Blood of Kings
-.
-.
Nothing. No one.
The place was completely empty. Monika's [Danger Sense] read only three lifesigns deep in the fortress.
/"This… is what we call: a trap."/
But we had no choice but to spring it.
I blew open the door to the fortress' throne room and shouted "OI, ZORAH YA CRAZY BINT, DID YA BITE OFF ANYBODY'S DANGLIES YET!"
"You sure took your time getting here, fool."
/"Wow. You completely didn't worry about Zorah being r*ped at all, did you? As a woman this should be offensive to me, but you two hate each other and yet somehow you have such complete trust in each other's ability.
Monika chewed on her thumbnails./"Somehow it pisses me off."/
Inside, we found a large man with a broad grizzled chin and a faintly wolf-like demeanor lounging on the throne. He was wearing brass-colored plate armor and grinned rakishly as we rushed in.
Zorah was tied up like a caterpillar, with only her head exposed, hanging upside down from the ceiling. That was sensible. It robbed her of all leverage, and she could not pull bullshit with momentum to give herself super strength. Wiggling around would just send her swinging around in circles until dizzy.
She stared back with a dull, completely unimpressed stare.
"Are you from Belfast?!" screamed a pudgy man in ornate robes inside a cage hanging on the opposite side of the room to Zorah. "Save me! The General's gone mad! Treason! Murder! Heresy! HEEEEELP!"
The General in question said "What's this? Is this all that Belfast can send to me? Children? Adventurers still with milk on their lips instead of their proper soldiers?" He tilted his neck at a jaunty angle, and we could almost feel a physical sensation of his lusty leer. "Well the girls don't have as much meat on them yet, but I guess they'll do fine as tribu-."
"DOUBLE LIGHTNING BOLT!"
KRAK-THOOM.
"What the shit!" Elze screeched as she shielded her face. Linze eeked and shut her eyes. Yae… sprang into acton.
We were told about his antimagic field. But because we could see my spell travel across the room, we knew that it had a range. And of course, no magic shield ever stops ambient light.
While everyone was blinking light spots from their vision, she had already moved towards the other side of the room well within the antimagic zone, cut down the metal chains that bound Zorah, slung the noblewoman over her shoulders like a bag of rice, and ran all the way back to her starting position.
In less than three seconds.
But those were still three seconds of a continuous lightning barrage. A heat haze obscured the other end of the room for a few moments until it cleared.
And sitting there, still lounging carelessly on the throne, with a wolf-like smirk on his face, the General Bazoar was as expected completely unscathed.
The wall behind him was blackened by carbon scoring, the drapes were on fire.
"Huh," the General grunted. "You kids aren't as bad as I thought. All right then. I won't kill you. I'm still keeping the girls, but I'll only break your legs and then give you a fair chance of taking them back."
I bristled. What mercy from a rapist! No one sane would believe that. He was just toying with us.
He really didn't see us as any threat, huh. I did expect to be constantly underestimated, not the least because of my apparent youth. Someone dressed in such bright primary colors like I did wearing a mask was either a useless fop or like Landschecks or Rondeleros were not afraid of anything, least of all charging into a wall of pikes.
"… Could we just leave Zorah here instead?" I had to say it.
"Gyahahaha. No. You were dumb enough to want to take her back. Keep her."
I regret this already.
Okay then. Well our job was done, immediately I started walking backwards because exposing your back to the enemy was just dumb.
I heard a frightened squeak from Linze behind me.
"... The Demon Lord's behind us, isn't it?"
/"It's outside the door, yup."/
"Oh my lord, you could grate cheese on those things," Elze mumured about the Demon Lord's impressively well-defined ten-pack abs, which were the only things visible past the door.
The creature had to bend down to enter the hall. It had the face of a goat, the horns of a ram, the furred neck and shoulders of a lion, the arms and muscular chest of a man, the furry legs of a bear, the wings of a bat, and were those eagle talons for feet?
Shite, this thing looks like the Icon of Sin. Do I have enough rocket launchers for this?
