by Langland, J.
Its howls were so loud that Tom almost thought his ears would break. Having no choice but to carry on, Tom brought his knee up, and pulled the demon’s two wrists down. This action promptly connected the demon's head to his knee with a satisfactory clunk. It didn't knock the demon out, of course, but it did change the pitch of the demon's scream slightly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tom noticed some movement coming towards him. Looking up, he saw the other three demons converging on the fight rapidly. Quickly he scanned the sky looking for his support, he didn't see any. Fun, thought Tom. Stepping over his now kneeling opponent's back, Tom turned, bringing the demon's arms with him. The demon's arms were now behind its back, and crossed over each other. Using the oldest restraint trick in the book, Tom shoved the demon's wrist up over the back of his head. Human arms would have been in bad shape at this point, instead the demon simply uttered a completely new timbre of howling.
Knowing that he had to get rid of this guy for the moment, he bent his knees and lifted. Ungracefully, yet with the rudimentary form he'd learned in class, he flipped the little demon over his back with all his muscle power. As it was, even if he'd been the greatest black belt of all time, instead of not quite a brown belt, he probably couldn't have pulled it off if it hadn't been for the shear strength in his new body. The demon went sailing over Tom's head, forty feet, into the middle of the on looking soldiers. These soldiers, Tom decided, must be really stupid, despite the fact that they kept getting a demon thrown into their midst, they still held their ground and watched the fight.
One problem temporarily on hold, Tom turned to face the next three. This wasn't going to be fun, Tom thought. He had absolutely no idea how to deal with these three. As he stood, staring at the demons descending on him, he felt a pinprick between his shoulder blades. Arching his wings slightly, he turned to see what had caused the small pain. He couldn't see anything that could have pricked him. Quickly scanning the crowd of soldiers who had been behind him, he detected some slight movement, as if someone moving away. He really didn't have time to deal with whatever was going on there. He began to turn back, when he spotted a dagger lying on the ground. Apparently, someone had tried to throw a dagger in his back. Tom stood still, staring at the dagger for a few seconds. He didn't know why it surprised him that daggers were bouncing off his skin, given everything else he had discovered about his demonic form.
Suddenly, as he stood there, someone slammed into him from behind. Sinewy arms closed about his neck, trying to strangle him. He had temporarily forgotten about the demons charging from behind. Startled violently, reflexively, without conscious thought on Tom's part, his long prehensile tail came stabbing straight up. Tom felt it shoot up, and before he could stop himself, it rammed hard into the demon behind him.
Once or twice, when he'd been in elementary school, Joe Montague, who had always been the class trouble maker, had snuck up behind Tom and quickly placed one of his hands flat on the top of Tom's head, and pounded on it with his other hand. This was what Joe liked to call "Ten Thousand Volts," which was because it felt like a bolt of electricity was traveling down one's spine. That was the feeling he now encountered. It felt as if an electric shock were traveling down his spine, from his neck, down the small of his back, down his tail and up to the sharp pointed part, which was stuck in the attacking demon.
The offending fiend screeched piteously. The sinewy arms fell slack, and then slid off Tom's shoulders. Tom turned around to see a badly charred demon, which looked as if it had been split in two from the crotch up to the sternum. Even as his eyes widened upon the grisly scene, the demon's body began to fade. This Tom realized was what it must look like to others as he disappeared back to the Abyss. At least that was where Tom figured the demon was going. He really couldn't think completely straight at the moment, but everything Boggy and Tizzy had said, as well as his own experiences with the dragon, indicated that the demon should be returning to the Abyss to regenerate. At least he hoped so. He would hate to think that he'd killed the smaller demon, just because it was following its orders.
Tom looked up from the offending corpse. The other two smaller demons were simply standing a little ways off, looking at the spot where their compatriot had vanished from. Slowly they glanced up with sickly smiles. There was, Tom thought, definitely a hint of wariness, and perhaps even fear, in their eyes.
"Hi?" one said hesitantly. It made a feeble gesture with one hand, as if waving hello.
Trying to think quickly, but without knowing what to say, Tom just stood there. He realized later that the look of concentration on his face could probably only be construed as a fierce scowl to outsiders. Whatever the case, the two demons looked at each other, and then suddenly without warning, charged Tom.
Tom scrambled back a little, trying to take a defensive stance. However, just before the demons reached him, they let out high pitched howling noises, clouds of smoke sprang from nowhere, and the demons disappeared. "What the hell?" Tom said in surprise.
What were these two up to? Tom quickly looked around, suspecting a trick. The two demons however, were gone. He couldn't see them anywhere, as far as he could tell, they'd gone back to the Abyss. The question was, why? It really didn't make any sense.
"Cute," said a voice from the crowd of soldiers to Tom's left. Tom glanced over and saw the first demon slowly emerging from the crowd. "Perhaps you can scare pip squeaks into pretending that you destroyed them, so that they don't have to fight; but it won't work with me.”
"No, you're going to have to get rid of me the hard way, asshole. That lightning trick ain't gonna work on me either. So you'd just better be prepared for a long fight." As he spoke the demon marched closer. As he finished speaking, Tom judged that he was just at the right distance.
