Aric fought the demons like a savage, with no reservations as he shot through them without a care as to which one lived or which dead. There was no reason for him to fight each demon and even if he did, the odds of him killing(in this case, subduing) all of them were next to impossible.

  If anything, he was thwarting the demons away like they were flies—not that they were. Aric’s mind refused to accept the threat of the surrounding horde of demons and chose to focus on one thing… Scarlett.

  The red-haired girl was in danger and he had to get to her as soon as he could. So while the demons around him were indeed a threat, they just weren’t threats his mind acknowledged given the situation he was in. Perhaps there was one demon amongst them that was capable of snapping his bones in half given the chance and perhaps it was even one of the many demons Aric’s serpentine form had allowed him to slip past unscathed.

  Aric didn’t know, didn’t consider, or even care about all that.

  Far ahead, vines pooled around the tainted string of vine holding Scarlett down and hacked at it. The girl did the same with a knife whilst trying to pay attention to the demons around her. Her eyes scanned the weird vines with curiosity.

  The one pooling around the one keeping her down was different and looked more natural—excluding the fact that they kept trying to rip the tainted vine off her leg, something they shouldn’t have been able to do.

  ‘Must be one of Alistair’s many mysteries,’ a passing thought whispered through her mind as she continued stabbing at the dark vine frantically.

  The bck swirls in the vine’s green gave her a clue that it wasn’t there by mistake. One of the demons had the power to control vines… but so did Alistair. The vines currently yanking on the tainted one told her he wasn’t far.

  The girl pulled knife after knife from her arsenal of bdes, expertly downing demons with the guts to attack her whilst the air around her hummed and rippled. From a fissure in the air, a phoenix emerged, glowing with fierce red fmes before the forest went up in fmes.

  An explosion shook the woods, leaving Scarlett untouched. She turned her attention to the vine holding her down. She tried to yank her foot free. She tried to cut the vine off but with each attempt, the stubborn thing only grew more resilient.

  She summoned fmes in her hand and gripped the root only to find that it wasn’t even possible to burn it, ‘What is this?’

  The phoenix rose into the air like a herald of fmes, summoning fmes from its fiery feathers and snarling at the surrounding demons. With a loud screech, the fmes around them swirled in a tornado of incinerating inferno. Shrieks filled the air as demons caught fire and were incinerated at a fast pace—well, most of them.

  One got through the inferno tornado.

  An abomination that looked vaguely half man and half bear stepped through the fmes, fire burning on its upper half. Scarlett looked at the beast with shock on her face. Her guardian’s fmes were hot… but she was well aware that there were far hotter things on the continent of Valeria than her guardian’s fmes.

  Several times, they were hot enough to deal with whatever problems she had… but once in a while, she met a creature strong enough to resist them.

  She pulled a bde from her ring and sent it sailing for the demon’s eye. The next bde missed the beast’s eye and sank into the sizzling flesh of its shoulder.

  A chilling roar sent waves of fear through her body right before the bird of fire crashed into the beast’s side.

  Her breath hitched… For a moment, she felt relieved. Her guardian was here to help her. She would be safe. A mere demon was nothing in the face of her fiery B-css guardian.

  There was a mess of teeth and cws before Scarlett watched her guardian get tossed on the ground like a ragdoll and a giant foot descended on the elegant phoenix’s form.

  “NOO…” she yelled, her skin turning cold and pale at the horrific sight before she recalled the guardian. The air beneath the beast sizzled and the guardian vanished in time for the giant foot to stomp down on nothing, sending tremours through the woods.

  Guardians weren’t immortal.

  And while they were indeed powerful otherworldly beings capable of performing incredible feats, they were also companions of their masters… going far beyond the flimsy bonds humans were fond of breaking.

  Scarlett’s heart was beating perhaps faster than it did when Aric mentioned the demons were cloaked. If she didn’t have her guardian… then, what would she have left? Her uncle was dead and she’d left the group of Assassins that had practically raised her. Her guardian was one of the st things that were still the same in her life.

  The fmes surrounding her began to die out. Without the phoenix in the physical world, there was no way it could keep the fmes going.

  [ Little Girl, let me out. They will kill you without my fmes to protect you. ] the guardian yelled out at the girl.

  [ No, you almost died. ] Scarlett shouted back.

  The burning half-bear pulled the bde in its eye out and growled at the girl with hate burning in its one good eye. The demons in the trees and surroundings yelled in response, as though urging the half-bear to tear the girl to shreds.

  [ Stupid child, they’ll kill us both if you don’t let me out. ]

  Tears streamed down Scarlett’s eyes, her mind locked in the world of what-ifs. ‘What if her guardian had indeed died?’ It was a thought far more frightening than death itself.

  [ I don’t care. I’ll die before I see you die because of me. ] she yelled back at her guardian hysterically.

  The phoenix screamed within the locked pocket dimension. It sent fmes flowing through the girl’s body in an attempt to take control of her body. Anything to keep her from throwing her life away… but Scarlett remained rooted to the spot, petrified by the fear of losing her guardian.

  With one final stomp, the half-bear came reeling towards her, fangs drawn and cws ready to rip her to shreds. The creature had endured fmes and even lost an eye. It deserved to end this gnat of a human.

  Scarlett coiled up and looked away as the beast came reeling with mad fury.

  ‘My second day as an adventurer and I’m already staring death in the eye. Some former assassin I was,’ she thought to herself.

  She peered up to see an ugly set of teeth heading for her. Time seemed to slow as she came close to her death. She even managed to smell the beast’s vile breath before it snapped its mouth shut and shot away from her, grunting in immense pain.

  In its pce, the body of a human boy appeared, nding lightly on his feet in front of her. Alistair gritted his teeth as a chain of bones came following him.

  Scarlett’s heart skipped a beat, ‘I’m… not dead.’

  The boy blurred to her side and put his hand on the ground beside the bck vine. After a second of concentration, the ground shuddered and turned soft around her foot, enough for her to pull her leg free. She looked at the boy with an expression of shock.

  “Can you run?” Alistair asked her.

  She nodded, unable to utter a word to him.

  “Then run with everything that you are,” he ordered. Standing, she looked around and noticed demons everywhere. At this point, her body was moving on its own, drawing on the training she went through as an assassin to keep moving even during situations as traumatizing as these ones.

  Demons were everywhere. Was this boy crazy now? There was nowhere left to run.

  Alistair walked ahead of her, spinning the Bone Tiger’s bde-tipped tail in his hand, “I’ll carve a path forward while you run.”

  Scarlett furrowed her eyes at the boy. Had he hit his head and become delusional somehow? She knew he was strong but come on… He didn’t even have a guardian.

  “Alistair, perhaps if you…”

  In the next moment, Alistair blurred out of sight, shooting into the fray of demons with the sword tied to a chain following him like an extension of his arm. The only difference with this chained bde though, was that it seemed to move with a mind of its own, flowing around the boy like a serpent of death.

  The bde plunged into the demon’s bodies and threw them into trees in a seemingly chaotic dance, coiling around the boy like a powerful snake protecting its master as he fought the demons.

  In that chaos that ensued, a path appeared before the girl where no demons walked—or were allowed to walk. It all looked like something out of a storybook.

  Alistair’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts, “What are you waiting for? I can’t hold them back forever. RUN!”