“Hey. Hey. You. I’m not going to hurt you. I never do, right?”

The bear regarded Matt with a wild, suspicious eye. It was true that Matt had never hurt him, but from the bear’s perspective, he was probably like a psychotic dirt ninja. To be fair, Matt had let him go so far mostly because it was funny. He imagined the bear didn’t have much confidence in the human’s overall stability.

“But I have a reason for that,” He lied. “I need information. And If I don’t get it, I’ll keep following you, doing this kind of thing and then disappearing. And everyone will keep thinking it’s you. So provide me the information, and everything will be cool.”

“What information, you dumbass?” Lucy asked. “You know you have to come up with something now. He’s not going to believe it if you just ask him his favorite flavor of ice cream or something.”

Suddenly, a low, growling voice filled the wagon as the bear started to speak. In any other situation, it would be intimidating to the extreme, like the voice of the devil himself as he approached on his way to claim your soul. But knowing what Matt knew and seeing the state of the speaker, it was also possible to pick up on wavers that hinted at a deeper truth: the bear was terrified, and possibly almost crying.

“What do you want to know? I don’t know much. I’m… a bear. We are troops.”

“I mean, all sorts of stuff.” Matt desperately scanned his mind for something he actually did want to know. His current plan was established, mostly just running around causing mayhem. But long term, the plan got foggier. Matt took a stab in the dark to buy time, asking something there was no chance the bear knew, or would answer if he did. “First, where is the demon lord? Where does he… stay, I guess?”

The bear’s eyes widened with shock and terror. This wasn’t like before, when he was simply afraid for his own life. This was like the entire universe had suddenly peeled back before him, revealing everything he had ever known to be a lie and parading a thousand impossibilities in front of him as replacement truths.

“How do you know I know that?” The bear didn’t seem like much of an actor. And even if he had been, he would have had to have been about the best actor ever to pull this off. Matt had interrogated several demons before this, and the conclusion he had come to regarding the movements of the demon king was that most of them simply were too far removed to know anything. All Matt knew at this point was that the demon king moved city to city fairly often, but that nobody knew the schedule or the complete set of cities. But somehow, against all odds, this bear knew.

“Oh, fuck. He really is a Gollum.” Lucy said. “I thought we were just fucking around with that.”

—

After finishing his work in the wagon, Matt had beat it back towards the demon army. If his guess about who had come was correct, then he couldn’t leave them to just die. The good news was, if they decided to turn traitor on him, they probably weren’t in great shape at this point, and he could likely take them if it came down to that.

As he approached the rear of the enemy force, he saw three mole-demons conferring. He was pretty tough now, but something about the moles looked dangerous to him. It was the same feeling that he got when he saw the falcon-demon with Brennan. It was just a lot. Luckily, their backs were to him and the rapidly-fleeing bear. Plus, he still had the stealth bonus from his cloak.

Suddenly, they jumped up and dove directly into the earth, carving through it like butter and leaving roundish, mole-shaped tunnels in the ground as they disappeared. Matt was short on time, given what was happening, and was willing to take a risk to get to the other side of the army faster. He just hoped the moles couldn’t turn around. So he jumped in the tunnels after them.

And, worst-case scenario, I’ll be underground when that thing goes off.

—

Matt climbed out of the hole to pure chaos. The last thing he did in the tunnel was use a charged dig upwards. He had never actually dug upwards before, and he especially hadn’t done it with the fullest charge he could hold. And he especially, especially hadn’t done it when his dig skill’s 10x critical hit multiplier finally hit, as it did here.

The digging had cut upwards from him at a diagonal angle, destroying the ground on that plane for better than fifty feet. Everything was dust and mayhem. Luckily, he had a rough guess about where his targets were when he did it, and the dirt had been moving so fast it basically whipped out from under their feet like a magician’s tablecloth rather than send them flying with it. With the surrounding demons still trying to figure out what had happened, Matt ran to where Brennan, the old man, and the others and began yanking them to their feet.

“No time to explain! We have to go! I did something dumb!” He yelled. Seeing that Brennan was in worse shape than the others, he ignored the drawn sword and hoped for the best in terms of non-betrayal as he put his shoulder under Brennan’s arm and began to run.

“Matt! What the hell?” Derek shouted. “Warning would be nice! What’s coming?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Big trouble. Let’s go.” Matt reached down with his remaining free hand and yanked Artemis to her feet and almost flung her away from the demon army. “Come on!”

The old man wasn’t asking any questions at all. He had taken one look at Matt and apparently pattern-matched the look of panic to the kind of thing he had seen done before, or the kind of thing he might do in the same situation. Then, he realized that he was the slowest of the group and busted ass away from the battle.

The assembled demons were pretty effective at blocking the heart-pulses, but did nothing against the raging inferno. The team was outside the blast radius when it went off, but just barely. One lesson that was getting more and more impressed upon Matt as time went on was the fact that groups of soldiers not only didn’t move quickly, they literally couldn’t. Any kind of panicked retreat meant the majority of them would trip over each other, bump into each other, and generally reduce the speed of the whole group to a crawl.

