Volleyball was going to be upset. It would take longer to get to the capital now, but since the idea came from Tony, she shouldn’t bitch too much. Plus, they’d still be on time for school.
This time, Henry was just a driver. He was definitely willing to follow Tony’s directions as long as the kid kept steering them well. At the end of the day, Henry was a pragmatic man, and he enjoyed how he continued living as long as Tony was around.
***
Yelm snarled as he stalked away from the meeting chamber, but quickly schooled his expression when he heard footsteps. It wasn’t much longer until he could stop pretending, stop acting like these cultist vermin were anything more than pawns.
He couldn’t wait.
Still, they’d had their uses. For one, a true attack on Henry and Jason’s group was being planned. And Yelm was going be involved. At least these religious fanatics were taking Henry and Jason seriously. However, that was probably more due to religious instructions from their dark god than through any sort of logic. Either way, it served Yelm just fine.
Jeth’s father smiled, mentally rubbing his hands in glee. Yes, everything was moving exactly as it should. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
Everything for Jeth. My murdered little boy. I can’t wait to see that bitch’s face. Yelm chuckled to himself. He noticed that his thoughts were not as clear, not as solid as they had been before, especially before he had dwelled with the dark cultists.
But he didn’t care. Ludus had a tendency to drive people insane anyway. Yelm was both orb-Bonded and working arm in arm with true evil. He did not lie to himself on that front. The Tolstey bandit-turned-farmer-turned-bandit-turned-insurgent was even willing to admit that Jeth had been a little monster himself. He’d been Yelm’s monster, though. Jeth had been the only family he had left in this world after Jeth’s mother had died of sickness.
Now that had been a woman. Jeth’s mother was the only woman Yelm ever respected. It figured the broad had went and gotten herself killed while she was piss drunk. Of course, she'd beaten him that night and at first, he'd been glad she was dead, that she'd started something with someone she shouldn't have. However, he'd later realized what he'd lost.
Avenging his wife had been the first time he had murdered anyone.
Yelm shook his head. Focus. Focus. He carefully stepped around a hulking demon standing in an alcove, apparently guarding something. Yes, his situation was less than ideal, but the outcome would be glorious.
He’d help kill Henry, Jason, and especially Mareen. He’d burn it all, burn everything down. His thoughts were still clear enough that he could admit he might not get to see everything, all the planning to the end. He had faith that his masters, his real masters would get their way.
The price had been high, but Yelm did not regret his service. Every bargain required loss on both sides. What was his sanity or life when compared to power and revenge? Yelm closed a fist and briefly let power run over his knuckles.
Yelm had worked as a double agent or in some sort of position where his whole identity was a lie for most of his life. Acting as a triple agent now was wearing him down, but he could handle it. Everything would be worth it when Henry, Jason, and that traitorous bitch were killed. Everything would be worth it when Ludus burned.
Everything for Jeth.
Choices on the Fly
Jason flew through the air, enjoying the freedom of his momentary weightlessness. Doing patrols and scouting ahead were responsibilities that would never actually be a chore for him. No matter how many times he teleskipped, the name he’d recently come up with for traveling in the air with his magic, it never got old.
Some lessons could be hard-earned but also set in deep once learned. One of those lessons for Jason had been the value of scouting ahead. His abilities gave him unique advantages while doing so, too.
In retrospect, the assault on the bandits in Tolstey would probably have killed them all if not for the recon Jason had done beforehand. He had always intellectually known that information was important, but now he had practical examples of why.
When he’d asked Henry about it in the past, wondering why Henry wasn’t more proactive in gathering intel, the laid back but prickly man had said he had always worked as a medic or an EMT. Jason translated that to mean that planning ahead was not Henry’s strong suit except in specific, random circumstances.
Jason didn’t get it. He had concluded his friend was an idiot savant or something. At least Henry’s personality and his military training allowed him to quickly react to hairy situations, though.
