Kurt rushed in towards the Aura's vessel, darting between dryads and shamans who were either running or rolling in the ground screaming, depending on whether a dryad had gotten to them or not. As he passed by one of the wooden poles, which were each slightly thinner than his thigh, he grabbed it with his free hand, yanking it off the ground (which was pretty easy, since it had been planted just a half foot or so) and throwing it to one side.

  The length of wood drew an arc into the air for a seond or two before the ropes tying it to its kin reached their maximun length, yanking it to a stop and a fall. So great was this pull, however, that half the poles forming the circle were partially unrooted, and they fell tumbling down soon after.

  The emanation of Red Aura grew even more unsteady, bulging and growing brighter in a way that spoke not of an increase in power, but of a decrease in density and efficiency.

  It was still bright enough to nearly blind Kurt, who had to partially cover his eyes with his free hand to see where he was going. He reached the black box, and though the roaring and glowing of the red flames around him left him greatly disoriented, they did not hurt him in any way. The Auras were powers of reinforcement, after all. Thet only had power when manifested through living flesh.

  Without daring to look within the box, lest he actually go blind, Kurt raised his sword above head with two hands, looking almost like he was planting a flag, and flared his Od just a little above the safe limit.

  He brought his sword down, planting it at a random, near the edge spot of the box's bottom. The clang of metal hitting (and rending through) metal told him he had failed. Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Kurt yanked his sword free, rising it to try again...

  And immediately moving it to his left, blocking the red fist that the scream announced. The flat of his blade caught the shinning knuckles of the stranger, making a sound almost like a gong's. Memories of his fight with MacArthur appeared before Kurt, guiding him into not trying to match the blow for strength. Kurt heeded this instinct, and jumped back and away from the assailant, landing ten feet behind.

  He nearly landed atop a downed shaman whose red robes had been punctured as though by needles and stained with small patches of blood. The woman was moaning in pain, and she barely noticed Kurt, which was fair enough since Kurt barely noticed her. His eyes where fixed somewhere else.

  Standing right besides the Aura's container and engulfed by its flames was the silhoute of the head shaman, identified through his staff. The man rose that staff with a scream, and planted it on the ground. The chaotic surge of Red Aura focused momentarily, forming into a spire that stabbed into the dirt like a pile driver, sending a pulse of red energy along the ground. The energy slowed when it passed through the vegetation, suffusing it. Kurt saw one of Mila's geckos catch the pulse, which caused it to convulse and for the spirits animating it to dispel, 'killing' the dryad.

  It, and every other one, given how far the pulse reached.

  The figure stepped towards Kurt slowly, stepping out the crimson maelstrom of energy, and carrying that same red within his flesh.

  The man was slightly shorter than Kurt, and his face was marked by wrinkles and a somewhat unkempt balck beard that covered his entire neck from sight. In normal circumstances, those would have been the only wothwhile details about the man's appearance.

  These were not normal circumstances.

  The man looked, in one word, swollen: his shoulders, chest, arms and legs were all bulging to nearly twice the size the should have had, filling and nearly straining the man's once loose robe. His hands and face were the only visible patches of skin, aand they were both suffused and shinning with crimson power. The veins at the back of his hands, the ones that only start sticking out when you're old, looked engorged and thick as fingers. The man's eyes were on the same state, with their sclera so blood-shot that it nearly melted visually with the surrounding red skin.

  Before that picture, the screen was almost an afterthought.

  Supreme Shaman of the Red Horn Cult

  Jedidiah Musser

  LV:36

  "Hello, Mr. Musser," Kurt said. "I guess you know why I'm here, right?"

  The man gritted his teeth, baring them. "You are here to steal it, aren't you? You want to take my Aura!"

  Kurt sighed, shaking his head. "I'm not here to take it, you moron. I'm here to release it, and to take you down." Kurt looked at the man, his eyes sharp with hatred. "It seems like it's gonna be easy though. Your security is rather lacking. What's the matter? Don't know how to defend your cult without your spies giving you a heads up?"

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  "What?" Jedidiah spat, his red eyes squinting. "The hell are you talking about, you brat?"

  This took Kurt by surprise. Wasn't this guy the cult's boss? How could he not know about what the masked man had told Mr. Anderson?

  "The guy with the bronze mask," Kurt said. "You know him? Is he part of your cult?"

  Jedidiah frowned. "What bussines do you have with Hernest?"

  Hernest? Wasn't the guy called Trismegistus? It was a very weird name for a person to have, Kurt knew that much. But it was the one his screens had said. Had they given him false information for the first time?

  No. It could not be that. There was no way that Trismegistus guy could have cooked up a way to trick his power just like that. At least not with just the second hand account Conrad had given him. Plus, there was...something telling Kurt that his screens could not be wrong. He could not disbelief their information any more than he could his own eyes.

  A worrying thought crept in his brain: since when is that? He was so wary of these powers at the beginning, so what had changed? Kurt didn't know. It was just now that he stopped to think about his powers and their origin since the trip had started. Somewhere, in between his birthday and now, amidst all the battles and constant use of his power, a barrier had been broken down between his soul and these abilities, and Kurt know saw them as part of himself with a clarity that could not be artificially implanted.

  These were his powers, and the masked man's name was Trismegistus.

  "That's the name he gave you?" Kurt said, then scoffed. "It seems that he has been keeping more than one secret from you, then. The DSP is on your asses, and 'Herbert' knew. Hell, he has been working with the Blue Aura's wielder. Did you know that? Uh?!"

  The dumbfounded face the shaman made told Kurt that he did not. The man looked away, and his face twisted, both through rage and Red Aura, into something demonic. His grip on his staff tightened so much that the implement snapped in two like a dry twig, both its halves falling on the ground.

