Defiant Guardians Anthology

by Jacob Peppers

  Deborah followed my example. She placed her hand on the altar and instead of a robe she was given a nightgown. She raised a questioning eyebrow as she too placed it over her shoulders giving me a quick glance at her exposed breasts.

  Dear Almighty, cleanse me of these impure thoughts.

  “The altar gives you what is needed and bases its manifestation slightly on what you desire.”

  “Makes sense for me,” I said. “Seeing my old church had me wishing I was preaching again. Guess that’s why it gave me a robe”

  “And I’m really tired,” said Deborah, rubbing the soft material on her skin and yawning.

  Gauss placed the sword back on the table and it disappeared. It was then replaced by a set of black armor, the same ones he’d left in the real world. As he started to don the plate, Deborah and I walked back around the window to explore a little.

  We walked forward a ways, both of our heads turning as if expecting to see something different besides whiteness.

  “How do you think something like this has come to exist?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Out of all my years of preaching, I’ve never heard of this place. It makes me wonder why places like the Refuge have kept these sorts of things out of the heads of the public.”

  “Maybe because the public can’t be trusted with these sorts of things. Maybe it’s too much for them.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But you would never know unless you tried.”

  “I think anyone who told the truth and explained to the masses of Auracle that there were hidden lands like this, that that confessor would probably get his ass hanged in the gallows for blasphemy.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, nodding my head. “If you would have told me something like this existed a year ago, I would have laughed at you and told you to come to church with me where I would then instruct you on reality. Turns out, I had no clue what reality was.”

  “I was born in the Refuge so this stuff has always been my normal,” Deborah said, keeping her face forward as we walked.

  I felt a warmness in my chest and started taking a few steps closer to her without even knowing it. Never before had I felt this way and I wondered now if I could, would I change the past to get rid of all of this? And I was no longer sure that I would. I was really starting to like Deborah and not just for her physicality. Well, I’d never really liked a woman before, never had the chance to.

  I was just about to respond to her when my foot stepped into something wet. I looked down to see a mid sized pool of pale green water that had a thin layer of steam coming off the top of it. It was warm on my toes and I had an urge to dip myself entirely into it.

  “Turn around,” came Gauss’ voice, more stern than it had been since the outbreak of demons in the Refuge.

  Both Deborah and I did turn around. The man was breathing heavier than normal and he looked downright scary in his black armor.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him, taking a step back.

  “Prepare yourselves. Both of you. Training starts now.”

  I put my hands up as I looked at Deborah. She had a nasty scowl on her face.

  “Now, hold on a minute. Can’t we just rest a few minu-“

  Gauss was on me like an animal. He slammed my demonic hand out of the way with his left while using his right to punch me straight in the jaw. I spun with the momentum of the hit and found myself laying on my side a few seconds later, my head ringing from the impact.

  I could hear Deborah screaming in the background as Gauss continued his attack. He mounted me and was hammer fisting me in the shoulder and in my ribs. The pain lasted for only moments before I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

  I was in a dreamlike state when Gauss stepped off of me and attacked Deborah. She put up a better fight than I did but only for five more seconds. She too fell to her side and Gauss fell atop of her as well. He picked her up by her hair and smashed her face into the ground repeatedly.

  I wanted to scream but just could not. I was having a hard enough time breathing as is and so I just laid there watching Deborah lose a few teeth before Gauss stood up rubbing his hands together as if saying to himself job well done.

  He walked over to me, his chest rising and lowering rapidly, both of his nostrils flared. I closed my eyes, waiting for him to restart his beating of me. But that’s not what happened. Instead, he bent over and started to roll me over gently.

  With one final push, I felt the warmness of the pool drench my robes as I sunk to the bottom.

  27

  Six months of hell passed. Each day I truly believed that it would be my last. But, with broken arms and legs, punctured lungs and torn tendons, I was dropped into the damned healing water and renewed once more.

  I would be so close to death but when my skin touched that warm water, my eyes would pop open immediately. Adrenaline would rush through me and I could watch scrapes close themselves up. My bones would reattach themselves and spin into their correct positions. My energy, once depleted, would come back renewed.

  Twelve hours in the pool of healing and I was ready. Ready for another day of agonizing training.

  Gauss was relentless in his motives in a way I’d never seen. Not even at the Refuge had he treated us so roughly. It was like we were animals in a cage being tortured day in and day out. After nearly killing me a few times, he finally took some time to explain what he was doing. He’d said neither of us was ready for what was to come.

  When we’d asked him what he meant, he would change the subject quickly. At some point early in the training, I caught him writing in a book behind the window. When I had the courage to confront him about this, he was open in saying that this dusty looking book was his contact with the outside world. Specifically, my mother.

  That’s when Deborah and I learned that we only had a year, which was only two days in the real world before whatever was coming would arrive at Auracle. When asked what it was that was coming, of course, he wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t even talk about the book after the first explanation. And so, all Deborah and I had was our training.