Monika helpfully reminded us of Leene's information from earlier:
/"A Demon Lord is a creature of magic. I'm not sure if it's related to that Crystal Cricket, but probably not. That thing got stronger the more magic it was exposed to, but a Demon actively needs magic to live. To think. To grow.
/"Magic is useless against a Demon Lord because it absorbs it completely. Only physical attacks would work, but the problem is that it is also a supernaturally powerful creature with its own ability to cast magic.
/"What a cheatery existence."/
So Elze's [ONE-PUNCH] wouldn't work.
/"No. It would absorb her magic and nullify her inherent self-protections against her own magic's side effects. Magical weapons would be ineffective for the same reason."/
The General still wasn't getting up. He sat there, slowly becoming bored with our inaction.
Yae and I shared a look. We looked down at Zorah on the ground like a worm, and then together at the nearby open window.
"Tell me you are not going to just toss me out that window," Zorah hissed dangerously.
I gestured, and Yae with nary a shred of hesitation chucked her out the window.
"OH YOU ABSOLUTE CUN-…!"
Leene would catch her. Probably.
"HAH!" the General laughed and slapped his palms down on the armrests of the throne. "Good enough. I will allow that." Then his eyes narrowed. "But if you think you're going to escape that easy, better think twice, children."
I clenched my fists, and lightning crackled up and down my arms. "... Why don't you just tell us all about your nefarious plot already."
"Whut," said Elze.
Without looking back I answered "Man like that, not leaving the scene of the crime? He wants to monologue. To brag about his great work to people that don't matter. It's no fun if no one understands the horror of not being able to stop it from happening."
He raised one shaggy eyebrow. "Huh. Weak. But smarter than you look."
"Who even are you, if you don't mind my asking. We're not really all up and up on important figures on the continent."
"Hmmf. As ignorant adventurers, I will forgive that. I am Guron Bazoar, Wolf of Regulus! Know my name and despair!"
"What do you get from trying to incite war between Belfast and Mismede?"
"Heeh? What do I get?" He spread his beefy arms wide. "Is it not obvious? WAR! WAR ITSELF IS THE ANSWER! A GLORIOUS WAR! _MY_ WAR! BEAUTIFUL WAR!
He threw his head back and quivered as if in orgiastic bliss. "THE WAR TO REPLACE THE OLD AND ROTTING REGULUS EMPIRE WITH THE NEW AND VIGOROUS BAZOAR EMPIRE!"
The fat noble trapped inside a hanging gibbet began openly sobbing.
"That is bugnuts insane, how are you even planning on accomplishing that? Even if you do manage to win the inevitable Regulan Civil War, there's still the rest of the continent ready to dogpile the weakened empire. Is what I should be saying right now, right?"
My fingers twitched. Light. Fire. Light. Fire. Wind. "You wouldn't be so confident of saying that even to no-name adventurers like that if you didn't have a way to fix the drastic difference in manpower."
"Heheheh. You know how a nation can't have all its people under arms, right? But what if you could exchange useless civilians for soldiers instead? You kill a demon, and it only goes back to its plane, harmed none! Eaten happily from the life power and magics of this plane! They don't fear death at all!
"I will take your Belfast, and offer it to a glorious sacrifice! Let Rodmere send its army, it will be eaten! All your men will be an offering, every one of them in exchange for a demon! Your children! Boys and girls, we don't need them! Throw them to the offering pile too! Ugly women, old women! More fodder for the army!
"We will have only a new beautiful generation of the BAZOARIAN PEOPLE. GWAHAHAHA!"
… This guy is total fruit loops. What the hell.
/"Player, an extraplanar summon can only exist in this plane as long as magic power is supplied to it from its summoner. If the Demon Lord is gone, so will the Army that is bound to it. Sacrifices can only allow them to remain for so long./"
The General grinned fiercely. "Tell this to your pathetic King. Declare war. Fight for his life. Struggle mightily, entertain me! If he is too much of a coward to battle Regulus with men, I will drown his pitiful kingdom with under a tide of demons and hang him by his own intestines."