Unfortunately, repeating a mistake he always seemed to make, Jason had been too passive in the past and had gotten complacent during the long journey out of Tolstey. The entire group had almost paid the price. Liangyu’s ambush could have easily cost them all their lives, and even now, the group was split up and Henry had almost died several times over. Jason held himself personally responsible.
When he realized he was getting lost in thought again, Jason focused. It would be silly to ponder the importance of scouting so much that he didn’t actually scout.
After focusing again, Jason thought he saw movement in the sparse trees below. He frowned, and looked more closely. His job was to tell the rest of the group about monsters ahead, and sometimes to deal with them himself.
The movement he was seeing was odd. It was notable in the first place because the Delvers hadn’t seen any monsters for days this close to Berber civilization. Plus, something about what he was seeing just didn’t seem right. Jason interrupted his current weightless flight and teleported in for a closer look.
The action probably saved his life.
After he’d acted, he caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye where he would have been before changing his flight pattern. It was just a shimmer in the air, but Jason reacted with months of survival instincts honed by constant danger on Ludus, and situational awareness hard-won by surviving battle after battle.
He didn’t waste any time wondering if he was seeing things. Jason just acted, slamming his infrared vision into place and scanning where he’d been. His blood ran cold.
Two large, winged creatures showed up in his augmented sight. One of them had whipped its claws and a wicked tail through the space Jason would have been. Months before, he would have been temporarily frozen at the sight, requiring time to process what he was seeing. But now, the Terran man’s combat instincts had been beaten to a savage edge. With a burst of magic, he teleported up above the attacking creature, angling his forward trajectory straight towards it.
When Jason came out of his teleport, he immediately sped up his thinking, allowing himself to process information faster and slow down his perception of time. The buff was incredibly useful, and underutilizing it had been another of Jason’s past failings. He was fixing all of his mistakes one by one.
Jason drew Breeze and cut in one smooth motion. Traveling about sixty miles per hour, he flashed past the winged monster in the air, leaving a visible trail of blood and viscera in his wake. A gurgling roar sounded behind him, and his target tumbled out of the sky.
As the creature died, it lost its invisibility and Jason got his first look at what had attacked him. In infrared, the monster had just been hues of warm colors, but as after it became visible, Jason swallowed in horror. The thing was horrible, even to Jason, someone who killed monsters almost every day.
The creature’s large, insect-like wings trailed behind it as it fell. Its bulbous head was covered in multiple, dimming eyes, and a long, curling tongue trailed from a mouth full of sharp, crooked teeth. Long, spindly arms ended in a mass of angular fingers that all had wicked claws. The creature’s legs were like those of a cat, and its tail had a stinger like a scorpion.
It was...wrong. Most monsters on Ludus were powerful, dangerous creatures, but they still fit into the greater world somewhere. The thing Jason had just killed had no greater purpose other than to kill. To cause pain. This was a fact he instinctively knew when he saw it
.
Jason got goosebumps. He’d heard about such things. True-demons, demon-demons. Creatures that existed to destroy, to consume.
The second creature turned and flashed towards Jason, still cloaked to visible light. Jason’s enhanced mind ran through several scenarios. He could create a null-time barrier on its side to slice the thing in half, but then the demon might still reach him. Stopping it with a proper null-time barrier would be very helpful, probably, but he’d be uncomfortably close.
Jason’s compressed thoughts were cut short when he noticed a light approaching him. He didn’t know what it was, but with his sense of time sped up, it was obvious that the light was moving quickly and heading right for him.
He teleported, and identified the light as a blast of fire from the ground. There were orb-Bonded or mages down there, and they were gunning for him. Jason felt his pulse hammering, the rage inside him slavering at its chains, wanting to escape, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. He needed to keep his wits about him.
The situation was greater than just himself. The odds of finding a powerful group of magic users and demons that attacked without provocation, effectively in the middle of nowhere, was too much of a coincidence. Delvers LLC was being targeted again.
This meant someone or something was trying to take Jason out too, or keep him away from the fight. He’d learned his lesson fighting Liangyu’s zombies. Jason needed to get back to his friends, and his wife, as quickly as possible.
