-Hurray!! My first assignment in the Academy! I’ve been waiting months for this! Oh, I haven’t introduced myself yet, haven’t I? I’m Gabe. - Gabe said to his newly assigned partner, Lucy.

-I’m Lucy. Pleasure to meet you. - Said Lucy, with rather a pretty obvious fake smile on her face.

-So, what’s the assignment, Lucy?

-We have an old graveyard in the woods in England, people in the village say that it might be possessed by a ghost, because they can hear screams coming from that direction at night. Also they found scratches on a grave. Apparently, an old guy from the village has seen a shadow in the dark with huge claws. The demon took the old man’s dog, but they think that his dog might have gotten attacked by another animal and he is just not straight in his head. He is around his eighties. So they sent us to investigate. – Said Lucy, utterly uninterested, as if she'd said such a thing a thousand times before.

-What level is the demon? – Asked Gabe, even more nervously.

-Level one, that’s why they sent a rookie like you to do it. But they sent me to help you, just in case.

Yeah, I forgot to say something very important. Gabe and Lucy both come from The Demon Hunting Academy, where people with special abilities train to kill demons. Now, you are probably wondering “How can a human with special abilities kill demons”? Well, strap the hell in, because it’s exposition time. First of all, don’t fall for that Hollywood crap about the crucifix or silver killing demons, they are actually pretty easy to kill. Well most of them, at least. 

Demons are killed with the shouhu-zhe. For those who don’t know what the shouhu-zhe is, that’s a weapon that has a pentagram imprinted on it. So this is where those special powers, called uno, come in. The people who can use uno are merged in the weapon, their subconciousness carved in it. The shouhu-zhe is a part of them, physically and mentally. The users of uno can call upon those weapons to slay a demon. The shohu-zhe’s look, of course, varies a lot depending on the personality of the user. The shohu-zhe is truly the ultimate demon hunting weapon. 

Attack and defense. Attack, because of its pentagram. Everyone knows that in the middle ages pentagrams were used to summon demons and collect their powers. Well, that’s half true. The pentagrams can collect demon powers, but they cannot summon them. The shohu-zhe-s do exactly that. They harvest demonic powers. To be exact, demons do have organs (well, some of them), but they are of no use to them. The thing that keeps them alive is spirit energy (ki, chi, soul energy, different names, same thing). They get spirit energy by feeding on humans. So when you kill a demon with a shohu-zhe, because they harvest demonic powers, a.k.a. spirit energy, they lose what kept them alive. That’s when its body descends, or to be exact disintegrates back to „hell“. And since the powers are placed in the shohu-zhe, and the shohu-zhe is placed in its user’s body, the demonic ki itself are placed inside the user’s body. In time, the uno users rise above humans, becoming faster, stronger, and more agile than your average man.

Then, the defense. Well, if you can call it a defense anyway. It’s more of a healing ability. Every wound inflicted on the body will heal, with the condition of time. Based on the severity of the wound, it takes different amounts of time to heal. If the user bleeds out during the process of healing, he dies. Also if the user has a wound in a fatal region, he will most likely die. The healing process takes a lot of time, but it’s good for long-term properties. For example, an arm can heal completely in four weeks. A person without uno would stay armless, but the users of uno heal. That’s why they can go trough some pretty tough battles and be ready for the next one pretty quickly. If the wound is great, just stop the bleeding or slow it down until the healing process stops it. But the shohu-zhe is not the most perfect weapon. It has its flaws. For example, the summoning time. When a shohu-zhe is summoned, black shards come flying out of the user’s body and they form the shohu-zhe in some time, but when you’re standing in front of a demon milliseconds matter. Though the calling time does vary from person to person, just like the looks, and it can be practiced to the person’s limits, which rise with every demon slaying. The average calling time is about three seconds.

And, of course, there is the term of spirit energy. Now, you all probably heard the terms chi, ki, stuff like that. Well, if you have, you have a pretty decent idea of what spirit energy is. It’s like a fifth kind of aggregate state. It exists in everything that is alive (or was), and some even speculate that it provides life. Not all creatures have the same amount of spirit energy, though. Some, like humans, have higher amounts of spirit energy than, say, trees. Of course, also, some humans have more spirit energy than other humans. Now onto the most important part. Most of spirit energy is contained in blood, so logically things like trees have less spirit energy than animals. And that’s also why demons eat humans, to collect the spirit energy via the blood. Now, with that in mind, back to the story.