  The first two months was what I like to call the era of the pillars. Gauss would use the altar to conjure up massively thick cylindrical columns and shove them over on their sides. I was then instructed to push them while he and Deborah worked on sword fighting. At first I thought she’d gotten the better deal. However, when she started being placed in the healing water hours before me with limbs that were barely attached by the thinnest pieces of skin, I knew I was wrong.

  The pillars wouldn’t budge. Gauss would then conjure up smaller weights for me to move. Some were to be attached to my back and for me to run with while others were for curling. Weighted pushups became the norm. Pull-ups became like breathing to me. I made sure that every time he looked over to check on me, I was moving and moving hard. Once, he’d caught me resting and he’d crushed my hands beneath his boot.

  There was no way to argue with the man. No way to protest. He had both of us here by his own will. Neither of us knew how to leave except him and he was undefeatable. Deborah and I had tried to plan a sneak attack but the man never slept, using the healing pond as his only resource for sleep. He probably knew of our ideas to overtake him, to torture him into showing us the way out.

  Still, even if we did figure a way to defeat him, I doubted there was any amount of torture that could get the answer out of him. He was just that tough. Even after six months of training, the possibility of being able to take him on was just now showing itself.

  Question was, did we want to?

  After three months, I was able to push the heaviest column Gauss had pulled out of the altar. I could push it all day long and even lift up one end of it. This was when the man of Roth started my spear training which was basically him attacking me nonstop. Well, he did stop at some point, but that was when my body would no longer move on its own.

  On the fourth month, the quiet man spoke. He asked me, “Why hav
e you not used your arm of hell?”

  I didn’t answer right then. I’d been asking myself this subconsciously the entire time I was in the Stillness Chamber. Thinking back, I am pretty sure it was because I was ashamed of it. It felt like cheating. If I defeated Gauss with it, which I knew I could, then it wouldn’t be me that did it.

  It was when Gauss said these words that my mindset changed, “the Almighty has a plan for all living things. That arm you have is a part of his plan. I don’t know why. I don’t have that answer. What I do know is, and this will be hard for you to accept Ira, but your black arm, it’s a gift from the Creator.”

  A few days after that, Deborah had completed her weight training. Much to my dissatisfaction, she’d been able to move the column in half the time it had taken me. I blamed the fact that I had been the one to prove it was possible.

  Gauss then had both of us fighting him and it was our turn to be relentless. Only a day of this training had passed when I was able to defeat him. Deborah had been stabbed through the gut and we had paused to dip her into the healing pond. Something about the way her eyes bulged out of her skull awakened the reality of the epidemic that was going on outside the Stillness Chamber. If I couldn’t defeat Gauss then how did I expect to save Auracle?

  I dropped my spear, hardened my demonic arm, and slapped Gauss so hard that his head spun one hundred and eighty degrees. I was shocked when the healing pond had been enough to heal him of this. I was sure I’d killed him.

  That next day, Gauss was floating in the pond, his neck nearly healed. He told me that my training was just about to start.

  “What do you mean it’s just about to start? It should be finished! I beat you, Gauss. We should go back to Auracle.”

  “No,” he’d said, shaking his head and making a terrible cracking noise.

  “What is there cannot be defeated with the skill you possess now.”

  “It’s… there already?” I’d asked, but the question went ignored.

  “What will be needed, Ira, is the form I saw when you were speaking to that demon. To defeat the enemy… you must become the enemy…”

  “No! I can’t do that! That form was an abomination! A slight against the Almighty!” I’d turned away from him, ending the conversation. But Gauss wasn’t finished with his plan.

  “And after you have mastered the form of the demon, then you must also teach Deborah... as you have transferred some of your power to her… and it has manifested. I can feel it.”

  28

  Gauss’ idea of how to bring about the monster inside of me was, in my opinion, quite genius. Just retrace the steps as to how I took that form in the first place. It seemed simple in my mind and I think that is one of the reasons why I went along with the plan.

  I didn’t think a whole lot about it.

  I knew if I really delved into the idea and took it apart, I would never have agreed to it. Would the Almighty allow someone who has experimented with the occult or demonology permittance into the lands of eternal bliss? These were the thoughts I had to force out of my mind. From there, I created a mental barrier to keep them from seeping into my consciousness as I followed Gauss to the altar.

  “I know that this is tough, what I ask you to do,” he said, placing his hand gently on the ancient wooden altar. “And even I am unsure whether this thing we are about to do will work or not but I want you to know… that I hold a deep respect for you, young Ira. You and Deborah have become very strong, stronger than I imagined possible in such a few months.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but Gauss put up a finger to quiet me.

  “Please, allow me to finish. I want to tell you what it is that is coming. I want to speak to you what your mother has written to me through the book. But, I am afraid. Afraid that once you know, your brain will shut itself off and you will be mute to all further training. I need your curiosity and the lack of the known to carry you through these last months. Let it be your fuel and know that, if we do not succeed here, that our world back home will change for the worst and nothing will ever be the same. If, that is, there will be a world that of which is possible to walk on.”

