"Young Rick is doubtlessly with them," said Elizabeth. "With him to focus the powers of dozens of his friends they are a very formidable force and well cloaked and shielded."
"I also have two anti-demon teams watching them very closely." said Sam. "We dare not do more or we will call attention to their efforts. In the front of the building Demons have been exiting all night, but those quickly march outwards towards the battle raging around Hope. The children are cloistered to the rear of the building and have been very quiet and well cloaked. They seem to be chipping away at the outside if the Mansion in two places. Does that make sense? Why did they pick those spots? Could they possibly detect something which adult Wizards and elves have missed?"
"Possibly," said Elizabeth. "Are we are forgetting Ann's claim to be able to detect the presence of Ben? Could she be detecting him even through thick warded walls of Evil?"
"By Jupiter that must be it!" said Eric. "But my impulse is still to teleport myself to the Mansion and port my children the hell away from there!"
"I advise patience," said Kroner. "They are there and apparently undetected by the Demons, and they may be on to something."
"They better be," said Colonel Wells. "The Pentagon wants that bombing run to happen! Yesterday if not sooner! They might have forced the issue already if it hadn't been for all the publicity."
"Indeed, Elizabeth gave a wonderful TV interview this morning," said Kroner. "I especially liked her impassioned description of the plight of Ben and Soone."
"I liked it when they asked her to demonstrate powers and she levitated around the room," said Sam. "Levitating some of the news people was also a nifty trick."
"Yes, I suspect that having Elizabeth doing harmless magic such as that was a better way to introduce people to paranormal powers than having Sam bash things to bits with one of his hammers, or showing a werewolf eating several pounds of raw bloody meat," said Kroner.
"Yes, she could probably get her own reality TV show and make enough money to rebuild Hope," said Eric. "But first we need to survive the day."
****
In Grim Mansion the Master Demon paused from attracting Demons of the Void and assessed his three new apprentice candidates. That made four altogether, and he had only two elves captured. He would additionally have to capture some of the elves that he had recently seen battling his Demons.
But first he would do away with Soone.
Soone was held prisoner in one of the rooms he had re-shaped to accommodate his new gigantic size. The troublesome King boy would first be lured away from Soone when he saw that his guardian Moco was also captured.
The Demon's first indication that something was seriously amiss occurred when he stepped slowly through the wall of the room that had been accommodating Moco and Rog and found that it was empty! There was a Wolf-sized hole in the outside wall!
"Impossible!" he roared. The outside wall was three feet-thick stone and Evil reinforced by his wards! Those walls had easily withstood powerful human bombs and other weapons! To no avail he swept his big arms about, hoping to capture one of the escaped prisoners, cloaked but perhaps still within the room. The room was empty. Elf and werewolf were truly gone!
Fearing that his other prisoners may have also escaped he turned to enter the adjoining cell and got another surprise. As he caused his body to merge with the wall and push his way through it there were sections of wall that didn't melt and join his body! Instead there were wall sections that were now mere rock without Evil webbed through it! Nevertheless he used his great strength to push himself through, sending chunks of inert wall tumbling and flying.
There he arrived in time to catch a glimpse of Soone, escaping through an elf-sized hole in the outside wall. In rage the Demon threw a blast of hot plasma energy at the escaping elf that was blocked by the shields of the King boy, who was inside but cloaked while helping Soone climb through the hole!
The fifteen-ton stone/Evil behemoth charged at boy and elf, but the elf was already through the hole and the boy had teleported himself into the hallway, through the gaping hole in the room wall that the Demon had just made.
There the boy was promptly attacked by several minor but deadly Demons that soon found that the boy was soundly shielded by Wild-Magic. Ben skillfully tossed a tiny Mole into the mouth of each of them, causing them to stop their attack and claw at themselves instead of Ben. They had slowed him down however, enough such that in moments the Master Demon grabbed him in one of his gigantic clawed hands!
