by Daniel Ruth
I froze in place. The others, pressed up against me, felt me stiffen. “I have bad news. Jin has started his ritual. He must have a barrier like the other one. Probably better.”
“I am switching cameras again. There is a man kneeling in the middle of several circles waving his arms. I can’t see any details through the dust,” Mei reported tensely.
“We’re almost there,” I said as we passed the warehouse district. I could see the still collapsed warehouse on the far side of the park, however this time we headed straight in. The grounds were deserted and abandoned police vehicles and buoys littered the entire area. “Any ideas on how to get them not to vaporize us while we try to fix this? It likely won’t pierce the shield, but I’m sure it’ll go right through us.”
“I’m working on it. I have some of Conrad’s codes,” she stated uncertainly. “With Jeremy’s help, I might be able to fake a statement that we are investigating the aftermath. As long as they don’t see his status they might believe it. Mat might be able to help too if he remembers any of the report templates.”
“Do it,” I told her as we came upon the battle scene. I could feel the ley line energies peaking. We still might be too late. Bodies littered the area, many not wearing uniforms. Many were missing body parts but slowly getting up. Shifters were tough, but missing body parts would make them useless for combat until they grew back. Some of the less injured officers were staggering about seeing to the wounded and placing restraints on the fallen minions that had been far enough away from the satellite weapon to not be disintegrated.
Coming to the edge of the crater we saw the collapsed remains of a subterranean cavern. Most of it was caved in and rubble but in the center sat a tall Asian man with the classic evil mastermind mustache. He seemed to sense us watching him. He stopped his hand waving and chanting to turn to us.
“Welcome Mei Ling... and companions,” He said while smiling. That was a bad sign. It likely meant that the destruction of his lair didn’t matter. “I thought you’d never get her and the end game would come and go without seeing you at all. That would have been disappointing.”
“You... want to see me here,” Mei’s eyes opened in shock.
“Well, I was hoping you would be smart enough to decipher the clues. A bit surprised too. In the last ten years, you haven’t impressed me with your detective abilities. Still I feel a bond between us. Like a pet.”
“You wanted me here,” Mei repeated in disbelief. “You wanted me to catch up for ten years.”
“Your slow but still adorable, kitten,” Jin said with a grin.
“I may be no detective, however I know one thing,” Mei said with certainty. “You are not Jin. Leave off your disguise, who are you really?”
The magician stood there frozen in surprise. “You really outdid yourself. I suppose there’s no point in hiding it now. Fine.” At this, his body began to grow in stature to a towering twenty-five feet. Fur grew on his face and he took on a feline like cast. Very much like what I would expect Mei looked like in her hybrid form. Except twenty feet taller.
“Oh, a rakshasa. That was a possibility, but Mei had convinced me you may be dragon,” I spoke up for the first time. I had been enjoying the drama and somewhat amazed that the evil villain monolog was a real thing. I had thought they were a myth. “You’re powerful, maybe even a demon lord. That makes things more difficult.”
“Ah, the wandering dragon,” he said, this earned some shocked looks from Mei. Apparently she was expecting a dinosaur shifter or something silly like that as my secret. “It figures that my little Mei needed a helping hand to get through the puzzles. It’s not like your kind to hang around humans so long. No worries though, I have dealt with others of your species that weren’t mere hatchlings.”
“So let me see if I have this right,” I said ignoring the little insults and threats. “Ten years ago you killed Jin, took over his identity, took over his obsession for Mei and decided to go on a tour to set off the biggest multiple portal ritual I have ever heard of.”
“I had arranged for Jin to find enough of my true name to summon me hundreds of years ago. He summoned me for some small things, such as spooking that pathetic gaggle of vampires and introduced me to the lovely Ms. Ling through his scrying. He was captivated by her, yet too much of a coward to act on it.”
