body jerked upright and he climbed back to his feet in a mechanical motion. Turning around like a puppet controlled by the strings of a novice puppeteer, he stumbled northward into the forest and mindlessly heeded Maels’s commands.

Looking around, Maels saw that the only two corpses that hadn’t been entirely burned were the Ket girl’s and her brother’s, both of which had been flung to the fringes of the clearing. It seemed that the brother’s body had shielded the sister’s from much of the searing winds that had surrounded the reach of the demon’s flames. The magic circle had been completely erased, leaving no traces of the spellwork that had taken place here.

Knowing the risks that a wildfire might pose, Maels still had the sense to extinguish the fires that filled the area, though eventually his instincts screamed at him to leave the vicinity as quickly as possible.

Seeing that the demon’s broad, scaly back was still visible in the distance, Maels ran in the direction of the Winding Road as fast as his injured legs could carry him, stopping only once he could no longer sense the demon’s presence. He spent the next several minutes healing his wounds and repairing his hearing, at which point he collapsed to the ground on shaky limbs.

Off in the distance, large plumes of smoke were visible from the direction that the demon had stumbled off with fresh ones appearing at regular intervals.

Was he really supposed to believe that what he’d just seen was only five percent of the demon’s capabilities? Either the demon had been indescribably strong in its prime—moderate strength, Limnin had said!—or the seal had eroded and he currently had more energies at his disposal than intended. It had been five centuries, after all.

He stared down at the magic crystal in his hands, which only had a fraction of its original energies left to it. An exquisite-class magic crystal contained an incredible amount of power, so the fact that nearly all of its energy stores had been expended showed just how difficult it was to control the demon and hinted at the terror of its true strength.

Maels knew deep in his heart that the longer the demon remained outside of the space within the medallion, the more challenging it would be to control him. Not only that, but based upon the nature of the seal that suppressed the man’s energies, he would gain his powers back bit by bit the farther away he was from the one that had summoned him.

What have I done?

Now that the boy’s body had been completely evaporated, he could no longer cast an invisibility spell on his corpse and send him into the collegia to set off the grand explosion that he had been planning for several months. Even if he had remained intact, it had been the demon’s devious flames that had killed him, meaning that the only abilities the corpse might have gained would have been the use of the terrifying fire magics that had inadvertently taken his life.

Standing up on unsteady feet, Maels began to sprint toward the distant walls of Distan County, knowing that if he didn’t act soon, the entire town of Mayhaven might cease to exist by the day’s end. He had to reconnect with the main body of the delegation, and no matter what, the demon had to be put down. Only, he was worried about the cost that a direct confrontation might entail, for the less hold he had on the creature, the more of its original strength it would be able to use. If the demon somehow managed to gain back the majority of its abilities, such a development could only spell disaster for the citizens of this county—far more than the few dozen casualties he’d expected—and potentially for the forces that he’d painstakingly cultivated and included in his retinue.

This time around, Maels had gambled on a great gambit, though unfortunately he had made a grave miscalculation and now had a massive mess to clean up. Not only did he have to subdue the demon, but the task to kill Caedmon Distan Silverkin had yet to be completed and the collegia still needed to be destroyed, along with any of the count’s accomplices in regards to his research.

Half-naked in his burned robes that were pocked with holes, Maels picked up his pace and hurried toward Distan while covered in cold sweat.