by Evan Currie
Bones cracked under her pinpoint crushing strikes, the two crashing into the ground as she finally managed to force her lungs to open up and draw in a deep breath.
They rolled, Elan coming on top as she roared and grabbed the demon’s tusk with her left hand, leveraging every ounce of strength out of the armor. She began to pull down even as she punched with her right hand over and over again into the demon’s face and head.
Bones cracked; viscera spattered the ground, the demon, and her as she continued to hammer down over and over again.
Elan thought she might have blacked out. One moment she was locked in mortal combat with the demon, and the next he was lying motionless below her with a pulverized sack of bone and meat for a head.
A voice shook her out of the fugue.
“I’d say you can stop now.”
Elan jerked upright and twisted as she brought her fist up to defend, but the origin of the voice was a fair distance away.
Sindri smiled at her as he cleaned his dagger off and sheathed it.
“Nice work,” he said. “A bit messy, but it could have been far worse.”
Elan panted, taking deep, angry breaths.
“I thought you were going to help.”
“I did,” Sindri said, pointing to the dead demon behind him. “What do you call that?”
“Less than I expected!” she snarled, eyes flashing as she spun to glare at the approaching Brokkr and Jol.
Only Jol had the decency to look embarrassed.
“Was for a good cause, girl,” Brokkr told her. “Besides, you handled it. If you’d really needed help, we’d have stepped in.”
“Says you,” she replied skeptically.
“Yes,” Brokkr said flatly, “says me. Choose to believe me or not. That is on you.”
“Sorry,” Jol said, looking down. “Brokkr stopped me. I shouldn’t have let him.”
The short man grunted. “As if you could have prevented it.”
Elan shot Brokkr a disgusted look, turning her back as she looked over the mess on the ground around her.
“What do we do about this?” she asked, nodding to the bodies.
Brokkr shrugged. “Leave ’em to rot.”
“Won’t the local lord do anything?” she asked, glancing around at the people who were now appearing from the shadows. “What about them?”
Brokkr shrugged. “That’s their problem, isn’t it?”
Elan spun on him, eyes alight with anger. “I’m not seeing people suffer because of something I did.”
“So do something about it, then,” Sindri told her.
Elan glared but turned on the bodies left on the ground where they had fallen, eyes searching for an option. She could carry them out, though even in armor it would be a grisly and unpleasant task. She wasn’t sure what she could do with them, though.
Throw them in the water? Elan supposed that was an option, though she wasn’t sure if that would get rid them or not. How deep is the water here? Will they sink?
She considered that for a moment, then remembered something Merlin had explained to her once and reconsidered.
“Everyone stand back,” she ordered firmly, surprising the brothers and Jol.
“What are you—? Hey now!” Brokkr threw his hands up as Elan drew her sidearm again and swept it around. “Wait just a—”
The discharge of the weapon was surprisingly quiet. There was a soft crack as the magnetically contained pellet broke the sound barrier, and the weapon bucked lightly in Elan’s grip. She shifted to the next target and fired again as the first impacted and broke containment. Matter met antimatter, and a flash of pure white light blinded anyone who had the misfortune of looking in the direction of the blast.
There was no explosion to speak of, though, just an energetic reaction that made everyone dive for cover as she repeated the action two more times.
When she was done, there were scorch marks but little else left of the fight.
“Are ye insane?” Brokkr snarled at her. “That’s the stupidest . . .”
He seemed apoplectic and at a loss for words as he broke into epithets that Elan didn’t have to recognize to understand. She holstered her weapon again, then flashed him a rude gesture she’d learned from Caleb, ignoring his ranting.
“My brother’s over-the-top reaction aside,” Sindri said, coming out from behind cover he had dragged Jol to as she fired the first shot, “I’m going to assume that you weren’t briefed on that weapon you carry.”
“It was explained to me,” Elan said.
“Not well, apparently. That is a negative matter blaster,” he told her firmly. “When it encounters normal matter, the two self-annihilate.”
“Right.” Elan nodded. “I know this.”
“You may, but I do not believe you quite understand what happens to the matter in question,” Sindri grumbled. “The two cannot survive contact, so they are instantly transmuted to energy. That is the heat and discharge that causes the majority of the destruction. That energy is also rather . . . nasty in how it impacts humans. You’re wearing armor. Jol and the others here are not. Please restrain your impulses, lest you poison everyone around you in the future.”
Elan stared at him for a moment, then glanced down at her weapon. She wasn’t certain he could be trusted, but she would check it with Merlin when she had an opportunity.
“I will consider it,” she said aloud.
“Consider it?” Brokkr, who had been coming down from his apoplectic fit, cried out again. “You crazy, stupid little . . .”
“Brother, calm,” Sindri ordered, holding a hand up before looking at Elan evenly. “Please do so. Seriously.” He sighed, looking at the scorches. “Nevertheless, that does at least temporarily solve the current problem, if nothing else. I might even have considered it a good job if you’d given enough warning for people to clear out. Still, nothing to be done about that now, so good enough, I suppose.” He then turned to Brokkr. “And you may as well stop swearing. It was your idea to push her and see how she might handle the situation.”
