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Appearing on the lawn of some mini town I looked around, there were several buildings around, a church and a chapel, the largest building had a giant hole where a couple of rooms from the third to the ground floor had collapsed. A couple of dozen metres away from me stood a giant bear made up of black smoke with red glowing eyes. Upon noticing the enemy, I immediately activated a small rune circle that gave my eyes true sight for a dozen seconds. True sight allows a mage to see in several dimensions at once, and frankly, it's not the best kind. If its use in nature is still tolerable, but in cities it becomes a good horror film.
Our whole world is filled with free energy, and many not especially dangerous small parasites like to break into our world to feed off this energy. The cities of earth are an elite feeding ground for them. If any ordinary person suddenly got a true gaze, he would most likely go crazy in a couple of months from what he saw. All the air of the city, and all the people are just surrounded by a bunch of energy life forms from simple parasites feeding on the energy scattered in the air to dangerous creatures that can attach themselves to a person and slowly kill them. They cause disease by siphoning off life energy or make the victim depressed and slowly feast on negativity and then fatten up heavily at the point of suicide. And the best part is their appearance, when you are walking through the city, and opposite you pass people who have huge insect-like entities sitting on their heads, picking at people's brains or on their faces an analogue of a starfish that doesn't let a person see the colours of the world. Mages, of course, could try to overcome all this, but how many mages in the world 3-5 million? And people are billions and such dangerous entities for each city will be 10-20 million. The only fact that saves people is the selectivity of these creatures. Such pests first of all choose strong in the energetic plan of people, because from such can be fed for years if not decades. Also part of humanity is simply immune to such weak parasites and to their aura they can not even cling.
Also, 30-40% of their population is not particularly intelligent and flies to places of maximum energy charge. And these are 90% of the houses of mages who have defences against such small and weak scum. So this part of the parasites simply crashes into the barrier around the place where the mage lives.
Looking at the bear with my true gaze, I whistled. Just as I thought it wasn't its true appearance, in general demons below the higher ones usually don't have their physical appearance in the material world. They usually attach themselves to some creature or object and change it into a more familiar puppet to control. In front of me stood a rather interesting energy construct in the shape of a bear, created by someone in this town. Inside the bear was an eszer parasite equal to the top of a weak demon's powers, but because of the energy construct he was summoned into, this eszer was already at the middle level. Usually eszers are quite non-aggressive and just slowly suck the positive emotions out of the victim, usually they feed on one person no more than a month and then move on to the next victim. Taking into account that people who fell under their influence almost never died especially dangerous these parasites, no one considered, but looking at the human arm lying a metre away from me, this one is apparently a little different.
-Well, Bear, let's see how you feel about fire. - Said Pierce and his body became covered with white wool and his hands were enveloped in hellfire.
Assignment received
"Nightmare Alive."
Defeat the demon bear and don't let any of the teenagers die.
Additional Quest. : find out the purpose of the creation of this place.
Reward for completion: hidden.
Punishment for failure: lose some of the trust of the Ancient One and Kaecilius.
Quickly grasping the gist of it, I swung away from the pop-up and rushed at the bear. The demon, on the other hand, went for the girl who had jumped out of the ruined building. The girl herself had a rather interesting aura with mystical demon overtones. The blonde was holding an energy sword in her right hand, which was literally glowing from the concentration of magic in the blade. And looking at it made me want to switch from the teddy bear to this fool. I estimated that she had the reserve of a couple of masters and yet she was wasting 70-80% of her available energy reserves. She simply couldn't even contain the energy already invested in the attack, at this rate this real blonde would be exhausted in 2-3 minutes of combat. There was also a small dragon flying around her, which as I can see was tied to the girl in the most manhanded way possible. For such strong magical creatures our world has too low background, so getting here they either live in energy-dense places or being familiars of mages get a personal channel to their original dimension. And only for really hard battles the familiars use the sorcerer's reserve. But here the feeding depends on the wench and considering her level of energy expenditure the little one most likely spends 99% of the time in coma for the sake of preserving those crumbs of magic received through such a "cool" channel of communication with the mistress.
While the bear was turning to the blonde I managed to accelerate and under the switched on system Take It All by Valley Of Wolves with all the force I could I slammed my fist into the demon's face. The force of the attack dragged the bear a couple of dozen metres towards the church.
-Who the hell are you? - Noticing Raina asked the blonde.
