Face The Strange - Chapter 9/11: Zero Hour free porn video

FACE THE STRANGE by Crazy Baron Chapter 9: Zero Hour I blinked a few times as I strove to take in what my eyes were telling me. The abstract, intangible images of the deep sleep or unconsciousness, from which I had just awakened, had been wiped out. Instead of floating through space populated by glowing lights and disincarnate minds, I was sitting in a couch, staring at a large TV that was displaying a paused frame from a movie. Before I could begin to tackle the problem of where I was and what had actually happened, other commonplace sensations came back in a barrage. They instantly convinced me that I indeed continued to exist as a physical being and not a mere non-material ghost, and, to wit, that my soul was still housed in the petite frame of Miss Buffy A. Summers. The hair, the silky skin, the breasts, the slender limbs and the warm, tender little space in my crotch proved this beyond reasonable or unreasonable doubt. One of my first coherent thoughts was that I should have felt distress and sadness at not being back in my own masculine body. However, that idea dissolved without a trace almost immediately, and not only because I had plenty of other things to wonder at. I was simply thrilled to be alive. Despite everything, Buffy had grown on me to such an extent that it made no difference if I had to be her in order to escape an untimely death. The permanent restoration of my old sex and form had become such a remote dream for me that it was not really worth obsessing over. To be honest, I didn't know if I even genuinely wanted that anymore. I stretched my arms, just for the pleasure of possessing them for certain and having the ability to interact with the outside world once more. I was full of confidence, ready and flat out eager to take on and conquer whatever challenge my destiny would throw at me next. The TV looked vaguely familiar to me, as did the desk that stood in the corner, left to the entertainment center. A bowl of popcorn and two soda bottles were waiting on the floor. I ran my gaze over the room, from the huge computer monitor on the desk to the bookcases, from the bed to the multitude of posters pinned to the walls. This was probably a boy's den, I surmised, basically comfortable but in many respects practical rather than overly cozy. If the posters and the action figures on the shelves of the bookcases were anything to go by, the occupant was in his teens and enjoyed science fiction and anime. The obvious answer to the question of his identity came to me right away, but logic and reason made me reject it until I understood that it had to be right, no matter how inexplicable my presence in his room was. The boy was none other than Kenny Taylor, and I was again visiting him--but in his parents' house in Greensville, not his future home, where he would live with his wife Christine more than ten years from now. I briefly puzzled over the picture on the TV screen and the fact that I was seemingly alone, with Kenny and the other Taylors nowhere to be seen. The frame showed a wide shot of a desert, with a city on the horizon and two characters some distance off, walking away from the camera. A third was following them, a small cylinder-shaped robot, whose figure was unmistakable for anyone with so much as a fleeting interest in modern-day popular culture. Thanks to R2-D2, I recognized the film, and then it took scarcely an effort to piece together the rest. This was my so-called date night with Kenny, a couple of days after the fateful Halloween party. Kate had essentially set us up after the boy had met us by chance at the food court of the Chesterton mall. We had watched The Phantom Menace together, as a compromise between my cinematic tastes and his, and I had later had a bit of fun at the expense of a ridiculously flustered Kenny. My discovery made perfect sense, leaving aside one little nagging detail: the date had already taken place once, run its course and ended. It was supposed to belong to the past and stay there. On the other hand, lots of things involving me were decidedly not how they were supposed to be. I could go on an adventure in some non- existent land or dimension (albeit involuntarily), spend days there, meet strange people and wield apparently magical powers, only to be suddenly teleported into another world and find out that the previous reality had little bearing on the new present. Regardless, no jump had taken me back to live through a given moment for a second time. The realities I had been to so far had usually maintained a sort of causality, and in each one of them events flowed from the past into the future, never the other way around. I seemed to have found an exception to the rule. The privacy of the room allowed me to concentrate on thinking, and I did hit upon a hypothesis before long. What if everything since this particular point in time, near the beginning of my "date", had been unreal--a dream, a vision, a telepathic connection to higher powers, or something that had no name in human languages--and I was still here? Maybe I had entered some altered state of consciousness for a few minutes while Kenny was downstairs, and everything since then, from the abortive vacation in Texas, Dan, Cinnamon, Gunner Bill and Derry Darkmane to Sunnydale and the psychiatric ward, had been imaginary. While I couldn't deny that I was wearing the Buffy skinsuit, which meant that the suit definitely did exist, I wasn't an actual Slayer and I had never really staked a vampire or decapitated a demon. There were no such beings, just as there was no Angronok either, or a wormhole in the woods near the old roadside park. Amanda Elkins was going to help me out of the skin tomorrow, and that would be the end of this psychotic three-ring circus for me. In spite of my smug satisfaction with this clever reasoning, a tiny voice at the back of my head sounded a gentle alarm, warning me not to put too much trust in my theory. I duly noted its message, but as I couldn't come up with a better explanation, I allowed myself to relax a little. I would worry about the situation if something happened that gave me an explicit reason to do so, but not otherwise. With the basic ontological lay of the land thus in order, I could turn my thoughts to more immediately relevant and mundane things, and sure enough, one interesting observation struck me in a matter of seconds. I was sexually excited, or to put more bluntly and accurately, horny as hell. There was no evident reason for it, but the heat built up rapidly until I could have eaten a man alive. My nipples hardened inside the bra cups and my mouth was becoming dry. The cute little beast between my legs had woken up and was sending hot pulses all through my body. I had to admit to myself that I needed dick, plenty of it, and preferably fast. There was one person close by who could give me what I wanted. When this date had occurred the first time, I had talked Kenny into rubbing my back and then faked an orgasm as a dumb practical joke. Now, I decided that he owed me a real one instead. Kenny was a teen boy who had managed to get a hot girl in his room, and his parents had thoughtfully gone out for a drive. The house was ours for the next couple of hours. What could and should happen was blindingly obvious, I thought and bit my lip in anticipation. As if this were not enough, my memory conjured up an image of Kenny's future wife Christine. She was a blond part-time model and good- looking by almost any measure, but when I had met her, she had come across as insincere and shallow. I realized that I hated her with a passion. She was nothing but a vapid slut compared to me, a plastic doll with not a single genuine emotion or thought of her own. What right did she have to make Kenny hers? For all I knew, Kenny may well have been a virgin when they met, and so the damn bimbo had probably had the added pleasure of deflowering him. Okay, fine. Be it that I might not be able to prevent them from getting together five or six years down the road, but that didn't mean I would just give up and wallow in disappointment. For starters, I would take the boy's virginity tonight. Then, no matter who he ended up falling for and marrying later, I would always be his first, the girl he would remember ever after. Of course, I had to be cunning and not drag him to bed straight away. He was pathologically shy, especially around girls, and any overtly aggressive maneuver by me would have sent him into panic or reduced him into a blubbering mess. That would have done me no good. Moreover, I didn't want him to blow his load prematurely, before I had had a chance to enjoy the action as well. There was a closet adjoining the room, and for a few moments, I considered stripping naked of my tights, short skirt and soft sweater, raiding Kenny's wardrobe for a flannel shirt and greeting him wearing nothing but that. He would very likely be either too naive or too flabbergasted to understand the implication, but it would be my pleasure to clue him in. I didn't have the time to put the idea to use. Someone's slow, muted footsteps sounded from the staircase, and a few seconds later Kenny appeared in the doorway. This version of