"I don't think so," as fast as he could, Tom spun and landed a spinning back kick to the demon's stomach. The demon moaned in surprise and bent over. As he bent, Tom quickly repositioned himself. Breathing as he'd been taught, Tom began a series of quick punches to the other's face. Using the full force of his body, but keeping his shoulder's fixed, he jabbed as quick and hard as he could at the demons face six times, kiyaing each time. Shifting his balance, he then executed a right crescent kick. Unfortunately, because of his leg construction, he didn't coordinate it properly to get it as high as it should go. He'd intended to hit the guy's chin, instead, Tom's hoof impacted on the demon's shoulder, spinning it around and to the ground.
Tom backed up as far as he could. As he did so the other demon slowly got to its feet. Tom charged through the air. He was attempting to do the double flying back kick that he'd used so successfully on the dragon. Unfortunately, he realized as he flew by, this demon wasn't as large as the dragon, and it was a lot more mobile. The demon had simply seen him coming and leapt out of the way at the last second.
To his surprise, Tom kept going. He tried to slow himself down with his wings, but before he could decelerate appreciably, he found himself plowing through soldiers. Only vaguely did Tom hear the screams. All he could really note in those few seconds, was the thumping of bodies against his hooves and body. Hardly recognizing what he was seeing through the blood that was spurting everywhere, he came to a stop, about a two hundred feet from where he started.
Standing up dazedly, he unthinkingly looked at the mangled corpses around him. Uncomprehendingly, he noted calmly that at least one man's head had been popped off. Some soldiers were missing limbs and many just had their guts hanging out. How could he have done this? Slowly he realized that at least some of the damage had come from the fact that they'd been tightly packed and had weapons drawn.
So in reality, the only ones he'd really mangled, were those in his hooves' path. The other's had just been jammed aside as he plowed through, and they'd accidentally sliced and diced themselves and their fellows. Wanting nothing more than to get away from the death he'd caused, Tom took the only open path out, back the way he'd come. As he emerged from the bewildered and wounded soldiers, he
saw the other demon laughing at him. This was almost too much. "What the hell is your problem? It was your soldiers that got creamed!"
"I am laughing at you. You're nothing but a fool."
Tom was getting annoyed, this jerk was laughing, and now he'd noticed some fool wizard chanting something at the periphery of the clearing made by the soldiers. Tom couldn't tell what the guy was chanting, but a black cloud seemed to be forming in front of the wizard. Tom didn't know what the man was doing, but he imagined it wasn't for Tom's benefit. Angry, and lashing out, Tom once more charged the laughing demon. Again, the demon was ready, except that this time Tom didn't do quite what was expected.
Instead of trying to physically throw the other demon, or punch it, Tom simply attempted to grab one arm and spin the demon around. He was simply trying to throw it off balance and make it stumble. His ploy worked. The demon stepped aside as Tom charged up and in the process added to the momentum that Tom needed to grab its arm and jerk it off balance and away. Stumbling on its goat-like legs the demon accidentally backed into the mumbling wizard and his black cloud, just as Tom had hoped.
However, the results were more than Tom had bargained for. The demon ran into the wizard, thus throwing off his concentration.
~
Now, distracting a wizard in the middle of casting a spell is never a good idea. If a wizard loses control of a powerful spell, bad things can happen. This is especially true when the wizard is casting a Cloud of Disintegration, as this one was doing. Unbeknownst to Tom, C.o.D's are one of the few spells that can permanently discorporate demons. It also happens to dissolve anything that gets in its way. Including casters that lose control of it.
Thus it was that Tom heard only a very short yell, as the cloud expanded and completely engulfed the demon and the wizard. C.o.D's are very efficient, the victims feel only a momentary instant of infinite pain as their cells are ripped into their component molecules, which are in turn disassociated into their constituent atoms. At this point the victims feel absolutely nothing as the atoms are stripped of their electrons, and then the protons and neutrons are ripped apart. Suffice to say, one need not even mention any thought of pain as the nucleons are split into quarks and so on it goes down to the primordial energies and particles which may make up quarks. Naturally, a theoretical magic student may wonder at what happens to the incredible amounts of binding energy that are released in this occurrence. Unfortunately, the best theories simply state that this energy goes into feeding the cloud, allowing it to grow. After all, it takes an awful lot of energy to rip things apart on this scale in the first place.
It is also fairly easy to see that it would be nice to have a wizard controlling said cloud, otherwise it would disintegrate things, grow and eventually eat everything. Unfortunately, in this case, the controlling wizard was eaten by the cloud. Now, actually, Lenamare, who was observing from the castle wall, wasn't too concerned. He wasn't positive, but he was pretty sure that the cloud couldn't get through his wards. After all, the wards were pure energy to begin with. Thus at least he and his school would be safe.