-Allied, we'll talk after we deal with the demon. - Pierce replied, preparing to receive the bear's attacks.
After my attack, a burning stain appeared on the demon's face, and it was clear from his furious growl that he was able to fully appreciate the damage from my flames. Concentrating on me, he immediately rushed to the ram, wanting to swat the new enemy. But, to the demon's surprise, I didn't dodge and swung my paw, soaked with the desire to stamp me into the neighbouring building I took standing in place.
-Clench your teeth, bitch! - Pierce shouted, holding the bear's paw with one hand.
Pulling the demon's carcass towards me, I could hear its left paw burning. Covering my right hand with several times more concentrated cover of flame, I punched through the demon's clenched jaw breaking its 5-6 fangs. The girl didn't slow down either and immediately after my strike she plunged her blade into the bear's head. This attack logically should have ended the fight, but for a demon, especially an energy demon, even the loss of its head could not be fatal. Therefore, despite the pierced head, the carcass stretched out on the lawn he had destroyed and began to get back on its feet.
-Why isn't he dead? - The girl panicked, barely holding on to the monster's head.
-It doesn't matter. - Replied Pierce drinking a weighty sphere of fire on his right hand. -Survive it! - Shouted Raine shoving his hand into the gap between his teeth and releasing all the stored energy inside.
The demon's body immediately began to glow and after a couple of seconds began to burn from the inside out. A dozen seconds later, there was no trace of the demon-bear's body.
-Powerful. Who are you? - Having withdrawn the sword and stopped feeding the energy of her familiars immediately turned into a cloth toy asked the girl.
-Mage. - Pierce replied, cancelling the address in front of the girl's surprised gaze.
-И? You work for that doctor? - Looking suspiciously at Ryan the girl asked.
-I have no idea who you're talking about and I don't have time to look into it at the moment. There should have been some lower demons here, but I don't sense any yet. - Pierce said as he spun round in place.
-If you mean the creepy creatures with only one mouth instead of a face, then we've destroyed them. - The blonde replied.
-Who are we?
-The mutants studying here. - Already more calmly replied the girl.
-So this place was created to train you? I didn't know anyone other than Xavier had a school like this. - Looking round the building Pierce said.
-Who?
The creator of the X-Men.
-We'll figure it out later, while you gather all the students and staff and I'll check the area for uninvited guests. - Said Rain and without waiting for an answer created a series of platforms under his feet, with the help of which he climbed into the hole broken by the bear.
Exploring this educational institution my doubts about the purpose of its creation only grew. Even without confirmation from the system, I realised that such a set of thick metal doors on titanium pins was too much out of the norm for a school and more suitable for a prison. I looked round the area and found the observation point where a guard should logically be, but apart from a couple of bloody palm prints and a trail leading towards the infirmary I found no one.
The bag with my personal belongings had survived, so I took out a flash drive with a couple of viruses I'd created myself and plugged it into the system, and in ten minutes I had full access to all the information from the hard drives on the base. Only after logging in I realised what I had stumbled upon and who was responsible for the creation of this "school". Essex Corp, created by Nathaniel Essex, better known as Mr Evil or Sinister. An extremely unpleasant individual. He is responsible for the creation of the X-Weapon project and it was with his patronage that Stryker worked.
Essex himself is a mutant and the purpose of his life is the elevation of humanity. And since mutants are the next stage of humans, all his resources were thrown at improving mutants. And to improve them of course he decided with a lot of experiments and a lot of sacrifices. Most of the projects to create the perfect weapon from mutants and mutation enhancement is his work. Nathaniel himself is rarely shown and operates more from the shadows. He is an extremely powerful telepath almost as powerful as Professor X. He also possesses telekinesis, Logan-level regeneration, enhanced strength, stamina and superhuman reflexes. All in all, it's a very unpleasant adversary.After checking the cameras and finding no sign of the lower demons, I looked through the files of the mutants currently in training and shutting down the system, I just took all the hard drives. In principle and without more detailed information about the project and so it could be guessed that this place was created to produce obedient soldiers for Sinestra's personal army.
Mission accomplished
You were able to stop the demon without harming the mutants. You have also fulfilled an additional condition for the first time, because of which the reward will be doubled.
Reward: 50 S.O.; unlocking of the Essence Absorption function (long live farming!); 10000 EX for the demon-bear and the skill of the highest mental level of influence "Oh, Bear".
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