him couldn't have been further from the fashionable, ostensibly witty, overachieving hipster of the late 2010s with dyed hair, a stubbly chin, an attractive wife, an illustrious career and a huge house. Not the remotest signs of that person were visible in the nerdy, awkward youngster, who had a pair of oversized glasses on his nose and a bowl haircut, who slouched whenever he was standing up or walking and who was loath to leave his home and his computers. Kenny came into the room, dragging his feet and hanging his head diffidently. Just like last time, the tiny drops of water glistening in his eyebrows caught my attention. He had splashed his face to cool down and retain his composure, but if I had my way, things would soon heat up nevertheless. "Was the washing machine okay, Kenny?" I asked him. "Uh, yeah," he replied with poorly faked nonchalance. "It was off. I guess I was mistaken, o-or something." "Good. I was starting to get lonely," I said and gave him a playful little pout. "Getting left alone on a date is never fun." "I, uh... I'm sorry, Buffy," he mumbled with his cheeks flushed. "Don't worry, I forgive you. Now, come sit here and keep me company." I patted down on the couch next to me, and he obeyed reluctantly, lowering his bottom in the far corner of the sofa from me. He pressed a button on the remote and the movie resumed playing, but it was hardly the kind of entertainment I yearned for. I slid closer to him. He tried to scoot to the left, but there was no more space, and one of the armrests of the couch was in his way. Not about to let him flee, I pressed myself gently against him and snuggled up to him, letting out a happy sigh. Every single muscle in Kenny's body was tense, and his rigidity only increased when I moved my hand to rest lightly on his leg, as though accidentally. "Kenny?" I cooed. "W-what?" he responded stiffly, keeping his eyes fixed on the TV screen. "Do you... like girls, Kenny?" "Um, sure," he blurted out. "Sure I do. I-it's just that..." "Yeah? Go ahead." "I don't... Uh, they don't even notice I exist, mostly." "I notice you," I pointed out and leaned even closer. His right ear was mere inches away from my lips, and I made sure that a whiff of the warm air leaving my lips reached his skin as I exhaled. "And maybe other girls would too, if you were a little more proactive." This was absolutely delicious. All that remained of him was a weakly prey who was utterly at my mercy. I could toy with him to my heart's content, allow him to think that he was the one in charge or that I was only after some coy kissing, and strike when his guard was down; or I could be assertive and watch him quiver in fear as I pushed myself onto him and tore his clothes off. It was so much fun to be a bad girl. "What... a-are you saying, Buffy?" Kenny stammered and turned his head a few degrees towards me to give me the briefest imaginable glance out of the corner of his eye. "You look nice, for one thing," I told him in a sultry voice and let my hand sneak closer to his nether region. "You could use a couple of fashion tips, to be honest, but what you really need is confidence. You have to believe you're worthy. That's where everything starts. Women love confident men, men who know what they want and... who are bold and strong enough to take it." "I-I, uh, I---" "We have our needs, Kenny. We want to be with someone, to love someone and to make love to that special someone, just the same as you men. We've got to have it too." Kenny swallowed hard and attempted to say something, but only some indistinct mumbling and murmuring came out of his mouth. The intensifying tingling between my legs told me that it was time to go in for the kill and be done with the games. "You see what I'm driving at here, Kenny?" I half whispered in his ear. "I was thinking you could be that man for me tonight--if you feel up to it." I squeezed the front of his trousers with my hand, and the poor boy almost jumped into the air. He drew a panicked, sharp breath, and his eyes were on the verge of falling out of their sockets. "You, uh, you... m-mean we should... uh, like, h-have... like, sex?" he stuttered so quietly that I had trouble making out the words. "Yeah, pretty much," I said and touched his earlobe with the tip of my tongue. At that very instant, I sensed someone else's gaze on me. I craned my head to look towards the doorway and was too stunned to speak. Eric Rankins, my father's first cousin, a gray-haired, lean man in his late 60s, stood at the threshold. He was staring at us through the thick, rectangular lenses of his glasses. The fellow had appeared out of nowhere and without making the least bit of noise to alert us to his coming. There was almost half a minute of silence. I struggled just to comprehend that he actually was there, to say nothing of trying to come up with a greeting or a conversation opener. All this time, he remained completely still and quiet, with his small but sharp blue eyes boring into us. Eric was dressed in khaki trousers and a red-and- white plaid shirt with the hem carefully tucked in, exactly if he had been coming to visit my family in his motor home with his wife. "Hi," I finally managed to say to him. "What, uh, brings you here, Eric?" His face remained completely expressionless, but after maybe three or four additional seconds, he sprang into action. I saw to my terror that Eric had been carrying a baseball bat behind his back, and he raised his weapon and lunged at us, completely without warning. A lot of things happened in a very short period of time. Mr. Rankins' unexplained appearance was stupefying in itself, but this act of violence was so outrageous that I barely managed to realize he was indeed going to hit us. I dived onto the floor at the last possible moment, and I heard Kenny cry out in pain. My pulse throbbed as I scrambled to my feet. As soon as I was standing up, Eric attacked me. He swung the bat and hit one of the bookcases, sending Kenny's prized action figures flying while I retreated. His next strike followed immediately. I ducked, with the result that another shelf broke down. Letting out a grunt of exertion and disappointment, he tried to hit me again, but I was too quick and evaded the blow, albeit by only an inch or two. The business end of the bat swooshed past my face and missed, but now I was backed against the wall. Eric continued to approach me steadily, and he raised the bat for the final blow. His stare was cold, categorically devoid of any kind of human emotion or his own personality. That had to be it, I thought. He was possessed and controlled somehow, like a zombie or a robot. The man who was intending to bash my skull in could not be Eric Rankins. Regardless, I was out of options. He blocked my path to the doorway and safety, and he would strike at me at any second. "Eric!" I shouted. "Eric! Don't do this! Don't hurt me!" If his eyes and face were any indication, nothing had changed inside him. Once more, the events seemed to progress like in a slow-motion film, tardily but unstoppably. He began to swing the bat, and I could see the tip of the wooden weapon start its arc. Although I consciously knew I was not Buffy Summers and didn't have her abilities, the mortal threat to my life caused something to stir within me. Abruptly the being, who on the surface looked like Eric Rankins, a harmless and kind aging man, registered in my mind as a demon. The appearance had been a disguise, and I had to eliminate the fell creature underneath. I moved my right leg, and it shot up and delivered an incredibly fast, accurate and forceful kick right at Eric's wrist. He emitted a loud, hoarse scream, staggered back, and the baseball bat dropped on the floor. The monster that had assumed the appearance of Eric Rankins was not willing to concede the fight so easily. It charged at me with its fists, aiming a punch at my face, but I deflected the blow easily and responded with one of mine to its chin. The force was enough to throw the man against a cabinet. He hit his head and back and collapsed to a sitting position on the floor, with DVD cases and various kinds of small decorative items, mementos and souvenirs, raining over him. One of the lenses of his glasses had detached from the frame, and a trickle of blood, coming from a wound on the back of his head, left a red streak on the cabinet behind him. My hands and legs were shaking as I surveyed the scene. I was in a severe shock and nearly overcome by nausea. A tormenting guilt was already building in my chest. Whether he had been possessed by an evil spirit or not, I had hurt Eric Rankins badly. He had suffered at least a serious concussion at my hands, possibly worse. Another acute concern flashed through my mind as my thoughts swiftly returned to Kenny. He had yelled in pain during the attack, and he was sitting on the couch with his eyes closed and his head hanging back limply. Fearing the worst, I hurried to check up on him. His glasses had fallen off, and he had received a bruised, bloody tear to the side of his head, well above the hairline, where Eric's bat had grazed his skin. However, his chest heaved as he breathed in a regular rhythm. He was moaning in a low voice, and I surmised that he was not fully