"What have you done to my apprentice candidates, human!" he bellowed. The four smaller demons were headless and gradually disintegrating from the neck down!
The Master wasn't equipped to feel pain, but he did notice his hand stiffening where it was in contact with the boy. He decided to bash the boy to bits by smashing him against an Evil wall as hard as he could. To his surprise the blow smashed through the Mole-weakened wall and his right hand also crumbled to bits! The strongly shielded unharmed boy then scampered back through his cell and out through the hole in the wall to the outside!
The bellowing Demon followed by working his body through the outside wall while absorbing a section of wall into himself. He emerged larger and stronger than ever to face an assemblage of human and elf Wizards!
He sensed them but there was nobody in sight; they were obviously cloaked. Then abruptly a dozen Ben Kings surrounded the Demon, each hovering at his eye level, waving a glowing sword at him!
Harmless projections of course! The Demon raised his right hand, intending to create an explosive burst of power that would rock, singe, and hopefully kill any nearby cloaking human or elf that wasn't very strongly shielded. That is when he noticed that his entire right-hand was still gone! It should have healed itself but instead some sort of corruption was eating away at the Evil that he was made of! It must be the same unfamiliar spell that had weakened his walls and demolished his apprentice candidates, he realized!
With his left hand the Demon created a massive power-burst, a thunderous blinding eruption that threw back the cloaked Apprentice Wizards a hundred yards, but because of their collective shielding only shook them up a bit instead of killing them. Though the Ben King projections also disappeared, the real Ben King stood directly in front of the Master Demon and remained as totally unaffected as the Master!
At least the Wizards had been stopped for the moment! The Demon next willed that his corrupted right forearm separate from his upper arm and drop to the ground. That saved himself for now, the Demon reasoned, but that was not fully adequate as a defense. There were obviously numerous instances of this spell; he had to defeat them all! He reached out telepathically to examine his truncated arm. What he sensed was Evil gradually disappearing as it encountered what could only be Wild Magic! It was the meddling King brat again! An intricate Life Energy spell that he had never seen before was influencing the Wild Magic to destroy Evil!
He tried to destroy or disrupt the spell, but the Wild-Magic protected it from all his attempts. But he did notice that a tiny amount of the Wild Magic was also consumed when any Evil was destroyed. So the answer to the problem was obvious! More Evil and more Evil Demons: so much Evil that all the Wild Magic would be consumed! For every Demon the King boy attacked with his Wild Magic, ten would take its place!
Though he had expelled the corruption from his arm, he sensed something wrong deep within his chest! It was another instance of corruption, he realized! He had inadvertently taken it into his body when he merged with the outside wall to pass through it! He willed his body to eject the corruption and the bit of Wild Magic within it that was causing the corruption. It flew out of his body as an irregular bolder the size of a basketball!
By now his right arm and hand had fully grown back. Drawing on energies from the still immense Evil of the Mansion and himself he ripped open a rift to the Void and called forth more Demons!
There were infinities of Demons in the Void, but there was competition for the best of them, between the infinity
of universes where an infinity of Master Demons called them forth to destroy life in an infinity of life-infested universes. Seldom however was a Master Demon as skilled as the one that based his magic on Gaou Lucian. Once again hundreds of new Demons responded to his well-structured call and appeared around the Master Demon!
There was no competition for or shortage of raw Evil, it existed in unlimited quantities in the Void. The Master Demon drew in many tons more of it, and incorporated half into himself and half into the Mansion.
While he was busy doing this Ben and Soone tossed handfuls of Wild-Mole pellets over the Master Demon. These Moles also began to immediately eat into the Master, but seconds later the Demon expelled them all from its body, each one encased in rock. The Master has inconvenienced by the Moles, but not defeated. Ben had crafted a sword of Wild Magic also, but doubted that it would be more effective than the Wild-Moles, so he merely carried it with him as a weapon of last resort as he and the others retreated.
