Elan didn’t reply as he ran on, leaving her there to glare for a moment at his back. With that out of her system, however, she, too, got to her feet and started to swiftly move through the growing underbrush that had been steadily getting thicker.
He wants to ditch me here? I’ll show him, she thought fiercely as she sprinted now. I’ll catch up before he can even blink!
The demons had posted a watch, she could tell as she approached, but it was arranged to cover the direction they’d been travelling and not where they’d come from. Elan slipped in close so she could get a good look at the scene with her own eyes, rather than relying entirely on the red and blue blotches that the armor put up in her face.
She was shortly glad that she did when she instantly spotted several humans who appeared blue to her armor holding weapons, shoving and kicking at the prisoners. Elan’s grip tightened around the blade in her hand and she saw red.
“I strongly advise that you calm down.” Merlin’s voice shocked her. “Your heart rate is entering concerning levels, and you’re beginning to interfere with the armor’s ability to regulate hormone generation and delivery.”
“Later,” she hissed as she picked her target and sprinted from the underbrush.
“This is not how operations are conducted!”
Merlin’s admonition was entirely ignored, barely even registered for that matter, as she pushed her speed to the highest she’d ever tried in the armor. She simply wasn’t interested in anything he might have to say, nor what anyone might have to say at that point.
She cut through three demons without even looking at them for more than an instant apiece before cutting them down on her way to her first real target.
The armed man barely had time to turn from where he’d just kicked an old woman to the ground. The whole world had become a blur of motion and color as she delivered a backhanded hammer blow that lifted his body off the ground and sent him sprawling to the ground some distance away with his neck twisted at an odd angle.
Elan didn’t stop moving, even as more demons rushed in on her.
She wasn’t even really seeing them after the first few moments. In her mind, she was back in the badlands, on that night just hours after her parents had been murdered. She felt them scrambling at her skin, the blades piercing her arms as she struggled…as she fought. Elan felt like she was being pulled down, drowning in a swarm of the vile creatures…
Then, instead of being chained in place, unable to move, she surged out and up and threw the bodies off her.
Men and demons screamed as they were thrown across the camp by the force of the blows dealt to them by the dark creature that had viciously appeared in their midst. Some threw down their weapons in terror and ran, but that didn’t save them as the whirlwind of death descended on them and set them flying through the air on their final voyage.
Arrows and bolts snapped off, impacting with no effect, and the few swords met a similar fate as their demonic counterparts’ claws and teeth. In seconds the camp was a slaughterhouse, men and demon alike having met their end in a seemingly single violent instant.
One of the last few surviving human guards recognized that the captives hadn’t been targeted and grabbed up a girl from their number. He held her in front of him as the black demon charged down on his position.
“I’ll kill her!” Venadrin screamed. “I will kill her!”
Elan stopped, in a seemingly impossible motion, and for the first time he saw that it seemed to be a female figure. He held a dagger shaking at the throat of his captive.
“I’ll kill her if you come any closer…”
Elan would never know for sure why she stopped, if it was the threat to the prisoner that stopped her or the sudden recognition of the man she was facing. In later years, she would hope it was the former, but just then she could only really focus on the latter.
“You,” she hissed, her voice almost inhuman as it was twisted by rage and adrenaline.
“I’m going to back out of here,” Venadrin said. “If you follow me, this bitch is dead.”
Elan lunged forward, hand closing on the blade in his grip and tearing it from his hand with a single yank. The shock caused Venadrin to fall forward into his captive, knocking her to the ground and out of the way. Elan stepped over the former prisoner and picked the man she’d seen in her nightmares up by the throat.
She didn’t quite have the height to lift him off his feet, but instead dragged him across the camp and slammed him into a tree trunk with enough force to shake the plant and drop leaves all around them.
While she held him there, glaring at the face she’d come to hate, a demon struck her from behind with a club. It snapped off, barely fazing her as she looked over her shoulder and snapped out a reverse kick that crushed bone as it lifted the demon from the ground and sent it hurtling across the camp.
She slowly turned her eyes back on the hated figure, who was clawing at her arm and trying to breathe through her grip.
“For what you did to me,” she hissed, “I could never kill you enough times.”
He gasped, eyes bulging. “Who…are…you?”
Elan let him drop, and he did, to his knees as he gasped and gagged.
“You don’t deserve to know,” she said as she lifted her blade.
Merlin’s voice surprised her. “Hold your blow… I want to see something.”
“Back off, Merlin,” she growled. “He’s a dead man.”
“Indeed he is. Look to his shoulder,” Merlin said.
She shifted her gaze from the hated face to where the shoulder was now lit up. “What is that?”
Venadrin, hearing only one part of the conversation and little enough of that, looked up weakly. “What is what?”
Elan ignored him, listening to Merlin speak. Finally, she reached down and pulled the man to his feet, again slamming him back into the tree. She thought she heard bones fracture but didn’t care.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Of course it damn well hurts, you crazy bitch!” he snarled. “You slammed me into the tree!”
“Not that.” She shook her head, jabbing him in the chest with her finger. “That.”
“Ow! Yes, it hurts! Don’t do that!”
Elan cocked her head to one side. “You’re not even human anymore, and you don’t even realize it.”
“What are you talking about?” Venadrin asked, a cold fear rushing through him.
“You’re already one of them,” she said. “The Change is turning you, slowly. It’ll be crippling soon, they tell me. A pain that never goes away, just eats at your brain until you’re incapable of doing anything but eating and killing…just a mindless, soulless husk of the man you used to be…not that that man was worth much to begin with.”
Elan stepped back, eyeing him for a long moment as Venadrin’s face turned white with horror and realization, his hand reaching for the bubbling rash hidden under his tunic.
“This would a punishment,” she said. “Eternal pain, condemned to become a demon…”
She half turned away, then stopped and almost casually swept her blade up and across Venadrin’s neck. The thump of the head striking the ground was the last thing Elan registered of the man who’d killed her parents. She didn’t even bother to turn around to see his body slump to the ground, but simply walked away.
“Be grateful,” she said to the air as she walked away, “that my revenge isn’t worth the lives you’d take as one of them. You certainly took enough as one of us.”
It took everything she had to keep her steps steady and not collapse where she stood, but her control eroded with every step as Elan saw her parents appear in front of her. Wavering, unmoving, they didn’t look at her but through her before fading away.