conscious. "Kenny!" I said to him gently. The words almost stuck in my throat. "Kenny, can you hear me? Kenny?" Apart from some more unintelligible whimpering, he made no reply. "Kenny, please don't... You have to pull through," I implored and swallowed a sob. I caressed his forehead. "It'll be alright. I promise you, it'll be alright. I'll get you to the hospital straight away. I'll call the ambulance, and... and..." My voice cracked at this point. The desire to give in and break down in tears was overwhelming. "We'll forget about this godawful mess and then... everything will be fine. You hear me? Kenny, I'm so sorry you got involved. I'm sorry! Kenny, please don't die! Please!" I covered my mouth with my hand as the first little tears rolled from my eyes. I knew I had to call 911, but I had no idea what to tell the dispatcher, or whether I was capable of picking up my phone, dialing a number and speaking to another person to begin with. What would I say to them? And what would I say to my parents at home? What should I do? Who would believe me? In order to gather my composure and clear my mind, I rose to my feet and stepped over the popcorn that had spilled over Kenny's rug. In short, gingerly steps, I made my way to the large window and peered outside. What I saw through the window gave me a fresh scare. There was something in the yard. The yard lamp was on, and even though its rays illuminated the grass and the picket fence, a pitch black area, roughly circular and a good ten feet in diameter, hung between the lamp and the edge of the yard. A chill went through my body as I discerned that the patch was an object, not just a shadow. It cast one itself, although the mass and its shadow were difficult to tell apart. It changed its shape slowly while it hovered above the ground like an extremely concentrated thundercloud. An incredibly strong, intense, unyielding will resided in that cloud. I could sense its presence in the same fashion I had been awake to the entities surrounding me in the darkness. It had caught my attention-- and then I caught its attention. When its thoughts shifted towards me, they were like the stab of a dagger to my chest. It was a stark manifestation of irredeemable evil whose sole purpose and intention was to suffocate and destroy. Dread had paralyzed me, and I could do nothing but stare at the cloud in horror, waiting for it to make its move. It held me in its invisible grip for a few moments more, perhaps to study me and my potential, and then it pulled me in. I felt as if I fell forward and down from the second story of the house, through the wall, and my essence was sucked into an endless black tunnel. ***** The motion, real or illusory, came to a halt just a second later. I was gently lowered onto a chair from above. My brain was left reeling by the transition from plunging down freely to being seated at a desk, so much so that I felt lightheaded to the point of fainting and could not think clearly for a good while. The images formed by my eyes were meaningless to me. I was again in a room inside a house, undoubtedly, but that was everything I could say for certain. The whole building was spinning around like a carousel. "Amy?" a woman's voice called from somewhere inside the blur. Nobody answered to her. To my immense relief, the disorientation began to clear soon. The room settled down, its walls found their place and the rows of chairs and desks stopped swirling. Of course, I thought and nearly let out a sarcastically amused chuckle. I was at school, and this was a classroom, complete with a blackboard at the front and three columns of desks neatly arranged to face it. To be sure, there was also a teacher, a brunette woman in her thirties with long, curly hair, standing by the board with a piece of chalk in her hand and looking intently at me. The crazed higher being responsible for my adventures had deemed it appropriate to take me back to Sunnydale and another day in Buffy's life. "Amy!" the teacher repeated, more sternly than the last time. "Are you paying attention?" It was only then that I understood she was talking to me. She had fixed her eyes on me and was definitely expecting me to respond somehow. Goosebumps spread on the back of my neck as the reality began to sink in. This was certainly not Sunnydale High, or even a high school. Most of the other students had meanwhile turned on their chairs to look at me, wondering what was wrong with me. They were children, not older than ten, or eleven at the most. The drawn pictures of animals on the wall were at home in an elementary school classroom but out of place almost anywhere else. "Why don't you answer when I'm talking to you, Amy?" the teacher asked me. Her growing impatience with me was palpable, although she maintained her professional tone. "Uh... Yes, ma'am!" I blurted out, still nonplussed. I jumped at the sound of my own voice: it was extremely, downright ridiculously high- pitched, and the 'S' carried a slight but distinctive lisp. The intervening years had erased my recollections of how exactly my speech had sounded to myself when I was around ten, but there was no way that it could have been anything like this. A girl had uttered my reply, not a boy. The other kids erupted into giggles. A boy with light brown hair in the adjacent column, one row ahead of me, pointed at me with his finger and laughed loudly, showing that he had two front teeth missing, and two or three girls were tittering in unison behind my back. "Alright, that's enough!" the teacher ordered, and the hilarity promptly died down, but it had induced a major bout of self- consciousness in me. A deep, burning blush covered my cheeks, and I bit my teeth together and fought the temptation to scoot out of the room and not come back. The woman teaching the class had struck me as vaguely familiar as soon as I had seen her, and my overworked, confused memory had finally managed to retrieve the information that I wanted while I was enduring the giggles the other kids were having at my expense. She had to be Erin Lough, one of the teachers at Greensville Elementary during my years there. Miss Lough had seldom taught me, and then mainly as a substitute, since she had been assigned to the lower grades for the most part, but these children were from my class nonetheless. I could recognize their faces, although I had forgotten many of their names. It was bewildering to think that in the time where I belonged, the students were supposed to be middle-aged men and women, in fact older than the incarnation of Miss Lough who pulled the teacher's chair out from under her desk and sat down, and Lough herself was either nearing retirement or already recently retired. Everything, except for me, was precisely as it used to be. Someone had turned back the clock and undone all the change, maturing, growing, development, decay, progress and regress in the world since these bygone simpler days. "Amy," Lough addressed me, "you keep fidgeting and you can't seem to concentrate for one minute. Do you need to go to the bathroom?" I opened my mouth to say I was fine, but I realized that a minute or two in private was altogether too good an offer to overlook. "Yeah," I responded, and again Amy's sweet little girl voice spoke for me. "I think I do, Miss Lough." "I see," Lough said. "In that case, you'd better get on with it so you won't fall behind on the lecture. If you promise to go straight to the bathroom and get back as soon as you're done, you don't have to have a hall pass. But try to make it quick." "I will," I said and got up, leaving the open mathematics book, pink pencil case, plastic ruler and a staggering number of colored pencils where they lay on Amy's desk. Contrary to what I had expected, the classroom and everything in it hardly seemed to get any smaller, despite the fact that I was standing to my full height as opposed to sitting down. This diminutive frame felt so alien to me and its proportions were so far removed from mine, or Buffy's, that I had to expend conscious effort on retaining my balance. Every part of Amy was sensitive and tender, and her limbs moved in a curiously fluid manner, with the joints flexing easily and the muscles barely having any work to do as I took my first steps in the direction of the door. I couldn't remember ever having lived as such a seemingly light and nimble human being. Buffy was impossibly strong, fast and agile, true, but even her body with its awesome skills and powers couldn't compare with Amy's overall delicateness. Needless to say, the floaty existence came at a steep price. My tiny legs had to take lots of steps to carry me to the door, and when I grabbed its handle to open it casually, it felt enormously heavy and resisted me so that I almost concluded it was locked until it ultimately deigned to let me pass. Then I was in the empty main corridor. Trusting my memory, I turned right and started walking down the cavernous, empty hall towards the other wing of the building, where the toilets, showers, locker rooms and the teachers' lounge were located. The entire length of the hallway was deserted. The walls returned the faint sound of my sneakers padding on the linoleum floor as I trekked towards the distant bathroom, but