Shooting the piece wrapped around his ankle, it shattered into pieces, and I helped him up to his feet. "Why would he spare you?"

"Ah, I don't... ah, know..." He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. "The only thing we need to talk about now is those kids! This... monster... He controls worms and lice with his mind!" I flashed back to the worms from earlier. "He... he's cooking those kids with the body heat of the bugs! Just- Just help them!" I looked where he pointed, and saw a second wooden door fixed with a padlock, easily shooting it off before kicking open that door.

But when I opened it, I didn't see any children. I only saw huge piles of countless worms and insects, and heard the now soft moans of dying children, and the softer slurp of the worms and lice as they rubbed against each other, generating heat.

I looked at the priest and now his face had changed from that of shock to that of pleasure or happiness, and some of the worms and lice were leaving the piles on the children and coming towards me. "You know, I wonder what's going through your mind right now. Probably a lot of things. Fear, anger. Maybe even sadness, for those I've killed today. But all that ends right now.." Everything started turning red, and my body started acting on its own, starting with the index fingers of both of my hands as they squeezed the triggers of my guns, their bullets digging deep into the chest of the priest, my legs launching me out of the room backwards as four more explosions sounded off and filled him with led. My guns dispelled and reappeared again, filled with six more bullets.

For a few minutes, he stood and then fell on his face, a puddle of blood spreading on the floor, followed by a steady flow of... Worms?! Then he slowly got up, and in a few moments they had crawled back inside of him, followed by the wounds healing in an instant. "You can't kill me! You can't! My worms will just heal me back again-" Bam! The gunshot echoed through the sewer as a bullet tore its way into his face, then out the back of his head, leaving a crater in the space between his eyes. The worms tried to heal him again but I kept the hole there by firing bullets faster than they could heal him, and then I shot his neck until it simply couldn't hold his head, watching it roll across the uneven floor like a lost ball.

"You- You can't do this! I'm a Dark Lord! I could send the order for your whole family to be execu-"

"I have no family." Another shot in the face and the room went silent before I placed his head in my satchel before finding my way back out of the sewers. The worms in the room are too many, and by the time I find a way to kill all the insects covering the kids, they would already be dead. Tough luck for them I suppose.

"What?! No! No! I won't accept it!" I knew she wouldn't take the news well, but there wasn't any way I could hide it from her, anyway. "Look, I know what it's like to have your family slaughtered, but we have to keep moving. I don't know how long it might be before the Lords realize that he hasn't returned to his castle. But to cheer you up..." I opened up the satchel and revealed the currently dead head of the Dark Lord, his eyes rolled back. The hole had shrunk significantly.

"A head?!" She shoved it out of my hands, and it rolled back behind the shed. I picked it up. "Not just any head. This is the head of the Dark Lord that killed your family, and everyone you love." Now I have her attention. "But that's not all." She watched in horror and awe as the worms inside him started doing their work, and soon he was alive again. He tried to scream, and he tried to yell, but without a voice box all he could do was let out what little saliva he had left. "This sucker here has a healing factor even stronger than that of the other Lords from the bugs that nest in him. You know what that means?" A little whirlwind of darkness swirled around in my hand and molded into my six-shooter, and I handed it to her.

"You get to bring him just as much physical pain as he gave you emotional pain. Well, at least until the worms realize that their host is now beyond repair." The so-called priest could hear every word I spoke, and that knowledge alone brought me immense pleasure.

"Go ahead. Give it to him." For the first time ever, I got to see what might be an even prettier smile than that of Mother Cerdwin's.

We stayed around for a while looting some of the empty homes before I let her torture the Third for what was probably around an hour, until I decided it was time to leave.

"Come stand behind me." Calling on a mound of smoke from the ground below us, it let out a whinny and formed out legs, a tail, hooves, and finally a long head with a snout and pointy ears. "Giddy up." The horse skidded in the desert sand for a little bit, and then started galloping at full speed towards the next village. "All right, here's the plan." "What?" I looked back in time to see a few tears running down her face, but she was quick to turn her head away. "I was headed this way to find someone, but first, I'll drop you off at the village that's the least out of my way, and I guess that's the last we'll see of each other." For the last few hours, we didn't really say too much, and that was fine with me.