BTIV - Chapter 10

Micah put his shoulder into the window, shattering it and leaping out into the night sky.  Air rushed past him as he hastily tucked the letters into his carrying pouch.  Already he could feel ritual energy coiling around him, nipping at his skin as it sought to pierce through his body and latch its claws into his soul.

The guards on the walls, the gardens, really all life other than Micah himself withered in a matter of seconds, their energy siphoned by the ritual circle.  One by one the handful of visible humans collapsed, streamers of green fire jumping from their bodies toward a point hovering in the air some hundred paces to Micah’s left, the absolute center of the circle formed by the wall.

Then the circle pulsed a second time, and streams of fire began to flow from the mansion, up into the air where they wound together.  The flames writhed, forming esoteric and arcane symbols one after another that Micah could only grasp a fraction of.

A chill ran down Micah’s spine.  He couldn’t understand the ritual.  In all likelihood, no one below Dakkora’s level could, which made its existence all the more troubling.  Count Arass was a summoner in the previous timeline, but he wasn’t capable of anything on this level.  The man struggled to summon and leash a single luoca.

Micah turned toward the entrance to the estate and began flying away as fast as the spell would carry him.  Someone had changed the past, and the only someones capable of that were himself and the Third Prince.  Stopping here and now to stop the ritual wasn’t strictly necessary, and if Micah could help it, he didn’t want to get embroiled in a fight before he had secured the support of Sandrovok’s royal family.  For now, all he needed to do was get the letters to Gwen so she could present them to her mother.

Just as he was about to cross the line formed by the wall, a long, deep ripping sound echoed through the air toward him, and a morbid sense of curiosity forced Micah to look over his shoulder.  The sphere of green flames and runes was gone, replaced by a hole in space much larger than any he had ever seen before.

A claw, ruby red and as big as Micah’s torso, thrust through the opening.  Behind the appendage, he could see the dimly glowing and ever roiling mists of Elsewhere.  Almost instantly, Micah’s brain flipped back through the books on daemons he had read and came up blank.  Whatever this was, it wasn’t anything that had been committed to writing.

Another claw pushed its way through the opening.  With both of the appendages in the portal, there wasn’t much room leftover, and for a moment Micah let himself feel some relief.  The monstrosity in the other world seemed to be too large for the summoning circle used by the Count.

Then, the claws pulled away from each other, stretching the boundaries of the glowing portal.  The gateway held for a second, and then another ripping sound sent a shiver down Micah’s spine.

The glowing green boundaries were gone.  Instead, there was an angry tear in the fabric of space itself, and the circular armored body of the daemon itself pushed its way through opening on a dozen massive armored legs, all of which ended in sharp stabbing points that punched holes through the roof of the Count’s manor.

It looked like a crab, but wrong in subtle ways.  Its torso was almost perfectly circular, the same vibrant red as the claws, and it had half again more legs than it should.  More importantly, where a crab would have a pair of beady black eyes, the monster had a pair of human heads.

The minute the human faces touched Karell’s air, they began to wail, gnashing their teeth and shaking their heads.  Their discordant wails seemed to shake the air, and Micah felt a wave of nausea wash over him as his vision doubled.

With a wave of his hand, Wind Shield snapped into existence around Micah and he breathed a sigh of relief.  He had amplified the effect of the spell to the point where all outside sounds were excluded, and already Micah could feel his eyesight returning to normal, but the same couldn’t be said for the Count’s manor.

If the aura from the luocas was like lapping waves against the sand castle of the physical world, gradually eroding it, the screams from the crab daemon’s eyes were a tsunami.  They crashed into the building and the ceiling bent.  Parts bowing inward while ripples flowed across the stone like it was water.

Then, the roof shattered, most collapsing inward while parts spring upward,, forming a corona of mutating and shifting debris that orbited the monster.  Droplets of molten marble floated gently in the air, gravity a meaningless concept while the heads wailed.

It turned the screeching heads toward Micah, and his skin began to burn as if he’d been out in the desert sun unprotected for hours.  Both of its claws opened, revealing a pair of circular mouths at their bases, each lined with inward facing teeth like a shark or a remora.

He turned and ran.

Micah wasn’t sure what the creature was or what its abilities were.  He didn’t even have a hint.  What he did have was the evidence he’d need to begin the long process of mobilizing Sandrovok, and a general idea of how daemon summoning worked.  The duration of a summon depended largely upon the size of the sacrifice used to draw it into the human world.

If he could draw the monster off into the desert, or better yet, escape entirely, it was only a matter of time before the energy that powered the daemon dissipated.  Given the overwhelming power that the crab-thing was demonstrating, even with an entire mansion full of nobles, there wasn’t any way that it could last more than ten minutes, let alone the half hour or so it would take to get back to civilization.

A flash of rainbow light was all the warning that Micah had.  He jerked to the left just as a jet of dark liquid sprayed past him.  Even with his reactions, a drop landed on the Maarikava armor, and almost immediately Micah’s arcana skill began to scream a warning as it began to hiss and melt through the borderline artifact tier defense.