otherwise the whole building was silent. It was heavenly to be alone for a while, away from probing eyes and intrusive questions, hunting enemies and dimensional portals, no matter how weird the situation was in general. Whether the school was a fantasy, an elaborate recreation of some sort or actually real, it felt perfectly authentic to the smallest detail. They were precisely as I remembered them from decades ago, from the posters on the hallway wall and the pastel-colored jackets and backpacks of the children hanging from the coat hooks to the smell of the dignified old schoolhouse permeating the air. They triggered an avalanche of memories that I had believed to be forever forgotten: games out in the yard, my first detention, the hand-drawn pictures in my third grade English book, the voice of my classmate and occasional bully Jimmy Rist who had gone on to die in a drunk driving accident when he was seventeen. I had to push these images to the background so as not to stop right where I was and become entirely lost in my thoughts instead of staying at least somewhat focused on the present-- which was, presumably, 1988 or 1989. Somewhere out there, the Soviet Union was on its last legs, Ronald Reagan was about to leave the White House and all the cool kids had huge, clunky boom box stereos. Finally, I reached the door to the girls' bathroom, opened it and slunk in. The room was as empty as the hallway, luckily even if not very surprisingly, as the students were supposed to be in class. I made a beeline for the white ceramic sinks and wall mirrors, impatient to see what and who I had morphed into this time. My heart thumped in my chest as I gazed in, leaning forward over the sink. The face that looked back was pretty, heart-shaped, with a dainty pointed chin, a button nose and large, round, greenish-blue eyes. Curly, voluminous dark blond hair covered the girl's head and cascaded on her shoulders but didn't reach much below them. She was dressed in a pair of black trousers and a pink sweater featuring a My Little Pony theme. Spontaneously and virtually unknowingly, I raised my hand to my face, and the mirror girl copied the gesture. More memories surfaced, and then she had a surname as well. I was Amy Beckinsale, another classmate of mine from third, fourth and fifth grades. Her family had lived in Greensville during that time, but moved closer to one of the big cities on the East Coast afterwards. What had happened to her and how her life had played out in the past couple of decades was a complete mystery to me. While we had been on fairly good terms at school, as far as I could recall, we (she being a girl and neither of us anywhere near teenage yet) had never associated much with each other outside of the classroom. Even by the standards of my experiences with the reality distortions, this was an unfathomable twist. I was at a total loss as to what Amy could possibly have to do with the skinsuits, the Buffyverse and Angronok's attempts to break out. I hadn't put on a suit of her, to the best of my knowledge, so how could I have been transformed into her? Had the force responsible for the strangeness suddenly decided to start placing me randomly in the bodies of girls and women I had known in the past, and if so, for what purpose? What was I supposed to accomplish as a nine-year-old Amy Beckinsale? I pinched my cheek with my chubby fingers, took hold of the skin and tugged on it. On cue, a slight pain emanated from my new face, but I ignored it and pulled the fold to the side with my fingertips while keeping my eyes on the mirror image. The youthful skin was prodigiously pliable and elastic, but it did have its limits, and eventually I had to let go of it. Maybe, just maybe, Amy's face had stretched a bit more than I would have expected, but it remained solidly in place. If it was a mask of some kind, I wouldn't be able to remove it and the rest of the girl disguise by simply tearing it off of me. The door opened, startling me and disrupting my thoughts. Turning around, I saw another girl student enter the bathroom. She was taller than Amy and perhaps a year or two older. Her hair, tied in a ponytail, was nearly the same color as Amy's but straight and a lot longer. She looked familiar to me as well, albeit less so than Amy or Erin Lough. A chain of uncertain mental associations retrieved the first name Sophie for her from the depths of my memory, but little else. "Hi, Amy," she said to me. "Hi," I greeted her back meekly. "What're ya doing here?" "I... I felt kinda sick during class and Miss Lough said I could go and---" "Sick?" she inquired abruptly and with more interest than I would have hoped. "What d'you mean? Sick, how?" "Uh, just... you know, sick." "Like a flu or something, or like you were gonna throw up?" "Maybe. I didn't feel so good, and... I don't know what it was." I turned to face the mirror again and fluffed my hair, pretending that my main concern was my appearance and that I was giving myself the makeup-less, elementary school girl equivalent of feminine touching up. Sophie kept her inquisitive eyes on me, and I wondered how I could get rid of her. "What about you?" I asked her, out of both politeness and a wish to change the topic. "Why aren't you in class?" "Mr. Newman gave me a pass," she explained. "I had to tell him in a really roundabout way it's that time for me today. Men don't get that stuff." "What time?" "You wouldn't know," she said with a thoroughly amused and condescending snort, and I blushed in embarrassment at my own absentmindedness. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a brief silver flash of reflected light. Without pausing to think, I spun around, and my breath seized up. Sophie had a long, sharp bread knife in her hand, and she held it in a determined grip. "You're dead, whore!" she screeched and her face contorted in rage, but she missed her chance by a fraction of a second. Guided by my instincts and nothing but them, I jumped forward and threw my whole weight against her as hard as I possibly could. In a fortunate coincidence, my body was sideways to her when I hit her, so my right elbow sank into her abdomen and effectively pushed the air out of her lungs. Sophie let out a choking grunt as she dropped the knife, lost her balance and tumbled down. I fell on top of her, and for a moment, there was a heap of wriggling and writhing girls in the middle of the bathroom floor. Afraid that she might attempt to strangle me, I scrambled up and managed, by sheer luck, to step on her hand. She emitted another groan of pain. The coast was clear. I was not willing to continue the fight, so I made a dash for the door, pawed at the handle in panic and succeeded in slipping outside. I pulled the door closed behind me, panting heavily. Sophie was probably not seriously hurt and would recover in short order. She was older, bigger and likely stronger than me. My only option was to flee. Some distance ahead, the corridor leading to the shower rooms came to a corner where it joined with the main hallway. I had barely taken a couple of running steps when an adult woman, Erin Lough, walked slowly around the corner. She spotted me immediately, and a smile appeared on her lips. My first reaction was to go to her for protection, but I froze at the very next moment. Hanging idly in her hand was a long object--a fire ax with a red-painted blade. "Amy, honey," Lough spoke in a chilling tone that equaled her smile in counterfeit friendliness, "aren't you forgetting something? The rules say you're not allowed to run indoors!" "What is this?" I cried out in anger and fear. "Why are you doing this to me? Why!?" "There's no way you could comprehend that, sweetheart," she said and chuckled maliciously. "It's too complicated for you." She approached me confidently, delighting in my obvious defenselessness and taking her time. The side corridor was a dead end, and escaping into any of the rooms would have been futile, since I would have been trapped in them just the same. As I stared at Lough and her evil, sadistic smirk, my heart pounded furiously in my tiny chest. I wanted to scream, but my tongue was stuck in my mouth and my teeth chattered. "I'm afraid this is the end for you," Lough intoned in a mocking voice and took a better hold of the ax. She was now mere feet from me, ready to strike, and she raised her weapon. "If only you had had the brains to stay---" Right then, an irresistible impulse to make a break for safety overwhelmed my paralysis. I shrieked involuntarily, broke into a mad sprint and rushed past Lough, whose blow missed. I heard the blade of the ax glance off the wall with a bang, and she cursed out loud. I bolted down the corridor, rounded the corner so fast that I nearly fell over, and veered left into the hallway. I ran as quickly as my short legs would carry me, but the harsh sound of a pair of women's walking shoes stomping against the floor came closer on every step. "You can't get away, you piece of shit!" Lough yelled. "I'll smash your fucking skull in! I'll hack your arms and legs off! Fucking cunt!" My head start was shrinking. The teacher and would-be murderer was on my heels, and I already expected either an explosion of shattering, incapacitating