All this meant that most of them didn’t get away when the inferno came. But two of the moles had. Brennan was more or less out of action, and Derek and Artemis were tied up with more mundane troops. They shouted a warning, telling the old man and Matt that the moles were battlekings before plunging into their respective battles. That left one of the moles for the old man, and one for Matt, who had never fought a battleking before.

Having now killed several dozen demons solo, Matt had a better idea of the weird way his shovel interacted with skills. For the most part, it absolutely ignored active defense skills. If a mage threw up a shield or a body-cultivator type flared some internal mana to block a blow at a single point, the shovel would hit like it wasn’t there at all. Passive skills worked a little better. If something had mana-enhanced tough skin or some kind of always-on adaptation like that, the shovel would do well, but not to the point of acting like the passive didn’t exist.

And then there was a third tier, where the animal in question was, skills aside, just tough. The Gaian ape had been like that. Matt had eventually gone back and identified the corpse, finding that nearly all of its stat points were dedicated to VIT and STR, making its stat distribution skew heavily towards it being a hard-hitting tank. But it wasn’t just the numbers. The ape was also built like a tank, all heavy hide and muscle. Gaian apes were powerhouses with or without the system, and that system independent toughness didn’t allow the shovel to cheat. It was similar to how the shovel didn’t magically ignore the fact that iron or stone materials were simply tough.

Attack skills, on the other hand, were a mixed bag. Anything that left an enemy’s body as a formed mass of mana, like a fire bolt, was absolutely helpless to get through the shovel. But anything that used mana to accelerate the body or another object worked just fine. The shovel didn’t do anything to nullify normal physics.

Which made animal-demon hybrids like the moles the worst possible matchup, at least in most ways. They were big, had insanely tough hides, operated mostly using strength and weight, and didn’t rely much on mana-based skills to be dangerous. From the first impact, Matt was on his back leg. This thing was strong, it was reasonably fast, and it was heavy. It hit, and Matt skidded back through the dirt, leaving furrows where his feet cut into the dirt. The mole galloped after him before he could charge or even properly set again, hitting him again and again and keeping him entirely off balance.

Matt endured the blows. His boots had a solution for this, but it was a matter of chance. He had to survive enough dice rolls, but it was coming eventually.

Then it did. Every strike the mole made was specifically aimed at compromising Matt’s footwork and stability, and the boots had a small chance to nullify the effects of those strikes. Finally, one of the big, looping claw strikes landed and did nothing. Ducking the next strike, Matt activated Pocket Sand, sending a tiny pinch of his strongest demon spice straight into the mole’s nose.

He figured if demon moles were anything like Earth moles and the larger Gaian moles he had encountered in dungeons, they had an over-developed sense of smell. And if the demon-spice did what he hoped, it might buy him just a second of distraction to get some of his own strikes off.

Instead, the spice hit the mole’s face like a scent-based wrecking ball. Its head snapped back like it had been jabbed in the chin, and as it came back out of its tunnel, Matt’s shovel was waiting. It wasn’t a charged shot, but it was a good, clean blow to the face, and the mole stumbled backwards under the weight of it. Matt charged after it, and the mole revealed that not all of its stumble was completely honest, as it suddenly found its balance and aimed a perfectly timed blow at Matt’s eyes.

But Matt had already shifted direction, using his momentum-shift attack to duck much faster than he would have otherwise been able to. The mole had put a lot into the punch from an already compromised position and had no way to respond to the newest development. As the mole’s claws sailed over his head, Matt changed his grip on his shovel a bit and pushed up hard, stabbing the blunt point of the shovel hard into the tip of the massive demon’s jaw.

The mole’s jaw clacked shut as it turned to glare at Matt, blinked in confusion, then collapsed to the ground with all the grace of a tranquilized hippo. A second crash followed a moment later as the old man finished up with his mole.

“Dammit, boy, I wanted to finish first. Ya never heard of respecting your elders?” The old man said, swinging his clubs hard to de-blood them before tucking them back into his belt.

Matt brought the sharp end of his shovel down on the back of the mole’s neck, not decapitating it, but doing more than enough damage to important stuff. “Well, that’s what you get. Have you considered being a less ancient relic of the distant past?”

The old man laughed. During their spars, Matt had learned that what the old man really wanted from insulting people was to get a kind of banter going, something that Derek had never managed to stop being too terrified to do. When possible, Matt tried to remind the smith that he was both old and questionably attractive at best, which seemed to satisfy the old man’s craving for mutual trash talk.

Off to the side, the others were finishing up the last few of the mooks, with Brennan apparently having recovered just enough to join in by finishing off the more heavily injured demons. Matt left it to them, since whatever surviving-the-event type experience he got from the fight wouldn’t be much enhanced by killing off the last few mooks.

“Good to see you, Matt.” Brennan said, once it was over. Leaning heavily on his sword, he smiled. “Quite the mess you’ve gotten us all into. What’s the plan from here?”