He fired an Air Knife at his own body as he spun around, barely denting the armor but sending the hissing and bubbling droplet flying into the air.  One of the daemon’s pincers was open and extended, a thin trickle of the acidic liquid dripping from the circular mouth built into its base.

Both of the heads that passed for its eyes began to laugh, and Micah’s blood ran cold.  He couldn’t hear them, Wind Shield was still sealing out all outside sounds, but the crab had climbed down off of the half destroyed manor, each step of its dozen legs melting through the now barren garden and turning the land into lifeless sludge as it scampered toward him with surprising speed.

Micah willed himself to fly backward.  Flight didn’t differentiate between the direction that he was facing, and so long as Micah wasn’t trying to weave his way through some sort of narrow space filled with obstacles, he could keep his attention on the daemon.  Given its speed and ranged ability, that was clearly the correct choice.

Experimentally, he summoned a Pressure Spear, tossing the spell at the daemon as he flew.  The distortion zipped toward the crab.  With supernatural quickness, both of the heads focused on it, letting out a hyena bark of laughter.  Through his headband, Micah could feel the structure of his spell shatter, as the mana itself boiled and disappeared under the unnatural sonic assault.

It didn’t slow either, lifting its other pincer and opening it wide.  This time, Micah wasn’t surprised when Foresight warned him of the blast acid, but even forewarned, the speed of the attack was breathtaking.  He jerked upward only for the daemon’s claw to track him, tracing a line through the night sky as Micah dodged and wove to stay ahead of its attack.

By the time the acid beam stopped, almost five seconds had passed.  He didn’t have any idea how much damage the virulent acid had caused where it landed in the desert.  Hells, he wasn’t even sure how far the acid went.  It was certainly coming out of the daemon’s mouth fast enough, it easily could have made it to the road or into one of the nearby trading posts.

He chanted the words to Binding Vines as the creature surged toward him, legs pumping fast enough that an ordinary human likely couldn’t see them.  Really, the only saving grace of this scenario was that Count Arass valued his privacy.  If this fight weren’t taking place deep in the desert, it would have been a massacre.  Just the sound of the daemon’s wails would have been enough to kill thousands.

It raised its first arm, opening the pincer to fire again.  Micah’s heart dropped.  It had been less than a minute since its first attack, and if the daemon could fire the acid streams repeatedly, even with all of his gear, he might be in trouble.

A push of his mind switched the target of Binding Vines, and this time when the spell activated the roots burst from the ground grabbing the raised arm and jerking it downward before it could fire.  Acid sprayed into the sand at absurd pressures, melting a deep, narrow tunnel into the desert.

But, for a brief second, the acid stream was impacting on the open ground without any sort of hole to absorb the backsplash.  The dark liquid sprayed everywhere, including back onto the daemon and the vines that were holding it in place.

Micah didn’t have much hope for the vines surviving long against the daemon.  Between its massive size and the reality slagging screams of its eyes, it would have only been a matter of seconds rather than minutes before the beast broke free.  The acid caused even those weak hopes to vanish in a flash.

The hardened roots that had pinned any number of high level foes dissolved like salt in a pitcher of water as the acid devoured them, destabilizing their mana and undoing Micah’s spell in an eyeblink.  His only consolation was watching the same acid burn fist sized holes in the daemon’s thick armor, revealing tender flesh underneath.

It shook like a dog drying itself, trying to rid its body of the clinging acid with partial success, but that moment bought Micah a little more time to open the distance.  As he flew, he began casting Explosive Thicket repeatedly.  The spikes and roots wouldn’t do much damage, but they would slow the pursuing daemon, hopefully keeping it at a far enough distance that Micah could dodge its acid beams until it ran out of animating energy.

After it ran into the second spell, the pair of heads on the daemon stilled for a second, no longer laughing madly.  Then, the monster leapt into the air as both of them burst into tears.

Micah gritted his teeth as a wave of unnatural energy washed over him.  The sound of the heads’ lamentations might not be able to reach him, but the taint of Elsewhere could.  His arcana skill pushed itself to the limit, shielding him from the worst of the reality bending assault, but Micah could still feel the skin of his face cracking, trickles of blood running down from the wounds that were opening of their own accord as he dried and burned under the constant attack.

Worse, Karell seemed to be responding to the screams.  The daemon was no longer on the ground.  Instead, each and every one of its steps landed on discs of crystal, solidified from the air itself and hanging motionlessly for the fraction of a second that the monster needed to scurry through the night sky after him.

They fell to the ground, in the monster’s wake, a steady rain of glass as Micah redoubled his speed in an attempt to flee the monster.

A bolt of acid flew past Micah, forcing him to dodge downward.  More blood leaked from cuts on his face and arms as Regeneration and his arcana skill began to lose their ongoing battle with the wailing heads.