pain or a sudden plummet into the final darkness at any second. I felt a surge of despair as I realized that the outside door was too far. I would never make it. Lough only had to close the distance a little more, take a couple of extra fast steps, and everything would be over. The building around us remained bizarrely quiet. Nobody came to the hallway to help me, or even to see what was going on. It was as though Erin Lough and I were alone in the whole school, which was about to become a slaughterhouse. I cried silently in my panicked mind, praying for someone, anyone, to intervene, restrain her and let me live. I was begging for nothing less than a miracle. Scarcely more than a few feet separated me from Lough's footsteps and heavy breathing, and every single hair on my skin stood on end as I imagined how she was aiming another blow of her ax at my cranium. I sensed a brief, abrupt rush of air, and it was followed by a hard thud right behind me. Lough screamed, and I bent my head down in a pitiful attempt to avoid her imminent attack, but it never came. I was much too scared to stop, but I did have the courage and the curiosity to glance over my left shoulder. Erin Lough had fallen down. A human figure--who to me looked like a man dressed in a full-body red spandex costume--had tackled her, and both were rolling on the floor, struggling fiercely for the ax. Lough was trying to kick the man and push him off, while he was twisting her arm and attempting to immobilize her. Whoever the strange man was, he had saved me at the eleventh hour, and I would be indebted to him as long as I lived. I felt that I should have gone back to see if I might have been able to aid him somehow, but my legs refused to quit running, to say nothing of turning around. It would have been suicidal anyway, my rational side declared. Mike could have given the man a hand, and Buffy Summers wouldn't have needed to be rescued to begin with, but little Amy Beckinsale was neither of those two adult people who were capable of taking care of themselves. She continued her frightened headlong rush to the main door, pried it open and was finally outside. A series of steep concrete steps, long overdue for reconstruction, led from the door down to the schoolyard. Although I had traversed them hundreds of times in both directions during my school years, often in a hurry as I was late for class, on this occasion I broke every record. It was only after I had reached the yard that my spurt came to a grinding halt. The black shapeless cloud blocked my way. It floated in the middle of the yard, above the asphalt-topped path leading to the school parking lot, and it absorbed the light and warmth from the air around it. Now that I was level with it and also closer to it than at Kenny's parents' house, its presence and will were far more intense. They hit me like a physical pressure and stopped me as surely as if I had collided with a stone wall. My resolve was drained from me. It made no longer any difference to me whether Erin Lough caught me or not. The cloud was the true source of my terror, the enemy that corrupted friendly people into vicious killers and bent reality into a nightmare. The thing itself was a manifestation of malice the like of which I had never imagined to exist, much less encountered. I faintly sensed an echo of an emotion from the cloud. It may have been satisfaction or sadistic pleasure, or perhaps it was just hatred towards me and every other living being; all the same, I was performing for it like a gaged animal, and it savored my distress and suffering. Suddenly, the mouth of a tunnel opened in the space between the cloud and me. I was dragged forward, and once more daylight disappeared and I fell. ***** I felt a brief and gentle rising movement, as though I were in an elevator going up, and then there was light around me. The weather was warm and sunny, and I was standing outside on a concrete-paved walkway. The oppressing presence of the cloud was gone, and I broke out in cold sweat because of the unmitigated relief. It was only then that I became conscious of the change in my physical form. I was a man, and most probably my old self. The weight, height and clumsiness of my own body were back, and along with them, the rest of the world had resumed its customary proportions. At first, the mere thought that my legs would again have to carry and support such a huge mass made me tired and tempted me to sit or lie down for a minute, but then I remembered I also had the muscles to match my bulk. I might have been heavier than the elfin Amy, but I was stronger, too. On my arrival, my eyes had happened to be trained on a large, boxy house covered with yellow sandstone, and that solved the riddle of my whereabouts. The building was the University main library, so I had to be on the campus, presumably heading for work or leaving it for my apartment. A smile came onto my face as it occurred to me that this could have been the end of my tormenting journey. I was not in Sunnydale, a twisted version of Greensville over ten years in the past, or an even more twisted version of the elementary school of my home town 30 years in the past. I was going to work in the present and in the normal world on a typical, boring day. But then, it was far too good to be true. If anything, my paranormal persecutor had raised the stakes lately, and it had openly tried to have me killed twice during the last half an hour. It had no reason to stop now. Since there appeared to be a short lull in the procession of horrors, at any rate, I resolved to make good use of it by putting my brain to work. It was the only resource, weapon and survival tool that I had. I desperately needed a battle plan, no matter how insurmountable the odds might be against an enemy who could alter reality at will. One thing was certain. The black cloud was behind the attacks. It contained the entity or consciousness that was pursuing me, whether the churning ball of gas was its actual form or just a disguise it donned when dealing with flesh-and-blood beings. Interestingly, it had not made contact with me but instead possessed people with whom I interacted and reprogrammed them into assassins. Was this significant? It could be that the cloud was not substantial enough to manipulate matter directly and so had to rely on others to do that for it. Pondering if the cloud entity had any weaknesses gave me another thought. Although my nemesis was unquestionably powerful and awe- inspiring, it didn't fit very well in the role of the near-omnipotent force that was responsible for my experiences. The cloud was too cruel for that, plainly and simply evil instead of curious, playful and sardonically amused but mostly aloof, as would have been a lot more appropriate. In addition, the transitions between one scenario and the next were not seamless, and the "realities" themselves were clearly drawn from my memory. There was nothing here that I didn't remember or hadn't seen before, while the opposite was true for Cinnamon's house, the psychedelic wonderland and of course Sunnydale. Perhaps I had an ace up my sleeve. If the cloud depended on my thoughts to build these fake worlds, I might be able to fool it into creating one where it was at a disadvantage and could be beaten. I had to know a lot more about it for this idea to have any chance of success, but if my reasoning was correct and I could survive long enough, maybe there was a way out. A group of four students went inside the library, chatting casually. I suddenly comprehended how idiotic I must have looked as I was standing still in the middle of the walkway, completely spaced out and gazing into nothingness, so I decided to head for a nearby bench to sit down. However, no sooner had I snapped out of my daze than a voice came from behind, "Hey, excuse me!" It was strikingly nasal, whiny and androgynous, low in pitch for a young woman but high for a grown man, as well as colorless in tone. I turned around slowly and deliberately on my heels, doing my best to prepare for anything. The sound of the voice had brought up a recollection, and as the speaker came into my view, I recognized him. Some time last October, or possibly late September, I had encountered this person on the campus. He had pestered me, including pushing pamphlets to me, and I had been at pains to get rid of him. He had made such an impression that he had later reappeared on several occasions in my dreams and visions as a murder victim who had supposedly been killed by me. The person, who was presumably a man in his twenties (but might have identified as just about anything), essentially consisted of a small, narrow, pallid face with two bulging eyes, a tuft of purple hair, a thin neck and a mass of oversized clothing. The latter was a haphazard collection of totally disparate items, from massive boots to a tattered green coat, and all were dirty. Only his head and his hands were visible of his body, but they revealed that it was thin and bony, bordering on anorectic. Aside from his hair, he wouldn't have seemed out of place in any of the city's gangs of chronic old-timer alcoholics who lived out on the streets. He had a small satchel, worn out like his clothes, hanging from his