Chapter 11: The tour: final

'Ten people in total.' Zez observed. There were ten of them scattered around the hall. And if what he observed from memory was accurate, then these guys were pretty much fodder. Greaves might be the exception, but then again he is a prodigy with superior spiritual pressure to the rest despite them all being rank 4 exorcists.

'This should be quick,' Zez mused as he strode leisurely into their midst.

"There seems to be a slight misconception here, Greaves," Zez'Thorah said, in a very casual tone, as if trying to correct a minor error. He halted his slow, deliberate steps, and the exorcists visibly tensed up further under his presence. "You all seem to think I'm something you could fight. You think we'll exchange blows and spells and you might even think there's a chance you could win."

"Let me correct that notion."

The exorcists tensed, glancing uneasily at each other as Zez's words sank in. Even Greaves, found his grip tightening on his blade. Zez'Thorah continued to close the distance between them, in slow steps.

Before anyone could react, a dark flame ignited around each of them, seemingly springing to life from nowhere. It was dark-gold, deep, and definitely not natural fire. The flames clung to their bodies, unfazed by the armor or protective sigils they wore, settling on them like a second skin.

The black-gold fire didn't consume them in an instant. It took its time, seeping through their armor, clinging to flesh, and slowly devouring every ounce of strength they had. One by one, their desperate struggles faltered as the flames sank deeper.

As the flames intensified around them, the exorcists didn't hesitate. In trained fashion, they reached within themselves, drawing on their spiritual energy, a last-ditch attempt to douse the unnatural fire devouring their bodies. Hands raised and wills concentrated, shimmering glows of energy wrapped around their bodies, flickering desperately against the relentless blaze.

But the heat intensified. One exorcist seemingly running out of spiritual energy, dropped to his knees, choking as smoke began to rise. He tried to draw more spiritual power from his blade which also served exorcists as a sort of extra battery for spiritual energy—it glowed, infusing him with further energy, but Zez'Thorah's flames disregarded its power, burning through with ease.

"Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh."

One by one, the same began to happen to the others. The screams tore through the corridor, raw and filled with agony, the smell of burning flesh filled everywhere. Each exorcist's voice rose and fell with the agony of the fire, as the flames took their time slowly devouring them. Some were guttural, a deep rasping born of relentless pain, while others broke into hoarse cries, high-pitched and piercing, as the fire reached through their shields and scorched them from within.

Greaves, seeing his squad in agony, snarled with rage. Ignoring the pain lancing up his arms, he lifted his sword and charged, slashing through the flames as he reached Zez'Thorah. Greaves was determined, but Zez'Thorah barely made a slight move to dodge the slash and remained calm.

"You wish you had taken the offer, huh Greaves?" Zez'Thorah asked, in a mocking tone.

Greaves didn't answer, his body radiating with spiritual energy as he swung his sword, slicing through the dense flames surrounding him. He pushed forward, chanting louder, the words reverberating through the corridor as he advanced. The flames pulled back, giving him a narrow opening, but Zez'Thorah only smirked.

'His seems to have an incredible amount of spiritual energy.' Zez'Thorah remarked as the flames reared up behind Greaves's fallen comrades.

With a simple thought, the fire around the remaining exorcists grew wild, consuming them completely. The corridor filled with their final cries as Greaves watched in horror, realizing he was the only one left.

The final flames faded, leaving only ash and silence. Zez'Thorah stepped forward, standing over Greaves. he'd had his fun, so it was time to wrap it up, Or so he thought.

Zez raised the flame intensity around Greaves, preparing to bring his hellish fire to its final round when, suddenly, everything shifted. The world around him began to slow as if the playback speed of reality was slowed down, and then it stopped — utterly, completely stopped. The air itself froze, particles hanging as if someone had pressed pause on existence. Sound ceased, leaving an unnatural silence that pressed down on everything, and the only movement remaining was Zez'Thorah himself, standing amid the eerie suspended world.

He turned his attention to Greaves, feeling something wrong — profoundly off. His flames around Greaves began to recede, not flickering or burning out but reversing, as though time itself was rewinding. The fire rewound, unburning itself from Greaves' flesh, the burns on his skin reversing leaving him intact and unscathed as he had been when he arrived on the floor. The exorcist's injuries disappeared; his skin smoothed, as he stood upright, the previous agony on his face replaced by a calm nonchalant look. Zez'Thorah sensed something disturbingly different. It definitely wasn't Greaves in that body anymore.

