by Neven Iliev
Both mortal armies had given up on fighting one another by that point. No meaningful military action could be taken until the Overlords finally ran out of juice and returned whence they came. Only then would the survivors be able to decide which side claimed dominion over New Whitehall. Or what was left of it at least. Until that moment came, every soldier’s sole mission was to preserve their lives and that of their comrades, which was easier said than done.
As if the massive demons weren’t enough, their respective minions caused just as much havoc. The Flaming Legion unleashed by Nagnamor did its best to rampage through the Republic’s ranks, while clouds of the Endless Swarm crawled over and devoured any Imperials they came across. The situation was so dire that there were multiple incidents of fighters from opposing sides joining forces to fight back the demonic hordes. From the perspective of the men and women caught up in this mess, this battle was no longer about the Empire or the Republic. It was a clear-cut case of life versus death.
Amidst all the chaos surrounding them and atop the flat roof of a particularly tall building stood the monster responsible for bringing one half of this demonic duel to the physical realm.
“Oh! He broke out of that glacier so easily!” commented Boxxy.
“Well duh,” said Kora indignantly. “What sort of Overlord would let something like a bit of ice tie him down?”
“Yeah okay, fair point. It’s just that, it was hard to tell when we first met, but Punchy is a lot stronger than I ever gave him credit for.”
The Sandman and his fiend familiar were thoroughly enjoying Nagnamor and Liusolra’s epic brawl from a safe distance of about half a kilometer. ‘Who would win in a fight between Punchy and Frosty?’ had been a question in the back of Boxxy’s mind ever since it performed its second Offering. It looked forward to getting an answer to that interesting inquiry. Kora, on the other hand, simply enjoyed the fight for what it was – a rare clash between tremendous powers well beyond her own.
“Woah, did he just throw her? What move was that?!” Boxxy asked.
“That’s called a suplex, boss! It’s really fun to do and- Wait, is he going for a double suplex!?”
“He is! Look at him go! Wait, he still hasn’t let go of her abdomen!”
“Could it be!? Oh, baby, a triple!”
“Frosty isn’t beaten yet! Here comes that ice elemental she conjured earlier!”
“Ouch, right in the finedticles. Damn that cheeky cunt!”
Regardless of their reasons, both of them were quite excited to have front-row seats to such a tremendous spectacle. That said, there was a risk that the fiend’s enthusiastic yelling might attract some unwelcome attention. The monster-in-charge had ordered its familiars to refrain from any verbal chatter to avoid someone spoiling its fun. As such, all of their exchanges were carried out through telepathy. Some might think that having to focus on broadcasting thoughts would negatively impact their viewing experience, but the shapeshifter and its entourage were so used to it that it felt just as natural as talking.
*SHKRAKOOOM*
“Holy shit!” the fiend exclaimed. “Where did that lightning bolt come from?! It completely broke off uncle Naggy’s horn!”
“That must be Imiryl. Yeah, right there,” Boxxy pointed. “See that little light-blue speck just in front of that volcano?”
“Where?” Kora squinted.
“No, not that one. The smaller one that’s still erupting a little.”
“Uhn… Oh, I think I see it, yeah. Why would she butt into their fight, though?”
“That’s actually a very good question.”
The vast majority of people in the war zone either went into hiding or were busy fighting off the Flaming Legion and the Endless Swarm. That was the smart thing to do, and Imiryl was by no means stupid. Nor was she the righteous type who’d interfere in a vain attempt to limit casualties. Her involvement was most puzzling indeed, especially since she only seemed to be attacking Nagnamor. On a hunch, Boxxy activated the Eagle Eye Skill it acquired earlier that day, courtesy of Keira’s Ranger Job reaching Level 35. The monster’s vision zoomed in on the Republic VIP, allowing it to barely confirm its suspicions.
“Yep, looks like she’s being mind-controlled. I see a whole lot of Frosty’s brood all over her neck and head.”
“Oh, I see. Clever of the frigid bint. Then what about that flashy yellow guy?”