shoulder. "Yeah, you there," the freak said and closed the distance until he was less than two yards away. "I'd like to talk to you about something. Do you have a minute?" "Not really," I replied frankly. "This won't take a minute. I'm with the People's Front for Equal Treatment of Broad Spectrum Minorities, or PFETBSM. Maybe you've heard of us." "I can't say that I have." "It's okay. We just got started last July, so we obviously haven't reached everyone yet. Anyhow, our mission is to increase awareness and fight for the rights of groups who are neglected by the mainstream intersectional feminist and sexual minority support networks. We lean towards classic Marxism-Leninism, basically, but Maoists and Trotskyists and even Revisionists are welcome too. We don't discriminate, and we try not to label anyone against their wishes." "Oh." "Here," he continued and pulled a leaflet from his satchel. "We're organizing a protest next Wednesday at the main building entrance, and we want as many people to come as possible. It's in support of declaring the classrooms and all common areas as safe spaces for transspecies people." The freak held the leaflet out to me. "Transspecies?" "That's persons who identify as species other than human, or as multiple species in one." This definition rolled off his tongue effortlessly. "You can keep that," I said to him and made a gesture to reject the piece of paper. "Look, I don't mean to be rude, but this stuff is not for me. I don't like any flavor of communism or other extreme ideologies, and quite honestly I didn't understand a fraction of what you told me. It goes way over my head." "It's always a good time to learn," the freak countered and pushed the leaflet almost to my chest. "Sorry, but I'm not interested." "In enlightening yourself?" "It's not what I'd necessarily call enlightenment, but if you go for it, I'm fine with that." The freak was not discouraged, to my dismay, but he swiftly changed tack. "You know how the saying goes," he preached in much the same tone but with an added dose of aggressiveness. "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Your day is over. People like you, white, male, privileged, cissexual, full of toxic masculinity--you're going the way of the dinosaur. There's gonna be a revolution and that'll smash the suppression of minorities, the heteronormativity and white supremacism that linger on, even in this institution." The rhetoric was intended as menacing, I gathered, but the speaker's lackluster voice undermined the effect. In any case, my patience was running out, and I was feverishly attempting to find a reasonably polite but decisive way to end the tedious conversation. "Yeah, whatever," I said and shrugged. "You're free to support whatever cause you believe in, and I've got no personal quarrel with you, but you can count me out, so---" "You should be interested. We're the future, the people you and your kind used to look down on. You're on the losing side, simple as that. We're the wave that's going to wash the crap off." "Go away," I told him bluntly. "I'm serious. Leave me alone, please. My life is strange enough as it is." "Well," he retorted sassily, "sometimes you've just got to face the strange, you know what I'm saying?" "You have no idea what you're talking about," I grumbled. My impatience had developed into full-blown anger. "I've had a bad day and a shitty month, the shittiest in my whole life. I don't want to deal with anything I don't absolutely have to anymore. I'm at the end of my rope. So, let's go our separate ways and forget we ever met. How's that sound?" "You can't just turn your back on me," the freak said. "You can't slow down progress. You hate me because of what I represent, not because of what I am." I thought I could see a beastly, inhuman glint in his otherwise vacant eyes, an intimation that something dangerous lurked beneath the surface. For all I knew, the freak could have been the next killer sent by the cloud to murder me. At this point, I became aware of a weight in my right hand. It had not been there a moment ago, when the freak had called out to me. Yet it was plainly present and real, and it grew, until I comprehended that I was holding a solid, cold, metallic object. I glanced down at my hand and saw what it was: an automatic pistol, reminiscent of a Colt 1911. It had materialized out of nowhere. "Step back," I ordered the freak and lifted my hand so that he could see the firearm. "Right now." "And if I don't?" he said mockingly. "What are you gonna do? Shoot me with that phallus symbol? You think that's gonna stop the change, you fucking pathetic Nazi?" "Shut up and step back," I repeated in a calm voice and took aim at the freak. "I won't warn you again. Leave me alone." "Like you had the guts," he taunted and stepped towards me. The reality was again a dream. I saw my finger press on the trigger, all the way back, and then the pistol fired. I heard no sound and felt no recoil. The slide moved, the spent cartridge flew out and the pistol jumped in my hand. A round hole, tidy and small, was slapped in the middle of the freak's forehead simultaneously. Blood, brain matter and fragments of his skull blew out of the back of his head in a quickly expanding, dark red cloud. The freak gaped at me with wide eyes, with his face frozen in a mildly surprised expression and his mouth ajar. He remained on his feet for a long time, as though unaffected by the bullet through his head, until his knees buckled and he collapsed backwards, so sluggishly that he had to be defying gravity. A few small drops of blood gushed out of the hole and rolled down his cheek, and they left a red trail on the pale skin of his face. Everything had happened as in the vision that I had had when I was returning from Greensville to the city after Halloween. The freak was dead, and I had taken his life. Killing him had been this easy, this fast, this inevitable. I stared in shock as his body landed in a heap on the ground, coming to rest on its left side. Somebody screamed in the distance, and someone else, a man, yelled at the top of his lungs, "Gunman! There's a gunman!" More shouts erupted in the campus yard, and the students who had been leisurely strolling towards the library a few dozen yards away broke into a run in the opposite direction, with one woman dropping a pile of books in the process. A pandemonium was in its opening stages. People were taking cover wherever they could, locking doors, hiding behind walls and calling the emergency services. The severity of my deed began to register with me. I could never convince anyone that my intention had not been to shoot the freak, no matter how annoying he was, or that some supernatural phenomenon had placed the pistol in my hand. The police SWAT team would storm the campus and possibly kill me in their zeal, even if I threw the gun away and surrendered. I had obliterated my own future. Just then, I noticed that the weapon had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. My hands were empty. Although my instincts were loudly telling me to escape the scene of the crime, I decided to conduct an experiment. The school and Kenny date were not real, I said to myself; neither is this. I had nothing to lose. I focused my thoughts and forced them to picture the freak alive and well, precisely as he had been seconds before the shot. He would be standing up and talking to me, his mouth moving and his heart beating. There would be no bullet or bullet hole, blood on his face or damage to his brain. The entire event of his death would be erased from history. The conclusive proof that I was immersed in an unreal world was not long in coming. The blood that had leaked through the bullet hole in the freak's forehead ran back into his skull, and the hole itself shrunk and closed up. Then he blinked, moved his arms and legs and rose awkwardly to sit up, with a dumbfounded look on his face. He stayed seated on the grass for upwards of half a minute, not uttering a sound, until he stiffly rose to his feet. His eyes were fixed at something on the horizon, safely away from me. I had no chance to congratulate him on his resurrection. A debilitating fear gripped me abruptly, and my skin felt as though it were covered by ice. The black smoke rolled into my field of vision from every direction at once and coalesced in front of me, assuming its cloud form. The freak stared at it with an impassive look on his gaunt face. Neither of us was able to break free of the spell and flee from the mortal threat. A thin tendril reached out for the freak and touched him lightly on the chest. