It’s hard to call the village an effective fortress, considering I know all too well just how destructive a strong demon can be when they’re barely trying. Surrounded by large wooden walls made of whole logs planted upright into the soil, side by side to make a long, thick barrier around all sides of a perimeter, though, it does a pretty convincing job of being something that looks like it could be difficult to assault. We stand at an open gateway through the wall into a space of decently well-crafted but nearly identical wooden homes, built for space efficiency in concentric rings around a wide-open village square of sorts.
The houses feel lived in, each decorated with varying gardens filled with tools for farming, or with machinery used for all sorts of crafts: forges, lathes, ovens, all kinds of machines used to create, left outside in wide-open workspaces. I suppose it makes sense. I've never seen a cloud in the sky, which means foul weather was another detail that Aegis had overlooked in creating her world, and couldn't threaten exposed machinery. The sight sends a certain happy tingle through my artist's soul, and I can’t help but wonder what my own yard would look like if I had a house in this world.
As we walk inside the walls, I get a sense that this could be a cozy place to work and live, if the space weren't abandoned. It’s a ghost town. I don’t need drake senses to tell that the residents have either fled or are cowering somewhere inside the myriad homes. As we walk toward the center, though, I can plainly see why. In what had once been a place for gathering at the heart of a community sat several dozen corpses of various demons, each impaled through their center upon individual thick black iron pikes jabbing up from the ground in such a way that displaced the very dirt we stand on, like they had been struck straight up through the earth.
I swallow hard at the sight, looking up to Sai, who seems calm, eyes still blue as she makes her way past all the houses and right up to the gruesome display. She approaches a little insectoid creature, not unlike a beetle made to stand upright. It has a round, segmented body, four spindly clawed arm-limbs, a set of antennae, and a pair of creepy, glowing, lidless eyes that stare into nothing in front of them. It's protected by a chitinous shell draped over its back, but it seems to have done little to protect it from the spear that's stuck a devastating hole directly through its torso, shattering the natural armor surrounding the wound.
Sai stops to inspect the creature from about a meter away. “Hey Josh.” was all she said with the candor one would expect from an acquaintance passing on the street.
“Wait, what? That’s-” I flinch, jumping back a little when one of the insect-thing's legs twitches. “Gah, it’s alive!”
“They’re halves, kid.” Sai rolls her eyes. She takes a step around and looks at the metal pikes that appear to have just spontaneously jutted from the ground and through the various demons’ internal organs, cataloging their positions.
“Oh fuck, that means they’re all conscious for this?” I wince, gritting my teeth and trying not to think of how it would feel to just be sitting on a sharp spear for gods know how long. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s help them down!”
“Hang on.” Sai murmurs as she holds a hand out in front of me as if to bar my path. “Don’t touch them or the spears. It’s a curse.”
“What? A curse?” I spat. That sounds absurd. I’m not really clear on exactly what a curse is by underworld standards, but the concept triggers memories of occult magical hexes, cast at a terrible price to call mystical vengeance on someone who has committed a grievous wrong. But of course that was overworld fiction. This didn't feel like that kind of magic. “Sai, they’re impaled. I may not have been a demon for long, but that’s a little less subtle than what I’d think a curse would be, isn’t it? Fuck, just… pick up the damn things and get them off so they can heal.”
Sai crosses her arms and I see her glance down at me with orange eyes. “Well, why don’t you touch them then?”
I notice that she’s carefully worded that sentence to not be a command. This was another teaching moment, and I'm not going to stubbornly wander into her challenge this time. I bite my lip, some fleeting sympathy that I'd somehow managed to cling to leading me toward trying to solve the puzzle. I need more information. “What exactly is a curse?”
She nods, apparently pleased by my restraint as her eyes return to blue. “A curse is a persistent, reactive, self-propagating spell. Its effect is triggered by taking certain action on an enchanted object or person. Look how they’re arranged. They’re all within arm’s reach of each other, with Josh at the center.” I look around and take in how the bodies are arranged. They all look like they could have been prepped to touch one of the other victims. “If you try to help them, you get run through.”
“By what? Some kind of magical lance dispenser?” I raise an eyebrow, circling around in a futile attempt to see what Sai sees in the killing field. A few more of the corpses writhe slightly and make me squirm away, no doubt reacting to our presence and the fact that Sai’s solved some kind of puzzle that might mean she’s in a position to help. “Well, how do we get them down, then?”
