“Andras,” I said, standing straighter. “Why don’t you shut up for a second and hear what I have to say before you make me angry?”
His livid owl face turned incredulous. “Before I make you angry? Who do you think you’re talking to, you son of a traitor and a coward?”
“I am talking to Marquis Andras, demon royalty,” I said stepping forward. “I have rightfully evoked you. I have made no errors in drawing your sigil, and you will do as I command. I have two tasks for you, and you will complete them.”
The feathers on the demon’s head bristled. “You have the audacity to ask me for two boons? You have the right to ask for one.” He spat that last word bitterly, admitting I had done the evocation properly. I relaxed, but only slightly. “And after I complete this task you have forced upon me, I will return and devour the flesh off your bones, and I will shit your remains in hell.”
“You must be a real hoot at parties,” Clara muttered from her position behind the gun.
I laughed at the unexpected pun. Andras raged, smashing his fist against the invisible wall binding him.
“Only one of the tasks is my official request,” I said. “It’s a kidnapping. Don’t worry. It’s not one of your fellow demons.”
That seemed to calm him greatly. He leaned forward, suddenly interested. “Go on.”
I quickly explained what we needed him to do. I made the plan as simple as possible.
“Are you certain you don’t want me to just kill this enemy of yours?” he asked when I was done. “It will be much easier.”
“No,” I said. “We have a contract. You do the kidnapping exactly as we ask, you do not harm either myself or Clara or any of our familiars, and you’re free of your binding.”
“Very well,” he said after a moment. “And what is this second task you have unwisely requested of me?”
I grinned. I pulled out the black sprout. Like Fronz, the demon recoiled at the sight of the flower. He recovered quickly, but I could tell it unnerved him.
“You’ll never guess how I came into possession of this thing,” I said. I took another step closer. I could tell he was fighting the urge not to flinch. “And when I do tell you, I’m guessing you’ll want to do something about it.”
Chapter 56
Feedings Left: 5
Over the past three months, Clara had been building her character in such a way that maximized her stealth capabilities. She had given herself several spells that allowed her to sneak in and out of places unseen. She already had the Cone of Silence and Invisibility spells, and she had the ring that allowed her to cast Miniaturize for a total of five minutes three times a day, making it much more impressive than my version. And when she hit level 40, she gave herself a skill that would become very important.
It was called Pass Unseen. The skill was exclusive to fae and brownies. It allowed her to move about the forest and the rest of the hinterland and remain undetectable to non-demonic, non-NPC creatures. That category included pets. It was an expensive skill, and she said it was absolutely required to gain certain high-level mounts.
That skill was the reason why Banksy hadn’t seen or heard from Clara in weeks even though she had been coming and going regularly from Avvinik. When Clara flipped it on, she wasn’t just invisible to Banksy. He couldn’t hear or smell or feel her passage in any way. Unless she physically touched him, she simply wasn’t there.
After her confrontation with Jenk, she decided she needed to learn as much as she could about his comings and goings. She was spying on him, collecting his schedule all the while avoiding detection by his ever-present early alert system.
Olga. Olga the frog.
Olga was a creature called a Slobbering Grunter, and she was the third evolution of a type of familiar called a Skull Poll. I didn’t know what the middle evolution was, but skull polls were little, tadpole-like animals that started out as deep-dive only familiars. They lived within a guardian’s blood system, and they leveled by eating, just like Banksy.
The slobbering grunter, I learned, could not go deep dive at all. She could teleport. She had the ability to swallow prey whole, which I’d already seen. In addition, she was one of the rare familiars who shared experience and leveled by eating, not killing.
Jenk had the ability to see through her eyes. That made her the perfect guard frog.
But since she couldn’t go deep dive, she spent most of her time hopping around the grasslands near Orthrus, swallowing any creature stupid enough to get near her. Olga had a particular fondness for a fat type of a glowing grasshopper. They were as big as my fist, but they were harmless. Their butts glowed in the night, and if you killed one, the luminescent goo got everywhere. That made Olga easy to track in the darkness because her face was usually smeared with glowing grasshopper guts. The bugs were called glass hops.
Clara spent several weeks doing nothing but following the frog. Because the marker over the familiar’s head indicated when Jenk was offline, Clara had gotten a pretty good idea of the man’s schedule.
Jenk logged in once a day, and he stayed online anywhere from a half-hour to two hours. It didn’t make a difference if it was a weekend or not. He almost always logged in between 7 and 8 P.M. game time, which we knew was 10 or 11 P.M. his time in Toronto, Canada. Sometimes Olga would teleport away while he was online, which suggested he was tooling about somewhere outside of Orthrus. Once, Clara said he’d emerged from the kaiju and played catch with Olga for almost an hour. He’d thrown a glowing ball over and over, and the antlered frog had happily hopped after it and returned it. They both appeared to love the game despite it being pitch black outside and drizzling.
The predictability of Jenk’s comings and goings gave us a template for how we were going to pull off this part of the plan.
Everything we were going to do from this point forward was going to bring a lot of attention to ourselves. As a result, we had to deal with our Jenk problem now.