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he dropped to his knees and then fell on his face on the ground. I knew for certain that he was beyond help, killed for a second time. The cloud only had to do the same to me, and my life would end instantaneously. However, finishing me there and then was not on the entity's agenda. The cloud stayed in the center of my vision while the circumference distorted, changed colors, flowed and morphed like a watercolor painting dissolving and losing its outlines. A throbbing pressure assaulted me, pushed in my eardrums and hurt my eyes. The cloud was about to crush me, but then, without warning, it let go and disappeared from sight. Meanwhile, the University campus had melted and shifted into a completely different scene, that of the psychedelic dream garden which I had visited during my drug trip, courtesy of Lady Cinnamon. Evil had come here ahead of me. The sun was still shining, but nothing else had stayed the same. Wherever I laid my eyes, I saw senseless, indiscriminate and total destruction. The fruit trees had been torn and uprooted, the flower beds dug up, the flowers cut, and the grass had withered. The little children, who had played and frolicked in the garden, were dead. Several of them lay in a group on the ground nearby. Their limbs and heads were twisted in unnatural positions and their clothes were shredded. Right next to the slaughtered children was the body of an aging man, dressed in a cowboy outfit, lying face down. He had most likely tried to protect the children in a valiant but futile effort, I reasoned. There was no need to take a closer look, since I knew who he was. Real or not, this sight was unbearable, and I tore my eyes off of it and looked away. Far away in the distance, I could see an immensely tall, pillar-like mountain of red rock standing alone. A tiny black dot--so small that my eyes only discerned it because of its stark color, and then barely- -hung above the flat top of the mountain. However unobtrusive and easy to miss the entity was when viewed through the normal bodily human senses, its poisonous presence could be felt clearly even here, and it gripped and held the whole of my attention and thoughts. The enemy was waiting for me at the mountaintop. The landscape became a blur, and I was lifted into the air and carried forward. The sensation of movement was much softer than it could ever have been in real life, as though only my consciousness and not my body had made the trip. I landed at the peak of the red mountain and was no longer in the garden. The air was hot here, and it carried a pungent smell that stung my throat and made my eyes water. The ground appeared to be a sea of fire everywhere around the mountain, with the scattered clouds reflecting the glow. Dark gray wisps of smoke rose into the sky. At this height, the view to the horizon was uninterrupted on all sides, since none of the other features of the land could rival the mile-high peak. As imposing as the scene was, the impression it made on me paled next to the monstrosity that I was facing yet again. The black cloud was there, hovering only a few paces from me and exuding such terror that I had to struggle constantly to prevent myself from collapsing under the unbearable weight. It was a concentration of horror, a visible shape for the primal fears that human beings had inherited down the path of millions of years of evolution. "There you are, child." The sound of the words shook me. They were spoken in a soft, low tone, but purposefully, and they were backed by vast power. No mouth had formed them; they were pure ideas sent from mind to mind. "Look how small you are. Weak, fragile. A shadow. Your time passes soon." To me, this confirmed what I had already guessed. "Angronok?" I addressed the cloud. I was not sure whether I actually pronounced the word or merely thought of it, but that made no difference in this case. My enemy reacted with a brief emotion that could equally well have been scorn or amusement. "I have many names," the voice said to me. "Some have called me so. But I was born before there were tongues that could speak in any world." "What are your intentions?" "I must be free. You have dared to try and impede my designs, and therefore I shall kill you. But deem yourself fortunate: you have been allowed to see many things beyond the understanding of mortals." "I won't surrender without a fight." "You shall have your wish, child." A faintly glowing, curved outline immediately appeared in the air between Angronok and myself. The space enclosed by the line was completely transparent at first, like a clean window, but then it began to ripple and solidify into an opaque, mist-like gas or liquid. I retreated a few steps in a hurry as the color of the silhouette darkened and its shape rapidly became more defined. The matter that had not existed a moment ago was taking on the form of a huge living creature. The conjuring was complete in a few seconds. Angronok's thoughts had given rise to substance that had impossibly molded into the bones, the skin, eyes, heart, veins and other organs of a reptile-like monster, whose unsightly head with a pair of yellow snake eyes hung high above me. It had a long tail and muscular, thick hind legs, while its thinner front arms sported grotesque sinewy hands, each with four deadly claws. The brown skin of the being was covered in heavy scales and gave off intense heat, as though the creature had been made of molten lava. The monster reared its head and screeched. As it opened its gaping mouth, its triangular silvery teeth, each easily the size of the palm and extended fingers of a man's hand, were on display. A stream of hot air, smelling of sulfur, escaped from its throat and hit me in the face, nearly overwhelming me before the fight had started. Angronok was being true to form. Although the full abject horror of the dragon demon was a new, extremely unpleasant experience for me, I had seen reflections or images of the monster, once in a vision during the Halloween role play and then in a daydream while driving my car. They, I comprehended at length, had not been fatuous fantasies after all. They were glimpses of the future and meant to prepare me for the decisive battle. And I was prepared, more so than Angronok had probably anticipated. To withstand the intense fear and revulsion that both he and the monster commanded was no small feat, but I was not limited to passive resistance. I knew now that I had power over this world and could reshape it, as well as myself. The cloud containing Angronok, the monster and everything else grew slightly in my eyes as my frame compressed. My hands, feet, arms and legs became smaller and thinner; my hair lengthened and changed color; my face reshaped and my innards rearranged themselves; and two soft mounds formed on my chest, while the space taken up by my male genitalia was vacated in my crotch. My clothes and shoes disappeared and were replaced with form-fitting leather pants, a black sweater and a pair of boots. Irresistible, explosive energy coursed through every cell of this magically vigorous female body. It welcomed me back like an old friend that it was, familiar in many ways. Yet it was simultaneously also strange, since its powers and senses were increased, amplified and concentrated as never before. For the first time, I had transformed into Buffy Summers entirely of my own free will. She would be in for a hard battle, perhaps the hardest of her life, but her chances of victory were immeasurably better than Michael Caldwell's, who could not dream of engaging the demon monster, much less Angronok himself, in single combat. To even the odds a little further, I supplied her with a weapon. A double- edged, hand-and-a-half sword with a golden pommel materialized in my right hand. I felt its satisfying weight, proving that it was really there, and waved its blade a little to become accustomed to its dimensions. It was perfect for me, and I was ready. I fixed my eyes on those of the monster--two yellow, gleaming diamonds--and probed it with my thoughts for weaknesses. I silently commanded it to back down and lose its motivation to fight, its strength and its cohesion so that it would dissolve into nothing but a notion in the consciousness of my enemy. None of this had any effect. The demon's own will, or Angronok's will animating and controlling the body of the demon, was much more powerful than mine. The monster let out a thunderous roar, accompanied by a rush of toxic fumes. I avoided its head and arms and swung my sword. The blade hit a spot behind and above the creature's left shoulder, scraped the thick scales and bounced off. The weapon vibrated and transferred some of the force back into my hand, but I struck again swiftly. This time, the point of the sword cut the monster's skin under its armpit, but it left only a small, superficial scratch. If the monster had sensed my attack in the first place, it was certainly not deterred in the least. It lunged forward like a crocodile, veering its head and the front of its body a little to the side to reach me. I needed every last bit of my agility to evade it and its formidable teeth, but I ended up in a good position and ran my sword straight into its side. The sharp point of the weapon slid into the monster's hide. For a fraction of a second, there was a ray of hope, but then my thrust came against something absolutely impenetrable and stopped. Not even Slayer strength was enough to force the blade through the deep skin layer of the abomination, which roared and promptly made a short jump sideways. The sword was wrenched out of my hand and remained stuck in its target, with two or three inches of the blade sunk in. I suddenly found myself unarmed and on the defensive. The demon repeated its lunge-and-swerve maneuver, and I saw its hideous gaping