He almost wishes he could just leave her alone -

But he can't keep doing that. If he stops taking new swans, he's betting on Iri to come up with a way to make his magic self-stabilizing before he runs out. If she doesn't, there goes the mountain. Taking both of them and a significant chunk of the kingdom of Nathureme with it.

He materializes in front of the girl.

"Fuck!" she exclaims, dropping the knife.

...he laughs.

"That's not very polite," he observes.

"Haven't you kidnapped two people this year already? Is it getting lonely up there? Are you starting your own village? What the fuck are you doing here?"

Oh come on, can't he find one human being in this kingdom who's worth making a swan out of but doesn't tempt him to mercy?

"Well, you see," he says, "I have this unfortunate problem where I keep deciding not to torture people."

"That's very sad for you, I'm sure."

"It's more inconvenient than you'd think!"

"Well, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not make it my problem."

She's scared, under the bravado, but she's not just scared.

Plotting escape, no doubt, or - is she into him?

Well. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing to pick up another masochist. Still, he came here for a reason -

"Are you under the impression that you have a choice?"

She doesn't answer for a moment, staring at him wide-eyed with - fear, yes, but not just fear -

Not just lust, either. Hope? Triumph? What does she think she's doing?

- and then she blinks and grins and says, a little breathlessly, "Yes -"

...and Serik is consumed by a roaring column of fire.

It hurts. It hurts a lot.

He can handle pain if he's expecting it, if he's in the right mood, if there's not too much of it. He was not expecting this, not a bit, and it's more than too much, it's pure searing agony. Healing from a pile of cracked charred bones is almost as bad as getting that way in the first place.

He spends a few seconds on the ground, just breathing, recovering from the pain.

Then he turns to wind and chases her down.

She's a fair distance down the road, headed almost directly away from the mountain, running so fast she nearly blurs. Definitely a pain mage; she might conceivably have had some kind of incredibly expensive fire trap to burn him with, but the way she's running is obviously pain-powered - a little faster one second, a little slower the next.

He materializes on top of her, tackling her to the ground, and makes her a swan on the spot. She won't transform until next sunrise, which is handy because there are things he'd like to do to her that he'd much rather she be human for.

"Thank you," he breathes in her ear, "that was very - simplifying."

A bolt of lightning takes them back to her adorable cottage.

She struggles; travel by lightning stuns her briefly, but then she starts struggling again.

The swan spell takes her pain before she can use it. And there is some pain.

"That's an interesting place to have a burn," he says, wrapping his hand around her neck and lifting her off the ground. "You did that to yourself, didn't you? Clever. And bold, to work with your own pain like that. Well, it's all mine now."

Her clothes catch fire. Now she has burns in lots of places.

Yeah for some reason she is no longer in a bantering mood.

She's tall, almost as tall as he is; it makes holding her off the ground by her throat like this a little inconvenient.

He can deal. He is making a point here.

She looks almost like she's given up struggling, and then she kicks him very hard in the crotch.

Well, that doesn't hurt as much as being incinerated.

It does hurt enough to make him drop her and double over.

And she can't use her pain anymore but she can use his.

She burns him. She burns him into ash and then burns him some more. The wall of the cottage catches fire, and the fire spreads, up to the roof and down through the garden, and she keeps burning him, keeps pulling on his pain to feed back into the fire, worse than anything she's ever done before, because she's never hurt anyone so categorically immortal.

It obviously isn't going to end well for her. She doesn't care.

It hurts. It hurts too much for him to even begin to pull himself together enough to do anything about it. He is completely helpless for as long as she can hold him.

She can't hold him forever, though.

The fire catches up to her. She can hold the magic through the first coughing fit when smoke billows in her face; she can hold the magic through the first touch of flame, she's already pretty badly burned, she can handle a little more; but she can't hold it forever. And when she slips, the power roars up like a bonfire and burns her to ash.

For a minute all he can do is lie there, coughing and on fire, and try to collect his thoughts.

Then he's recovered enough to ride the wind, and before she can start doing something else unpleasant he takes her three hundred feet in the air over the blazing ruin of her home.