“There’s a few ways we could do that. Break the curse, which I’d probably have to go find a specialist for because I definitely don’t have enough scrolls for all this. Lucy's expertise is on enchantment rather than curses, so she wouldn't be terribly helpful.” She pauses a moment and puts her hands to her mouth, cupping her hands to try to make a bullhorn effect before she yells out loudly through the town “Hey! Anyone here a witch?!”
The silence that follows is deafening, only the wordless twitching movements of the victims hanging in the square. I can't help but wince. Is she trying to get us caught? “What if the person who did this was still around?” I hiss at her.
“That would make this easier. It’d be simple to reverse it if we had the caster or their corpse.” She looks mildly disappointed that no one’s come forward. She had been trying to bait them. “Another option is, we figure out the mechanics of the curse and find a way to subvert it into uselessness. Or we do nothing and just go.”
“Do nothing? Wasn’t the whole point of us coming out here to help this guy?” I grimace, dreading the idea of leaving these people to this fate.
“Yeah, but that’s what you’re gonna vote for after I tell you my other idea.” She sounds a little bit wary, her eyes dancing between blue and orange.
My breath hitches. I already don’t like where this is going. “S-Sai?” I ask, bracing myself for something personally unpleasant. “What’s your idea?”
“To have you touch Josh so I can watch the curse take hold and develop a countermeasure.” She explains casually. “It’s what I was gonna do if you were stupid enough to take that dare, but it feels unsatisfying to reward your critical thinking skills by throwing you to it anyway.”
My eyes go wide and I feel a lump in my throat. She wants me to impale myself so she can see how the magical lance dispenser works. Sai really doesn’t think highly of my well-being. “Would that kill me?” I whimper, knowing that death was absurdly cheap to me as a half-demon, but I've actually become attached to being a darkling already, despite the unpleasant memories that the form is now stained with.
“Maybe.” Sai shrugs “But I'm out of ideas, so unless you got one, it’s what I’m gonna go with.”
I wrack my brain quickly. I really don’t want her to command me to touch that thing and curse myself. Possibly to death. “W-What if we break the spears from a distance. Maybe the curse has a range?”
“Doubt it. You could certainly try.” She leans down to the ground to pick up a few stray rocks off the ground, holding them out to me. “See if a projectile sets it off.”
I whimper quietly, stowing my knife uncomfortably to the hem inside of my cloak and taking the rocks in hand. I don’t appreciate her using me as a guinea pig, but it was an order. Sai steps back to give me room in case I suddenly get impaled. I bite my lip, feeling sorry that I’m about to throw junk at someone who’s clearly already suffering, but I’m mostly bracing for the feeling of getting pinned to the ground by a magical needle. I pull my arm back and toss a couple of rocks at my fellow thrall, missing the first couple before the third bounces harmlessly off of Joshua’s chitinous abdomen.
I close my eyes and brace myself, but there’s no sharpness piercing me. No searing pain of being run through from the bottom up. I breathe a loud sigh of relief and then sit down on the ground, breathing heavily. I am so happy that worked.
“Alright, so it’s safe to use a projectile.” Sai nods pacing back and forth in front of me in thought. “Good job, kid.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“No problem, I love anxiety attacks.” I mumble putting my head down into my hands.
I hear the unmistakable sound of Sai manifesting something from her pocket dimension, and I look up in time to see her brandishing a large jet black handgun, pointing it toward Joshua. My eyes widen in the primal fear that comes from being raised in a society where guns are the ultimate deadly weapon. With an explosive crack that echoes through the fields around us, the gun fires off, and I see it strike the bottom of the spear, which buckles slightly, Joshua’s body tilting to the side a few inches. His weak wriggling becomes frantic for a moment, before he runs out of energy once more.
Sai clicks her tongue “Why do I even keep these around…?” she grumbles, inspecting the weapon in her hands with disdain. “Worthless weapons if they weren't so precise.” She fires off several more rounds at the same spot, denting the metal a few more times until Josh's spear finally breaks at the base and falls over, his dark bug-like face planting into the ground.
The spear begins to slowly dissipate into dust, whatever magic was manifesting the weapon unable to hold form when it’s separated from the ground it had sprung from. The wound it held shut gushes with ichor for a moment as Josh's body wriggles with renewed vigor, trying to make sense of movement again.
But I'm still too distracted from the brazen display of firepower Sai had just used to separate solid metal at a distance. Still shocked at the sight of a gun in use, I can’t help but stammer out “Worthless?! That’s terrifying.”
