“Your mole digging skill is really overpowered, Matt. That was close,” Lucy said.

“Yeah, no kidding. I’m going to go deeper.” Matt had not taken terrain into account when he had begun this particular tunnel, and the ground had apparently been at a slight downward slope towards the town. Matt had been tunneling fast enough through the ground that after a specific shovel stroke, his nearly level tunnel breached into open air, exposing his head only a few hundred meters from the walls of the city. He had ducked back down and as far as he could tell, he wasn’t spotted, but things could have easily gone loud right then, whether he wanted it or not.

“I’m going to lower the tunnel a bit. What do you think? Five feet enough?”

“Yeah, that should do it.”

Matt continued tunneling for a bit longer, before he suddenly hit a big problem, in the form of rock. As good as he was at digging, his skill didn’t count rock as a kind of compressed dirt. And while he was still underground, the fact that he had hit bedrock meant that things were a lot more cramped than he liked. He continued digging, now in a semi-crouch, grumbling at the inconvenience.

Then things got much worse. The bedrock started sloping up.

“Oh, no. No, no, no.” The ground kept rising, and Matt suddenly realized what had happened. This demon city was relatively high up in the hills, in a high country that didn’t quite qualify as mountains, but was still at a much higher elevation than the basically flat land around the borders. And it looked like when they decided to build this town, they wanted solid foundations. Whether they found an area of flat rock or shaved off the top of a hill or something, he had run out of dirt, and he was going to have to go above-ground in enemy territory while running directly towards Ra’Zor’s greatest threat.

—

“Did it not go off?” Derek yelled. “Do we need to go after it?”

“I don’t think we have that luxury!” Artemis yelled, backing desperately away from a large, iron-scaled winged lizard demon. “We are barely holding ground as it is.”

As they had approached the city, the forces protecting it had made a fundamental mistake. Their assumption was that any small group of humans this far into demon territory could be taken down by a group of a dozen or so elite guards.

But the combination of the old man present from the beginning of the fight and the fact that everyone had leveled heavily in their recent fights against demon outposts meant that the humans were far stronger than the average elite demon.

Brennan alone was able to eliminate about half the force off the bat with his new skill, which let him chain several precise, pre-programmed strikes together so long as he had sufficient time to observe a group of enemies. It was like lightning bouncing from demon to demon, followed immediately by thunder as the old man crashed to the ground like a geriatric natural disaster and began swinging his hammer into skull after immediately demolished skull.

With Artemis pumping arrow after arrow into the fray and reinforcements a dozen seconds away, Derek had plenty of time to grab the lip of the wagon, spin on his heels a few times, and heft the ever-loving shit out of it dead-on towards the center of town. It would never get all the way there, but it was a better throw than they had hoped for.

“Good, Derek!” Artemis yelled, quickly estimating the distance of the throw. “Fall back to position three!”

As a group, everyone beat a tactical retreat to a precise, predefined location. If the bomb went off, it would mean the majority of the enemies that made it out of the city would be buffeted by heart-pulses while they tried to reach the group, and incinerated if they failed to run fast enough.

Or they would have if the bomb actually went off. So far, it hadn’t. And the city was disgorging demons like a kicked wasp-hive, slowly overwhelming them. Any step they took back meant dozens more demons they’d have to clean up by hand after the bomb, and that was if they just moved back a bit. Artemis knew how quick this battle could shift, and she was moments away from sounding a general retreat.

And then, like the sound of one hand clapping, something magic and undefinable changed in the air. Just as the group was about to break, the first pulse flew out of the city. The wall had blocked most of it, but the wide-open city gates and the fact that the demons had moved in a pretty straight line to meet them meant that the protection didn’t matter much. The demons themselves did a good job of blocking some of the pulse and protecting the front line, but their dying screams were still concerning enough to help distract some of the demons closest to the group. The tide of battle had changed.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

And the fires were yet to come.

—

Matt had waited until the first pulse. Even if the demons on this side of the city hadn’t rushed to the front to fight his friends, he hoped the bomb would distract them enough that they at least wouldn’t have eyes on the wall. He could still slip in, and the plan could still work, just so long as the demons were distracted.

They weren’t. As he sprang over the wall, he came face to face with the reality that the city was guarded by the demons’ best of the best. The demons on the wall knew their jobs, knew their duties, and knew enough to know what a distraction was. As he hit the ground on the other side of the wall, a half dozen demons joined him.

He didn’t stop to see how well they fought. He ran.