“I didn’t know she was ignorant of the weapons she carries!”
“You made an assumption,” Sindri retorted dryly, “and we both know how well those tend to turn out.”
Brokkr started swearing again, but quieter, and he seemed to have no further response.
Sindri glanced back. “Unfortunately, that will only delay the inevitable response. You have done what you could, however. For the moment we should see to the issue of the elder, because I believe that is the most pressing of all the current problems you face.”
Elan looked at him sourly. “Fine. Let’s go.”
*****
She felt it again. The explosion of energy was intense enough that someone of her status could hardly miss it. It was like a small star igniting just a few miles away, brilliant and a little chilling at the same time. Ser’Goth twisted to look out toward the old docks of the city, where they extended far out into the sea beyond the environmental containment walls.
“Dispatch response forces to the eastern docks,” she ordered, not looking back. “And, Chamberlain?”
“Yes, my lady?” the chamberlain asked nervously.
“You said you assigned Krovak to find the source?”
“Yes, my lady,” the chamberlain confirmed.
“What did he say about it when you showed it to him?” she asked.
“I don’t believe it really matters, my lady. He was merely guessing . . .”
“A guess from such as he is better than certainty from many others,” she snapped. “What. Did. He. Say?”
The chamberlain winced but finally sighed and gave in. “Krovak believed that there was what he called an ‘authorized human warrior’ in the city.”
Ser’Goth spun. “He said what?”
The chamberlain held up his hands. “My lady, I told you he was merely guessing and—”
“If any would know, it would be he!” she snarled, crossing the room and snapping out
her right hand to catch the chamberlain under his chin to lift him entirely off the ground, slamming him back into the wall behind him. “You should have reported this instantly!”
“My . . . lady . . .” the chamberlain choked out, barely able to speak against the force of her grip around his throat. “I . . . sorry . . .”
“Feh!” She spat, tossing him aside with a casual gesture that nevertheless snapped bones as he struck the far wall. “Useless.”
Ignoring the fallen chamberlain, who was writhing on the ground, Ser’Goth strode out of the room and into the antechamber beyond.
“Guards!” she snarled. “To my side!”
A pair of hulking demons appeared silently from the shadows, an impressive feat considering their size—but they hadn’t been chosen entirely for their size, after all—and took positions on either side of her. Ser’Goth strode through the halls with guards in tow, dropping several floors before she reached her initial goal.
“Commander,” she growled, spotting the local legion commander.
“My lady.” The slim and surprisingly small demon saluted. “What are your orders?”
“We have intruders in the city,” she said with certainty. “I have been informed that Krovak identified the damage earlier as being from an authorized human warrior.”
The commander flushed dark. “Surely he’s mistaken . . .”
“The chamberlain believed as much as well and elected not to inform me of his conclusions until I sensed another energy release of similar proportions,” she snarled. “Krovak made the ill-advised decision to take only two trackers with him when he went in pursuit of the target.”
The commander hissed. “Foolish. He’s blinded by his ambitions.”
“Assuming he yet lives,” Ser’Goth grumbled. “If he and the trackers succeeded, then those recent blasts . . .”
“Understood.” The commander nodded firmly. “I will dispatch teams immediately. Where did you sense the release?”
“East docks,” she growled. “Scour them. Roust everything that breathes or moves. Find the source. If Krovak is there, I want him before me within the hour. If not, then discover where he is—or was.”
“It will be done.”
“Do not make the chamberlain’s mistake, Commander.” She glowered intently at the smaller demon. “Keep me informed.”
Chapter 15
Merlin rewatched the fight and its aftermath from the perspective of Elan’s armor as well as what few surveillance systems were functional in that part of the city. There were fewer of the latter than he would have liked—the outer rings of the city had suffered a higher rate of malfunction than the more protected inner areas—but he still had several views available to him.
The fight itself was both better and worse than he had the right to expect. He could have wished that she had drawn and fired her weapon quicker, but based on her telemetry from the armor, he suspected that she was afraid of hitting the other humans in the area.
A not unfounded fear, Merlin had to admit.
Given the scenario, however, a trained warrior would have fired anyway. Collateral damage was something to be minimized, it was true, but not at the risk of your own life . . . especially not when you were the only warrior in the area. Once she was dead, after all, who would be able to do those people any good?
Still, once she shifted to the close-range application of the sidearm, she did better than he might have expected.
He was rather amused by the aftermath. Using negative matter to annihilate the bodies was . . . well, not a novel approach. It had been done in the past, but it was a decisive one. It fit her personality well.
The short man’s thoughts on the risk of radiation were hilarious.
Not that he was wrong, of course. A self-annihilation burst of that nature pumped out some rather lethal forms of radiation indeed. However, most of the forms produced had half-lives in the nanosecond range. Extremely damaging but incredibly short-lived.