“The what? Where?”
Zooming out a bit, the monster caught sight of Lichter who had suddenly reappeared and was streaking towards the two Overlords. However, instead of striking at them, he used an Exorcism Spell to force the foreign influence from Imiryl’s mind. The high elf Wizard seemed to pass out from the mental shock and fell towards the ground. The Paladin swooped in and snatched her out of the air, then flew off into the distance, away from the calamitous clash.
“Noooo! Give me back my afternoon snack!”
Liusolra’s screeching voice was loud enough to shatter pretty much every pane of glass in the entire city.
“WHERE ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!”
Nagnamor took advantage of her momentary distraction and drove his armored fist clean through the fake Stalker Queen’s chest. He funneled his crimson flames into her exposed insides, incinerating a significant portion of her clones in an instant.
“Oooh, that’s gotta hurt!” Kora grimaced. “You go, uncle Naggy! Show that manipulative bitch how we fiends do things!”
“Uuuuuu… No faaair!” Drea whined through the telepathic link. “I want to watch Lady Liusolra’s fight, too!”
That Psionic had mangled her limbs and catapulted her beyond the city’s borders, leaving the stalker momentarily stranded somewhere in the Rainy Woodlands. Naturally, she wanted to see the throw-down of the century for herself, but she was far too crippled to make it back to the city in time to catch either of the Overlords. Furthermore, her Master had just expended all of its MP on the Offering ritual, so it wouldn’t be able to resummon her to its position for quite a while.
“Wait, that’s it!” she realized. “There’s no way this isn’t airing on the Boxxy Show! Master, can you send me back? You’d have to resummon me to get me back on my feet anyway, right?”
“Hmm? Oh. Good point, Claws. Off you go, then.”
“Thanks, Mas-!”
[Your familiar has been dismissed.]
“Yeaaaaah! Get rekt, you many-legged cunt!” Kora continued to cheer as the battle raged on.
“You know Nagnamor is technically the enemy, right?” Xera pointed out.
“… Huh?”
The succubus was also on that rooftop, although her interest in the two Overlords duking it out was quickly diminishing. She still looked on with a sort of bemused curiosity since it was an extremely rare event, but didn’t feel as personally invested as a certain braindead fiend. That wasn’t to say she had no stake in this, however.
“Nagnamor clearly wants to kill the Master. And since we are but things that belong to the Master, he is our enemy by proxy.”
“Don’t care. He’s still family,” she shrugged before raising her ‘voice’ again. “Cunt-punt that bitch, uncle Naggy!”
“For fuck sake, will you at least keep it down!? It’s not like he can hear our telepathic link in the first place!”
“Yeesh, what a buzzkill. Boss, can you just screw the bitch already so she mellows out?”
“Oh yeah, I did say I’d motivate her, didn’t I?” Boxxy recalled. “I guess I’m not doing much else at the moment, so I might as well get it over with.”
Several tentacles sprouted from the Sandman’s back and coiled around the surprised Xera. The appendages were as thick as arms and covered in random bumps and ridges. With little warning and absolutely zero foreplay, her ass, cunt, and throat were all invaded by a tentacle each, stretching her out to the point where even the succubus’s pliant flesh was in danger of ripping apart. They started pumping in and out of her like pistons while numerous smaller tendrils held her down and grinded her fa
ce and exposed nipples against the coarse roof. It was a truly barbaric act that was closer to torture than any form of sex. If the succubus actually had things like a womb or intestines they would have been instantly turned to mush.
It was a thought that filled Xera with an odd sense of regret, though it certainly didn’t stop her from loving every single moment of the act. Especially the way Boxxy’s tentacles took bites out of her to snack on while watching the fight.
“Boss, boss! Here it comes! It’s the Heaven-and-Hell Splitter!”
“Who-the-what-now!?”