I had been examining the area while we were talking. There were several horribly burned corpses near us that must have been the unlamented apprentices we had been hunting. The circles were much as I had been expecting. Portal circles were linked to at least twelve others and were slowly increasing in energy towards a climax that couldn’t be good for the world. It all lead to the same absurd plan that the council had to use our world as an energy sink. The one thing out of place was that a demon lord was monologuing over his plan rather than some young dragon.
“Enough of your obsession with our sweet tempered tiger woman. We know of your plan to use our world as a way to reduce the ambient magic from that other world. The thing is, we both know that plan wouldn’t work. A rakshasa lord wouldn’t waste his time on something absurd like that. By all accounts, your entire race are brilliant master planners. Surely you aren’t the exception?” I prodded.
“Well, you’re smarter than the magician’s council was,” he gave a grin filled with long sharp teeth. “It’s not completely their fault, I had to work hard to enchant them enough to go along with it. Because, of course, you’re right. It’s all nonsense.”
“So you flood this world with magic, disasters and mayhem follows,” I added. “Seems pretty pointless.”
“You think too small,” dismissed the demon lord. “I haven’t been working on this for ten years. I have been working on this for a hundred years. I have set up this ritual on ten other worlds. This is the end game. This is when I chain all of them together and lock out all the other planes.”
I stood there in surprise. The sheer audacity. Not to mention the technical difficulties. “That’s bold. Of course, that implies that you don’t have your own domain and that you don’t wish to share it with a higher rank demon lord,” I paused in thought. “You’re an exile. You lost your power base and you’re making a land grab that ends all land grabs. Ten dimensions. There’s a lot of entities you’re going to make very angry.”
“Bah, the gods will be locked out, only my minions will be here. Ten dimensions is something even my fellow lords can’t claim.”
“It’s all very clever but in the end it’s just a typical invasion. I’m rather disappointed,” I confided to my companions who had been listening with growing horror. “One last thing, there is no head of the magicians guild is there, just you?”
“Good guess,” acknowledged the demon with a shrug. “You can call me Vatapi. I suppose you can watch from outside the barrier as your world is engulfed in rampant magic. You can even live until I come back through the permanent portals to rule my tenth world. I’ll kill you then, and take my little tigress.”
“You seem pretty confident behind your barrier,” I pointed out idly as I sidled over to the corpse of the nearest apprentice.
“It is impenetrable by anything you or your world can bring to bear,” he returned confidentially.
“Yes, but you didn’t make this barrier by yourself,” I noted as I formed talons and split the breastbone of the corpse from neck to stomach, exposing his dead, but still bloody heart.
“What are you doing? Desecrating my dead apprentices won’t help you,” the demon stated uneasily. In the background the magic in the air thrummed, gradually gaining intensity as it inched towards critical mass.
I wetted my hand with the blood and dabbed my forehead and chest with it and quickly went over to my companions to do the same. They flinched and the looks they gave me showed disgust. I think Faramond almost decked me. They didn’t refuse though. Turning to the demon lord, I said, “I guess we’ll see whose plans come into fruition.”
“What do you mean,” was as far as he got before I leaped t
hrough the barrier. I felt a minute bit of resistance as if the air was thicker before I passed. I was growing to my maximum size, which turned out to be about twenty feet tall and grew my talons and teeth as much as I could. I landed on top of him, managing to knock him down among the circles. I was slightly smaller, but our strength wasn’t so very different.
I tore at him with my claws over his face and neck. Sadly it only caused lines of thin scratches and welts. He wasn’t ignoring my efforts, but it was going to take a week to kill him at this rate. I fed psionic energy into my blows and was rewarded with tiny rivulets of blood. Now it would merely take a day to whittle him down. It was doubtful he was going to stay still and take it either.
My thoughts were prophetic since a moment later a blast of hellfire engulfed me and ejected me back through the barrier past where I was. Hellfire is demonic energy and borrowed nothing from the elements, I had little resistance to it. No one had any resistance to it. I became cognizant of where I was several seconds later as my eyelids reformed and I found myself staring sightlessly at the sky. Slowly rolling to my feet I looked around.