Sai tilts her head toward me, eyes orange again. Uh oh. What now? In one swift motion, she holds the gun out in front of her with both hands. At me. I only have time for my eyes to go wide in shock and horror before I hear the bang and… and then a sort of irritating pressure strikes my chest. I look down to see the bullet spinning slightly on the ground in front of me, deflected right off of my skin. I feel at my chest and find a little itchy spot, like a tiny bump you’d see after an especially irritating fly managed to sneak a bite in. “W-Whu?” I mumble.
“Time for a science lesson, kid.” Sai says, spinning the gun on her finger for a moment before banishing it back to her house. “GFM. Gravitational Force Multiplier. Demons have strength and endurance beyond our bodies. A measurable alteration of physics that surrounds us. It takes the force we output from, say, throwing something, swinging something, or even just using a punch or kick and multiplies it. It also applies in reverse when we’re struck with things.”
“You… SHOT me!” I shout indignantly, barely listening to her words, confusedly looking between her and the still-spinning bullet whose momentum still hasn’t been fully spent.
She points her head down and gives me that kind of condescending look you’d expect from a teacher when you just aren’t picking up on something obvious. “Tyler. How much physical force do I add to a bullet by pulling a trigger?”
That question makes me seize up and think for a second. Oh. I get it now. A demon’s considerable supernatural durability can only be penetrated by another demon’s considerable strength. And a gun doesn’t utilize that strength at all. Sai could likely do far more damage just throwing the bullet. So GFM, that was… some sort of demonic power level, then? I guess it would make sense that demons would have figured out some way to measure their absurd strength. Sai certainly wasn’t muscular, that much is certain, so there has to be a supernatural source to what she can do. Or maybe a divine source, since she's already told me that her power comes from loyalty to Aegis. I wonder if there’s actual math to GFM or if it’s just an arbitrary scale. “Still can’t believe you fucking shot me.” I mumble as I return my attention to the wriggling bug legs of our newly-released companion. “How much ammo do you have? This could take awhile.”
“I won't run out if that's what your worried about.” Sai laughs “But no, I won't be doing that. This doesn't solve the problem. Hopefully Josh can enlighten us to what happened here so we can find the culprit.”
“Why not just release all of them? Then no one can trigger it again, right?”
“Kid, Josh is still cursed.” She explains “That won't just go away just cause the spear's gone.”
I nod slowly. It means that it could still propagate from touching him. I take a cautious step back away from the regenerating bug man.
Josh releases a high pitched trilling sound that I have to guess was his version of a sharp inhale, his organs apparently beginning to function again. “Ahh! Shit! Fuck! Balls, fuck shit! Bastard fuck! Asshole fucking shit fuck!” The nasally insect voice exclaimed a tirade of frantic curse words into the air as the bug man rolled onto his back, his various arms feeling at the sucking wound left by the spear.
“Language.” Sai gave Josh the biggest shit-eating grin before he continued on shouting expletives into the air before he settled into deep panting groans while his body worked on the wound.
“Fuck you, Sai.” He groans weakly “Thanks for the assist, but fuck you.” He gives a long slow sigh, shuddering with each movement as he tries to settle into place “Fucking hell, that must've been… five? Six weeks?”
Joshua must have a great internal clock to be able to make a guess like that if he spent the entire time in agonizing coma pain.
“Something like that. What happened?” Sai asks, leaning down to Josh's level, but not stepping up closer. “You're still volatile, don't touch anyone.”
“Yeah, fucking caught that.” He gives a long, wet, coughing fit before he can manage to speak again “Reaper named Elgare. A hag with a wicked disposition. She heard about our operation and came looking for a runaway. We didn't even have them, but hit me with that curse. Guess she didn't believe me.”
“Did you have them? Tell the truth.”
“No. Fuck, Sai, I know I have a history with shit like this, but compelling me so I can't lie? You can be an ass sometimes.”
“Thanks.” Sai gives a playful smirk.
I start to get the idea that maybe these two haven’t had the best history with each other. Sai had called Joshua an idealogue before, so they probably have some kind of disagreement on how to run this operation of his. That she hasn’t interfered anyway is probably a good sign for my future, at least.
I guess I should try to get us on track toward something we can actually do about the problem at hand though: the curse. “Alright, so we need to find Elgare and make her end this curse. Or, you know, kill her. That fixes it, right?”
