Heidi felt her hair stand up on end and her stomach churn as her axe met its mark, its sharp head biting into flesh and what felt like bone. She felt terribly for the poor thing, daemon or no daemon. She felt herself staring into its eyes as she yanked the ax back out, trying to find something -- anything -- behind those soulless eyes. And then, quite suddenly, she did. A piercing scream tore through the air, and it seemed to tear away and ultimately dissolve whatever terribleness and ferocity the beast had put up to protect itself, and suddenly those eyes were sad and all too human. Heidi felt herself staring long and hard into those eyes for a split second, feeling her own soul seem to ache along with it. It was almost as if something inside of her was pushing out, threatening to explode. And then she realized it wasn't her soul, it was her head. Her head hurt like hell, and the world spun around her.

Flashes of something sparked and fizzled before her eyes, coming into and out of existence in small snatches. A young man, trapped in an endless void, letting out an agonized wail as the fog of broiling hot steam around him boiled the flesh right off his bones. A moment passed and she too felt the steam on her skin, warm and pleasant at first but then growing hotter and hotter until it was searing her shoulder. Heidi let out a gasp and dropped her axe, grasping at her shoulder. Her hand met Bannik, still perched on her shoulder, who was swathed in clouds of steam hotter than anything she had ever felt him emit before. He was burning her! Not even thinking, she batted him off of her shoulder and grasped her now blistering shoulder, as the daemon had burned straight through her jacket and her t-shirt and deep into her skin. She glared down at Bannik through her blurry, teary vision and let out a gasping cry when she saw he wasn't moving. She reached down to pick him up but recoiled when a puff of steam seared her fingers.

This was bad. This was very, very bad. Whatever had caused the hound to go into this state had definitely affected the weaker Bannik as well, sending him into what appeared to be a near catatonic state. Evidently, Bannik's intervention with her tumors had instilled something daemonic in her as well, and that scream had some effect on her as well. Bannik was the only thing keeping her alive, and without him, who knows how quickly her tumors would start growing again? She whirled around and struggled to keep her balance, and squinted, searching the swimming world around her for the perpetrator of her misery. Her head seared with the pain of every emergency surgery, of an agony that had no remedy. Unable to stand for the pain, she fell to her knees.

[i]Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop make it stop make it stop makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitSTOP.[/i]

Through sheer willpower she grasped her axe and stood, teetering dangerously on her feet. Somehow, her cloudy eyes found those of the daemon Set's. With tears streaming down her face and an agonized scream erupting from her lips, she bull-rushed the thing and completely passed by the hound, her ax held high over her head.