As if to punctuate his train of thought, the streak of fire from the ground continued on, leaving a sooty, expanding tail of smoke. Jason sensed he would not be able to teleport through it. His eyes narrowed and he realized he needed to end his fight with the flying demon as quickly as possible and immediately retreat.
He reached out with his mind, gritting his teeth. The demon’s presence wasn’t like any person or animal he’d felt before with his psionics magic. It was slippery and dark, like rancid oil. Jason still managed to lock onto the flying nightmare and attach himself with an invisible tether.
Jason slingshotted around, his inertia causing him to orbit the demon even as it changed directions again. He grinned without humor, drew a throwing knife from his sideways space storage, and then cloned it several times. He threw blade after blade, cloning them yet again in midair, creating a hail of sharp, bronze projectiles heading for the demon.
He’d been practicing.
Then Jason threw several more cloned blades teleporting them to the sides of the creature, adjusting the vectors of the blades at the demon’s vulnerable wings.
All the wickedly sharp metal hit at once. Not a single blade did enough damage to actually threaten the large demon’s life, but they succeeded in tearing apart its wings. Jason took advantage of his target’s confusion, noticing it reel from the attack in his infrared vision. With a thunderclap of sudden vacuum, Jason teleported behind the hideous, winged demon, attacking with a null-time edge on Breeze. The attack might have been a little overkill, but Jason wasn’t taking any chances.
One sweeping cut severed the demon’s tail and half of its leg. The return stroke neatly lopped off the wings on one side of its body. Jason noticed the telltale glow of more fire attacks coming from the ground, and immediately teleported away again.
Behind him, the demon fell from the sky, mortally wounded. Jason nodded in grim satisfaction and began teleskipping back to the Battlewagon. He adjusted his goggles as he flew as they’d shifted during the mid-air battle. The fight had seemed to last ages to him, but had only been a few moments, too short to even realize his goggles had come loose.
Jason maintained his infrared vision. He’d learned his lesson. Paranoia was only paranoia, and overkill was only overkill when invisible demons weren’t prone to attack.
Unfortunately, he was not living a demon-free life these days.
***
Bezzi-ibbi could sense something was wrong before Jason even returned. The surrounding land was too quiet, too hushed. The very air made the Jaguar Clan heir’s tail bristle, and the wind smelled like expectation.
The young Jaguar Troubadour carefully put his parchment and pens away. He’d been working on his first, great song for weeks now, and was almost done. His work was precious, and had to be protected. After his work was stowed away, Bezzi-ibbi took off his fashionable shoes - a common action for him now whenever he thought there might be violence.
He’d learned the hard way what it was like to be improperly dressed for combat.
As Bezzi-ibbi took off his vest and loosened his shirt, he said, “Mareen. Trouble. Might be. Readying.”
The dark-skinned woman had been staring into space with her arms crossed over the side of the Battlewagon. She looked up in surprise. “Trouble? Gonzo and Vitaliya are making the rounds on guard duty. Nobody has seen any monsters in days.”
Bezzi-ibbi just shrugged and continued loosening his clothing. The Battlewagon still had plenty of explosives. The Mo’hali youth wished Aodh was still with them. He wished Rark-han was still around too, the thought causing a momentary pang of sadness.
He shook his head. Not for the first time, Bezzi-ibbi vowed to survive, to reach the Berber capital with his friends so he could start figuring out how to address Rark-han’s wish. The dead wolf-race man’s note lay folded in a pocket on the inside of Bezzi-ibbi’s vest.
Everything in due time.
By the time Bezzi-ibbi had loosened his sleeves, Mareen had narrowed her eyes and nodded. She began putting on her heavy wooden armor and hollered, “Assemble! Everyone group up!”
Uluula was the first to appear, as she’d been meditating nearby while Jason scouted ahead, a twice daily occurrence. The white-haired Areva woman cocked her head curiously. “Jason is not back yet. Why are you preparing for battle? We have not seen a monster in days.”