On a plus note cloaked Apprentice Wizards darted about and retrieved the Wild-Moles expelled by the Master Demon or lying dormant after they had consumed a Lesser Demon, and used them to eliminate many more of the Lesser Demons. But the Horde Demons were now clearly overwhelming both the Apprentice Wizards and the two dozen anti-Demon teams that had been diverted to battle them as they emerged from the Void.
****
CHAPTER 19
The Void
It was a tired leadership that soon responded to Eric's call to parley back at the headcounters of Colonel Wells. He had moved his headquarters eight miles further away from Hope in order to be beyond the advancing Demons. "My spy drones record that overwhelming numbers of Demons are surviving despite record numbers being dispatched by Apprentice Wizard heroes, began Wells. Would someone who better knows what's happening explain it to me?"
"To sum up, we have rescued all captives safely and Ben King has created a wonderful new weapon against Demons and Evil," said Eric. "Unfortunately the Master Demon has responded with thousands of new Demons and many new tons of Evil which are again overwhelming us."
"So the Master Demon survives?" asked Dr. Crane.
"It's bigger and badder than ever," admitted Sam.
"But it still has no new apprentices," said Soone. "That at least is a good thing."
"It seems to me that we were at some sort of a critical tipping point and we lost," said Crane.
"It seems that way to Washington too," said Wells. "But I assume there is another plan in the works?"
"Ben and Soone have come up with one," said Eric, "but like all plans it entails risks."
"We can hardly wait to hear it," said Major Osborne.
"Ben King will attempt to open a rift to the Void to gain more Wild Magic," said Soone.
****
The group that teleported to Desolation Glen consisted of the most talented human and elf Wizards available. Sam and Wells remained focused on the Mansion and the Master Demon, supported by most anti-Demon teams, werewolves led by Krell, and elves led by Jeanine. Their job was to keep the Master Demon diverted from Ben's quest for Wild Magic.
Ben's job was to return to the place he feared and had nightmares about since the deadly Demon attack eight years ago, and to gain deeper knowledge and skills with regard to Wild Magic than had been obtained by the elves over millions of years of study and experience.
Soone, Red Eric, Rick, and Ann monitored Ben's every thought and spell. Rog mostly monitored the monitors. Cloaked elf and human wizards that included three anti-Demon teams cloaked and shielded the entire party. Claire Jones and sixty Apprentice Wizards were cloaked nearby, ready to strengthen through Rick any spells that Ben might cast. The Wolf roamed about the entire Glen area with a dozen of his pack friends. Similarly, Army drone surveillance was accomplished from a distance so to not raise Demon suspicions, with access to dedicated air-strike assets on call.
The select half-dozen member Wizard team lay down a canvass tarp over the ash-covered ground in the middle of the Glen and sat on it in a circle, Ben sitting between Soone and Ann, while Rog, Eric, and Rick completed the circle. They immediately joined hands and bonded together, Rick leading the way to conjoin the inner circle led by Ben, and to link to the outer Apprentice circle led by Claire Jones.
Ben sat with eyes closed, expanding his awareness of the area. There was nothing visible to normal senses to indicate anything peculiar about this spot, but they all sensed that from deep in the Earth below them a great fount of Life Energy welled up. Ben hadn't experienced this since he was a child, and the sensation threatened to overwhelm him. Countless billions of the living things of Earth contributed to the Life Energies, plants and animals, microscopic and gigantic, near and far. The Earth itself collected and for a time contained the Life Energies, most of which in turn served as a catalyst for yet more life, while a small but significant part of it was automatically diverted by ancient elf Balance wards to deter Demons and Evil.
"BECOME IN TUNE WITH THE LIFE ENERGIES, BEN," said Soone.
That was easy for everyone in the circle, for being in tune with Life Energies was the essence of being a Wizard. Ben explored the welling up Life Energy in detail, its complex structures and strengths. It was all familiar to him, like a scent, taste or familiar tune from long ago. He had done this many times before with his parents.