Boxxy shifted its attention back to Nagnamor just in time to see the archfiend unleash what was apparently his signature move. It was a massive downward swing of his glaive that split Liusolra’s avatar clean in half. The weapon’s flaming shockwave carved a sixty-meter-long lava-spewing fissure through the city and parted the stormy clouds overhead. Even if it sounded a bit pretentious and over-the-top at first, Boxxy reluctantly agreed that ‘Heaven-and-Hell Splitter’ was a truly fitting name. And judging from how it took Liusolra awhile to glue the two halves back together, the power behind it was every bit as impressive as it looked.
“That attack is way too strong! What’s with that unfair power?!” the doppelganger protested. “Come to think of it, doesn’t the wind-up motion look strangely familiar? Wait, is that what he tried to use on me when we first met?!”
“Probably,” Kora shrugged. “It’s uncle Naggy’s signature move, after all.”
It was the single most terrifying attack the shapeshifter had ever witnessed. If its past self had taken that attack head-on, then it would have been annihilated so completely that not even dust would have been left behind. The loophole it had stumbled upon allowed it to somehow avoid getting injured, but scary things were, in fact, scary. As such, the whole affair had ended up as yet another of Boxxy’s unforgettable near-death experiences.
“That’s a bit too much effort to kill a Level 30-something mimic, isn’t it?!” the monster complained. “I’m not saying I expected Punchy to pull his punches, but even demons have to exercise restraint to a certain degree, right?”
“Restraint? What’s the point in that?” Kora was thoroughly confused. “If you see a pathetic weakling walking around, it’s only natural to instantly wipe them out using 100% of your power. Like my dad says, there’s no kill like overkill. Know what I mean, boss?”
“I… Sure, whatever.”
Boxxy could have argued that needlessly wasting one’s stamina could prove to be a fatal weakness, but gave up when it remembered who it was talking to. This ‘overkill’ mentality was yet another in a long list of quirks that could be collectively summed up as ‘just fiend things.’
“Then I guess I should be glad Snack worked out as Punchy’s sacrifice back then.”
Of course, that was hardly the only case when the succubus had proven herself incredibly useful. The mimic of the past would have surely died on multiple occasions without Snack’s assistance. The more Boxxy thought about it, the more it realized it owed much of its early success and its ongoing survival to none other than Snack.
“Heh. Still think she’d qualify as a pure maiden?” Kora completely derailed its silent introspective.
“… Honestly? I have no idea how the crap that ritual even worked in the first place. I mean, just look at her.”
“Look at what? Holy fuck, when did this happen?!”
The fiend was so engrossed by what was going out in front that she somehow completely failed to realize the scene unfolding behind her.
“Damn, boss, you’re really letting her have it!”
Said ‘boss’ didn’t respond, however, as it was currently burning the sight of Frosty’s headlock on Punchy into its memory, letting its numerous appendages ravage Xera’s body on autopilot. This was a bizarre side of Kora’s master that the fiend could never truly get used to, no matter how much she thought she understood the creature. All that potential for lewdness, perversion, and all around carnal depravity – wasted on a creature with absolutely no sex drive. Even though the shapeshifter brought the succubus to orgasm after orgasm, it regarded the whole affair with indifference and dispassion. It was the sort of attitude one might have towards a bothersome chore like doing the dishes.
A fact that helped said ‘dishes’ get off even harder, just as it had expected.
Kora did her best to ignore the shameless slut as well as her own raging erection, focusing her attention back to the calamitous clash that was steadily destroying the city’s northwestern quarter. The fight of the century was much more important than some pervert’s exhibition show, so she continued mentally cheering for her archfiend uncle with great gusto. Once that epic fight concluded, she’d probably be told to continue smashing humans into a pulp like she’d been doing for the past few hours. She was also given permission to leave one or two of them alive so she could sodomize them to her metaphorical heart’s content. She’d wrap the day’s festivities up by giving all of the ‘freshly motivated’ succubus’s orifices a very thorough inspection later that night.
Kora didn’t know what part of the day’s proceedings to be the most excited about, so she threw all four of her arms into the air and gazed up at the stormy sky with actual tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.
“Best! Day! Ever!”