We had to incapacitate him, but we had to do it in such a manner he didn’t realize we were the cause of it. By this time tomorrow, the entire north side of the map was going to be on fire, and we had to make sure he wasn’t able to see it all going down.
It wasn’t a perfect plan. It probably wasn’t even a good one. But if it worked, and we needed it to work, it was going to be glorious.
“There,” Clara said, pointing. “He’s done it. That owl-headed asshole has done it.”
We sat at a café in a middle-class, earth-magic area of Medina. Clara sipped on hot chocolate. I couldn’t have anything, of course. Still, I could smell the drink, and for the first time in a long time, I felt my stomach rumble. God, I missed eating.
I looked into the sky, searching. As usual, black flocks of demons soared above, screaming down into the city, constantly attempting to dive bomb anyone they saw. The demons spent the day dropping rocks and living creatures on the NPC citizens. The magic shell around Medina protected us from the rocks. It did not protect us from the falling animals. Thankfully they mostly focused on the northernmost part of town, splattering the temple with animal bombs. Today the air was especially thick with pazuzu, gargoyles, and blood wyverns.
Then, I saw them. Right on time.
“Yeah, she looks pretty pissed off,” I said, squinting. “My ex-wife had a dog that would squirm like that whenever you picked her up and threatened to give her a bath.” I shook my head, suddenly remembering that damn dog. Her name was Bubbles. Ruth had named her. “That dog was part chihuahua part hellhound part what-the-fuck. She literally barked herself to death one day. Gave herself a heart attack while scream barking at the UPS guy.”
“I never liked little dogs,” Clara said. “I used to have a pet hedgehog, myself. Okay, he’s dropping her.”
We were worried that Olga was just going to teleport away the moment she got grabbed, but Andras had scoffed at the idea. “Do not fret about how I will accomplish my goal. Only worry about the result,” he had said.
This part of the city was just
a few blocks north of the town square with the main transport gazebo. It bordered the poor area of town. It also overlooked a large, grey building that was both a substation for the city guard and the headquarters of the office of Medina Animal Control.
An earlier conversation with Renault had given me the idea. They take their work very seriously. If he knocks down a single farmer’s stall, you will attract their attention.
We had hired the most powerful, most celebrated assassin in this world to kidnap and frame a frog.
Because Andras was a shapeshifter, I asked him to do something very simple. He needed to take the form of the largest blood wyvern he could. Then he was to swoop down and pick up Olga the frog. While clutching the frog in his talons, he was to fly directly over Medina, flying as close to the shield as he could. Then he was to drop the frog directly into the spire. Before the invasion, the top level of the spire extended well beyond the limits of the city shield. As a result, those top levels had long since been lopped off, leaving a jagged and exposed floor as the new topmost level.
Andras was to fly close, and he was to drop Olga directly into the building, which would ensure her survival. But first he would cast his favorite charm on the frog.
A spell called Enrage.
Since she was inside the city limits at that point, Olga wouldn’t be able to teleport out. We’d confirmed this part with Winky, who was very pissed off at being used as a guinea pig. If Olga wanted to return to Jenk, she needed to hop to the transport gazebo and then teleport away, just like everybody else.
Jenk wouldn’t come online for several hours.
That was plenty of time for the frog to get herself into all sorts of trouble. Especially a frog that was charmed into thinking everybody she saw was an enemy.
“They’re already coming,” Clara said, pointing. Sure enough, the office of animal control was suddenly frothing over with brownies and fae, coming out and heading for the spire. We followed at a discrete distance. It was important that Olga not see us.
The brownies could fly using a pair of gossamer wings, but apparently utilizing them was frowned upon within the city limits, so the mixed group of animal control officers jogged the five blocks over to the base of the spire.
They arrived in time to watch a sundered explode against the street. A second then a third followed the first. I traced the trajectory of the falling NPCs, and they came from a window about halfway down the spire.
A spider-like night barber woman leaped from the window as we watched. She trailed silk from her ass. Olga’s tongue whipped out the window, attaching to the back of the screaming woman. She was sucked back in.
An entire wall of the spire blew out, the result of some unknown spell. More bodies fell, crashing to the street like rain.
“You know,” I observed. “Olga is strong, but she’s usually not that strong. I think the demon may have given her more of a boost than what we asked for.”
Clara grunted. “As long as she doesn’t take down the whole city, the more damage, the better.”
The small group of animal control officers looked at each other uncertainly before running inside. A mixed group of regular city guards followed them inside a moment later.
For several minutes, nothing happened. A group of NPCs hesitantly peeked out their windows and doors of nearby buildings and started talking with one another. Then a window smashed on the third floor, and bloody husks of multiple animal control officers splattered to the ground. The NPCs panicked anew, all rushing back into their homes.
A few moments later, the front door opened, and a human city guard rushed outside, screaming. A tongue snaked out, grasping him, and he was pulled inside. Olga smashed through the front window, showering glass all over the street. The last few bystanders scattered as they were set upon. The frog devoured everyone in her path.