Ben could control the Life Energies he quickly realized, and use them directly as yet another mighty weapon against Demons and Evil. But he knew that wouldn't be enough. It wasn't mobile and not powerful enough to defeat the Master Demon. He knew this because he and his parents had used this energy to shield themselves from this same Demon eight years ago and it hadn't been enough then. Now the Demon was many times stronger than it was eight years ago. What Ben needed was more Wild Magic, and to get it he needed to create a rift in this universe that reached to the Void!
Eight years ago the Demon had created such a rift. Ben and his parents had been crafting Life Magic here when the Demon suddenly appeared and used its Evil to open a rift to the Void and cause tons of Evil to rain down in the Glen! He and his parents had used the Life Energy to fight it but it wasn't strong enough to stop the Demon. But there was Wild Magic in the Void also, and Ben out of desperation tasted it and heard it and learned how to draw, shape and manage it.
He had quickly learned how to shield himself using Wild Magic. It seemed so simple and obvious to him how to do it! He couldn't explain it from a science perspective any more than an orchestra conductor could explain all the thoughts and physics of an orchestra playing a symphony, but he could do it! It had to do with sensing and controlling harmonics, he felt, harmonics that linked precisely tuned Life Energy with Wild Magic such that they worked together!
But he had no time to savor his insights; he and his parents were under attack by the Demon! Before he could extend the shield to also protect his parents the Demon incinerated them to ash before his eyes! He had been seconds too late!
Now he had another chance to succeed or fail! Instead of his parents, this time it was his friends that would die if he didn't gain and tame the Wild Magic, and then perhaps all humans, elves, and those protected by elves!
But he had no time for such thoughts. He immersed himself mind and soul into understanding and subtly shaping the universe around him! He found that it required strength that he initially didn't have. Through Rick he reached out to his fellow Apprentice Wizards to drink in their strength and they didn't fail him.
With their combined strength Ben formed the flood of Life Energy about the remaining Wild Magic he had been holding in his body and extended it like an antenna, miles above the Glen. Then he strummed it like a musical instrument, evoking numerous different combinations of frequencies, attempting to coax a space-time rift into existence that would exude Wild Magic in harmony with its song! It was a song that he was remembering as he rediscovered it: he had held and tasted the Wild Magic for most of his life but repressed that knowledge until now because at a deep leve
l he associated it with his parent's deaths.
In the outer fringes of Earth's atmosphere, a rift in the fabric of the universe opened to the Great Void. A surge of Earth space/time/matter shot out into the Void and became Wild Magic that would strike out towards countless other universes, and an answering surge of Wild Magic shot into Earth's atmosphere, destabilizing it. Above Hope where blackening gathering clouds towered, countless molecular bonds succumbed to sudden high voltages and shed countless electrons that surged through instantly ionized pathways.
Some of the erupting lightning reached Earth, where shields protected elves and humans from electrical surges and from sudden rising winds and pummeling hail and rain. The Earth beneath them rocked and shook as blow after blow of raw power shot through it! Above the Glen winds swelled and twisted into a roaring tornado funnel that reached from above the heads of the circle of conjoined friends of Life up into the featureless, timeless, infinite black Void that yawned above them.
Some of the Wild Magic from the Void reached towards Earth and Ben snagged and encased it with his own reaching net of Life Energy and Wild Magic and coaxed it under his control.
Strengthened, Ben reached further out into the Void, which far from being empty, was an infinite timeless turmoil of both being and nothingness, bordering infinite areas of structure called universes. The chaos that ruled the Void was far different from the patterned instances of normal unpredictable behavior found in most of the universes. The chaos within universes obeyed set mathematical rules, the chaos within the Void constantly changed rules.
Yet even in this environment patterns arose, patterns of mathematics that through self-consistency worked better than others and persisted, sometimes persisting so well that entire universes were formed and walled themselves off from the Void. But most forms that arose in the Void never reached universe status. Most were inert, but a few lived. Most were simple but relatively few evolved into complex beings known as Demons.
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