Then he relaxed back on his chair. "Women, surrender. Kneel down. And I won't have my demons breed you. At least you will be only broken by my soldiers. You - boy - beg for your life and you will be able to flee back to your pitiful king to deliver this message unharmed. If not… well, you only need your mouth to say the message, legs to get there.
"Arms, nose, your manhood… you won't need them."
"You… you're evil!" Elze hissed. "You won't get away with this!"
I grinned back. "Then aren't you, oh future Emperor, the weak point of this whole scheme?"
Then I switched my stance to point both palms out front and back, and Monika and I shouted at the same time "[Fire] [Light] [Boom Tube] - Oh Light from the Heavens, in infinite power, shine! [SOLAR LASER!]"
The girls dived to a crouch and closed their eyes with their arms over their faces in a defensive fetal position.
Portals opened in front of my palms. They connected to a pair of smaller Boom Tubes in the upper atmosphere that accumulated photons continually moving between two points, and exited into searing heat of the purest heat of the sun's anti-vampiric holy symbolic potency.
The noble up on the hanging cage squealed like a pig as the ambient heat and light surged to flesh-roasting levels. It didn't take extra effort to mentally project an [Air Shield] around him.
The Demon Lord's chest was struck by the 20cm laser and roared in pain. The fur on its forearms as it instinctively tried to protect itself was set aflame. Then, strangely enough, the blindingly white disk on its body was being... pushed away?
General Bazoar was nowhere to be seen, the shield that suddenly sprang up in front of him coruscated with light as if staring directly at the sun.
Stones crackled and fizzled. The air hissed with steam. I had to pump new summoned [Wind] to keep everyone around me from suffocating or being cooked.
The girls slowly got back up to their feet and prepared to fight.
"So you have chosen death…" General Bazoar's deep and scratchy voice said through the fog of superheated air. He stood up to his full height. The silhouette of his brass armor and long red cloak flapped in an unseen wind. Shite, I thought there might be a loophole with photons being allowed through because of course how else are you going to see, but apparently even natural light counted as a magic attack.
He roared: "Pathetic. Ignorant fools, you don't know your place! If you don't want to accept my mercy to leave, then why not just stay forever!"
He waved forward and an unseen force rammed into us.
Elze and Linze let out a gasp, and fell down instantly unconscious.
Yae grunted, but after a small puzzled shiver, remained standing.
I felt myself suddenly blank out, cold and drained, as all my magic power was instantly drained out of me - and then almost immediately refilled.
Antimagic wave? Wait, what? He can do that?!
Monika's face abruptly appeared over my vision /"Player I need to shut down don't freak ou-"/
There was a cracking sound.
And then I knew only darkness.
At first there was darkness.
And then a dim light, coming through frosted eyepieces.
And then darkness again.
And a yawning terrible silence.
"... Monika?" I whispered.
The feeling I had of my own [Null] ability, one that would not light up a magic crystal amplifier due to there being nothing to amplify, returned a feeling of emptiness.
"Babycakes?"
I had a natural sense of Monika-as-a-smartphone's position anywhere in the world.
Except now.
Everything felt like it was contracting. I shivered in place. My palms sweated under my gloves, I was unable to breathe!
My thumb and fingers automatically tapped out a sequence, embedded magic stones on magic stones: Wind, Water, Wind, Fire.
"... Playa-dono?" Yae's voice seemed so far away.
And then my [Air Sense] spread out.
Blind as the apocryphical bat, my magic sense fed me awareness of my surroundings. To my left, Yae was half-crouched in a fast-draw position for her sword, ready to slice away with an air blade. I shook my head.
In front of me was a fuzzy man-shaped thing, as the general's magic shield absorbed the invisible ultrasonic vibrations of the spell.
Behind me, the Demon Lord's physique was presented in unnatural clarity, because it absorbed magic waves at the very tip of its skin and hairs and - like lines of charcoal defining shapes and shadows, I could discern it more by termination of input. Unlike echolocation, [Air Sense] worked via passive incoming pressure and displacement.