It would be comic if it wasn’t so terrifying. Olga wasn’t that large. She was the size of an overfed pig. Her normally lumpy exterior was crisscrossed with angry purple veins.
“Yep,” I said. We were hidden on the third floor of a building a half-block away. “Unless that Enrage spell comes with a massive strength bonus, he threw something else into the mix.”
When Olga jumped, she leaped thirty feet at a time, and cobblestones shattered where she landed. Her rampage down the street continued unchallenged for several minutes, long enough that I began to worry she wouldn’t be stopped at all.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “I think we just gave Andras an idea on how to destroy the city.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Clara said. “They’ll be in here in a couple days anyway.”
Multiple tracked vehicles and armored personnel carriers turned the corner, emerging from the celestial area of the city. Olga charged one of the APCs, knocking it over. But then one of the larger tanks belched blue fire. The whole street shook. Olga was hit with a direct blast, splattering her down the street.
And just like that, it was over.
A new group of fae and brownie animal control officers descended on the remains. They scooped some of the goop up and poured it into what looked like a large wineskin. They rushed back toward their building with the container of Olga goo.
A moment later, a voice boomed out of the loudspeaker of one of the police vehicles. “Attention citizens. We have successfully captured the threat. The grunter has regenerated in the animal control offices, and it is safe for you to resume your normal daily duties. Lycan Jenk, if you are nearby you are advised to immediately proceed to the proper authorities to discuss this matter. Once you pay the fine, you may receive your familiar back! In the meantime, she is being held at the Greater Medina Animal Control Center!”
I put out my fist, and Clara bumped it.
I grinned at Clara. “Well that was the easy part.”
***
It took almost three hours for Jenk to log in, discover his beloved pet was missing, and for him to make his way to Medina to bail his psychotic frog out of familiar prison.
This time we weren’t taking any chances with being discovered. Clara remained invisible while she observed from the roof of a nearby building to watch. I kept low on the roof, completely out of sight. I didn’t dare peer over the edge.
Darkness descended on the city, but luckily this area of town had electric access, and streetlights dotted the roads.
“He’s coming,” Clara said. “He doesn’t appear worried or suspicious. He’s at a potion stall chatting with the human running it. Okay, he’s going into the animal control building.”
“Go,” I said to the street kid. “Tell Captain Renault that it’s time. He’ll pay your two teeth when you get there. Remember to stick around in case we need you for plan B. Remember what you’re supposed to do.”
“I remember I get another five teeth if I have to do it,” the brownie child said. He was covered in dirt and had holes in his wings. The boy’s name was Jar.
“That’s right,” I said. “Now go.”
The boy zipped away down the stairs.
Renault and his regiment of newly minted city guards stood nearby, ready for part two of the plan. I didn’t want the entire guard regiment to be worm surgeons. That would be too suspicious. Lycans used resurrection and wind magic, making their natural enemies the night barbers, who used celestial and earth. It was easy to recruit them to this task, especially after Olga had slaughtered an entire nest of the spiderling NPCs during her rampage through the tower. Renault also added a dryad and a nerve agent to the group of eight guards, just to round it out.
It was crucial that this happened the moment Jenk stepped outside of the animal control offices. That would serve two purposes. First, it would make this whole setup seem more like an AI-created game event. Also, it would prevent Jenk from getting to one of the many banks that littered the city.
Five minutes passed. I spent the time staring at the sky, watching the demons continue to swirl above. The darker it got, the harder it was to see them except the pazuzu, who often carried
flaming whips, giving them the appearance of oversized fireflies. A gargoyle emerged out of the darkness and dropped a rock right at my head. I watched as the stone disintegrated the moment it touched the invisible shield. Only the blood wyverns were smart enough to drop living creatures on the city, but they focused on the northern part of town. I’d heard the streets there were covered in blood and fur and guts, despite the constant cleaning of the street sweepers. It was rare for something to survive the fall.
I hadn’t yet visited that part of the city. We weren’t welcome there. If all went well today and tomorrow, we’d be there soon enough.
“I see him. He has Olga with him,” Clara said. “Yes! He’s being confronted by Renault!”
The fine for Olga’s spree through the spire was set at 6.5 million teeth. We had confirmed the amount with Renault. Like with the former city of Little Cibola, the Medina system for civil and criminal penalties was completely out of whack thanks to Anatoly’s tinkering with the code.
That meant the moment Jenk stepped foot outside he couldn’t possibly have more than 3.5 million teeth on him. Hopefully he’d have less. He’d have received a notification telling him the amount of teeth he needed to bail Olga out. But assuming the worst possible scenario of 3.5 million, that meant three things had to happen.
First, Jenk needed to somehow raise the wrath of the city guard. We had this part covered. Second, he needed to create such a ruckus that the fine for his behavior was sufficiently high. And finally, he needed to be captured or killed before he could get to either a bank or a transport gazebo.
I was worried about this third part. We had no idea what level Jenk was, but it was well over 50. He and Olga had easily slaughtered every living soul in Kinnegad. He could probably butcher his way through Medina, too. Captain Renault was only level 35. But there were eight of them. Hopefully that would be enough.
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 44
