Chapter 457: Herald’s curse
Phuong sliced off another chunk of the demon with his Soulblade as it kept on screaming threats and profanity in his mind.
There was quite a bit of terrible and creative variety. But ‘I’ll rip you apart’, and ‘I’ll eat your fucking soul while you scream for mercy’ summed it up. Phuong ignored the voice, and cut.
Every landed blow visibly splattered a physical piece of the strange creature. For once, his attacks seemed far more effective than Carl’s. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Seamus was cursing somewhere in the back as his endless bolts of fire did little more than tickle the thing. Carl’s dagger was about as useful as any other little piece of metal stuck into a twenty foot giant. But Phuong’s blade? It struck like it had a foot-wide invisible aura of force, blasting smoke and black blood away in a wave of destruction.
The demon hardly even fought back. It seemed focused on everyone else, drifting away from Phuong as if afraid and unable to do much. When it tried to turn its huge blade on him he just got in close and deflected, the same ‘aura’ on his sword pushing back his enemy’s attack without actually suffering the blow.
Then came the mental attacks. But these too seemed somehow…muffled, and far away. Like they couldn’t actually reach Phuong’s mind. It was like the same aura of his sword or some other power was a magnet, pushing away the opposite force of these evil creatures. Then came the threats and curses. But Phuong wasn’t afraid.
For fighting demons, especially powerful ones, his class and abilities seemed—in a word—perfect.
So he cut. He ignored the rest of the battle, seeing little effect from the others except Mason’s arrows. If it were only him and his patron, he would have little concern, expecting the frightening young man could survive whatever was thrown at him. But with everyone else here, and the slowly increasing threat of the event, Phuong felt a sense of urgency.
And so he cut. Ever shrinking pieces of the demon sloughed and splattered with Phuong’s blade, hissing and rising with smoke as they rained on dead earth. The thing screeched and pulled away, desperately trying to avoid the attacks as it all but ignored him and attacked…someone else.
“This is fucking useless, I’ll help the boys in the back!” Carl shouted, vanishing with an arcane pop as Phuong nodded without looking away. Alex had gone, too, and even Seamus’s fire came to a stop. That was good, they were no doubt needed elsewhere.
But it wasn’t his concern. Nothing was except the demon and its filth spilling on the ground. When a soldier had a job to do he didn’t worry about the rest of the battlefield. He did his job.
Phuong dodged as a piece of the creature’s twisting body thrashed and tried to swipe off his head pushing down a piece of…barbed smoke with the force of his blade. And he cut.
**
Ayet moved through the symbols in her mind and surrounding the planar portal at a speed somewhere beyond reckless. Dariya slumped at her side, leaning on her staff like the ancient woman she was, still glowing with white light.
“Hurry, my lady,” she croaked, eyes half closed and hands trembling as she raised one to cast some new spell.
Ayet could have screamed in frustration. To close such a portal was not a task for a single enchanter. Ayet should have been surrounded by colleagues—by wizards, by resources.
She had no crystals or gems to help her channel, or to draw mana from. So she had to be careful with her shrinking pool. To keep the speed of her spells to a minimum as she did the work with her mind and memory.
Dozens of actual living, breathing demons were attacking her from multiple directions. Only Dariya and Mason’s warriors kept her alive. But she couldn’t seem to put this from her mind—to ignore the screams and roars and sounds of violence so close and getting louder.
“We’re gonna need a fuckin’ apocalypse soon, mate!” someone shouted, though Ayet had no idea what that meant.
“Not yet,” shouted another voice. “We have a spear wall left?”
Ayet lost track of the voices as she focused, the sounds of humans shouting and butchering lost in the endless background noise. She pulled apart runes and swiped them away to a growing scrap heap of magical power, the energy not ‘gone’ until the whole thing came crumbling down.
If she wasn’t careful, she could do worse than fail. If she manipulated enough runes into the wrong place—if she failed to safely extract the planar energy from its creators it might be re-shaped, or it might become unstable. She could kill everyone standing anywhere nearby. She could open an even larger portal to the same plane, or to another.
“Slow down!” she heard the voice of her favorite instructor all those years ago. “You have more time. Use it. Precision is more important than haste in planar magic, Ayet-sa.”