Merlin doubted that anyone in range had received more than a couple of times the normal radiation dose they would have endured on any given day at a high-altitude location on earth.
Whether he would tell Elan that when she inevitably asked . . . well, Merlin was still debating that point. Firing off a late-war sidearm without extremely good cause was reckless, at the very least, and he normally wouldn’t encourage it. Of course, the times were not precisely normal either, else he never would have issued one to her in the first place, so he would have to consider it further.
He shifted his focus back from the events at Lemuria and examined the happenings closer to home . . . well, closer to the fledgling Atlanteans’ home, that was.
The standing stones were still intact, despite every attempt at regular attacks by local wildlife and, oddly, the occasional plant life. Merlin still wasn’t certain what was going on there, but he wasn’t one to ignore good fortune when it was presented to him either. Using the distractions presented, he had managed to drive the rune specialist to something very nearing upon a coronary, assuming the demon had a heart. His sampling probe had been busy at work, drilling out small core samples at every opportunity to destroy runes and slow down the progress as much as he could.
It was only a delaying tactic, however, as the probe had neither the capacity nor the endurance to continue on indefinitely.
Soon it would be up to the humans themselves.
*****
Caleb laughed as he stood in the stern of the dugout and pushed hard against the bottom with the long oar they’d fashioned from a good, solid tree trunk, sending the boat skimming through the water at surprisingly high speed as the heavy wood cut the waves. Three kids were laughing along with him as they rode in the front, bouncing and jostling with each slide through a wave.
“More! More!”
“Can’t do it,” Caleb answered, laughing regretfully as he turned the boat back to the beach. “This one tests out. We have more work to do.”
The kids moaned, but there was little they could say about it. Everyone knew how important the boats were, and now that the last one was tested, it was time for work of a different sort to get under way.
On the beach, as the prow dug into sand, Caleb hopped out and splashed in the water as he moved forward and easily hefted the boat clear of the sand and dragged it up on the beach.
“Did you have fun?” Simone asked, one eyebrow raised as she watched the laughing kids jump into the surf and play.
“Just a bit.” Caleb grinned unrepentantly.
“Good,” Simone told him, breaking into a smile. “But we have real work to do soon.”
He nodded seriously. “I know.”
He glanced up the beach and saw that the other boats were being packed, and some of the assembled people were carrying weapons and were dressed in unusual clothing.
“Fire protection clothing,” Simone answered the unasked question, following his gaze. “Merlin dug it out of storage after we monitored certain events at the other island.”
Caleb cringed. “Do I want to know what those events were?”
“Probably not. However, they might be important, so I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Of course you are,” he sighed, resigned.
Simone just chuckled and described the attack on the demons, causing Caleb to listen closely despite himself. The idea that the demons were stirring up something such that animals were attacking them was beyond his ken, and he really didn’t have a clue what to make of it.
“Are we going to have to fight through snakes and such as well?” he asked, more than a little worried.
Less for himself. He’d seen what the armor he was wearing could do. However, few of the others had much in the way of protective clothing at all, despite Merlin’s largess.
“It’s possible.” Simone nodded. “We’ll try to time our move so we don’t wind up in the middle of a swarm of similar attacks, but there are no guarantees.”
Caleb grimaced but knew she was telling t
he truth.
“Alright,” he said, setting his jaw firmly. “Let’s do this.”
*****
Merlin kept a probe on both the demons and the Atlanteans, who were now setting themselves in motion, observing the progress of both with deep concern.
The demons were rapidly approaching the completion of the runic circle engraved into the standing stones. Once that was done, the only thing left would be empowering them and then finally connecting them to the portion of the subquanta universe they were symbolically designed to influence.
He wasn’t entirely certain what would happen after that, but it seemed assuredly bad for humans and the planet in general. He’d finished scouring every record he had, and he had located nothing but rumor concerning the elder. That frustrated him to no end, leaving him with little choice but to go to the only remaining source of information that seemed to have anything he could use.
Merlin contacted Elanthielle.
*****
“Child.”
Elan jumped, startled by the voice. Merlin hadn’t been in contact with her much since she’d arrived on Lemuria, and she had gotten used to the silence in her head again.
“What is it?” she asked, in turn startling her companions, who all turned to see what, or who, she was talking to.
“We have a problem.” Merlin spoke through her armor into her ear. “The demons on the local island are constructing a circle of standing stones and have brought in a runic specialist to engrave them with a summoning set.”
Elan just looked confused, which left her observers just as confused.
“I don’t understand a thing you just said,” she admitted. “What is a summoning set?”
“Runes, girl,” Brokkr grunted, only hearing her side of the conversation but following it more than enough to answer anyway. “A set of runes that can open a gate through dimensions.”
“Precisely what he said,” Merlin said to her alone. “This set is attuned to something known as the elder.”
“The brothers mentioned that,” she said, looking between Sindri and Brokkr, who now offered her their undivided attention, while Jol just stared at her in total confusion.