  "You really know nothing, uh?" Kurt asked. "Do you even know where that guy is right now, you dumb fuck?"

  The shaman screamed in fury, and charged at Kurt with his fist above head. Memories from his fight with McArthur flooded Kurt's brain again in deja vú, allowing him to compare both foes. This guy was somewhat less clumsy than McArthur had been, though that seemed to be less about genuine martial skill and more about the fact that the shaman's body wasn't about two feet taller than it had been the day before.

  He was also much slower than McArthur had been. Much, much slower.

  Kurt didn't even try to block or sidestep the blow. Instead, he saw it come with calm and, when it entered his range, slashed at it almost lazily, bringing his sword up in an arc and then letting slump over his shoulder.

  Jedidiah's charge died then and there. The man planted his feet on the dirt, stopping himself before the rest of his body entered the sword's range, and clutched his bleeding fist. In the ground between both combatant's feet, two severed fingers lied. Ring and middle.

  This guy is weak, thought Kurt as he approached the man. He made a point of stomping on the severed fingers, splattering them. This guy, who killed an innocent person for their Aura, whose cult has caused so much fucking destruction across the country, is weak as hell.

  That thought made Kurt even more furious than he already was. This entire trip, and all of the bumps on the road they had faced through it, were this man's direct responsability. The breaking demon seal in Boston, that rogue sorceress and her familiar, and, Kurt realized, that vampire-wannabe alchemist who had kidnapped McArthur and turned Buck's pack into direwolfs (how else could he have gotten the Red Aura?), where because of this guy.

  And the bastard had the gall of being this weak. This fucking anti-climatic. All the pain and suffering so many innocents had gone through, and tthe responsible was some narcissistic old man who broke down in just one blow.

  Those thoughts made Kurt's temples rattle, and pressure acumulate behind his eyes.

  He drove a fist into the man's stomach, doubling him over, and then slapped him with the flat of his blade, seinding him flying towards the Aura's box. His robbed back hit the metallic container with a knell, driving the air out his lungs.

  Kurt was on him before that breath ended, and his hand closed on the man's head before a new one could start. Through this grip, Kurt forced the man back on his feet, putting his head at the perfect height for the headbutt Kurt delivered next. In the brief instant the impact took, Kurt felt the man's nose pop before his forehead. The shamn's head and torse were thrown back with enough force to bend one of the boxe's sides, enough to act like a sort of seat for the slumping, whimpering shaman.

  The Red Aura around them grew thinner still, losing most of its glow. The ritual had been screwed up enough that even that waste was going away.

  "You killed a person," Kurt told the old man, not even sure if he could hear him. "You killed someone just to steal their magic, then set up this whole cult... and you have the gall to go down this easy?! Stop whimpering, you old fuck! You have questions to answer!" Kurt grabbed the man by the neck of his robe, forcing their faces close. The Red Aura was vanishing from the shaman's body, leaving nothing but ached and battered flesh behind. The level above his head dropped to an even more dissapointing 22. "What was their name? Did you even bother to learn it before you killed them?!"

  "He's not dead!" the man cried. Tears poured from his eyes, and blood did the same from his crooked nose. "For the love of God, I didn't kill anybody! Just look!"

  The man gestured with his head at the bottom of the box, from which the Aura was beginning to disperse. Kurt leaned in to look at the Aura's vessel, expecting to see a big red jewel or some thing of the style.

  He found a mutilated corpse instead.

  The entire thing was positively suffused with Red Aura, so much that the corpse looked like it had been painted on the world with neon light. It had no arms below the shoulder, and no legs beneath the knee. An Iv had been plugged to the right shoulder, its bag janging from one of the box's walls. The head had been stripped of its scalp and ears, and the eyes and mouth had been swen shut. Entire sections of the chest had turned into black, hard wood, like a growth of obsidian emanatin from the heart,

  Based on the length of the naked and skinny torso and half-legs, the person could not have been any taller than four and a half feet before this was done to them.

  Before that picture, the screen was almost an afterthought.

  Bearer of the Red Aura

  Eric Clark

  LV: 83

  He had a screen. Dead bodies did not have screens.

  Something twisted violently in Kurt's guts, and he was forced to double over and lean on the box's edge for support, which made the horror before him grow closer. Bile rose to Kurt's mouth, burning his throat and nostrils. His eyes began to water.

  "See?" Jedidiah called. "He's not dead! I-I just-urgh!"

  Kurt's hand went from robe to throat, clenching with nearly the same abandon. He pushed himself away from the casket (That was all it was in his eyes now. A casket) and dragged the...the thing that had started this with him. Its face redened and its eyes teared, hands going for Kurt's wrist in an innefectual attemp to pry the throat free.

  Kurt wanted to kill this thing. He wanted to kill it more than he had wanted to kill anything in his life.

  He threw the bastard to the ground, drawing a series of dry, heavy coughs, and stood before it with his sword raised, ready to fall on its exposed neck like a guillotine. There was no one standing around them. Half the shamans had seemingly runned away into the wilderness rather than face the attack to their ritual, while the other half was lying on the floor in diverse states of beateness.

  Kurt realized distantly that he was facing a moral intersection, that he was to choose whether he killed the so-called human to his feet when it couldn't do him any harm, or if he restrained the urge of play jury,judge and executioner and left the rest for the DSP to deal with.

  With what this bastard had done, there was no doubt he would be executed even if he did that, so the question was really about whether hated this man more than he did killing.

  After a moment of deliberation, he had his answer.

  Kurt brought his sword down, sinking its tip on the earth.