The world had become a poorly ventilated oven, and David was the main course. He stumbled through a landscape of smoke, heat, and the distinct, lingering pain of having ever boarded that plane.

  Everything was on fire, and the trees, the great, tall demonic redwoods, seemed to be loving it. Their bark refused to burn; it glowed brighter with a satisfied, infernal warmth, as if they were basking in a particularly pleasant sauna. The smaller, normal trees were less enthusiastic, being enthusiastically consumed into splinters and ash.

  A fireball the size of a small wine cask slammed into the ground ten feet to his left. The concussion lifted him off his feet, and he landed in a roll that was more frantic stumble than tactical maneuver, his ears ringing a high-pitched symphony of protest. Damnit, he thought, spitting out a mouthful of soot and what he hoped was just dirt, I need my shield. Bad. Or a particularly large idiot to sacrifice themselves for me to escape.

  “David! Over here!”

  Corbin was crouched behind one of the obliging, fireproof redwoods, his face a mask of soot and grim desperation. His sidearm was out, but his eyes kept darting to the empty indicator. Useless. Evans was a few yards away, pressing himself against another tree, a jagged shard of metal that might have once been part of the airship’s galley clutched in his hand like a sacred talisman. Mara, her sword held in a white-knuckled grip, was the only one who looked like she belonged in this particular circle of hell.

  “Better than nothing,” David croaked, scrambling behind the tree with Corbin. The bark was warm, like fresh bread, which was a profoundly disconcerting sensation.

  “This is no time for fucking jokes!” Evans snapped, his voice cracking. “We need to move!”

  Well, yes, David mused internally. That does seem to be the general plan. Stating the obvious did so little to change the itinerary. Aloud, he said, “It’s a werebeast warlock, level seven, if the floating text in my vision is to be believed. Overqualified for us, don’t you think?”

  The creature in question was a mountain of matted fur and corded muscle, standing a good nine feet tall. It moved with a casual, predatory sloth through the inferno, its surroundings warping behind a visible force field that shimmered like a heat haze. It hadn’t even bothered to look at them directly since its initial, playful volley of fire. It was toying with them, the way a cat toys with a spider before the final, messy pounce.

  Another fireball, this one a sustained stream of liquid Prometheus, washed over their position. The redwood absorbed it without complaint, but the smaller, normal trees around them vaporized. The heat was immense, a physical weight trying to crush the air from his lungs.

  David pressed his back against the burning trunk, bark cracking under him, flame crawling along the edges. He tried to breathe and his mouth filled with fire. Heat tore through his throat; it felt like swallowing molten glass. Pain spiked down into his chest, sharp enough to make his eyes water. He doubled over, coughing hard until blood hit his tongue, metallic and hot.

  A sudden chill ran up his spine, his lungs raw from the heat, throat torn by smoke. He froze, panting, half-believing it a hallucination. Energy Affinity. The phrase blinked through the noise. The skill had sounded vague on purpose, and maybe that mattered.

  The skill’s name had said energy, “all energy.” He’d assumed magic, the glowing, mystical kind. But heat was energy too. Energy meant a lot of things. Everything that moved or burned carried heat. If I can take one, I can take the others. But then what? Become a human torch forever? Get a ‘Heat’ stat? David would rather not have to spend the rest of his new life naked and on fire, but anything was better than being dead.

  A dangerous theory, one test away from suicide. Either he’d absorb the fire out of existence or turn himself into charcoal with a hypothesis attached.

  He braced and inhaled sharply, just a little—enough for it to feel like drinking hot coffee before it cooled.

  This is… profoundly unpleasant, David thought, feeling his eyebrows threaten to singe off. But then something odd happened. As he sucked in a searing gasp of air, his lungs, which had been screaming in protest, did a sudden and complete about-face. The pain vanished, replaced by a strange, cool influx of… power. The air around his face momentarily lost its blistering quality. He glanced down at his hand, which had been exposed to the wash of superheated air. The skin, which should have been blistering, was merely pink. And it was cooling down fast.

  Oh, David thought, a slow, dawning realization cutting through the panic. I’m a battery. A very specific, very convenient type of battery. It wasn't a very complex epiphany, but a simple, bodily understanding. Fire in, not-death out.

  He needed to test this. During a brief lull in the bombardment, he deliberately extended his left hand from behind the cover, palm open towards a nearby patch of burning brush. The heat was instant and sharp, a searing pain that made his teeth clench. He focused on breathing it in, a short, sharp inhalation. Again, the same process: agony, then a sudden siphon, a draining sensation. The pain faded, replaced by that same thrumming energy in his veins. The flames in that small patch guttered and died, as if the very heat had been stolen from them. A pocket of cool air settled around his hand.

  “Mara! your sword!” he said, his voice now calm, analytical.

  “What? Why?” she demanded, her eyes wide with battle-fever.

  “Because I have a theory, and it requires a pointy object that isn’t currently holstered in someone’s empty gun!” He yelled through the flames.