“MNNNNPGHHHHH!”
Xera very much agreed with that sentiment, albeit not in as many words.
Part Four
The remains of a Republic platoon were currently holed up in a small, dark, and dank basement. The twenty-two Legionnaires and nine conscripted adventurers making up the unit stood in relative silence, either seated atop old barrels and crates or leaning against the wall. They were hardly optimal resting positions, but it was either that or the underground chamber’s cold and muddy floor. The only source of light in the room was an illusory globe of light that hovered just under the low ceiling. With nearly nothing to reflect it, the dull yellow luminance did little to dispel the dark atmosphere.
Under such conditions, it was no surprise that none of these men and women wore a smile, though the depressing environment was the least of their worries. They were stuck hiding in a corner like a bunch of rats right in the middle of a war zone with an unconscious VIP in their care. To make matters worse, their commanding officer had run off somewhere, and their Comm-crystal was as functional as a fork with no prongs.
“C’mon, you piece of junk! Work!”
Not that it stopped the elf called Syme from trying to activate it. As the recently-appointed second-in-command, the Warrior was responsible for communications with Republic headquarters. He needed to report the unit’s status as well as their location, but couldn’t get through no matter how many times he tried. Under the circumstances, it was no surprise that his patience was at an end.
“Give it a rest, Syme,” an elf woman groaned. “I already told you that banging that against the wall isn’t going to solve anything.”
Someone had to stop him before he broke the Comm-cube, and Kaleera the Warlock saw fit to do it herself.
“No, no it’ll work,” he insisted. “There! I think it connected!”
One could hardly blame the man for that surge of optimism, seeing as how his repeated attempts at percussive maintenance seem to elicit something from the faintly glowing cube.
*Khrkkkhht*
This reaction came in the form of a grating white noise, somewhere between a scrawl and a screech. The magic item attempted to construct a holographic image of the other party, but the result was a garbled mess of blue lines and shapes that didn’t look like a person. The cube suddenly went completely inert, even going so far as to lose its pale blue glow and turn a dull, lifeless gray.
“Oh, shit! Did it just break?!”
Syme gave the thing a few worried taps and was instantly relieved to see it regain its soft luminescence.
“Will you stop messing with that thing, already!?” shout-whispered Kaleera. “You’re going to b
reak it for real!”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she rolled her eyes. “How about you just sit there and wait like the Dec told you to?”
Indeed, their orders had been quite clear. They were to remain in cover until further notice, but not knowing what exactly was going on up there was incredibly stressful. Their unease only grew since there wasn’t anyone around to give them orders. Their Comm-crystal couldn’t connect to Primus Underwood, Decanus Morgana had run off to assist the Sandman with some urgent plan, and Hilda was still in a comatose state. Of those three, the most pressing concern was the second one – the ‘Dec’ herself.
“I really shouldn’t have left her alone with that guy,” complained one of the adventurers. “He’s super creepy. And shady!”
“No offense, Mikey, but you’re a conscripted human Rogue,” spat out one of the Legionnaires. “That doesn’t make you entirely reputable, either.”
“Wow, okay. Wait, is that why you put off on healing me when I got caught up in that explosion earlier?”
“Your bumbling set off one of our own landmines! You’re lucky you got off with just a scratch!”
“A scratch?! My femoral artery was severed! I would’ve bled out on the spot if you put off treating it any longer than you did! You almost let me die!”
“Maybe I should have!”
“Alright that’s enough, both of you!” Syme shouted.
The two men kept glaring at each other in quiet anger, neither particularly willing to admit fault. This sort of interpersonal friction was one of the main problems with forcing adventurers and soldiers to work together. Their differing perspectives and personalities inevitably led to small conflicts of opinion, which had a bad habit of exploding into ugly disputes when tensions ran high. The Warrior named Syme understood this very well, being the most seasoned grunt in the group. That was precisely why the Decanus gave him the difficult task of keeping this unit from collapsing from within during her absence, and he wasn’t about to let her down.