A thick, overpowering presence filled the room, centered in Greaves' body, he couldn't really see it yet, but he could feel it. It felt like staring at an ocean, powerful and indifferent. Greaves' eyes opened, but they were not his own; they were black, pitch black, with an otherworldly glow that felt far beyond mortal comprehension.

"Fascinating," came a voice from Greaves' mouth, echoing like several dozen voices layered atop each other, not loud but it carried a sort of authority. "You seem to be completely unaffected by my manipulation of time in this area." The entity inside Greaves tilted his head, studying Zez with an almost clinical curiosity. "It takes an entity with considerable power to be unaffected."

Zez'Thorah remained calm, his spiral shifting in response as he probed the presence before him. He could feel the foreign energy radiating out, a boundless force that bent the very fabric of reality to its whim. It was not just powerful; it felt ancient, indifferent, as though it had witnessed eons pass and civilizations crumble without care. Whatever had taken over Greaves, it was something beyond the realm of human capability or even the standard spiritual boundaries he'd sensed in the other creatures here.

"And who might you be?" Zez'Thorah calmly asked, his voice rippling through the frozen air, carrying a touch of his own superior resonance. He did not hide his interest, he was undoubtedly cautious, but for some reason, he wasn't really scared or anything like that. Perhaps he was now incapable of fear as his soul was changed on a molecule level upon his transmigration.

The entity looked through Greaves' eyes, an amused smile forming on his borrowed lips. "I'm known by different names to different beings. But for the sake of formality, I usually go by... Dave."

Zez'Thorah paused, he was a bit surprised not by the name itself but by the fact that such an ordinary name was attached to the one before him. 'Dave, huh?' Zez didn't know what he was expecting, but it sure wasn't no Dave.

"So Dave, I don't know what you are, but I'd like to know why you've come here now?" Zez asked.

"While I can't exactly explain my being to you now, I can tell you why I came" Still wearing a smile, he replied. "To put it simply, I owe a favor," he said, glancing at Greaves' form as if it were something delicate. "To the grandfather of this... Greaves, actually. So what requested was that I intervene just once, should his grandson ever face certain death."

"So you're here to save him. You don't care that I roasted the others here?"

"Oh, them?" Dave laughed, pointing to one of the charged corpses. "Although I do have a kind of partnership with the Exorcist Order, I generally do not care about the death of inconsequential mortals."

"Is that so?" Zez asked a bit perplexed "But you care about a favor owed to a mortal?"

Dave shrugged casually. "A deal's a deal, right? even one made with a human. I do owe him that much." He paused, eyeing Zez with an unreadable expression. "What about you though, where are you from? You're unaffected by the flow of time, so I can't glean much about you, past, present, or future." He paused. "How does a being as powerful as yourself, be captured and bound for so long by humans? Care to satisfy my curiosity a little."

"Not really, no," Zez replied resolutely. "So, what's the plane here, Dave? What happens now?"

Dave chuckled in amusement. "Well you seem rather determined to leave, so I'll let you get back to that — for now — I'll take Greaves and everything else somewhere safe." He replied. "I'm confident we'll meet again at a later date... Zez'thorah" He concluded.

____

Dave raised his hand, and a finger snap echoed through the frozen air, everything vanished—instantly, completely. In one heartbeat, Zez'Thorah found himself utterly alone. Where just a moment before the room had been littered with flames and scorched bodies, and the faint flickers of spiritual energy, now there was...nothing. Silence settled in the air as if the world had reset itself.

The corpses of Greaves' squad, every bloodstain and scorch mark, hell he couldn't even feel Donovan in the facility—all gone. It was as if they had never even been there. Even the other entities seemed to have vanished too, as he couldn't detect any presence in the locked chambers.

Dave's power had restructured the entire space in a heartbeat, stripping the entire facility of everything it once contained just a second moments ago.

Then, as suddenly as it had stopped, time flowed back into motion, filling the silence with the hum of the facility around him. But Zez remained still, contemplating the situation he had just witnessed. He knew that this world was bound to have powerful beings, but what he had just experienced raised the stakes significantly. He wasn't really sure if he could do anything had Dave been here to fight him. But it matters little, as he knew he would be growing significantly more sooner rather than later.

'At least the purification won't be happening now.' He thought. Since it could only be triggered by the warden, he did not have to be worried about it now. The lockdown still remained though.

'Instead of punching my way out from floor to floor, might as well blow this tin can off the face of the Earth.' Zez decided, knowing what he wanted to do was pretty straightforward.