  She hesitated for a fraction of a second behind her cover, then, with a frustrated grunt, tossed him the weapon. It was an old blade, balanced, simple, ancient-looking. He caught it by the hilt. Right. Step one: acquire pointy stick. Step two: figure out how to stick it in the invulnerable murder-beast.

  “What’s the plan?” Corbin yelled over the roar of the flames.

  “The plan is to not die,” David replied, peering around the tree. His Battle Sense was a gut-deep, muscle-twitch feeling, a phantom pressure behind his eyes showing him the ghost of a future half-a-second or two hence. He saw the demon’s arm begin to rise, the air coalescing into a knot of heat. He ducked back just as the spot where his head had been was vaporized. It always pauses for a half-breath after a sustained blast. It’s smiling. Arrogance. Thinks it’s untouchable.

  Blood slid down his chin, throat raw from smoke. No guarantee strength scales evenly with levels, he thought. Could spike, could go exponential. For all I know, that thing’s a very hairy Superman. The idea sat heavy, absurd and entirely possible. Can’t take chances. Need the shield.

  Potential fire-proofing or no, he desperately needed his shield. It was lying thirty feet away, a dented, demon-forged disc of metal near a smoldering crater. Thirty feet in this was a marathon.

  “I’m going for my shield,” he announced. “Do try to look distracting. In a non-lethal, for-you, kind of way.”

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  He didn’t wait for a reply. He was moving. Sprinting, each step boosted by desperation and a strong desire to remain uncooked. His Battle Sense fed him a series of visceral, pre-cognitive twinges. Dive left. Now. Roll. Now. Stop. He moved in a stuttering, chaotic rhythm, a dance partner to death’s own lead. A fireball blossomed to his right, the heat washing over him. For a second, it was agony, his clothes smoldering. Then he inhaled, a deep, deliberate breath, and the agony was siphoned away, converted into a thrumming, internal reservoir of power. He felt the air shift, like he stood in a cold breeze. The smoldering fabric snuffed out. A pocket of unnaturally cool air followed him like a personal bubble of autumn.

  He slid the last few feet, his fingers closing around the familiar grip of his shield. The moment he lifted it, he felt more complete. Right. Pointy stick and big metal disc. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  He scrambled back, his body humming with stolen energy. He felt… good. Alarmingly good. The hellscape around him was lessening from bonfire and staring to feel like all-you-can-eat power buffet. With a murderous invulnerable chef that wanted to kill him.

  “Your arm…” Evans stammered, staring at David’s previously scorched shoulder.

  “Hm? Oh, that. Just a flesh wound. A formerly well-done flesh wound, now medium-rare at best.” He flexed the arm. The burns were visibly healing as the heat energy within him was consumed. His arm worked perfectly. Fascinating.

  He looked at Mara’s sword in his hand. Let’s see if this works. He focused on that internal reservoir of power, the demonic energy he’d been allotted and more–the thermal energy he’d just stolen. Heat energy. He pushed it down his arm, into the blade. He expected the metal to glow. Instead, it began to vibrate faintly, humming with an energetic, deadly, constantly moving potential. Excellent. Pointy stick is now a vibrating, pointy stick. Now the hard part.

  “Right,” David said, his tone conversational. “I’m going to go and have a word with it.”

  “You’ll die!” Mara shouted.

  “I would’ve thought so, but I’ve just filled up on negative calories, so I’m feeling optimistic.” He handed her his shield. “Here. You'll need this more than I will. Try to look very, very distracting."

  She stared at him, then at the shield, then back at him as if he’d just grown a second, equally insane head. But she took it. It was logical. He didn’t need it for what came next.

  Evan’s expression was a blend of grin acceptance, fear, and resolve. "What are you going to do?” He yelled.

  "Something profoundly ill-advised, but statistically necessary," he said, his tone breezy. "Corbin, Mara—make some noise. Anything that makes a nine-foot-tall murder wizard forget to look behind him."

  The two marshals and fellow passenger didn't need further encouragement. Evans fired the last few rounds in the gun at the demon’s impervious force field, the bullets vaporizing with pathetic puffs of light. Corbin hurled his metal shard, shouting obscenities. Mara, now armed with David’s shield, banged it against a rock, creating a resonant clang that echoed through the infernal forest, running between cover. The werebeast warlock, amused by the gnats' sudden fervor, turned its full attention toward them, its force field distorting air without a single flaw.

  Perfect, David thought. Nothing like a collective suicide pact to open a window of opportunity.

  He moved, using the roaring flames and the towering, fireproof redwoods as cover. His Battle Sense was a series of gut feelings—duck now, pause here, move fast between those two burning shrubs. He was a ghost in the machine of this hellscape, his footsteps silent on the ash-covered ground. The demon was thoroughly entertained by the others’ desperate performance, its back partially turned.

  He was almost there, close enough to see the individual matted hairs on the creature’s back, when the demon’s head suddenly swiveled a full one-eighty degrees. Its eyes, pools of molten malice, locked directly onto him. A slow, horrific smile spread across its bestial features. It had known. It had just been waiting.

