The grey demon gave no warning, and adopted no dramatic battle stance of the kind human knights favour. To this creature, Dex was not an adversary worthy of formal combat-merely an irritating fly that had defiled the sanctity of its crystal refuge.
The beast moved. A single step.
But that step obeyed no ordinary law of physics. Its speed was explosive, violent, and so far beyond the natural order that Dex's eyes, despite the enhancements of his Mana Core, could not track the arc of its body with any clarity. All he perceived was a grey, blurred streak erasing the twenty metres between them in a fraction of a second.
In the blink of an eye, the demon vanished from its original position and materialised directly in front of Dex, blocking out what remained of the cavern light. Its enormous fist-matching in size the millstone of a grinding wheel-was driving toward Dex's chest in a perfectly straight line, aimed at caving in his ribcage and driving his heart out through his back in a single blow.
Had Dex relied on logical thought or Earth shield magic to deflect this strike, he would have been dead before he formed the incantation. The Mana left to him would not have stopped even a strong gust of wind, let alone the blow of a Rank B creature.
What saved him was not magic. It was the instincts of the prisoner and the condemned man-instincts honed in hundreds of lethal fights with knives and bare hands in the narrow bathrooms and overcrowded prison yards. In those environments, an effective response does not come from the mind. It comes from pure muscle memory.
At the moment the fibres of the demon's shoulder tensed-before the fist had even fully launched-Dex hurled his body to the ground with brutal force, twisting his torso to the extreme right, ignoring the savage pain in his dislocated left shoulder as it struck the floor again.
BOOOM.
The fist did not strike Dex's chest. It struck the stone floor where he had been standing a fraction of a second before. The force of impact was not natural-the solid rock beneath the demon's fist detonated like a buried landmine. Stone shrapnel flew in every direction like the fragments of a hand grenade, filling the cavern with a deafening concussion that reverberated through the crystal halls.
Dex rolled across the hard floor, moving away from the impact point, feeling the friction of stone tearing what remained of his leather coat and stripping skin from his body. His back struck one of the massive blue Mana crystals and he came to a stop-gasping, blood running from a shallow gash in his cheek where a flying stone splinter had caught him.
"Damn it... damn it-I cannot fight this thing with brute force under any circumstances," Dex thought, adrenaline pouring through his veins like liquid fire, granting him a terrifying mental clarity in the midst of this nightmare.
His eyes swept the cavern at speed, analysing every detail in desperation-searching for any tactical advantage, any vulnerability, any instrument that could be turned into a weapon. His magic was exhausted. His body was broken.
Then his eyes stopped on the crystals surrounding him. These formations were colossal concentrations of raw, unrefined Mana. In the elementary magical theory texts he had absorbed from the novel, there was a golden rule: raw Mana in its solid state was extraordinarily stable-but if its crystalline structure was shattered by a sudden, violent force, it did not break like ordinary glass. It released what was known as a magical rebound-a wave of unstable energy that blinded the senses and devastated any Mana channels in its immediate vicinity.
"If I cannot kill you... I will blind you and drive your Mana channels into madness," Dex decided, his eyes darkening to something cold and frightening. He had made his decision: all pretence of honourable combat was abandoned. It was time for methods forged in the gutter.
The demon charged again. This time there was no silent approach-the creature released a roar of fury that shook the cavern's foundations and rained dust from the ceiling. Its pride had been wounded: this human insect had survived its first strike. The beast was faster this time, and more enraged-raising both rigid arms to crush Dex, using its colossal bulk to seal off every escape route to the left or right.
Dex, leaning against the crystal and breathing with great difficulty, gathered every last particle of his savage will. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In that moment, Dex Williams-the frail young man who had read a novel-died. And from the same place the Executioner was born: the cold-blooded killer who recognised neither surrender nor fear, who looked at an opponent's body as nothing more than an assembly of joints and tendons waiting to be severed.
As the demon raised both arms to deliver the killing blow that would reduce Dex to a bloodied paste, Dex did not retreat. He did not jump. Instead, in a movement of pure suicidal madness, he ran toward the demon at maximum speed. And before those arms could descend, he threw himself onto his knees and slid across the smooth stone floor like a desperate baseball player-gliding directly between the demon's enormous legs.
The creature, because of its massive bulk and the forward momentum of its committed charge, could not stop itself or redirect its strike in that critical instant-its target had vanished below its line of sight.
In that narrow window of sliding beneath the demon, Dex's right hand shot to his leather boot. With a motion he had rehearsed thousands of times in his former life to conceal smuggled weapons, he drew a shiv-a thin blade no longer than two fingers, carved from dense bone, hidden in the sole of his boot. Not a magical weapon. A filthy assassination tool.
As he passed beneath the demon's ankle, he did not thrust blindly. The Executioner's experienced eye-trained in anatomy-had already identified the single unarmoured vulnerability not protected by the creature's plated musculature: the Achilles tendon, directly above the heel.
Dex drove the small bone blade with every ounce of physical force he possessed, using the momentum of his sliding body as a lever, and dragged it savagely to tear through the taut grey tendon.
Skreeeee-
The tendon was not severed entirely-the creature's hide was too hard-but the blade opened a deep, sufficient tear. The grey demon released a terrifying roar mixed with pain and shock. Nothing in this forest had ever attacked from below with such contemptible indignity. The enormous beast lurched off-balance immediately: its right leg could no longer support its immense weight, and it pitched forward, flailing its arms in disordered chaos.
Dex did not pause to savour the successful strike. He knew this pain would not kill the demon-it would only madden it further, and the creature would recover in seconds. He seized that single golden second of lost balance.
He stopped sliding, used his own momentum to spring back to his feet like a compressed coil, and drove himself directly toward the largest nearby blue Mana crystal-the one standing like a pillar between him and the crimson passage.
Dex gathered the final one percent of Mana remaining in his dying Mana Core. It was not enough to form a spell-but it was enough for one single thing: an Ignition Spark. He directed that meagre charge into his bare, bloodied right fist.
"Shatter, you cursed thing!" Dex screamed, his voice carrying all the desperation and fury of the world, and he drove his fist into the hard blue surface of the crystal with every last ounce of strength his body possessed.
What detonated was not fire, and not a physical concussive force like a grenade. It was something far worse for magical creatures. When Dex's spark penetrated the stable crystalline structure, the enormous formation cracked with a sound like reality itself being torn apart. From those fractures, no ordinary light emerged. What poured out was a flood of raw, pure Mana.
The blazing blue light was so concentrated and dense that it scoured the colour from the cavern entirely. The blinding wave hit the demon's white oval eyes with total, absolute effect, and the colossal magical pressure-a sorcerous electromagnetic pulse-tore through its sensitive Mana perception, inflicting upon it a cerebral agony that far exceeded the pain of its severed tendon.
The demon was seized by total stupefaction and sensory paralysis. It released fragmented, panicked screams and began lurching blindly backward, claws raking the empty air, retreating step by stumbling step away from the source of the crystal detonation-and directly toward the burning crimson passage it had been guarding.
Dex collapsed to his knees, gasping hard, his right hand bleeding freely from where it had struck the crystal. The blue light was searing his own retinas-but he was smiling. A bloody, dark, and terrible smile. The Executioner's smile, of someone who had just flipped the table on hell's guardian itself. The path to the Core was open, if only for a very short while.