Back in the pit Faramond had taken my place in grappling with the demon. He had one arm of the demon in a firm grip and was twisting it around. Of course, the limb was the same size as the álfar protector himself, so although I expect it was agonizing I had doubts how effective it was. Stella was up, out of sight of the lip of the crater doing a spell. I recognized it as the summoning spell she had done earlier. Mei was pulling her sword out of nowhere and heading into the pit.
“Do you know how I realized you weren’t Jin?” Mei began as she approached Vatapi. “Jin didn’t avoid me because he was shy. He avoided me because I had a sword that was made to kill gods and demons. Meet Final Death demon!”
Upon saying this, she sprinted to where the creature was bathing Faramond in hellfire while he in turn had his arm grappled. She leapt upward and the sword came down on the wrist of the hand spewing the demonic energy. And the wrist flew off in a small spout of volatile black blood. I gaped. My heart lifted a little. That was one badass sword.
I ran towards the pit again intent on grabbing the arm with the missing hand. If we immobilized both arms Mei could carve him up at our leisure. Vatapi must have realized this too, because he opened his mouth to an unnatural extent and more hellfire poured out from it, engulfing Mei. A blazing Mei flew back over the crater lip, dropping the sword in the process. I didn’t expect to see her back anytime soon. Faramond was obviously an endurance freak, but shifters, even bear or tiger shifters, weren’t tough enough to get up after that.
I reached the demon lord just in time to get his full attention as he finally managed to throw the fairy guardian off. He, at least, seemed mostly unhurt, though his skin had sunburned patina to it. Unlike Sabastian and Mei, I am no martial artist, however I do know a few basic tricks. I rushed in and grabbed the taller creature. It seemed to know less martial arts than I did because he barely resisted my levering him over my shoulder and he flew up out of the barrier and out over the crater’s rim.
Alone for a moment, I stood under the barrier surrounded by the active circles getting my bearings. The magic was reaching its peak and whatever was going to happen would be soon. Examining the circles, I saw the barrier and frantically scanned how the exclusions were defined. There is saw the spots of blood that must have been from the apprentices. Borrowing on the sympathy of the apprentices blood was how I had bypassed the protection but how had Vatapi defined himself? Ah, there. Of course, he hadn’t inscribed his name. Names were dangerous things for demons or any greater entity. A bit of black blood showed where the demon lord had excluded himself from the spells effect. Tearing off my sleeve I spat on the crusted demon blood and rubbed hard. My specially ordered clothing had stretched with me when I grew. It was now skin tight so it had taken a second to get my finger under it.
I heard a thud and a screech of frustrating from the edge of the circle. Vatapi had leaped down to the barrier to find that he was now excluded. He pounded on the barrier in rage spewing vitriol from his mouth, both hellfire and verbal. Faramond was his back, his arms wrapped around the demons throat in a futile attempt to choke him with one arm and slam his other fist into the demon’s cheek. I could actually see swelling bloom under the fur as the blows landed, but this wasn’t going to have a happy ending unless we significantly changed things.
“Sorry, this location is under new occupancy,” I shouted over my shoulder as I continued to examine the circle. Okay, those circles linked to the other portals. Those other circles looked like barriers. The circles were almost active, brimming with power, a minute more and they would activate and likely became almost indestructible. The energy was distributed equally across all the circles. If I destroyed any of them the excess energy would redistribute and switch on the entire thing. That meant I couldn’t simply destroy the entire thing.
I felt the ground tremble and looked back to see a huge earth elemental approach Vatapi from behind and encase the demon lord in a rocky embrace. It was a bit careless of its attack and Faramond was crushed in between the demon and the elemental. I winced, elementals were infamous for not caring about collateral damage. Nevertheless, I was sure he would be fine.