mouth approaching. Just before it could snap my head between its jaws, I did a backflip, propelling myself out of reach, and landed on my feet. The sword dropped to the ground with a clang. Where it had damaged the skin of the monster I thought I could just discern a tiny triangular wound that emitted a dull red glow, coming from within the being's hulking body. Whatever inconvenience and pain the injury had caused to the dragon monster, it was definitely not serious. To drive the point home, it swung its fleshy tail back and forth and again nearly managed to hit me. I ducked and threw myself down as fast as I could, and the tremendous mass of muscle and scaly skin missed me by scarcely an inch. Moving as fast as I could, I jumped to my feet, charged for the sword and picked it up just as the monster turned rapidly yet again. I had to stay on the move, dodging the monster's attacks and looking for any opening to strike back. It swept its tail and flailed its front legs to prevent me from getting close, and when that failed, it shot its colossal head towards me in an attempt to bite. I hacked and stabbed the gargantuan bulk with my sword, but the wounds I inflicted on it were little more than shallow scrapes, and then the monstrosity retaliated. One of its arms made contact with my chest and sent me flying backwards. I came down on the rock surface, luckily without hitting my head or breaking any bones, and scrambled up. I was fighting a losing battle. Searing heat radiating from the demon's skin and maw had burned my face and hands, and despite the adrenaline in my blood, the combined pain was now beginning to get to me. The scale-covered hide of the monster was too thick for my sword, and I would tire eventually, make a fatal mistake and promptly lose my life. I had to come up with a better plan, but the combat was too hectic for me to pause, step back and consider my options. Nonetheless, one thing was clear. It was obviously no use hitting the demon where it was virtually invulnerable. The dragon demon had to have weak points, and I should find and target them. The monster's piercing reptilian eyes focused on me as it walked menacingly forward. There was my answer--the skull of the being had to be weak behind the eyeballs. If I could thrust the sword into one of them, the blade might make its way to the dragon's brain. I had dispatched a three-eyed demon in this fashion in the woods near Greensville, and maybe the tactic would work for a second time. Of course, this was easier said than done. I closed the distance, avoiding the monster's thrashing tail and front legs, jumped and swung the sword, but the monster pulled its head to the side and dodged the strike. On my second try, it was a little too slow, and the point of the blade nearly found its mark. The sword cut through the soft skin of the monster's eyelid, and the being roared angrily, but that was the extent of my success. As soon as I was on the ground, the tail of the demon slammed against me and knocked me out. I regained consciousness in time to see the humongous rear foot of the monster coming down and about to crush my head. I rolled to the side and narrowly averted the stomp, looked frantically around for the sword and grabbed it by the hilt as I simultaneously rushed to my feet to avoid the monster's next move. Its head lunged towards me and its jaws snapped closed right in front of my face. A fetid gush of its poisonous breath blew stinging gas into my eyes, nostrils and lungs and brought me to the brink of vomiting. Nearly blinded, I hit one of its forelimbs with my sword, but that was a glancing blow and did scarcely more damage than my previous strikes. The skin on neck of the dragon folded into a series of ridges and deep troughs whenever it turned its head. The scales had to be much thinner there than on the flanks, I reasoned. Especially one particular spot a little behind what appeared to be the end of the monster's jawbone looked surprisingly supple. It was about the size of my fist, but larger than the being's eyes and lower than them. Once I had noticed it, I could no longer take my eyes off it, and the monster almost rewarded me for this lapse of attention with a heavy tail swipe that I managed to avoid only by throwing myself to the ground again. I got up as the dragon demon turned its head and the front part of its sturdy body in preparation of a new attack. For a precious second, the soft spot on its neck was within my reach. Time slowed down for me, the smarting subsided and the overpowering stench in the air and the heat of the monster all but disappeared. This was my chance; there would not be another. I couldn't afford to squander it. My whole form was a spring, full of stored tension that was waiting to be released. I had to act at precisely the right moment, aim carefully, stab just at--- "Do it now!" The words were loud and clear, but they were not spoken by Angronok or my own voice. The hilt of the sword tingled in my hand, as though a small electric current were running through it. And then my hesitation was gone. Thrusting with all my strength, I pushed the sword forward and at the demon's neck. The point met its mark and the blade slid in, cutting effortlessly through the tough skin, flesh, blood vessels and nerves. The demon jerked its head up and released a deafening, shrill scream that made my ears ring. It yanked the sword out of my hand, and I retreated quickly, but my enemy was done for. It staggered, stumbled back and teetered for an incredibly long time, as though unsure whether it was supposed to die or not. Finally, its bulk collapsed with a rumble, my weapon still sticking out of the vulnerable part of its neck. Its mouth and eyes were left open, and a wave of some viscous, hot, foul-smelling black liquid spilled out of its gullet and flowed onto the ground. As I held my breath in awe and anxious anticipation, fearing some last moment surprise, the lifeless carcass began to dissolve. It faded away in the same manner it had appeared: the outlines of the dead creature became fuzzy, and then the whole mass gradually lost its dark color and also its substance, which went from tangible flesh and blood to a misty pall and soon a faint shadow that vanished without a trace. Only my sword was left, marking the spot where the being had fallen. I bent forward to pick the weapon up, clenching my teeth at the shooting pain in my head and limbs and the burning sensation on my skin. I was hurt, but the battle wasn't over. Angronok himself had to be vanquished somehow. The cloud had watched the fight in apparent passivity, staying in the exact same place and without displaying the faintest sign of joy when the monster had had the upper hand or dismay at its ultimate defeat. The hellgod remained inscrutable in his current guise, and he allowed me to discern only what suited him. I concentrated my thoughts on the apparition and pictured peeling it layer by layer, trying to strip naked the will inside. A new fit of rage erupted from the center of the cloud, but it took no action yet. To my surprise, the black mist of Angronok's shroud did thin out somewhat, and the cloud shrunk as it leaked. Nevertheless, the essence within was still strong. Weakened though it was by the death of the dragon monster, my willpower soon collided with an unyielding obstacle. With his gaseous cloak partially removed, Angronok stood in front of me as an all-black, featureless, vaguely humanoid shape, much taller than any living person. His rank malice once more caused a sensation of pulsating pressure and coldness on my exposed skin. "Your impudence shall not go unpunished," his voice intoned. "Although be it that you have slain my champion, you have forfeited your life." In a flash of intuition, it dawned on me that his threat was idle. He had had several good opportunities to kill me and he could have done so at any time, but he had not. His behavior made no sense, unless he was actually incapable of hurting me, except through an intermediary, and I had defeated every single one he had sent to confront me. He had exhausted his resources, and nothing but intimidation and deceit were left for him. "No," I said. "It's you who's going down. You have shot your bolt, and now it's my turn. Let's see if you like having this sharp appliance in your guts better than that dragon pet of yours did." "If you touch me, you die," Angronok's voice spoke calmly. "That doom is upon all mortals who dare raise their hand against me." "Seems reasonable, as far as bargains go," I commented. He might have been truthful, but I no longer feared either him or my own death. I had attained total serenity and lucidity, and they precluded every normal emotion. Under any other circumstances, I might have wondered at this marvelous state of existence, but in reality, there was nothing to wonder. I would only fulfill my purpose. "We settle this between us, and the rest of the Universe gets to stay safe forever." "I cannot be slain. You are a fool, child." "Call me Buffy," I retorted, held the sword firmly and plunged its shining blade straight at and into the human shape. The weapon went in without resistance and sank ever deeper. A blink of an eye later everything became dark.