  My mouth never shut as I gaped at Gauss. Never before had I ever heard these many words come flying out of his mouth. Not only that… but it was like this husk of a man actually felt emotions! Hearing these words got my blood boiling and my heart racing. Something about Gauss believing in me inspired me to say, “Let’s do this then.”

  A small smile peeked at the corner of Gauss’ lips. He nodded and said some words under his breath. His hand began to float upwards as, below his palm, sprouted the green wrinkly head of a demonic form.

  The skull was the exact shape of a walnut but the same size of an orange. Small spindly grey hairs, few enough to count, fell before its yellow eyes with black vertical pupils. Its ears were long and dwindled by its bony shoulders, more hair sprouting out of them than the top of its head.

  Its arms were too long for its body and it was forced to hold them out so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. The legs were short but the feet made up for them by being double the size they should have been.

  The smell made me pinch off my nose and almost look away, but I made myself keep my gaze on it. If I couldn’t face this monstrosity then how could I face whatever it was that was coming?

  “Try and speak to it,” Gauss said, putting his hands on the thing’s shoulders as it tried to hop off the altar. “Go ahead. Try.”

  “Uh, hello?” I said, my face scrunching together in discomfort. This was wrong. So very wrong.

  The demon tilted its head, a constant smile on its face as it panted like a dog.

  “Not like that,” said Gauss. “Like before.”

  “That was different,” I said. “I was…”

  “You were emotionally involved,” Gauss finished for me, closing his eyes and nodding his head. “Do the same here, Ira. Recreate those emotions and try once more.”

  That was easier said than done. I had been in a cramped and damp cellar. Deborah had been almost dead or maybe she had been dead. There was just no way to recreate those feelings! But, then again, seeing Deborah’s blood pour out of her throat like that… that feeling of despair. Of hate. And how could the devil have had the audacity to use Jonni against me once more! Why must he put salt in the wound! Was there no limit to his heinousness? And did he really expect his son, the one he created through rape, to behave the way he wanted him to!

  My hand shot out without me telling it to. The smile on the small demon faded and its yellowish tongue receded back into its mouth as it gulped. It tried to back away, to turn its head and flee, but Gauss had been waiting for this and kept it still, its face facing forward.

  “Go,” I commanded the demon. “Tell my father I know it is he who is coming not for Auracle but for me. Tell him I understand he is using my kingdom and its people against me. To draw me out. Tell him I know his plan and that I accept his challenge. I will be there, ready to cut off his head and shove it up his ass.”

  The demon’s eyes bulged from their sockets and the way its throat gulped let me know that it had understood my words.

  I raised my hand, and with it, the demon floated into the air and out of Gauss’ grasp. “Go!” I cried, slamming my demonic hand onto my leg as hard as I could.

  The small demon smashed downward into the altar and disappeared into the fiery hell from which it came. Just before I pulled myself out of the mental state I was in, I had half a second to feel how it would be to consciously control this power rather than it control me. It was subtle, but the feeling of invincibility, aggression, and intense skill was there. As for what skills would become available, I had no clue.

  The very soft feeling of untapped potential power flowed through me and I only needed to figure out a way to draw it out… and control it.

  29

  We didn’t have enough time to fully complete Deborah’s training. Out of the two of us, I would have thought that Deborah would’ve been the o
ne more inclined to pull out her inner demon. Still, she resisted. Every time we would pluck a demon out from the altar, she would begin to tremble and sweat. Gauss never looked upset with her but kept his face deadpan as day after day he made her confront a new demonic form. Still, no matter how patient he was with her, nothing changed.

  When the day came to leave the Stillness Chamber, Deborah had made zero progress. Of course I didn’t blame her. I felt as though I was losing my mind with the constant amount of exposure I was giving it from my demon blood. When this was all said and done, would I ever be the same again? Or will I have changed for the worse?

  I was once a pastor. Now… I wasn’t sure what I was. A hybrid sure, but it felt more than that. I’m not positive I could ever go back to preaching the Almighty’s word the way I use to. Besides, who would want to listen to me? I held in my body that of which I was preaching against.

  And to be the one to fight the devil… was something like that even possible? When I had spoken to people about his diabolical-ness, I always referenced him more as something metaphysical rather than an actual being. Oh, how wrong I was.

  Gauss called for us to come to the window, the window that looked out into the church. Some months ago it had turned black as if some fallen piece of debris had blocked the view, or maybe it was a dead rat. Either way, it had been impossible to see the current state of the church and I could feel this worry putting pressure on Gauss’ shoulders. He was worried about my mother but not nearly as much as me. Anytime I’d asked about her and what she was saying in that book of his, he’d always tell me that if I truly worried about her that I would focus solely on my training.

  And so, that’s what I did.

  “I am unsure what we are about to find outside this holy and protected sanctuary, but I can tell you it cannot be good. Ira, I have not heard from your mother in a very long time and this worries me. And so I-”