Looking back to the circle, I made a decision. I couldn’t destroy it, but I could modify it. Inside the barrier circle, I inscribed the sigil for demon and evil under the inclusions and a dabbed a drop of my blood under the exclusions. Vatapi’s was likely there, but I didn’t have time to wipe it off. Then I took a talon and etched a connecting line to the barrier circles to the portal circles. This additional structure distributed the energy a little wider, slowing the charging a minute amount. I then raced over to the portal circles and etched the demon sigil under the exclusion section and my drop of blood on the inclusion list.
I had no idea how effective my changes would be. There was no time for calculation and although this was the master circle array that supposedly coordinated all the other circles in the ten dimensions, the others were not written with these changes. I had no idea the effect this mismatch would have. Ideally, as the master matrix it would overwrite the others.
I heard a thud behind me and a huge force smashed into me from behind. I found myself unwillingly flying through the air, over the circles and out of the barrier again. At that moment, the circle array hit critical mass and the world as it was, ended. And a new one began.
A massive tear in the dimensions formed above me, towering a mile above me by. Energy surged through the ley lines, now visible and glowing in a cold blue light to even mortal eyes. They were monstrous torrents of energy stretching from the portal. All five of the lines connecting to the node were visible, each one a river of energy. And oh, it felt so good. Gone was my hunger, my constant companion since I had been exiled to this world. I couldn’t help it, I roared in pleasure and heard and answering roar from the pit. Vatapi was enjoying the moment too. Right now, saturated with energy we could both shrug off megatons of explosives. The satellite weapon was meaningless now.
In the distance, I heard alarms go off and I saw the buoys around the park drop, as smoke billowed out. I knew that out in the city, probably the world, aircars were falling out of the sky, power plants were going offline and technology in general was unwinding as fifty years of advancement was destroyed. A lot of people were going to die today. Hopefully, the hospitals would have enough power to bring them back to life.
I raced over to the pit and saw Vatapi. He was inside the barrier, his arms raised in triumph. Faramon was still around his neck, pummeling the demon lord but being temporarily ignored. Meanwhile, the elemental pounded futilely on the outside of the magical dome. Stella was far behind me, well away from the crater, arms crossed over her chest and eyes closed. Supposedly she was directing the elemental. I looked closer at the demon lord and saw a smear of blood on his chest and forehead. Well, rakshasa were known to be smart, it made sense that he had stolen my idea and used the apprentice�
�s blood to regain entrance to the barrier again. I could tell that Faramon and the elemental each had benefited from the new energy levels. We were now all stronger than we were. But the demon lord was still the strongest among us.
The good news was that the circles were fully empowered and the changes I made were fixed. No changes could be made with that much energy flowing through them. You would have to shut down the portals and stop the energy flow first and if we could do that we wouldn’t have any of these issues in the first place.
The bad news was we had an angry demon lord on the rampage and he wasn’t going away until he had killed us all. I stared at Vatapi below me, a huge portal stretched from the surface of the inscribed circles to a mile in the air. With Mei out of commission where could I get enough energy to eliminate him? He was the closest thing to a god I knew of on this plane. It would take an artifact, such as Mei’s sword, or something similarly powered directly from the firmament to do anything. Mei’s sword was bonded to only her and until she came back from wherever she was flung, her sword would remain embedded in the floor next to the circles where it had landed like King Arthur’s sword in the stone.
Unless there were mad dwarves passing out rune weapons, the only runes I knew in the area were the ones on my chest and the ones on the tooth. The tooth was presently being carried by Stella. There was also the anchor rune on an indestructible chunk of permacrete laying in some nameless alley in the city. It was ironic that I had myself been hoping to create a portal to another dimension. The stress of walking through the portal had a chance to break or weaken the rune. Even if it didn’t break it could at least widen the definition of the rune. Increase my ability to wander, limited teleportation... something more than what I had.
I tapped my chest where my anchor rune lay. There was a lot of energy in runes. The moment when the energies rebalance were instants filled with limitless potential. That was an idea. More a hope, but I would take what I could get.