“Bezzi-ibbi thinks it would be a good idea,” said Mareen, giving her friend a shrug. Uluula merely nodded and began her own preparations.
The last few days, the group had been acting more casual, not dressed to fight all the time, and it had been nice. Bezzi-ibbi had particularly enjoyed it as he’d had more time to work on his songs. In his hunter’s heart, he’d known it wouldn’t last, though.
Bronze needed fire to be shaped. While traveling with legends, it was logical to expect flames.
Next, Vitaliya and Gonzo came jogging over. They took one look at the group donning armor and weapons, then both began grabbing a few extra pieces of gear as well. Since they’d been on guard duty, they’d already been prepared to fight.
When Bezzi-ibbi was completely prepared, he could tell that the rest of the group could feel some of what he had sensed. The air crackled.
Suddenly, with a whoosh of displaced air, Jason teleported nearby. He’d come in with just a bit of upward trajectory, and after a split second, his feet found the ground again. The tall man was breathing hard and had his naked sword flashing in his hand, its blade crackling with electricity.
“Everyone, get ready for—” He paused as he noticed the entire armored group gathered together, already armed. “Why are you all geared up?”
“Bezzi-ibbi felt something was amiss, so we are prepared,” stated Uluula.
Jason blinked, looking at Bezzi-ibbi. The Jaguar Clan heir grinned back, hissing in amusement and pride. He was pleased to show his hunter’s instincts to his older brother Jason-ibbi. Bezzi-ibbi was not a hero just for show. His line was true, full of great hunters.
“Well, that’s convenient,” muttered Jason. “Sometimes I wonder if you all really need me for anything other than driving the Battlewagon.”
“I can do that now better than you,” reminded Uluula. “But, husband, you have your weapon out and look frazzled. Perhaps that can wait?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Jason agreed, nodding. “We have a large, hostile group heading this way. I caught glimpses of them. There are demons and people wearing dark robes. I think they were expecting us to be on the road and were thrown off by the fact we wer
e taking this long valley instead. Our paranoia paid off.
“And when I say demons, I mean demon-demons, not Ludus demons.”
“True-demons?” asked Gonzo, his voice sharp. Bezzi-ibbi’s lip curled and he suppressed further reaction. Everyone on Ludus knew about true-demons, creations of malice and hunger.
“Yes, two invisible ones tried to gank me in the sky. I killed them while the welcoming committee on the ground lobbed fire at me. They almost got me, too.”
Uluula’s entire demeanor changed, becoming completely serious and cold as ice at once. “They almost got you?”
“Yes. They were invisible and the ambush was a good one. I definitely almost died. These guys are serious.”
“Describe the demons please, Jason,” asked Gonzo.
Jason began explaining what the demons had looked like, and Bezzi-ibbi’s hackles rose. True-demons were awful, and rarely seen on Ludus. The situation was not sounding good. What was worse, it was late in the day and the sun would start setting soon. Secret Jaguar Clan hunting lore cautioned against being near demons at night.
“Yes, those were definitely demons,” said Gonzo.
“Shall we run?” asked Uluula.
Gonzo gave a sidelong look at Jason before saying, “If it was my decision, I would say no.”
“Why?” asked Jason.
“Remember our conversation in Mirana about Asag?”
“Yes,” Jason replied, drawing the word out.
“I’ve been receiving reports that the cult is confirmed and has also been active. People have been disappearing and a small village was wiped out.”
“This would have been helpful to know before,” said Jason, scowling. “But why would you not run away? I saw a shit ton of cultists and demons coming this way.”
“Because they are probably after us, and because we just passed a little village.” Gonzo shook his head sadly. “And telling you about this earlier would have been unnecessary and meant sharing a burden with you for no reason.
“You may not know this, but to keep true-demons satisfied, so they don’t turn on their summoners, they must be constantly fed. If we run, the village and anywhere else the cultists go will just produce victims. Berber is my adopted country. I am a spy, not a soldier, so I will run if I must, but sometimes doing what’s right is worth doing.”
Delvers LLC: Adventure Capital Page 31