"Don't rush," the dark-haired man advised her, not hiding his amusement. "Savor this successful day right to the very end."

  The girl wasn't able to answer him, so she just flipped him off between heaves. That damned demon. He would pay for this.

  The Not-a-Doctor laughed and returned to observing the leader's futile efforts. With boredom, he gave her another order: "Bite it off. If he can't get it up, he doesn't need it."

  The bald man instantly paled and began to struggle, but the girl had no intention of losing her own soul so easily. She clenched her teeth, ignoring the wild screams and the blows raining on her head. No, she wasn't thinking about the pain, the broken bones, or anything else except her own soul. Even God barely concerned her now.

  She bit. It took some time, cost her half her face, her hair, and even one eye, but she managed. When she was ordered to swallow the bitten-off penis, she did so without the slightest resistance. Anything, just so she wouldn’t fail. Something inside her snapped, she felt it clearly, but she didn't care. Only survival mattered, which is why she didn't even blink when she saw the bald man lying on the ground, screaming, then going into convulsions.

  "Dying won't be that easy for him," Alice snarled, raising her voice and wiping bile and the remnants of her dinner from her lips.

  The bald man was literally within her arm's reach. So Alice reached out, placed her hand on the body of her would-be tormentor, and began to siphon his energy. She absorbed and absorbed, fast and without restraint. She didn't hold back, she didn't count. She felt him dying, felt the moment he drew his last breath, but she didn't stop. She kept absorbing until she came across something she had never encountered before. She understood it was his soul, the essence of his being.

  Suddenly it hit her that if she didn't stop now, it would be too late. Just a moment more and she would devour his soul, assimilate it, robbing him of the right to preserve his being, to ever obtain salvation. She was about to stop when she remembered his slobbering face, his animalistic howls. No, someone like that didn't deserve salvation. Heaven would not receive his soul; God would only see it when she accepted its essence into her own body, or whatever He was.

  Hooray, world, a new Alice was born!

  She felt something small, almost round, penetrate her body. A memory stirred deep within. She had seen this. A blue sphere held in a hand. It was the essence of a soul, isolated and secured within a crystal shell. When was that? So long ago, when death seemed like a joke and Heaven a clumsy administrative caricature. But before she could remember more, her body was filled with pure, magnificent power. It was a feeling impossible to convey with any words. In a fraction of a second, everything became more understandable, clearer, distinct. She gained new memories, new experiences, new skills. She suddenly became two people in one body, two minds, two...

  "Absorb him completely," the Not-a-Doctor said quietly, watching the girl intently. "To the very end, or you'll go mad."

  She listened to him. She didn't know how to do it, but she acted on intuition. She closed her eyes and in her mind saw a clear image of the terrified man. Then the blackness beneath his feet shot up into the air, tightly enveloped him, and then there was nothing left except pure energy, a charge exceeding her wildest expectations.

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  She had succeeded. Both she and her guardian knew it.

  The black-haired man let out a sigh of relief. Until the very end, he couldn't be sure whether Alice would manage to shatter that bastard’s personality. He couldn't have helped her anyway. It was something she had to face entirely on her own. Well, she handled it perfectly. His cold eyes returned to the weeping leader.

  "Take your clothes off," he said, and she did so without a word. Then he turned to the last boy, paralyzed with fear.

  "Rape her, the way you planned to rape my witch."

  The boy just stood there, staring blankly at the Not-a-Doctor. To the girl lying on the ground, it felt like an eternity. She started screaming at her former friend, hurling insults, then begging him in turn to just get it over with. He finally snapped out of it, the meaning of those earlier words sinking in. Shaking with fear, he approached the girl and pulled down his pants. His cock was limp, and he tried to push it into her, but he was trembling too hard. Suddenly it hit him that he was probably going to die. Adrenaline rushed through his veins, self-preservation kicked in, and some sick, twisted part of his brain, the part that had orchestrated all of this, decided the bloody spectacle was arousing. His dick began to harden, his hips started moving in rhythm. He did it rougher and rougher, more violently, and he didn't care about the screams of his friend, howling in pain.

  "Enough!"

  The black-haired man's voice cut through. The boy stopped, though it took some self-control. On the other hand, he wasn't ready to die yet, so he pulled himself together just in time.

  "Grab the neck of that broken bottle."

  He didn't need to say anything more. With a strange, perverse pleasure, the boy pinned the writhing girl down and grabbed the bottleneck. He shoved it into her with force, ignoring her screams. He pushed it deeper and deeper, feeling blood running down his hand. His erection turned almost painful, the sense of power and dominance overwhelming.

  He didn't even notice the kidnapped woman slowly approaching. He didn't see her place her hand on the dying leader's body. He missed the moment of death entirely.

  "What about him?" the Not-a-Doctor asked Alice.

  "Make him gouge out his own eyes and scoop out that fucked-up brain," she snarled back.

  The black-haired man laughed as he forced the last cultist to carry out her words. Alice devoured his soul as well. They were all dead.

  Alice stood naked for a moment over the body of the last bastard, then remembered the handbag she had left in their car. Inside were pants and a blouse she had bought earlier that afternoon. Not much, but enough to get back to the apartment. She thought about that while staring at the corpses. She didn't feel even a flicker of guilt. They got exactly what they deserved: pure nothingness.

  "Freeze!"

  A voice shouted from the bushes. Alice turned and saw herself surrounded by a group of police officers. She hadn't been careful enough to sense them, but it didn't matter. She had plenty of power to erase her image from their minds.

  "I don't exist," she said.

  And all at once, every single one of them stopped perceiving her. No, that wasn't even strong enough. The surge of energy she pushed into them forced them to delete from their consciousness the very idea of Alice, both now and before.

  The Not-a-Doctor watched their dumbfounded faces with delight. He had done the same without the slightest effort. But what really thrilled him was knowing that Alice hadn't implanted that conviction in everyone. Oh no. The last surviving cultist stared at her with sheer terror.

  "Shoot her!" the girl screamed at the officers. "Shoot, it's her!"

  She pointed at Alice, but to them there was only empty air. After all, no one was there.

  "You should have died," the witch said with a wide grin. "Died like the scum you are."

  She walked past her, heading toward the abandoned car to grab her new clothes. She didn't even bother to turn and watch as the cops cuffed the girl and shoved her into the squad car, charging her with the murder of her four friends.

  The world was a rotten place. Too rotten to fix. But good enough to set on fire and watch it burn.