As soon as we entered back into the Breach, everyone in the car tensed up. It made perfect sense, we were very lucky to not get attacked on the first pass, despite having five sources of large amounts of ULE in one place. In light of that, I activated the newly created threat-tracking software as a precaution.

All I got in return was an error indicating that too much would be highlighted- which would have resulted in what the computer called “excessive power draw from organic components.” After adjusting the parameters to ignore the relatively-moving but generally-stationary objects, an outline reminiscent of my wireframe perception popped up at the edge of where my perception could reach. Worryingly, it was followed by half a dozen more and was heading in our direction. As soon as I noticed that, I unbuckled myself and reached for my canisters- now secured in holsters on my thighs and accessible from hidden slits between plates on the dress.

I slipped into multitasking with surprising ease: creating a series of softball sized orbs with a small hole from my polymer, rolling down the window with my tail, estimating how much time we had until the demons reached a sight line, and calmly informing our driver, “we’ve got demons coming up behind us. They’re only a tiny bit faster than our current speed, however, it would be nice if you slowed down a little. I’m going to be leaning out of the window while chucking balls of irresponsibly dangerous chemicals behind us. I tend to prefer racket-sports to ball-sports and the extra wind might make me fumble.”

One of the other aides blanched a little, while the driver only nervously nodded. I’m not sure if it was the extra practice I had been doing in my spare time, or the pressure of necessity that allowed me to create the admittedly simple shapes in such a quick time, but when the demons skid out of an alley a few blocks behind us, I was armed with ten balls waiting to be filled with chemically-purifying fire, and oh boy did they deserve it.

When witnessing ungodly amalgamations of bastardized biology, practically being force-fed every little detail of the cursed creatures form in a full HD render was… disturbing.

Each was vaguely spider-like, well, except for just about everything. Literally cutting them in half down the middle was a wheel composed of naked bone and meat, being turned by way too many spindly legs with way too many joints, feverishly bending in motions that snapped their bones and spilled fuming ichor into the street. Dozens more legs tried to steer the abominations while being ground to paste along the rough surface of the road- only to be replaced by more when they were no longer long enough to touch the ground.

Overall, I think it says a lot about the creature’s general construction that neither the fact the face was a melted collection of eyes and teeth, nor how it was the size of a scooter really made it worse than it already was.

Trying to hold the contents of my stomach down, I grabbed an orb each in my right hand and tail, using my left to fill it with chlorine trifluoride as I leaned almost halfway out of the window. Despite being one of the strongest oxidizing agents, the chemical was surprisingly cooperative. Not in a ‘didn’t immediately explode and liquefy my upper body’ way, but in a ‘puppy learning tricks and being very enthusiastically confused.’

Please remember that my magic inexplicably gave different chemicals pseudo-personalities for no discernible reason.

Before the ball of horribly painful death decided it no longer wanted to obey my commands to sit and stay, I gave it an underhand toss backwards and immediately started the process over with the next one. I don’t know how or even if demons think, but one of the spider-wheels decided the large amount of ULE in the ball keeping everything safe would be a delicious snack and veered over to catch my poorly aimed throw.

As it smushed the sphere between the rows of eyes lining the interior of its face-hole- somehow stripping the ULE out of the chemicals from what I could see- the thin shell of cyanoacrylate broke and deposited its electron hungry contents into the creature's body. The eye-burning aberration tried valiantly to keep things contained, but since what it was trying to swallow would burn anything from the normal organic compounds to glass- or even water in a hand-wavy technical sense- it was a losing endeavor.

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The general wetness of the demon and street was converted into many fun gasses: hydrofluoric acid, hydrochloric acid, fluorine, chlorine, and maybe even some oxygen difluoride. Should you feel inclined to look any of those up, you will find that you would probably prefer to encounter none of them at the concentrations that were being produced.

I guess the demon was also engulfed in a healthy amount of flames. And sputtering chlorine trifluoride everywhere as it boiled- but those effects were a little overshadowed by how the demon was melting into a slowly deepening pit in the road.

Had the thing been not so worthy of such a death, I would have felt pity at how none of its compatriots slowed down or even turned one of their many eyes to check on it. The same goes for the second time one of them eagerly caught one of my presents. And the third. Maybe by the fourth I would have gotten over it, since even after half of the group were reduced to piles of melting and burning flesh, the rest were still not taking the hint they should maybe not be playing catch with me.

After I got over the initial shock from their appearance, the whole encounter was a little boring. No matter how absolutely awful my throwing was, at least one of the demons would go after it. Since we were going a little slower than the demons, they were unsteadily gaining on us- only helping my aim as time went on. I could tell none of the aides appreciated that, but I was going as fast I was comfortable with, considering the horrifically dangerous stuff I was working with.

When only one was left, its small amount of stored ULE disappeared, which probably had something to do with how it jetted forwards, catching up and trying to take a bite at my face. I was groping around for the next ball to fill as this happened, forcing me to awkwardly turn and curl up along the outside of the car. Only the fact I didn’t need to look in a direction to coordinate myself saved me from being pulled out of the window as I sprayed a gout of ClF3 down its maw.

There was a loud thump as the dissolving corpse hit the side of the car- nearly dislodging my questionable fingertip-grip from the seam where the skylight met the roof, but desperate flailing rewarded a more solid handhold in the form of my seat’s headrest, as well as a near heart-attack for the second or third time in the past two hours.

Now that all of them had been dealt with, I pulled back into the vehicle and put away my… weapons. After a small break to slow my heart rate and steady my voice, I asked the person sitting next to me, “are all demons that stupid? Not that I really mind, but for how disgusting they were, I was expecting a little more resistance. Or at least for them to not willingly cooperate in their own deaths.”

Still shivering a little, they replied, “w-well, proper intelligence is theorized to be more difficult or expensive for the Breach to manifest. M-most demons appear to have basic instincts guided by something like a set of instructions.”

“Huh, is there a database of demon’s descriptions and likely behavior patterns somewhere?”

“M-maybe? It’s not really my area of expertise.”

A little disappointed, I sent out the question to my fellow MGs in the non-urgent channel before writing, “WTF-spider-wheel-abominations: will go after any ULE source one at a time, very dumb, wide turning radius but very fast” in a newly created document for my observations of demons. I guessed that even if there was an official database, every entry would probably be bloated with every scrap of information and speculation xenobiologists could cram in, burying the info you might want if you’re face-to-face with one behind minutes of reading.

Seeing as we were still a minute from the forward base, I added a few more entries to my records for the other demons I encountered last Breach.

Flower-dogs: Summon close to targets, surprisingly strong leap and bite(?) force, takes a while to abrade through material, flammable after eating.

Groaning mimic: Appear and sound like an injured human, dumb, don't react until picked up(?).

Constructor: Bad ULE vision, slow, not very aggressive but strong.

Destructor: Bad ULE vision, slow, dumb and aggressive, very strong, general distaste for walls.

It wasn’t a long list, and likely wouldn’t help me this Breach- but maybe over time having something like this on hand would pay off. If I was lucky, it might literally pay off: other lesser experienced MG might support funding a record-keeping project, maybe also some image-recognition software to automate the identification. And since this is the military we’re talking about here, there’s a lot of money going around.