I spoke. "Yae. Go."
She nodded, understanding my intent perfectly. Yae took her hand off her sword and waited for my opening.
A part of me was going 'What… this is wrong. Why am I acting so calm and composed?I should be freaking out. I want to freak out. Why am I not freaking out?
'I want to scream. I want to rage. Why can't I show that on the outside? Is this shock? Is this denial? Do I have a split personality now?
'... Am I the evil side? Fuck me, I'm the evil side.'
Rage? Fear? Despair? Why can't I scream at the world for taking my love - my reason to exist - away from me?
'I would look super stupid with a goatee.'
That was the part that was still thinking. Everything else felt automatic. Dissociative breaks were common in substance abuse, concussions, high stress situations, and as a symptom of depersonalization disorder. (1)
It was like watching my own body move, flicking my arm out in a circle, whispering "Come [Earth], bared fangs of stone, [Earth Spike!]" and as it passed the stone floor undulated, growing a line of sharp conical spikes, bigger and bigger as the move completed, like a cobra lunging at its prey.
Shrak. The Demon Lord stepped back to avoid the wave of spikes aimed at its neck, and as my whirl completed back to front, the arc of spikes lessened in height as if the waves retreating down and away from the shore.
Yae grabbed grabbed Elze and Linze like a sack of potatoes under each arm and like a thief skedaddled forthwith leaping out the nearby open window.
And then as my right arm swung around back to the front, the flat of my fingers pointing towards the General, I went "Go [Earth], stab this frakker, [Stone Daggers!]"
The thin line of conical spikes following on the ground beneath my extended arm suddenly punched out, becoming a hail of sharp stone missiles.
All of which slowed to a stop in front of my enemy like e was frikkin Neo or something.
He sneered back at me, curling his lips and raising his chin. He sat back down on the throne, completely dismissing me as a threat.
"I AM INVINCIBLE!" he cackled.
I did not cry out - "Bullshit!", because I had my own [Air Shield] after all, and any decent magic swordsman ought to have defenses against ranged attacks. I always assumed that about anyone going around in plate armor without a helmet.
I turned towards the window, so that I had the Demon Lord and the General directly to my left and right, and dropped to sit on my knees.
Without thinking. Without planning. My brain was completely clear, and cold, like still waters.
With both hands I raised my long-handled sword, Zanzibar Mark Two, above my head.
"It's too late to surrender, boy. It's too bad, I wanted those girls to live - but what they're going to find out there… gaha. There are a lot of demons that can fly, you know."
I let go of my hands, opened my arms out and lowered my head in weariness, and with my two index fingers pointing at each of my enemy's faces; as if crucified.
My sword remained hanging impossibly in mid-air.
General Bazoar stood there, confident against this new line of trickery. The Demon Lord, not being a moron, but still contracted to remain and assist its summoner, opened a palm out to cast another magic shield.
From out under my cape floated a pair of tempered steel daggers, for [Mage Hand] was the laziest and best of magics, and the daggers each took position just over my outstretched fingers.
I breathed "Oh, [Wind], oh [Light], in sufficient velocity, [Knife Missile]."
One after the other, in opposite directions, the knives abruptly went hypersonic.
This was my solution to the magic railgun with a 200-meter rail that would break my arms. The knife missiles were not equivalent to a 120mm APFSDS, around 55mm APCR at best, due to the drastically lowered acceleration corridor.
General Bazoar blinked, staring at the knife that suddenly appeared fixed in space, hovering right in front of his right eyeball.
The Demon Lord let out a screech of pain as the other knife missile hit the shield, punched through, and embedded into its hand.
Considering the sheer size of its hand, the damage was nowhere near significant, but for the first time it was wounded.
"Well…" I said out loud as I stood back up. "Looks like one of you _isn't_ immune to physical damage."
"Wa… what, how dare you! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!"
The Demon Lord bent forward, opened its mouth and let out an ear-piercing screech!
Magic purple-pink lightning sparked around its horns and glowing balls of witch-fire appeared around its head. I dropped and rolled backwards, as the balls of eldritch fire blasted my formed position.
