It was beginning to feel rather like cheating, the pitiful things were so easy to kill. If not for the fact that they were monsters in their own right, he might actually be feeling guilty about it.
Okay, probably not, but that was because he knew the sorts of monsters they really were.
He’d lost track of the general and his more powerful legion, which made no sense. A demon that powerful shouldn’t have been able to slip from his senses so easily, not within a city this small.
He must be more to the center, Kaern decided as he began to penetrate deeper into the city, deciding to up the risk a little.
The demons he’d encountered to this point would be of limited threat to him, even if they managed to swarm him. Being pinned down in a narrow city street would make that risk a little higher, but he was getting nowhere as it was. Picking them off a few at a time was satisfying, perhaps, but pointless. Ninth Circle trash was literally endless in their reserves, and he was well aware that the commanders of the demonic legions considered thinning those herds to be a positive thing.
Losing scores of them just meant that the few who survived were likely to be made of sterner stuff than the dregs they normally were.
The real threat here were the lower circles assigned to this world, rarely less than Sixth Circle, thankfully, but they were infinitely more deadly than even a mob of the lowest trash of the demonic legions.
Which made him worry, as the general should have set at least a few larger threat beasts loose on the city as part of the general scouring for survivors.
Where the hells are they?
*****
Merlin observed the crude human city, both through the eyes of the armor he had issued to the girl and the surviving scanners that remained within the now reactivated secure base that people had built around. The city itself was a chaotic mass of locally sourced materials, mostly stone and crude cement, with an almost organic structure that was generally seen in places that grew with little to no oversight.
No civil planners had a hand in the design of the place he was scanning, that much was certain. The Ancestors would have been horrified by many of the design “features” put into place, assuming they stopped laughing long enough to consider the ramifications. People did as they must and to the limits of their capacity, however, so Merlin refrained from amusement on their behalf.
It would be in poor taste now anyway.
The infestation of the dimensional intruders was near complete on every level, but the Elemental Intelligence found himself agreeing with the thoughts of the two children who now searched through it. The demons within the scanning range of Elanthielle’s armor and the security facility were all twisted, shambling wrecks of their former beings, barely mobile by many standards, and only a threat to the very weak or when in large groups.
That didn’t fit with the initial scans he’d received when the old security facility had come abruptly back online. There had been several high-risk entities within the range of the facility and many medium-risk signatures who’d actually penetrated it.
Where did they go? the elemental entity wondered, examining the records of the facility’s scanners with intent.
Unfortunately, after centuries of disuse, little of the facility was fully operational. He could track them for a short period after the children had transported to Avalon, but lost them quickly all the same.
I need more range, but there’s nothing left to give it. He cursed the loss of the old satellite network that had once provided near-instant access to intelligence from anywhere on the world.
He felt like he’d lost his limbs, was half blind, and had clearly suffered from dementia for good measure.
Perhaps he had.
Either way, he knew he could only act on what he knew, so Merlin set about making the appropriate plans. The girl had brought people back to him. He refused to give up the opportunity without a fight. He had thought it was all lost before, and that darkness would not swallow him again without a fight.
*****
“I’m not seeing more than scattered groups,” Elan said as she looked across the burning city.
The light from the rising sun was eclipsed by the smoke and shadows cast by the fires as thatched roofs and wooden buildings burned. Most of the city was stone, so it remained intact, but the damage would be undeniable come daylight.
Elan scanned the city section by section, but all she found were scattered survivors and demon squads hunting them. No signs of either the real population or the main force of the demon army, which left her and Caleb in a quandary.
“Where’d they go?” Caleb asked, frustrated as he planted his hands on the parapet in front of him and glared out across the city that he had once called home.
“I don’t know, but they’re not here.” Elan shook her head. “I…”
Her pause caused Caleb to look at her curiously. “What is it? Do you see something?”
“Yeah…no…I don’t know,” she said, leaning forward. “A red figure just killed a bunch of other reds.”
“The demons are turning on each other?” Caleb snorted. “Good.”
“Yeah,” Elan nodded, but her voice remained curious. “Why, though?”
“Does it matter?”
The girl shrugged, honestly not knowing if it did.
“That,” Merlin’s voice spoke in her ears, “is not a lower level demon. It reads as entirely human, aside from a dimensional variance that only shows up on the security facilities’ scanners. Your armor would not read it as a demon without my direct link to them. Only higher level demons are that well-disguised.”
“Well, that is interesting,” Elan said softly.
“What? What is?” Caleb asked beside her.
She glanced at him, annoyed. “We really need to get you something so you can hear the jerk.”
“You make it sound so appealing…” he deadpanned.
“He said that the demon I’m watching isn’t a low level like the rest, which means he might have more information on what’s going on,” Elan said. “Let’s go.”
“Wait, wait!” Caleb caught her shoulder, causing her to half turn back to him. “The invisible voice in your head told you that this one is dangerous, and your instinct is to go down and ask him where his friends went? Are you out of your mind?”
She stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged and asked, “Would I know if I were?”
Then she slipped his grasp, hopped down off the parapet, and dropped to the next level so she could scramble down the stairwell to the ground. Caleb swallowed the urge to curse at her and followed as best he could, losing ground and gaining frustrations with each step.
*****
Kaern stood his ground as the small group of demons charged him.
They were pitiful things, clearly wracked by the Change and likely unable to think rationally through the pain and primal urges that marked that period of a species’ metamorphosis into the Ninth Circle. By the time they reached the Seventh, some level of intelligence would return, but that would be centuries away at best.
Of all things he’d seen come from the revolution against the heavens, this was the worst.
It was blasphemy beyond heresy to see sophonts turned to mindless raging beasts.
He sidestepped the first to reach him, flicking his sword casually out to cleave its chest in. The body kept running for another dozen feet, dead but entirely unaware of its disconnection from the mortal coil. Kaern ignored it.
He lashed out with a boot that utterly crushed the next one’s knee joint, toppling it to the ground in howling agony. The beasts could operate without their hearts, or even their brains, for a limited time, but the mechanics of how their bodies worked were no different than humans. Cripple their joints, and they would fall.