“If you wanna force a bunch of halves to turn mortal, yeah.” Josh intones before turning to Sai and gesturing subtly at me “New guy?”
“Something like a guy, anyway.” Sai's smirk grows wider. Was that a joke about my gender at a time like this? Ugh. “They're a drake,” she stage whispers to Josh, who lets out a sharp cackle before wincing into his wound. I hate that that's apparently an insult.
“So… What, you don't wanna kill her? After…” I gesture around us at all the still-shifting corpses held aloft by a series of overenthusiastic piercings. “… this?”
“Course I don't wanna kill her. Bitch deserves so much fucking worse than that!” He shouts vindictively, wincing in pain once more at his own outburst. “Never liked offing reapers, anyway. It’ll leave a lot of bystanders in shitty, vulnerable bodies and shitty, vulnerable positions.”
“Can't save everyone, Josh.” Sai mutters in a resigned tone. It sounds like it has weight to it, like she's said it before and was just reinforcing it. This was a point of contention between the two.
“Yeah, well, doesn't mean we shouldn't try.” He mumbles, closing his eyes and trying to focus away the pain.
“Well, what do you suggest? You keep walking around getting a magic spear up your ass whenever you touch someone for the rest of eternity?” Sai drips sarcasm, hands on her hips.
Josh coughs “Well, first I was gonna get my people down.” he muttered “Neat trick with the gun.”
Sai shrugs “I guess it’s got its uses every now and then, just as long as it doesn’t involve shooting a demon.”
“You gonna help the rest of us out, or what?” he asks impatiently. Feels like everyone gets to mouth off to Sai but me. Or maybe I’m just not doing it right?
“I’m gonna help them out by slaying a hag.” Sai admits defiantly.
“Ugh… okay, how about this? How about I go with you, and I give that bitch a nice big hug. Bet that’ll make her cancel the curse real quick. Teach her not to fuck with me. Don’t gotta kill her that way.”
I finally speak up again. “Sounds like a waste of time. She’s just gonna come back and do it again if you do that.”
“Kid’s got a point.” Sai nods appreciatively my way. It feels good to be useful to her. More worrying thoughts I’ve been subtly brainwashed? Or am I just starved for affirmation? “You need to take care of this problem, permanently. And you gotta be willing to do that, or everyone’s gonna be walking all over you forever.”
“Some of us don’t give up on being people so easy, Sai.” Josh grumbles, the carapace on his back flicking open and closed a few times as he experiments with what can still move through his wounds.
Sai looks around the square performatively before she holds her arms out “How’s that working out for you?”
“Fuck you, Sai.” He spits. “We do things our way around here, and if you don’t care about that, you don’t have to help us.”
“Suit yourself. But I wonder what the rest of your little operation here think of your pacifism?” She asks, manifesting the pistol in her hand again. She aims down the sights and with a few well-placed shots, she breaks the spear binding another of the people that had been closest to Josh. She does it again three more times, freeing what my memory quickly identifies as a tanuki, an ugly-looking goblin-wolf creature, someone that almost looks like a twitching mannequin, and a misshapen head surrounded by tentacles, and letting them fall to the ground. “That’s how you handle things around here, right? Democratically?”
Josh let out a quiet trill that sounded like some kind of insectoid growl. “It is.” he intoned angrily, glancing around at his fellow half-demons who begin to writhe about more functionally as they try to grasp freedom of movement again. “Don’t think they’re gonna trust you. People around here aren’t fond of reapers.”
“Don’t need them to trust me. Just need them to understand I’m gonna kill their tormentor, no strings attached.” She mimes blowing smoke from her gun before flipping it over in her hand and holding it out handle-first to Joshua. “Here. Free the rest if you want, just make sure no one gets touchy-feely while the curse is still active. I’m gonna go solve the problem in a way that matters.”
Joshua stares angrily up at the gun before he snatches it, Sai releasing it when he makes the motion so that they’re not both in contact with it at once. “… Thanks.” he mumbles quietly.
Sai chuckles “What was that?”
“Thank you.” He speaks clearly this time, gritting his teeth. “For looking out for me. Screw you for the way you do it.” he pulls the clip out of the gun to inspect it before sliding it back into place. He’d used one before.
“You’re welcome.” Sai said, reaching into her pocket dimension to retrieve two extra clips, dropping them on the ground at Josh’s feet. She motions for me to follow as she wheels back around. “Come on kid, we got a bitch to kill.”