I slapped at the ground and somersaulted into a spin, in the limited confines of the room managing to make one, two, three - the last bounce against the wall, angling myself to slash-jump at the Demon Lord.
The sword clanged against the bare flesh of its right forearm.
"Hahaha! The Demon Lord is as strong as the magic power it can absorb! With me providing it with infinite magic power, it is also invincible!"
I kicked off the Demon Lord's shoulder and acrobatically swooped around to face the throne again.
Well if he's going to be so obliging as to sit down and remove the ability to dodge and parry effectively, I'll take it!
I landed then rushed forward. Theory: Like a Holtzmann Shield, the slow blade passes through the shield.
Wind burst out in a circle around my feet, and I blasted off with [Jet Bootsu] swinging down putting all my weight into the blow, with the godspeed fast enough to defeat any attempts at blocking.
The tip of my blade stopped just before plunging into his neck.
General Bazoar raised a hand, and pinched the blade between thumb and forefinger, and locked it in place.
"I am a veteran of two decades, you little shit. Even if I didn't have this, you would never have won a clash of swords against me."
The sword was ripped right out of my grasp as he kicked me right in the gut. This close to his antimagic draining field, my [Air Shield] collapsed immediately on contact. If I had stubbornly tried to hang on to the grip, the kick from a steel-shod boot would have torn up my insides.
Instead I was flung all the way back into the center of the room, sapping the violence of the blow by converting impact into momentum. I somersaulted in mid-air and slid backwards to a stop in a three-point landing.
I tilted my head aside and a thin line of red appeared across my cheek, as the knife-missile I had thrown earlier was tossed at my head, expertly aimed at where I would land.
Then I began dry-heaving from the pain right in the pressure point.
Ghhurk. Hork. Hork.
So this is agony?
I rolled to the side as another tingling of [Air Sense] warned of an attack from behind. The Demon Lord crashed onto the spot I was in, landing in a crouch with its talons digging into the floor tiles, its wings softly folding down around its shoulders like Batman like a cloak.
This was not agony. Actually Elze had punched me harder than this. This was fine. Combat was all about reaching past your limits.
I still felt oddly removed from it all. No fear at all.
Scrambling backwards, I pointed towards the general from Regulus again, and cast "Come, [Earth], come [Fire], fill this space with choking fog, [Cloudkill!]"
Dark acrid smoke billowed around the general.
He contemptuously sniffed and raised his open hand. "More fool, you! If you want to give me more magic from the spell trying to turn my air into poison, I'll take it!"
The custom spell [Cloudkill], which combined the oxygen-starved conditions of a fire with obscuring smoke for battlefield control, turned wispy and vanished, lacking magic power to fuel its creation.
Uggh. It was Monika who had the [Boom Tube] and all other [Null] Powers such as [Fortify Physical], [Magic Drain], [Stacking], [Auto-casting], et cetera.
If only we had access to [Boom Tube] and my reserve arsenal, there was colorless odorless poison gas. White phosphorus. [Blood to Acid] conversion. A lot of options in our warcrimes closet.
The Demon Lord began spitting out micro-fireballs at me.
With a round shield of air [Vent Rondel] I was able to deflect most of it, but then I staggered as the shield vanished abruptly from another anti-magic - or rather, magic-devouring wave.
The explosion struck me in the side, burning through the armor cloth there, and blasted me against a wall. I ducked, and just narrowly avoided getting my head punched clean off. The Demon Lord's fist cracked the stone wall, sinking deep.
I grimaced and side-stepped again, one hand covering the raw red flesh at my hips, and pointed towards the general again.
"[Earth!] Smash him between two walls, [Slab Trap!]"
My ring finger exploded into blood and viscera. Blood pumped out of the open hole in my gloves, staining the white leather red.
I grimaced in pain, but too busy dodging the Demon Lord now coming in completely unafraid to get into the thick of melee.
"Gyahahah I really can't believe there's still someone stupid enough to use spell-gloves!"