  Ah, David mused. So it's that kind of party.

  David stood his ground, close enough to close the distance, far away enough that it wouldn’t bother to approach, it had favored streams of fire or fireballs at this distance, even as it pursued them. His legs were full of energy, ready to bolt if it chose the worst option, a fireball—he wasn’t willing to test if he could absorb explosions faster than they could obliterate him, or if he could bear explosions at all.

  With Mara’s humming sword held loosely at his side, he took a deep, theatrical breath. “Go on then,” he muttered, too low for anyone else to hear. “Give me your worst.”

  It did.

  The demon didn't bother with a fireball. It opened its maw and unleashed a concentrated torrent of pure hellfire, point-blank, intending to reduce him to atoms. The heat was instantaneous, a wall of annihilation. A tsunami of flame, a continuous, roaring jet meant to erase him from existence. David planted his feet, looked directly into the oncoming annihilation, and breathed in as deeply as he could manage. He couldn’t hear anything, but he imagined Mara, Evans, and even Corbin screaming and crying theatrically at his apparent demise.

  The pain was beyond anything he had felt before. It was the sun poured directly into his veins. For a terrifying second, he thought he’d miscalculated, that his capacity had a limit and he had just found it. His skin blackened. His clothes turned to ash. But he kept breathing, a desperate, focused inhalation. And then everything shifted. The pain didn't lessen so much as it was converted. The heat flooding into him was transmuted into pure, raw power. The blackened skin healed over in seconds, new and pink. The air around him froze, a pocket of absolute zero in the heart of the inferno. Frost crackled on the ground at his feet. The demon’s river of fire split around him, repelled by the sudden, intense cold radiating from his body.

  He was a void. A drain. The demon’s eyes, previously alight with cruel amusement, widened in confusion. It increased the output, the force of the blast digging a trench in the earth in front of David. It didn’t matter. He just absorbed it all, his body a perfect conduit, his internal reservoir swelling to a blinding, critical mass. He felt like a thunderstorm contained in skin.

  His clothes incinerated into nothing. Then, his physiology engaged. More than neutralization; it was affinity—inhaled, consumed, converted. The blisters healed over in the space of a heartbeat, his skin smoothing out to a healthy pink. The air around him flash-froze, frost crystallizing on the scorched earth at his feet. The demon’s flame, once a roaring river, was now just a light snack.

  He felt the power surge through him, a dizzying, euphoric rush of stolen energy. The sword in his hand began to vibrate, humming like a plucked guitar string, the metal straining under the contained inferno.

  He didn’t want to test its reaction time, or pose, or walk slowly, or say something cool, or any of the other profoundly stupid things people did in movies when faced with an existential threat. The theory was simple, a bedrock of practical violence: in real life, if you had to kill a superman, you shot him in the head and kept shooting until the body was cold. Then you asked questions and twitched anytime the light hit the corpse wrong. You didn't take chances. You didn't allow for a single, solitary second of recovery.

  The demon’s smile before the flames hit—a brief, contemptuous curl of its lip—was the only signal he needed. It wasn't a cue for anything dramatic; but a target indicator. Right. Smugness. The universal tell for an impending lapse in tactical awareness. Alright. One shot.

  David poured all of the stolen, churning energy into his legs and his sword. It no longer felt like flexing a muscle; instead, it was like channeling a star, a contained, violent redirection of fusion. He didn’t so much as step forward as he exploded, literally exploded, forward. The world blurred into a smear of fire and shadow, his body moving unseen through the flame, a phantom streaking through conflagration. He didn’t care to see comprehension dawn in the demon’s eyes—nor did he. He didn’t see anything but a structural weakness at the junction of its head and shoulders.

  He crossed the distance faster than his own fear could catch up.

  The blade struck. Again. Again. Each swing tore through sound, through resistance, through the force field that had once looked untouchable. He didn’t count the hits—he didn’t trust counting.

  When the thing’s body fell apart in front of him, he kept cutting until muscle turned to pulp and movement lost definition. His breath rattled like glass in a furnace. Stay dead. Stay dead.

  The world came back in noise—Mara’s voice first, then Evans, both raw and desperate. “David, stop. It’s over.”

  He froze mid-swing, chest heaving, blade shaking in his grip. The body lay still. Steam rose. For a second, he waited for it to twitch. It didn’t. He let out a breath that scraped the inside of his throat.

  [You have defeated a Infernal Warlock Lvl 7]

  [Level Up: Lvl 4 > Lvl 5]

  He allocated the points with a thought: five to Constitution, seven to Demonic Energy. The talisman around the demon's neck cracked audibly.

  David stood naked and unscathed, steam rising off his skin, the hilt of the now-vaporized sword clutched in one hand. He looked at it for a second, then let it drop. Evans, Corbin, and Mara stared at him as if he had just rewritten the rules of reality through immensely poor decision-making and something that looked like bravery, but absolutely wasn’t. Their faces hung somewhere between relief and existential horror.

  “Uh,” David said, eyeing the corpse that used to be a god. “So… anyone feeling generous about pants?”