Exador, on the other hand, had no such protection. Therefore, he quickly decided that instead of messing with more demons to fight Lenamare’s demon, he would do his best to try to get the cloud under control, before it ate his army. By the time he got close enough to begin work on trying to control it, it had quadrupled its size and had eaten four horses and five soldiers who hadn't realized the problem in time to get away. Naturally it was also dissolving the earth below it as well.
~
Tom though, didn't really care about the cloud. He was simply exhausted and sick. He was just glad that he apparently had no more enemies to fight. Without waiting around for further orders, Tom took to the air to head back toward the clearing with the wizard in it. As he flew off, his last glimpse of the army was of some new big shot wizard waving his hands, and of soldiers finally having the sense to run away from something obviously dangerous.
It took very little time for Tom to return to the clearing. By the time he was coming down for a landing he was already preparing something nasty to say to the wizard about the timely backup he'd received. The words died in his mouth as he quickly noticed the state of the clearing.
The clearing kind of looked like one of those paintings he'd done at a carnival, where he'd squirted paint onto a rotating piece of cardboard. The main difference was that the clearing was painted mainly in red, with a little purple here and there. In the center of the clearing lay the wizard, unconscious, obviously suffering from some relatively minor sword wound. Over the wizard stood the little demon he'd noticed upon arrival. It seemed to be standing guard over the wizard, and glaring defiantly up at Tom.
"Stay back!" shouted the little demon as Tom landed a few feet away.
"Why?" asked Tom.
"’Cause I'm not going to let you hurt him," said the little demon, with such seriousness and conviction that Tom had to restrain a bit of smile, despite his sour mood. Apparently, the little demon considered Tom a serious threat to his master and was quite intent on defending the man. A rather strange thought, actually, Tom decided, why would a demon want to protect its accursed master?
"Why don't you want me to hurt him?" Tom asked in curiosity. "If I offed him, you'd be free." Not that Tom had any desire to kill the wizard, the guy had been a little paranoid and pretentious, but he didn't deserve death.
"Cause I said so, " retorted the little demon. "Besides, he's the best master I've had in a long, long time, and I don't want to give him up and get stuck with someone a lot worse. So you just back off, or I'll make you sorry." The little demon puffed.
"Oh, " said Tom with what he thought was an amused grin. The little demon blanched, so Tom figured the grin must not have worked like he'd intended. "Very well then, I'll just go back to my cave." The little demon said nothing, it just glared.
Without wasting any more time, Tom visualized his cave and began to will himself back to it. As the image of the cave began to superimpose itself upon the clearing, he noticed that the little demon wasn't glaring so hard, but was still extremely vigilant. As he was almost completely back in his cave, he gave the demon a friendly wave and a nod.
Chapter 24
Lenamare shut the door to his study and motioned to Jehenna to take a seat. She sat down in her traditional chair across from Lenamare's desk. Lenamare moved briskly around his desk and took his seat. "So, you wanted to speak?" He asked with a slight smile.
"Yes, this teleportation trap of yours, what's the story."
"Not much actually, simply that anyone trying to teleport within the vicinity of this castle, without the proper password, will end up in a specific location of my choosing, and not theirs."
"Uh huh. And the bugs you mentioned?"
"Well...simply that the standard version of the spell puts them in a stasis field. Unfortunately, because they rematerialize in stasis, they're kind of permanently stuck in it. I haven't figured out how to get them out of it. That's all."
"They’re stuck in stasis? Meaning we can't question them?"
"Or do anything to them. They're in a complete Vergian Time Stasis, so we can't affect them. Apparently, materialization into frozen time fixes their reality in a different time frame."
"Why would this be? I mean, people have been doing Vergian Time Stasis' for centuries, and they always get out."
"I'm not sure, my guess is that it has to do with the entry into Skew Timespace. Remember, teleportation reorients the individual's energies to perfectly align with new space-time coordinates. If the teleportation aligns them more perfectly with Skew Timespace than the normal stasis spell, then it could be a hell of a lot more difficult to realign them to normal space-time.
"Essentially, the normal spell method of entry allows a small communication channel between our reality and Skew Timespace. If this entry isn't made, then the communication channel doesn't exist..."
"And so we can't communicate with them in anyway, espec
ially by magic. The reversal spell can't find them since no path exists between us and them."
"Precisely. Now if one could undo their teleportation spell, from outside, one might just be able to pull them out of it, the same way they got there."
"But no one knows how to do that, or even if it can be done." Jehenna concluded. Lenamare nodded.
"However, " Jehenna said as she realized something, "if there is no communication channel, then light can't pass between here and there. You couldn't see if anyone was there or not."
"True, but I know where I sent them, and when I go there I can detect the normal warping of space-time that you experience when examining someone trapped in a Vergian Time Stasis. It also happens to be fairly good size, so I am fairly sure that there are more than one would be infiltrators there."
"So what do you intend to do about them?"
"I haven't decided yet, there is not much I can do. For one thing, we don't have a whole lot of time. These wards aren't going to last indefinitely now that we've lost that student. Damn him for dying on me." Lenamare stood up and began to pace around the room, his elegant slippers making a slight whisper as he glided through the deep carpeting.
"Well, what do you plan to do, take them down and start from scratch?"