Numbers were numbers. If he got mobbed, every bit of strength his enemies had would be additive. He’d have to fight all of them. Chasing wasn’t like that. Anybody he was faster than, he didn’t have to immediately deal with. And it turned out he was faster than all of them but a few. After about ten seconds worth of running, it had turned out his high DEX, Spring Fighter, and ability to rapidly change direction meant that only a few of the demons had managed to keep up. Ducking down another alley, he charged up a shovel strike for the second or so he had until they passed the corner, then released it directly into the lead demon. The second and third fell before they fully found their footing, and he was suddenly free of his pursuers. For now, anyway.

From where he was, he could see the demon lord’s spire, and as he watched it suddenly flashed bright, bright blue. Or, rather, the surrounding space did. He was confused as to why for a moment, until the heart-pulse that had caused it wrapped around the building, reaching its maximum range just before it actually engulfed it.

“Shit. Lucy,” Matt said. “It’s a force field. Like around the hearts, only bigger. And the pulses from the heart don’t look like they are taking it down.”

“Shit. Do you think the shovel can get through it? Cut it?”

“It can, but only for itself. I’d still be repulsed, or whatever the big version of the force field does to people.” Matt was rushing towards the spire anyway. Whatever solutions he found, they weren’t going to be in a random alley somewhere.

“Can you dig? I know it’s stone, but…”

“Maybe. Or at least… I can destroy some rock. It’s not going to be very fast, but if the force field doesn’t move immediately, it might work.”

“Or we could leave. This isn’t the plan, Matt.”

Matt shook his head. “This is the only chance we have. We can’t take down all the demons by ourselves. We can’t get home without a portal. If there’s any way back, it’s either there or something the church has hidden. And we can’t slaughter the humans to get to it, Lucy.”

Arriving at the base of the spire, just outside the range of the force field, Matt began charging a stab not quite straight down, but one that sloped forwards ahead of him. As he did, the heart apparently reached critical mass and let loose its fire. Even that didn’t take down the field. It flashed as bright as he had seen the previous fields turn, but held. He didn’t let it distract him from his charge, which he kept going until he reached the point he now recognized as the maximum he could handle.

“Besides, Lucy,” he said, trying to move his mouth as little as possible to avoid breaking the charge. “We still have to do something about those plinths.”

He stabbed the shovel down, and it hit the smooth granite street with a sound like a cannonball slamming into a boulder. And then, with surprisingly little additional noise, the ground around him crumbled away, and he fell into the yawning darkness that had suddenly appeared below his feet.

—

Derek, Brennan, Artemis and the old man were still on the other side of the gate, or what was left of it once the inferno had done its work. To the demons’ credit, the survivors were still emerging from the ash and rubble that once compromised a huge chunk of their city. Once they saw the humans, they charged as fast as they could, enraged, snarling, and clearly looking for revenge.

But they were scattered now. There were guards and demons throughout the city, but they had apparently clustered most of their better fighters near the gates. Between staggered arrival times, weaker enemies, and general differences in morale, the humans were holding their own. A few battle kings had popped up, but Brennan, Derek and the old man had made the discovery that at least one of the trio was a hard counter for almost any build you could think of, besides mages. The one mage that did pop up, a kind of militarized lantern-fish, was held safely in place by concentrated arrow-fire from Artemis before the three converged on it and ripped it to shreds.

As good as things looked, it was still a temporary arrangement. This was, for better or worse, a city. The flow of demons had slowed, but they hadn’t killed nearly enough for depopulation to kick in yet. One or more of the demons had probably gotten wise, and was organizing somewhere behind buildings where they couldn’t see. Soon, the shape of the battlefield would change again.

“Do we keep fighting?” Derek asked. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but he had picked up injuries, and the old man and Brennan were similarly bloodied. “It won’t take long for them to get their shit together.”

Brennan took advantage of a lull in the combat to check his system clock. “We do. But we will back up as they come. They’ve been rushing through the city from all sides, and Matt’s either in or he’s running. Either way, we need to distract them as much possible for as long as we can.”

“Ya got that right.” The old man pulled his hammer out of an unfortunate horse demon and whipped it away from his side to clear some of the blood. “Artemis, watch our backs as well. City this big likely sends troops out to train. By now they’ve probably gotten a bit curious about what’s going on, I’d wager.”

Artemis nodded. “Got it. We are falling back to position D, then backing up as slowly as possible. I’ll call the movements to keep us synced, but yell if anyone gets in trouble.”

With no demons immediately adjacent, the group turned and ran towards one of their predefined points, one further from the city. As they did, Artemis turned her head and gave one last worried, conflicted look at the Demons’ spire.

“Good luck, Matt. End this thing.”