As I ducked under the Demon Lord's punch, and sliding between its legs, I managed to point two remaining fingers again at the general and shouted:
"From [Light] and [Fire], GET CANCER AND DIE, [RADION PULSER!]"
The air crackled with a distinctive frantic clicking noise of the Geiger Counter.
The General looked confused, patting his chest, even as I began rolling on the ground trying to avoid being set on fire. "Was that supposed to do something?"
Fukken intent-based Formalized magic! Fukken Ancient Civilization! Why you so dang competent?!
The Demon Lord snagged me by the cape and I only a moment to think /'No! Edna Mode! I'm sorry for rejecting your proscriptions!'/ before being flicked up and then slammed into the ground with a meaty crunch.
My vision blanked out red-hot with pain. This was fine. As long as it's not to the brain, I can heal tha-
The Demon Lord then whipped me about and tossed me into the wall. I face-slammed into it, and in a cartoon this would have been funny with me sliding down like a frog on a pane of glass.
[Heal]. [Heal] that shite. [Heal] it quickly.
Once on the ground I began to crawl away like a worm and rested with my back to the wall section right underneath the window where Yae escaped. I rested my back upon the cold stone and had one hand over the hole in my side, as if trying to keep my insides from spilling out through the paper-thin remaining skin tissue.
I took deep desperate lungfuls of breath.
"No… this can't be true, this is impossible!" I began to scream out hoarsely.
The Demon Lord stomped onwards to finish me off, but was stopped by a gesture from its summoner.
General Bazoar let out a dark chuckle. "Yess. That despair. That awful truth. You are going to die, and nothing, and no one, can stop it. I LIKE IT."
Thumping the back of my head against the wall, I muttered "I can understand the Demon Lord being this strong, but how can you A MERE HUMAN, have this much power? What are you doing? No one is that good at magic control without being a trained mage," I began to moan despondently. "No one!"
"GYAHAHA. There's a good reason I contracted with a Demon Lord. Not only can it absorb magic, it can shield against against magic, it can use magic to make its body stronger, it can SHARE that ability with its host."
He raised his right arm. "No mage can defeat me, I take their power, and give it back to the Demon Lord. I am perfectly immune to all magic attacks!"
He raised his left arm. "No fighter can defeat me, I am completely immune to physical attack. I block all of them!"
He raised both fists high and laughed maniacally. "I AM INVINCIBLE! This is the perfect trifecta of protection! In battle I am a GOD OF WAR! I AM THE CHOSEN BY THE GODS, and this whole world will become MY GLORIOUS EMPIRE!"
I stared dully at him through a hole in my mask, one of the lenses had been chipped out of its socket. I could barely see him at even this distance, but those bracers over his forearms just clashed terribly with the rest of his ensemble.
While the rest of his armor was brass-gold, the bracers were a pale silver I recognized as the same platinum-iridium that high-value currency was made of. They melted that out of Ancient Civilization coinage and materials because no one had any idea how to make such an alloy from scratch anymore.
I began laughing, first a slow chuckle, then rising to a mad loud cackling.
General Bazoar tilted his head. "What, you cracked already?"
Then he paused and looked up and around "... And where is that music(2) coming from?"
A slow rhythmic sound, almost like a heartbeat.
I said softly "Come, [Water], come [Light], dispel the illusion, [Minor Image]."
I flicked away blood from my fingers created by [Blood Maker] and clenched five perfectly intact digits into a fist. I gingerly got up and cricked my neck from side to side, limbering up, super casual after just getting my ass beat.
I looked to my right, at the Demon Lord, and our eyes met.
Its eyes were surprisingly human-looking in that goat face, with brown pupils and perfectly expressive.
I opened my palm out to my left, my sword Zanzibar Mk II sprang up into the air by itself to slap onto my waiting palm. I grinned up at it, and its eyes widened in the sudden realization.
And I whispered "Shoooryuken."
-.
-.
(1) mayoclinic /diseases-conditions/dissociative-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20355215
(2) youtube /watch?v=bI5l43cljBM
Doom 2016 Menu