“Yes, teacher,” she’d said dutifully, but secretly could barely stand the waiting. Even then she’d wondered: but what if I didn’t have more time?
Even then she’d understood and memorized the symbols so much faster than the others. Why not see how fast she could push herself? Why not do the recitations and copying as fast as possible?
She knew the answer, though—for fear of the terrible consequences. Far better to take the time when the stakes were low—to be precise and sure because it cost nothing but the time of students and teachers. But the stakes weren’t low. Not here. Not anymore.
Kill her, whispered a terrible voice on the wind. Kill the moon witch. Kill them both!
And then, far more quietly: I see you, Ayet of House Anshan. Stop this. Turn and run, or I will find you. Or your children. In a year or a thousand, I will end you and your line in shadow and blood.
Ayet clenched her teeth to stop her jaw from trembling. To hear her name on an abyssal tongue! Her people knew not to ignore demonic threats. Their memories were eternal, their vengeance and hatred as powerful as their single-minded commitment.
This herald of shadows did not speak idly. Unless it was destroyed here and now, it would never forget, would never stop until it had its revenge.
Ayet pulled apart rune after rune, focused on her task and trusting these humans to protect her, to destroy or at least stop the temporary physical form of the herald.
She did it for the prophecy and the dead husband she should have honored more. For her daughter. For the human lord who had taken her in.
“Just a little longer,” she lied to Dariya, and to herself and everyone else. “I’m nearly there.”
**
Mason’s lightning blast took most of his mana. A thunderous roar followed, a massive splatter of demonic goo and steam spraying across the portal. The creature kicked Becky (again), this time lifting her off her feet and tossing her out of the portal with a cursing shriek.
It turned, and as Mason watched another few chunks fly off, he started to realize it was mostly Phuong that was killing this thing. The swordsman was chopping off demonic flesh like a ginsu metronome, making a mockery of Mason’s arrows and lightning damage in about ten seconds.
So. New plan: Make sure Phuong did not stop until it was dead.
Except Mason was doing shit all to the thing by comparison, and it had stopped even trying to kill him, focusing instead on his friends, probably while the other demons built up enough to…
Mason’s eyes widened as he looked out at the growing army of creatures coming from the other portals. He summoned his Claws and charged towards his players.
“You OK there, Phuong?” he yelled, no idea if Becky was coming back or if she had her Aegis on him or what. It was gone from Mason, that’s all he knew.
He didn’t see Alex anywhere, so the Belarusian must have been with the others, too. In other words, Phuong seemed like he was fighting the herald pretty much alone.
The swordsman didn’t even respond. He just chopped and dodged, weaving his way around the shrinking demon as he kept on hacking it to bits, nothing but concentration on his face. Mason decided to take that as a yes.
He started to Shapeshift, his already changed body popping and contorting as he grew claws. Then he activated his cycled Aspect of the Cheetah, avoided the dead ground, and aimed straight at the biggest pack of demons he could see.
The creatures looked frantic, but not afraid. They were pushing and screeching, trying to get at Nassau’s players but stumbling over each other and kept out by well-placed spearwalls and apparently a big blue half circle of Becky’s.
Only one demon turned as Mason came charging. It blinked and pointed at him as it glanced at the others, as if it wasn’t sure he was real. He had the strange urge to lower his head to ram, but instead jumped and sailed straight into a clustered pack moving what had to be at least forty miles an hour.
His strength, weight, and speed made a bloody mess of things. For a few seconds he was the world’s worst crowd surfer, kicking faces and slashing with his actual claws until he dropped into a pack of demons.
They tried to grab him, tried to get in close enough to use their teeth and claws. He didn’t mind. He raked his own down the first face, shredding and spilling ichor as the thing’s skin and flesh came off like a mask.
He threw off a grappler and spun with his hands out, muscling his way through as he kicked and slashed at the trapped, packed, and confused mobs of lesser demons. Transformation was happily tick, ticking away, growing back flesh and shaping him into what he wanted: something not just hard to kill, something dangerous to touch.
He felt (and heard) spikes growing out his back, curved bone like scythes ripping out his elbows. He was biting something’s throat before he remembered how awful they smelled and tasted, spitting out some kind of acidic ichor with a disgusted roar.
A jackal-man tried to bite his throat, and he lunged faster and chomped down on its snout. The thing screamed and whined as he ripped off most of its jaw with his teeth, tossing it aside as he punched and checked his way through the shattering mob.