He glanced quickly over his shoulder.  Micah was almost back to the paved highway between Red Sands and the capital.  Hopefully his companions had fled as soon as the daemon was summoned.  If he barely had the resilience to fight the creature, there was no way that Drekt, let alone Leeka would be able to survive within a thousand paces of the beast for more than a second.

With a sigh, Micah slid his spear into the leather holster he’d attached to the back of his armor.  Usually, the weapon never left his hands, but it was clear that he wouldn’t be able to come close enough to the daemon to use a melee weapon.  Hells, even the mana of his Flight spell would probably be shattered by the screeches and howls of the monster’s eyes.

“I had hoped to avoid using this so early,” Micah whispered to himself, reaching into the leather satchel he kept at his side and pulling out an ornate scepter.

The second both of his hands were on the artifact’s hilt, power thrummed through his body.  On their own, both the crown and the scepter were strong, stronger than any other enchanted item Micah had laid hand on, but together they amplified each other.

Suddenly, the colors of magic around him snapped into focus and the night was as bright and vibrant as a bazaar at noon.  Green wind mana swirled through the air.  Gold earth mana set the desert ablaze, dotted with the brown wood mana of cacti and the brownish blue blurs of oases.

Only where the daemon had passed was there nothing.  Slag and ruin stretched in its wake, the power of Elsewhere destroying both reality and mana.  Even the air itself felt thin around the monster as it sprinted toward Micah some dozen paces above the desert.  As if the monster’s very presence on Karell weakened the barrier between Micah’s world and the deadly chaos of Elsewhere.

It lunged forward, extending one of its claws toward Micah.  He pushed his will into the scepter, using his mind to scoop a huge divot of sand from the desert and fling it in the way of the oncoming attack.

As the dry soil flew through the air, Micah reshaped it, pushing the sand into an angled plane just in front of the daemon’s yawning mouth an eyeblink ahead of the burst of acid.  The tight stream of liquid exploded into a cloud of droplets, most of which blew back into the daemon’s armor and face where they began hissing angrily.

Both of the heads stopped screaming for a second, their eyes going wide with pain and shock, and the circles of crystal stopped appearing under the monster’s legs.  It stumbled in the air falling toward the desert below where it landed in a huge dune of sand, legs kicking furiously.

Micah used the scepter’s telekinesis to catch three of the crystals, accelerating them until they were moving so fast that even his eyes couldn’t track them, and crashing the projectiles into the monster’s underbelly.

The first blow cracked its shell.  The second broke it entirely, and the third lodged itself deep in the monster’s abdomen.

The sand dune surrounding the daemon exploded the sand flying up into the air and freezing as the twin heads began to wail once again.  In front of Micah’s eyes, the dirt transformed into rot and slime before pattering back down to earth and coating the crab’s acid pocked shell.

Below Micah, the crab glared up at him angrily from its two weeping eye-heads.  It clacked both of its claws soundlessly, clearly angry at having taken damage, but not yet ready to initiate a new attack.

Micah shifted his grip on the scepter.  Everything around the monster was dim, but he had already grabbed a handful of boulders that were half buried in the sand a league or so away.  They were rushing toward the two of them with enough speed that they would beat the sound of their passing as they pummeled the daemon.  It was only a matter of seconds before they accelerated to-

He froze.  Out of the corner of Micah’s eye he saw a glint of steel.  A half dozen ranks of soldiers, all atop riding lizards and led by Gwen were galloping across the sands toward his battlefield.  Either someone had alerted her to their fight, or the elite blessed of the capital had sensed the summoning ritual and ensuing struggle, but her presence put him in a bind.

The rocks slammed into the daemon, battering and upending it.  Micah could tell that its left pincer was damaged, probably out of commission completely, but that didn’t matter.  If the princess joined the fight in an effort to help him, it would all be for nothing.  Even if the crab didn’t attack her directly, its sonic attacks would erase her and any warrior without the protection of arcana from reality.

“Fuck,” Micah whispered to himself, zipping past the monster in an attempt to draw it away from his relief, all the while whispering the words to Deja Vu.

He’d expended a fair amount of mana, and Micah wasn’t excited by the prospect of fighting the daemon at full health with half of his resources depleted, but at least this time he knew what to do.  Spells were almost worthless.  Only the scepter itself stood a chance, and the artifact barely used any mana.  It was perfect for the tight spot he found himself in.

The last word to the spell left his mouth, and Micah felt himself being yanked backward.  Five minutes wouldn’t take him back to the manor, but even if he engaged the daemon earlier in its pursuit he could lead it away from the road, that should-

His eyes widened as a squirming shape was ripped out of the daemon in front of him.  Formless and wriggling, like a worm made of mist, Micah could feel the daemon as it was pulled back with him.  Its spirit rocketed toward him, as if they were both magnets.

They slammed together, unable to avoid a collision, and Deja Vu shattered as the daemon passed through Micah’s skin, merging seamlessly into his body.  His eyes rolled back up into his head.  Flight sputtered and failed as he lost consciousness, plummeting to the empty sand of the desert as the world went black around him.