He heard his players shouting and aimed towards them, no idea what they were saying. For the moment, at least, it didn’t matter. Mason was exactly where he was supposed to be—between monstrous beasts and men.
A fat, spear-wielding, humanoid demon shoved its weapon into Mason’s chest with a triumphant sneer. Mason snapped it off, and shoved the handle through its eye so hard it broke through the skull on the other side. His wound healed.
Pain was becoming a kind of personal art to Mason. His body was like a canvass of flesh and bone, the kind of wounds he took the different paints and brushes. A splash of skin here, a cracked bone there. Sometimes he blocked or dodged or deflected. Other times he didn’t, taking the hit right where he wanted.
His back was his current project—a new, blank page he was stripping and piercing with claws and teeth, sensing the vision grow. It only took a minute before the scratching stopped.
Mason threw himself back against something and felt it stick. He twisted and slashed with his claws and ‘scythes’, shaking the pierced, screeching victim off before meeting and ramming his forehead into a horned goat’s charge.
The thing fell back, dazed. Mason laughed, and the demons finally broke.
“Where are you going?” he roared, leaping on backs and ripping apart anything he could catch. “Isn’t this what you came for?”
It took him awhile to remember his players. He blinked away the bloodlust and ran for the gap in the spears and walls, smashing through another small pack of demons until he’d reached them.
Garet and Jason shoved spears at his face, and he swatted both away.
“It’s me,” he said, walking past the wide-eyed spearmen as he first looked for wounded, then tried to see Phuong in the circle. It seemed everyone was OK. The players had done a good job defending the elves and building their little fort with the weaker people in the middle.
Phuong seemed…fine. Though it looked like the herald had somehow split and was now in some other form of multiple humanoid shapes.
“Doesn’t that thing ever fucking die?” Mason muttered, then realized Dariya looked like she’d aged a few decades. Ayet was still frantically doing…something, sweat dripping down her face.
“No,” wheezed the old seer. “Not unless the portal is closed. You can…” She turned and looked at him and her voice caught in her throat. He impatiently gestured for her to go on, and she swallowed and blinked but seemed to recover. “You can stop it physically. Maybe for a month. Maybe for a year. But you can’t destroy it. If Ayet can close the portal, however, that will end this herald’s connection to the abyss. Then it will truly die.”
“How do we help her?” Mason asked, looking at his beautiful new ‘concubine’ with a very mixed and confusing cocktail of concern and pride and lust.
“Pray,” the seer said dryly, then sighed as she slumped to the ground. “Protecting her is enough. And keeping that herald busy. If you can just keep them all away long enough, an enchantress of Ayet’s skill will eventually find a way to…”
Dark smoke exploded off the portal with a sizzle. The herald screamed with a dozen voices, the humanoids fighting Phuong all lifting into the air. Some clawed at the ground, others seemed to be trying to grab the ends of the writhing smoke like catching fleeing snakes.
“No!” the demon roared as all the smaller demons screeched and scattered in obvious terror, all running back towards their portals. “Curse you, Mason Nimitz. With my essence, I curse you and your line for a thousand years. I curse you!”
Mason snorted. He was trying to think of something clever when the pulse of magic hit him and the text started to scroll.
[Temporary title gained. Herald’s Curse. You have been soul-cursed by a greater demon of the abyss. Impressive. But bad. Increased attention from all abyssal creatures.]
Mason sighed as he watched the demonic energy fade into nothing. How did he specifically deserve that? He was just there minding his own business before the damn demons showed up.
In less than a minute, the portals all started sucking up every trace of smoke and shadowy form, every living, mewling demon, until there was nothing left of the ‘invasion’ but a few dozen dead circles of moss and trees. And a whole lot of corpses.
“Is it over?” Carl appeared out of nowhere and wiped a hand over his sweaty scalp. “Not gonna lie. I don’t like demons. OK, that sounds dumb. Obviously I wouldn’t like them. What I mean is I don’t like them even more than it makes sense not to like them.”
Mason practically heard the experience rolling in with the text as the event declared itself over in his profile. He nodded and went to put a hand on Carl’s shoulder before he remembered his claws.
“Seems over. But I don’t trust it. Get everyone back to Nassau.”